“The King is alive”—but where and how? Truly the King considered himself fortunate to have barely escaped being taken prisoner. Napoleon wrote triumphantly to his consort, the Empress Josephine, that he had very nearly taken the King. Although Louise did not know this, she knew that the battle was lost. Dark pictures of the present and future haunted her. She knew what it meant to be vanquished by Napoleon; knew with what boundless arrogance the heartless conqueror treated princes and people, and what terms of peace he was likely to dictate.
The carriage passed rapidly through Potsdam on its way to Berlin, where the Queen arrived late on the evening of October 17. Her children were not there. That morning, Lieutenant von Dorville, adjutant of Field-marshal von Möllendorf, whom the King had despatched to Berlin with the bad news from the battlefield, had arrived, and the Governor, Count Von der Schulenburg, had at once ordered the removal of the royal children to Schwedt-on-the-Oder. Scarcely had the Queen entered her home, when, hearing of the arrival of the Lieutenant, she had him summoned to her presence.
“Where is the King?” she asked.
“I do not know, Your Majesty,” answered Dorville.
“But is the King not with the army?” she asked again.
“With the army!” answered Dorville. “The army no longer exists!”
So great had been the confidence of victory that the news of the defeat was all the more crushing. Consternation and despair reigned in Berlin. The Governor sought to quiet the inhabitants by the proclamation: “The King has lost a battle: the first duty of the citizens is to be calm. I require this of all our citizens. The King and his brothers are alive.” Such were the men in power at a time when all the available strength of the people should have been called forth to enduring devotion and determined resistance.
After a terrible night, at six o’clock in the morning of October 18 the Queen summoned the court physician, Dr. Hufeland. He found her in despair, with eyes swollen with weeping and hair in disorder. “All is lost. I must fly to my children, and you must go with us,” she said as he entered. At ten o’clock the carriage was ready and the Queen drove to Schwedt, where her children were. The sight of them renewed and accentuated the mother’s distress. They ran tenderly to meet her at the great staircase of the castle, but she whom they were accustomed to see gay and smiling now embraced and greeted them with the words “You see me in tears. I am weeping for the cruel fate which has befallen us. The King has been deceived in the ability of his army and its leaders, and we have been defeated and must fly!” To the tutor of the two elder children, Delbrück, she said: “I see a structure destroyed in one day, upon whose erection great men have labored through two centuries. The Prussian State, Prussian army, and Prussian glory exist no longer.” “Ah, my sons,” she cried to the eleven-year-old Fritz and nine-year-old William, “you are already old enough to understand these trials. In the future, when your mother no longer lives, recall this unhappy hour and let a tear fall in remembrance of it, as I now weep for the destruction of my country. But do not be satisfied with tears. Act, develop your powers! Perchance the guardian angel of Prussia will protect you. Then free your people from the shame, the reproach, and the humiliation into which it has fallen! Try, like your great-grandfather, the Great Elector, to reconquer from the French the darkened fame of your ancestors, as he revenged the defeat and shame of his father, against the Swedes at Fehrbellin. Do not be corrupted by the degeneracy of the times. Become men and heroes, worthy of the name of princes and grandsons of the great Frederick. But if you cannot with all your efforts uplift the down-trodden State, then seek death as did Prince Louis Ferdinand!”
From Schwedt, the sorrowing but heroic Queen travelled to Stettin. There, on her own responsibility, she caused the arrest of the cabinet councillor Lombard, who had originally been a wig-maker and was now universally considered a traitor, and who had fled from Berlin to escape the threatening anger of the populace. Subsequently the King released Lombard, but deposed him and never saw him again. The King had gone from the battlefield to Sömmerda, where he collected a few scattered detachments of troops about him. Learning that the enemy had already passed round his left flank, he went on to Magdeburg, accompanied by a squadron of dragoons, reached Berlin on the eve of October 20, but did not enter the city, and arrived, on the morning of the same day at the fortress of Cüstrin, where his wife also arrived in the evening at ten o’clock. What a meeting after only a week!
