"FRIDAY, 24th. Prince Moritz with the Kolin Army made appearance, all safe, and is to command here; King intending for Keith. After dinner, and the due interchange of battalions to that end, King sets off, with Prince Henri, towards Keith; Head-quarter in Alt-Bunzlau again. SATURDAY NIGHT, at Melnick; SUNDAY, Gastorf: MONDAY NIGHT, 27th JUNE, Leitmeritz; King lodges in the Cathedral Close, in sight of Keith, who is on the opposite side of Elbe,—but the town has a Bridge for to-morrow. 'Never was a quieter march; not the shadow of a Pandour visible. The Duke [Ferdinand, my Chief, Chatham's jewel that is to be, and precious to England] has suffered much from a'—in fact, from a COURS DE VENTRE, temporary bowel-derangement, which was very troublesome, owing to the excessive heats by day, and coldness of the nights.
"TUESDAY, 28th. Junction with Keith,—Bridge rightly secured, due party of dragoons and foot left on the right bank, to occupy a height which covers Leitmeritz. 'Clearing of the Pascopol' (that is, sweeping the Pandours out of it) is the first business; Colonel Loudon with his Pandours, a most swift sharpcutting man, being now here in those parts; doing a deal of mischief. Three days ago, Saturday, 25th, Keith had sent seven battalions, with the proper steel-besoms, on that Pascopol affair; Tuesday, on junction, Majesty sends three more: job done on Wednesday; reported 'done,'—though I should not be surprised," says Westphalen, "if some little highway robbery still went on among the Mountains up there."
No;—and before quitting hold, what is this that Loudon (on the very day of the King's arrival, June 27th), on the old Field of Lobositz over yonder, has managed to do! General Mannstein, wounded at Kolin, happened, with others in like case, to be passing that way, towards Dresden and better surgery,—when Loudon's Croats set upon them, scattering their slight escort: "Quarter, on surrender! Prisoners?" "Never!" answered Mannstein; "Never!" that too impetuous man, starting out from his carriage, and snatching a musket: and was instantly cut down there. And so ends;—a man of strong head, and of heart only too strong. [Preuss, ii. 58; Militair-Lexikon, iii. 10.]
From Prag onwards, here has been a delicate set of operations; perfectly executed,—thanks to Friedrich's rapidity of shift, and also to the cautious slowly puzzling mind of Daun. Had Daun used any diligence, had Daun and Prince Karl been broad awake, together or even singly! But Friedrich guessed they seldom or never were; that they would spend some days in puzzling; and that, with despatch, he would have time for everything. Daun, we could observe, stood singing TE-DEUM, greatly at leisure, in his old Camp, 20th June, while Friedrich, from the first gray of morning, and diligently all day long, was withdrawing from the trenches of Prag,—Friedrich's people, self and goods getting folded out in the finest gradation, and with perfect success; no Daun to hinder him,—Daun leisurely doing TE-DEUM, forty miles off, helping on the WRONG side by that exertion! [Cogniazzo, ii. 367.]—"Poor Browne, he is dead of his wounds, in Prag yonder," writes Westphalen, in his Leitmeritz Journal, "news came to us July 1st: men said, 'Ah, that was why they lay asleep.'"
Till June 26th, Daun and Karl had not united; nor, except sending out Loudon and Croats, done anything, either of them. Sunday, June 26th, at Podschernitz on the old Field of Prag, a week and a day after Kolin, they did get together; still seemingly a little puzzled, "Shall we follow the King? Shall we follow Moritz and Bevern?"—nothing clear for some time, except to send out Pandour parties upon both. Moritz, since parting with the King in Alt-Bunzlau neighborhood, has gone northward some marches, thirty miles or so, to JUNG-Bunzlau,—meeting of Iser and Elbe, surely a good position:—Moritz, on receipt of these Pandour allowances of his, writes to the King, "Shall we retreat on Zittau, then, your Majesty? Straight upon Zittau?" Fancy Friedrich's astonishment;—who well intends to eat the Country first, perhaps to fight if there be chance, and at least to lie OUTSIDE the doors of Silesia and the Lausitz, as well as of Saxony here!—and answers, with his own hand, on the instant: "Your Dilection will not be so mad!" [In Preuss, ii. 58, the pungent little Autograph in full.] And at once recalls Moritz, and appoints the Prince of Prussia to go and take command. Who directly went;—a most important step for the King's interests and his own. Whose fortunes in that business we shall see before long!—
At Leitmeritz the King continues four weeks, with his Army parted in this way; waiting how the endless hostile element, which begirdles his horizon all round, will shape itself into combinations, that he may set upon the likeliest or the needfulest of these, when once it has disclosed itself. Horizon all round is black enough: Austrians, French, Swedes, Russians, Reichs Army; closer upon him or not so close, all are rolling in: Saxony, the Lausitz and Silesia, Brandenburg itself, it is uncertain which of these may soonest require his active presence.
The very day after his arrival in Leitmeritz,—Tuesday, 28th June, while that junction with Keith was going on, and the troops were defiling along the Bridge for junction with Keith,—a heavy sorrow had befallen him, which he yet knew not of. An irreparable Domestic loss; sad complement to these Military and other Public disasters. Queen Sophie Dorothee, about whose health he had been anxious, but had again been set quiet, died at Berlin that day. [Monbijou, 28th June, 1757; born at Hanover, 27th March, 1687.] In her seventy-first year: of no definite violent disease; worn down with chagrins and apprehensions, in this black whirlpool of Public troubles. So far as appears, the news came on Friedrich by surprise:—"bad cough," we hear of, and of his anxieties about it, in the Spring time; then again of "improvement, recovery, in the fine weather;"—no thought, just now, of such an event: and he took it with a depth of affliction, which my less informed readers are far from expecting of him.
July 2d, the news came: King withdrew into privacy; to weep and bewail under this new pungency of grief, superadded to so many others. Mitchell says: "For two days he had no levee; only the Princes dined with him [Princes Henri and Ferdinand; Prince of Prussia is gone to Jung-Bunzlau, would get the sad message there, among his other troubles]: yesterday, July 3d, King sent for me in the afternoon,—the first time he has seen anybody since the news came:—I had the honor to remain with him some hours in his closet. I must own to your Lordship I was most sensibly afflicted to see him indulging his grief, and giving way to the warmest filial affections; recalling to mind the many obligations he had to her late Majesty; all she had suffered, and how nobly she bore it; the good she did to everybody; the one comfort he now had, to think of having tried to make her last years more agreeable." [Papers and Memoirs, i. 253; Despatch to Holderness, 4th July (slightly abridged);—see ib. i. 357-359 (Private Journal). Westphalen, ii. 14. See OEuvres de Frederic, iv. 182.] In the thick of public business, this kind of mood to Mitchell seems to have lasted all the time of Leitmeritz, which is about three weeks yet: Mitchell's Note-books and Despatches, in that part, have a fine Biographic interest; the wholly human Friedrich wholly visible to us there as he seldom is. Going over his past Life to Mitchell; brief, candid, pious to both his Parents;—inexpressibly sad; like moonlight on the grave of one's Mother, silent that, while so much else is too noisy!
This Friedrich, upon whom the whole world has risen like a mad Sorcerer's-Sabbath, how safe he once lay in his cradle, like the rest of us, mother's love wrapping him soft:—and now! These thoughts commingle in a very tragic way with the avalanche of public disasters which is thundering down on all sides. Warm tears the meed of this new sorrow; small in compass, but greater in poignancy than all the rest together. "My poor old Mother, oh, my Mother, that so loved me always, and would have given her own life to shelter mine!"—It was at Leitmeritz, as I guess, that Mitchell first made decisive acquaintance, what we may almost call intimacy, with the King: we already defined him as a sagacious, long-headed, loyal-hearted diplomatic gentleman, Scotch by birth and by turn of character; abundantly polite, vigilant, discreet, and with a fund of general sense and rugged veracity of mind; whom Friedrich at once recognized for what he was, and much took to, finding a hearty return withal; so that they were soon well with one another, and continued so. Mitchell, as orders were, "attended the King's person" all through this War, sometimes in the blaze of battle itself and nothing but cannon-shot going, if it so chanced; and has preserved, in his multifarious Papers, a great many traits of Friedrich not to be met with elsewhere.
Mitchell's occasional society, conversation with a man of sense and manly character, which Friedrich always much loved, was, no doubt, a resource to Friedrich in his lonely roamings and vicissitudes in those dark years. No other British Ambassador ever had the luck to please him or be pleased by him,—most of them, as Ex-Exchequer Legge and the like Ex-Parliamentary people, he seems to have considered dull, obstinate, wooden fellows, of fantastic, abrupt rather abstruse kind of character, not worth deciphering;—some of them, as Hanbury Williams, with the mischievous tic (more like galvanism or St.-Vitus'-dance) which he called "wit," and the inconvenient turn for plotting and intriguing, Friedrich could not endure at all, but had them as soon as possible recalled,—of course, not without detestation on their part.