“In the mean time the Austrians had turned in upon us a rivulet, and by midnight we found our horses in the water up to their bellies. We were really incapable of defending ourselves.”
Just at that time, when all hope seemed lost, it so happened that a cannon-ball crushed the foot of the Austrian commander. This disaster, together with the darkness and the torrents of rain, caused the fire of the enemy to cease. The next morning some Prussian re-enforcements came to the rescue of the king, and he escaped.
It was on the night of the 25th of November, cold and dreary, that General Einsiedel commenced his retreat from Prague. He pushed his wagon trains out before him, and followed with his horse and foot. The Austrians were on the alert. Their light horsemen came clattering into the city ere the rear-guard had left. The Catholic populace of the city, being in sympathy with the Austrians, immediately joined the Pandours in a fierce attack upon the Prussians. The retreating columns were torn by a terrific fire from the windows of the houses, from bridges, from boats, from every point whence a bullet could reach them. But the well-drilled Prussians met the shock with the stern composure of machines, leaving their path strewn with the dying and the dead.
The heroic General Einsiedel struggled along through the snow and over the pathless hills, pursued and pelted every hour by the indomitable foe. He was often compelled to abandon baggage-wagons and ambulances containing the sick, while the wounded and the exhausted sank freezing by the way. At one time he was so crowded by the enemy that he was compelled to continue his march through the long hours of a wintry night, by the light of pitch-pine torches. After this awful retreat of twenty days, an emaciate, ragged, frostbitten band crossed the frontier into Silesia, near Friedland. They were soon united with the other columns of the discomfited and almost ruined army.
It will generally be admitted by military men that Frederick did not display much ability of generalship in this campaign. He was fearless, indomitable in energy, and tireless in the endurance of fatigue, but in generalship he was entirely eclipsed by his formidable rival. Indeed, Frederick could not be blind to this, and he had sufficient candor to confess it. Subsequently, giving an account of these transactions in his “Works,” he writes:
“No general has committed more faults than did the king in this campaign. The conduct of Marshal Traun is a model of perfection, which every soldier who loves his business ought to study, and try to imitate if he have the talent. The king has admitted that he himself regarded this campaign as his school in the art of war, and Marshal Traun as his teacher.”
He then adds the philosophical reflection: “Bad is often better for princes than good. Instead of intoxicating them with presumption, it renders them circumspect and modest.”[76]
Frederick, leaving his army safe for a short time, quartered, as he supposed, for the winter, in his strong fortresses of Silesia, returned hastily to Berlin. It was necessary for him to make immediate preparation for another campaign. “From December 13, 1744,” writes Carlyle, “when he hastened home to Berlin, under such aspects, to June 4, 1745, when aspects suddenly changed, are probably the worst six months Frederick had yet had in the world.”[77]
His wintry ride, a defeated monarch leaving a shattered army behind him, must have been dark and dreary. He had already exhausted nearly all the resources which his father, Frederick William, had accumulated. His army was demoralized, weakened, and his materiel of war greatly impaired. His subjects were already heavily taxed. Though practicing the most rigid economy, with his eye upon every expenditure, his disastrous Bohemian campaign had cost him three hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month. The least sum with which he could commence a new campaign for the protection of Silesia was four million five hundred thousand dollars. He had already melted up the sumptuous plate, and the massive silver balustrades and balconies where his father had deposited so much solid treasure.
“It was in these hours of apparently insurmountable difficulty that the marvelous administrative genius of Frederick was displayed. No modern reader can imagine the difficulties of Frederick at this time as they already lay disclosed, and kept gradually disclosing themselves, for months coming; nor will ever know what perspicacity, what patience of scanning, sharpness of discernment, dexterity of management, were required at Frederick’s hands; and under what imminency of peril too—victorious deliverance or ruin and annihilation, wavering fearfully in the balance, for him more than once, or rather all along.”[78]