Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

To the ambassador of England Frederick made light of his enterprise and insisted that it would permit him, if necessary, to defend Hanover. But it is difficult not to surmise that he looked for a great campaign. The capture of Prague, the rout of the army of Bohemia, and the seizure of its magazines—all this would be a fitting sequel to the coercion of Saxony. It was not too grave a task for the main host of Prussia.

Even the lesser scheme failed, however, because Augustus, though a weakling, was a man of honour. His army was less than twenty thousand strong, but it sufficed to hold Pirna and to block the highway of the Elbe. On September 9, 1756, Frederick entered Dresden, but Augustus had fled to the army and lay safe in the impregnable rock-fortress of Königstein. While the invader was rifling his archives for proofs of a great conspiracy against Prussia, he offered to observe the most benevolent neutrality and begged for an exact statement of what more could be expected from him. He received the answer on September 14th from the lips of Frederick’s favourite, Winterfeldt. It was nothing less than that he should join Prussia in attacking Maria Theresa.

“How can I turn my arms against a Princess who has given me no cause for complaint, and to whom, in virtue of an old defensive alliance of which Your Majesty is aware, I ought to furnish 6000 auxiliaries, only that it is doubtful whether the present war is a case of aggression?” Such was the old King’s reply to the Prussian tempter, and he coupled with it renewed assurances of neutrality. Frederick reiterated his demands and expressed regret that he could not extend complaisance further. By no effort of diplomacy could he shake the honourable firmness of Augustus, and it was therefore necessary to gain the highroad into Bohemia by force.

Frederick had surrounded Pirna, but he did not venture to assault it, though Napoleon declared at first sight that there were nine points of attack. It was clear, however, that hunger must soon force the Saxons to move and that their only hope lay in succour from the Austrians. Browne, the Irishman who had proved himself to be one of the Queen’s best generals, therefore led an army northward to the foot of the mountains and was confronted by Frederick in person at Lobositz. On October 1, 1756, a fierce fight of seven hours proved indecisive. Early in the day the King sent twenty squadrons of horse to meet disaster at the hands of the Austrian gunners, and later the Prussian infantry showed that they were still the men of Mollwitz and of Soor. The Prussians kept the field of battle, but of nearly 6400 killed and wounded more than half were theirs.

The relief of Pirna was checked but not frustrated. Lobositz is, however, chiefly memorable as the day on which the Austrians first encountered the Prussians at their best and were not beaten. It is no more than Frederick’s due to remark that the troops whom he had now to face were men who had learned what his father’s army had to teach. They had adopted the Old Dessauer’s iron ramrod, and the swiftness of their fire was no longer less than the half of their opponents’. Their artillery, thanks to the labours of Prince Lichtenstein, was always good and not seldom superior to the Prussian.

In little more than a fortnight after Lobositz the campaign of 1756 was at an end. On October 11th, Browne reached Schandau, on the right bank of the Elbe, where he expected the starving Saxons to join him. They were not ready, and after waiting two days he was compelled to retreat. The failure of the relieving expedition sealed the fate of Augustus’s army. On October 17th, the rank and file laid down their arms—only to be compelled, in defiance of the terms of surrender, to take them up again as soldiers of the King of Prussia.

Augustus, however, did not suffer martyrdom in vain. He lost his army and his Electorate, but his “ovine obstinacy” ruined the attack upon the Queen. In the hour of triumph Frederick wrote to Schwerin: “As for our stay in Bohemia, it is impossible for either of us to establish a sure footing there this year, for we have entered the province too late. We must confine ourselves to covering Silesia and Saxony.” Both Prussians and Austrians tacitly agreed to postpone the decisive blow till the new campaign.

To balance the gain and loss which Frederick owed to his preference of his own plan to the “timid policy” of Podewils we must take into account wider considerations of war and politics. By treating Saxony in Hohenzollern fashion, without scruple and without riot, the King undoubtedly gained some advantages. He found in the archives at Dresden the material for yet another manifesto to Europe. He tested and inspired his army, which only knew that under his leadership it had won a battle, captured an army, and conquered a state. He even increased its numbers by forcing the vanquished Saxons into the ranks. Above all, he won security for the western flank of Silesia and a safe base from which to attack Bohemia.

But all this was purchased at a great price in material and moral strength. Prussia was still a Power which had to ask herself whether she could bear a second or a third campaign. To raise new taxes was difficult if not impossible. Frederick, it might almost be said, paid for the war out of his own pocket with the help of his allies and of the enemy. Already he showed some signs of being pressed for money. In the middle of September he made secret arrangements for borrowing 300,000 thalers from a house of business in Berlin. Soon the Saxon officials were told that their pay must fall into arrear and Frederick observes with some brutality that Augustus, who had retired to his second capital at Warsaw, could support his queen and her household in Saxony from the French and Austrian subsidies. He thus denied to the victim that courtesy for his family which he had ostentatiously promised from the first.

It may be doubted whether 14,000 pressed men, even though some of them might otherwise have found their way to the enemy, compensated Prussia for the loyal veterans who fell at Lobositz. Throughout the war Frederick found no servants less reliable than the Saxons whom he had impressed and no foes more bitter than their countrymen who escaped. As for Saxony itself, it is true that if war must come, which Podewils regarded as dubious, Prussia derived much strength from her possession of it. But Frederick’s treatment of Saxony removed all possibility of escaping not only from a war, but from war upon the scale that he professed to expect. The spectacle of the suffering King inflamed all his enemies. As an exile in Warsaw Augustus was a more valuable ally to Austria than he could have been in Dresden. He made it absurd for Frederick to pose as the defender of German princes against the Hapsburg. In January, 1757, a majority of those princes, assembled in Diet at Ratisbon, solemnly commissioned the Hapsburg to marshal their corporate might against the Prussian aggressor.