THE KING TO M. JORDAN (in Breslau).
"POGARELL, 8th April, 1741.
"My DEAR JORDAN,—-We are going to fight to-morrow. Thou knowest the chances of war; the life of Kings not more regarded than that of private people. I know not what will happen to me.
"If my destiny is finished, remember a friend, who loves thee always tenderly: if Heaven prolong my days, I will write to thee after to-morrow, and thou wilt hear of our victory. Adieu, dear friend; I shall love thee till death.
"FEDERIC." [Ib. xvii. 98.]
The King, we incidentally discover somewhere, "had no sleep that night;" none, "nor the next night either,"—such a crisis coming, still not come.
Chapter X. — BATTLE OF MOLLWITZ.
"To-morrow," Sunday, did not prove the Day of Fight, after all. Being a day of wild drifting snow, so that you could not see twenty paces, there was nothing for it but to sit quiet. The King makes all his dispositions; sketches out punctually, to the last item, where each is to station himself, how the Army is to advance in Four Columns, ready for Neipperg wherever he may be,—towards Ohlau at any rate, whither it is not doubted Neipperg is bent. These snowy six-and-thirty hours at Pogarell were probably, since the Custrin time, the most anxious of Friedrich's life.
Neipperg, for his part, struggles forward a few miles, this Sunday, April 9th; the Prussians rest under shelter in the wild weather. Neipperg's head-quarters, this night, are a small Village or Hamlet, called Mollwitz: there and in the adjacent Hamlets, chiefly in Laugwitz and Gruningen, his Army lodges itself:—he is now fairly got between us and Ohlau,—if, in the blowing drift, we knew it, or he knew it. But, in this confusion of the elements, neither party knows of the other: Neipperg has appointed that to-morrow, Monday, 10th, shall be a rest-day:—appointment which could by no means be kept, as it turned out!