THE PRINCE OF PRUSSIA LEAVES THE ARMY.
The corps under the prince of Prussia, which had been witnesses to the destruction of this unhappy place, was by the king’s march to Bautzen, fortunately extricated from the danger of being surrounded by the Austrians, who, upon his majesty’s approach, retired from their posts on the right. Soon after this event, the prince of Prussia, finding his health much impaired by the fatigues of the campaign,* quitted the army, and returned to Berlin.
* This was the reason that was publicly assigned for his quitting the army; but a much more probable one, which was only whispered, seems to have been, that this prince, than whom none ever was more remarkable for humanity and the social virtues, disliking the violent proceedings of the king his brother, could not refrain from expostulating with him on that subject: upon which his majesty, with an air of great disapprobation, told him, “That the air of Berlin would be better for him than that of the camp.” The prince accordingly retired to Berlin, where he died soon after; grief and concern for the welfare of his brother, and for the steps taken by him, having no small share in his death.
In the meantime, mareschal Keith, who had been left upon the frontier to guard the passes of the mountains of Bohemia, arrived at Pima, having been much harassed in his march by the enemy’s irregular troops, and lost some waggons of provisions and baggage. After resting a day at Pirna, he pursued his march through Dresden with twenty battalions and forty squadrons, and encamped on the right of the Elbe, before the gate of the new city, from whence he joined the king between Bautzen and Coerlitz. The Prussian array, now re-assembled at this place, amounted to about sixty thousand men, besides twelve battalions and ten squadrons which remained in the famous camp at Pirna, under the prince of Anhault-Dessau, to cover Dresden, secure the gorges of the mountains, and check the incursions of the Austrian irregulars, with whom, as they were continually flying about the skirts of the Prussian army, as well in their encampments as on their marches, almost daily skirmishes happened, with various success. Though some of these encounters were very bloody, they cost the Prussians much fewer men than they lost by desertion since the battle of Kolin. The reason seems obvious:—the Prussian army had been recruited, in times of peace, from all parts of Germany; and though this way of recruiting may be very proper in such times, yet it cannot be expected to answer in a state of actual war, especially an unfortunate war: because the fidelity of such soldiers can never be so much depended on as that of natives, who serve their natural sovereign from principle, and not merely for pay, and who must desert their country, their parents, and their friends, at the same time that they desert their prince.
COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND OSTEND BROKE OFF.
It will be proper here to take notice of some events which could not easily be mentioned before, without breaking through the order we have proposed to ourselves in the writing of this history.—The empress-queen, more embittered than ever against the king of Prussia and his allies, recalled her ministers, count Coloredo and monsieur Zohern, from London, towards the beginning of July; and about the same time count Kaunitz, great chancellor of the empire, informed Mr. Keith, the British minister at Vienna, that the court of London, by the succours it had given, and still continued to give, the king of Prussia, as well as by other circumstances relating to the present state of affairs, having broken the solemn engagements which united this crown with the house of Austria, her majesty the empress-queen had thought proper to recall her minister from England, and consequently to break off all correspondence. Mr. Keith, in pursuance of this notice, set out from Vienna on the twenty-ninth of July; as did also Mr. Desrolles, his Britannic majesty’s minister at the court of Brussels, from this last place, about the same time. On the seventh of July, general Pisa, commandant of Ostend, Nieuport, and the maritime ports of Flanders, sent his adjutant to the English vice-consul at Ostend, at six o’clock in the morning, to tell him, that by orders from his court all communication with England was broke off; and desired the vice-consul to intimate to the packet-boats and British shipping at Ostend, Bruges, and Nieuport, to depart in twenty-four hours, and not to return into any of the ports of the empress-queen till further disposition should be made. The reasons alleged by the court of Vienna for debarring the subjects of his Britannic majesty from the use of these ports, obtained for the house of Austria by the arms and treasures of Great Britain, were, “That her imperial majesty the empress-queen, could not, with indifference, see England, instead of giving the succours due to her by the most solemn treaties, enter into an alliance with her enemy the king of Prussia, and actually afford him all manner of assistance, assembling armies to oppose those which the most christian king, her ally, had sent to her aid, and suffering privateers to exercise open violence in her roads, under the cannon of her ports and coasts, without giving the least satisfaction or answer to the complaints made on that account; and the king of Great Britain himself, at the very time she was offering him a neutrality for Hanover, publishing, by a message to his parliament, that she had formed, with the most christian king, dangerous designs against that electorate; therefore, her majesty, desirous of providing for the security of her ports, judged it expedient to give the forementioned orders; and at the same time to declare, that she could no longer permit a free communication between her subjects and the English, which had hitherto been founded upon treaties that Great Britain had, without scruple, openly violated.” Notwithstanding these orders, the English packet-boats, with letters, were allowed to pass as usual to and from Ostend; the ministers of her imperial majesty wisely considering how good a revenue the postage of English letters brings in to the post-office of the Austrian Netherlands. Ostend and Nieuport, by order of her imperial majesty, received each of them a French garrison; the former on the nineteenth of July, and the latter next day, under the command of M. de la Motte, upon whose arrival the Austrian troops evacuated those places; though the empress-queen still reserved to herself, in both of them, the full and free exercise of all her rights of sovereignty; to which purpose an oath was administered to the French commandant by her majesty’s minister-plenipotentiary for the government of the Low-Countries. At the same time, their imperial and most christian majesties notified to the magistracy of Hamburgh, that they must not admit any English men of war, or transports, into their port, on pain of having a French garrison imposed on them. The city of Gueldres, which had been blocked up by the French ever since the beginning of summer, was forced by famine to capitulate on the twenty-fourth of August, and the garrison marched out with all the honours of war, in order to be conducted to Berlin; but so many of them deserted, that when they passed by Cologn, the whole garrison consisted only of the commandant and forty-seven men. By the surrender of this place the whole country lay open to the French and their allies quite up to Magdeburgh; and the empress-queen immediately received two hundred thousand crowns from the revenues of Cleves and la Marcke alone. To return to the affairs more immediately relating to the king of Prussia. The advanced posts of the prince of Anhault-Dessau at Pirna were attacked, on the tenth of August, by a body of hussars and other irregular troops of the Austrians; but the Prussians soon obliged them to retire, with the loss of several men and two pieces of cannon. On the nineteenth of the same month, early in the morning, a great number of Austrian pan-dours surrounded a little town called Gotliebe, in which a Prussian garrison was quartered, with a design to take it by surprise. The pandours attacked it on all sides, and in the beginning killed twenty-three Prussians, and wounded many; but the Prussians having rallied, repulsed the assailants with great loss. These, however, were but a sort of preludes to much more decisive actions which happened soon after. Silesia, which had hitherto been undisturbed this year, began now to feel the effects of war. Baron Jahnus, an Austrian colonel, entering that country with only an handful of men, made himself master of Hirschberg, Waldenberg, Gottesberg, Frankenstein, and Landshut. They were, indeed, but open places; and he was repulsed in an attempt upon Strigau. On the side of Franconia the army of the empire was assembling with all speed, under the prince of Saxe-Hildburghausen; the French were marching a second army from their interior provinces into Alsace, in order to join the Imperialists: the first division of their troops had already entered the empire, and were advanced as far as Hanau. The Swedes were now preparing, with the utmost expedition, to send a numerous army into Pomerania; and the Russians, who since the taking of Memel had not done the king of Prussia much damage, besides that of obliging him to keep an army in Prussia to oppose them, and interrupting the trade of Konigsberg by their squadrons, were again advancing with hasty strides towards Prussia, marking their steps with horrid desolation. Field-mareschal Lehwald, who had been left in Prussia with an army of thirty thousand men, to guard that kingdom during the absence of his master, was encamped near Velau, when the Russians, to the number of eighty thousand, after taking Memel, advanced against the territories of the Prussian king, whose situation now drew upon him the attention of all Europe. In the night between the seventh and eighth of August, colonel Malachowsti, one of mareschal Lehwald’s officers, marched to reconnoitre the position of the enemy, when a skirmish happened, which lasted near two hours, between his advanced ranks and a Russian detachment three times stronger than the Prussians. The Russians were repulsed, and fled into the woods, after having fifty men killed and a great number wounded. The Prussians lost but one man, and had fourteen wounded.
MARESCHAL LEHWALD ATTACKS THE RUSSIANS NEAR NORKITTEN.
Several other little skirmishes happened between straggling parties of the two armies; and the Russians went on pillaging and laying waste every thing before them, till at length the two armies having approached one another in Brandenburgh-Prussia, mareschal Lehwald, finding it impossible to spare detachments from so small a number as his was, compared to that of the enemy, to cover the wretched inhabitants from the outrages committed on them by the Russian cossacks, and other barbarians belonging to them, judged it absolutely necessary to attack their main army; and accordingly, notwithstanding his great disadvantage in almost every respect, he resolved to hazard a battle on the thirtieth of August. The Russians, consisting, as we before observed, of eighty thousand regulars, under the command of mareschal Apraxin, avoiding the open field, were intrenched in a most advantageous camp near Norkitten in Prussia. Their army was composed of four lines, each of which was guarded by an intrenchment, and the whole was defended by two hundred pieces of cannon, batteries being placed upon all the eminences. Mareschal Lehwald’s army scarcely amounted to thirty thousand men. The action began at five in the morning, and was carried on with so much vigour, that the Prussians entirely broke the whole first line of the enemy, and forced all their batteries. The prince of Holstein-Grottorp, brother to the king of Sweden, at the head of his regiment of dragoons, routed the Russian cavalry, and afterwards fell upon a regiment of grenadiers, which was cut to pieces; but when the Prussians came to the second intrenchment, mareschal Lehwald, seeing that he could not attempt to carry it without exposing his army too much, took the resolution to retire. The Prussians returned to their former camp at Velau, and the Russians remained in their present situation. The loss of the Prussians little exceeding two thousand killed and wounded, was immediately replaced out of the disciplined militia. The Russians lost a much greater number. General Lapuchin was wounded and taken prisoner, with a colonel of the Russian artillery; but the former was sent back on his parole. The Prussia*: Army had, at first, made themselves masters of above eighty pieces of cannon; but were afterwards obliged to abandon them, with eleven of their own, for want of carriages. Three Russian generals were killed; but the Prussians lost no general or officer of distinction, of which rank count Dohna was the only one that was wounded.