Frederick the Great and the Rise of Prussia

by William Fiddian Reddaway

Both combatants, therefore, made for Neumarkt on the same day, and the forward movement of the Austrians was only quickened when they learned that the Prussians had chased their vanguard from the town. On the night of December 4th the armies lay within a few miles of each other. The Prussians were exulting in the news that Prince Charles had crossed the two streams which rendered his old position so formidable that Frederick had enrolled 800 volunteers for the first attack.

With an army tuned to the highest pitch and a King who knew every rood of the ground on the road to Breslau, the Prussians advanced to give battle. Before five o’clock on the dismal morning of December 5, 1757, they were on the march, Frederick in the van, and only a single battalion left in Neumarkt with the baggage. The exact position of the Austrians was not known to them as they hastened through the broken country east of Neumarkt towards the champaign west of Leuthen. If the enemy had placed this champaign at their back, the attack would still be hampered by the ground.

The Prussians had espied watch-fires on a height to the south of the great road a few miles east of Neumarkt—a height from which in daylight both the towers of Neumarkt and the farms and cottages of Leuthen may be seen. Was this an Austrian wing? To their delight it proved to be only a vanguard. Three regiments of Saxon light horse, heroes of Kolin, had been placed there with two of Imperial hussars to collect the wreck of the Neumarkt garrison and to watch the road to Breslau. They clung too closely to their task and were crushed by the Prussian vanguard. Eleven officers and 540 men were taken prisoner, many fell, and the rest fled wildly to alarm the Austrian right. Frederick could with difficulty check the mad pursuit of his hussars, who drew bridle almost within cannon-shot of the enemy.

The King’s spirits rose yet higher when he learned from the prisoners that Prince Charles had left most of his heavy guns in Breslau. He indulged his advancing columns with the sight of the captured troopers filing past them to Neumarkt and again condescended to repartee. “Why did you forsake me?” he asked a Frenchman who had previously deserted from the Prussian army. “Indeed, your Majesty,” the man replied, “our position is too hopeless.” “Well,” said the King, “let us strike one more blow to-day, and if I am beaten we will both desert to-morrow.”

PLAN OF LEUTHEN, DECEMBER 5, 1757.

As the gathering daylight revealed Prince Charles’s army Frederick’s confidence was more than ever justified. The Austrian position, chosen perhaps to cover three routes to Breslau, was far too extensive. Their line, which stretched from Nippern due south across the highroad, then on behind Leuthen village as far as Sagschütz and the pine-clad hill beyond, was not less than five miles long and unprotected for the most part by the ground. Only the right wing, where the Italian Luchesi was in command, was defended in front and flank by hills and woods and marshes. These made it practically impossible for the Prussians to attack at any point between Nippern and the highroad, and if they fell upon the centre Luchesi might advance through the wood and take them in flank.

Prince Charles, who knew something of Frederick’s methods, would have done well to strengthen his left. But on the day of Leuthen, Fortune seemed resolved to favour the side which trusted most to her help. By design or by accident, Frederick’s movements were such as to convince Luchesi that the Prussians were about to hurl all their strength upon him. While the King reconnoitred, the heads of his columns remained pointing in the direction of their line of march and thus seemed to threaten the Austrian right. In each of the great battles of this year, at Prague, at Kolin, and in a sense also at Rossbach, it was the right wing of the allies upon which the Prussians fell. Now when he saw Frederick diligently inspecting his own quarter of the field Luchesi insisted on being reinforced. His clamour prevailed and, at the moment when Frederick began the movement towards Leuthen and Sagschütz, Daun was galloping with cavalry from the centre and left towards Nippern, the point most distant from the danger.

The Prussian army this day surpassed itself in the swift precision of its movements. No sooner was the King’s plan formed than Maurice and Zieten were ranking the eager veterans for their mysterious march due south—parallel with the Austrian line of battle and in part hidden from its view by the undulations of the ground. Frederick rode along the ridge between the armies and exulted as he marked the mistake of Daun. For some two miles he might, for all the Austrians knew, be in retreat. Then as the ground sinks into a plain he drew nearer to the enemy’s left and hurled all his strength upon it.

Frederick and his 32,000 men had only some four hours of daylight in which to overthrow a host nearly 80,000 strong. Despite the tension the Prussian machine worked perfectly. The complicated attack in oblique order was accomplished as never before or after, and an invincible assault began. By steady valour, not by desperate onrush, the infantry cleared the height near Sagschütz and in perhaps fifteen minutes they took the battery which crowned it. The Austrians and Bavarians made furious efforts to regain what the flight of their comrades from Würtemburg had sacrificed. Nothing, however, could now withstand the disciplined onset of the Prussians, who swept before them the shattered regiments and the breathless supports who hurried to their aid. Hindered by ditches, the Prussian cavalry had as yet been able to give little help, but the irresistible advance of the infantry brought them at length to better ground and Zieten completed the ruin of the Austrian left.