History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 13

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Prepared by D.R. Thompson

Carlyle's "History of Friedrich II of Prussia"
Book XIII

FIRST SILESIAN WAR, LEAVING THE GENERAL EUROPEAN
ONE ABLAZE ALL ROUND, GETS ENDED.

May, 1741-July, 1742.

Chapter I.

BRITANNIC MAJESTY AS PALADIN OF THE PRAGMATIC.

Part First of his Britannic Majesty's Sorrows, the Britannic or
Domestic Part, is now perhaps conceivable to readers. But as to the
Second, the Germanic or Pragmatic Part,--articulate History, after
much consideration, is content to renounce attempting these;
feels that these will remain forever inconceivable to mankind in
the now altered times. So small a gentleman; and he feels, dismally
though with heroism, that he has got the axis of the world on his
shoulder. Poor Majesty! His eyes, proud as Jove's, are nothing like
so perspicacious; a pair of the poorest eyes: and he has to scan
with them, and unriddle under pain of death, such a waste of
insoluble intricacies, troubles and world-perils as seldom was,--
even in Dreams. In fact, it is of the nature of a long Nightmare
Dream, all this of the Pragmatic, to his poor Majesty and Nation;
and wakeful History must not spend herself upon it, beyond
the essential.

May 12th, betimes this Year, his Majesty got across to Hanover,
Harrington with him; anxious to contemplate near at hand that Camp
of the Old Dessauer's at Gottin, and the other fearful phenomena,
French, Prussian and other, in that Country. His Majesty, as
natural, was much in Germany in those Years; scanning the
phenomena; a long while not knowing what in the world to make of
them. Bully Belleisle having stept into the ring, it is evident,
clear as the sun, that one must act, and act at once; but it is a
perfect sphinx-enigma to say How. Seldom was Sovereign or man so
spurred, and goaded on, by the highest considerations; and then so
held down, and chained to his place, by an imbroglio of counter-
considerations and sphinx-riddles! Thrice over, at different dates
(which shall be given), the first of them this Year, he starts up
as in spasm, determined to draw sword, and plunge in; twice he is
crushed down again, with sword half drawn; and only the third time
(in 1743) does he get sword out, and brandish it in a surprising
though useless manner. After which he feels better. But up to that
crisis, his case is really tragical,--had idle readers any bowels
for him; which they have not! One or two Fractions, snatched from
the circumambient Paper Vortex, must suffice us for the
indispensable in this place:--

CUNCTATIONS, YET INCESSANT AND UBIQUITOUS ENDEAVORINGS, OF HIS
BRITANNIC MAJESTY (1741-1743).

... After the wonderful Russian Partition-Treaty, which his English
Walpoles would not hear of,--and which has produced the Camp of
Gottin, see, your Majesty!--George does nothing rashly. Far from
it: indeed, except it be paying money, he becomes again a miracle
of cunctations; and staggers about for years to come, like the--
Shall we say, like the White Hanover Horse amid half a dozen sieves
of beans? Alas, no, like the Hanover Horse with the shadows of half
a dozen Damocles'-swords dangling into the eyes of it;--enough to
drive any Horse to its wit's end!--

"To do, to dare," thinks the Britannic Majesty;--yes, and of daring
there is a plenty: but, "In which direction? What, How?" these are
questions for a fussy little gentleman called to take the world on
his shoulders. We suppose it was by Walpole's advice that he gave
her Hungarian Majesty that 200,000 pounds of Secret-Service Money;
--advice sufficiently Walpolean: "Russian Partition-Treaties;
horrible to think of;--beware of these again! Give her Majesty that
cash; can be done; it will keep matters afloat, and spoil nothing!"
That, till the late Subsidy payable within year and day hence, was
all of tangible his Majesty had yet done;--truly that is all her
Hungarian Majesty has yet got by hawking the world, Pragmatic
Sanction in hand. And if that were the bit of generosity which
enabled Neipperg to climb the Mountains and be beaten at Mollwitz,
that has helped little! Very big generosities, to a frightful
cipher of Millions Sterling through the coming years, will go the
same road; and amount also to zero, even for the receiving party,
not to speak of the giving! For men and kings are wise creatures.

But wise or unwise, how great are his Britannic Majesty's
activities in this Pragmatic Business! We may say, they are
prodigious, incessant, ubiquitous. They are forgotten now, fallen
wholly to the spiders and the dust-bins;--though Friedrich himself
was not a busier King in those days, if perhaps a better directed.
It is a thing wonderful to us, but sorrowful and undeniable.
We perceive the Britannic Majesty's own little mind pulsing with
this Pragmatic Matter, as the biggest volcano would do;--shooting
forth dust and smoke (subsidies, diplomatic emissaries, treaties,
offers of treaty, plans, foolish futile exertions), at an immense
rate. When the Celestial Balances are canting, a man ought to exert
himself. But as to this of saving the House of Austria from
France,--surely, your Britannic Majesty, the shortest way to that,
if that is so indispensable, were: That the House of Austria should
consent to give up its stolen goods, better late than never; and to
make this King of Prussia its friend, as he offers to be! Joined
with this King, it would manage to give account of France and its
balloon projects, by and by. Could your Britannic Majesty but take
Mr. Viner's hint; and, in the interim, mind your OWN business!--
His Britannic Majesty intends immediate fighting; and, both in
England and Hanover, is making preparation loud and great. Nay, he
will in his own person fight, if necessary, and rather likes the
thought of it: he saw Oudenarde in his young days; and, I am told,
traces in himself a talent for Generalship. Were the Britannic
Majesty to draw his own puissant sword!-His own puissant purse he
has already drawn; and is subsidizing to right and left; knocking
at all doors with money in hand, and the question, "Any fighting
done here?" In England itself there goes on much drilling,
enlisting; camping, proposing to camp; which is noisy enough in the
British Newspapers, much more in the Foreign. One actual Camp there
was "on Lexden Heath near Colchester," from May till October of
this 1741, [Manifold but insignificant details about it, in the old
Newspapers of those Months.]--Camp waiting always to be shipped
across to the scene of action, but never was:--this actual Camp,
and several imaginary ones here, which were alarming to the
Continental Gazetteer. In England his Majesty is busy that way;
still more among his Hanoverians, now under his own royal eye;
and among his Danes and Hessians, whom he has now brought over into
Hanover, to combine with the others. Danes and Hessians, 6,000 of
each kind, he for some time keeps back in stall, upon subsidy,
ready for such an occasion. Their "Camp at Hameln," "Camp at
Nienburg" (will, with the Hanoverians, be 30,000 odd); their
swashing and blaring about, intending to encamp at Hameln, at
Nienburg, and other places, but never doing it, or doing it with
any result: this, with the alarming English Camps at Lexden and in
Dreamland, which also were void of practical issue, filled Europe
with rumor this Summer.--Eager enough to fight; a noble martial
ardor in our little Hercules-Atlas! But there lie such enormous
difficulties on the threshold; especially these Two, which are
insuperable or nearly so.

Difficulty FIRST, is that of the laggard Dutch; a People apt to be
heavy in the stern-works. They are quite languid about Pragmatic
Sanction, these Dutch; they answer his Britannic Majesty's
enthusiasm with an obese torpidity; and hope always they will drift
through, in some way; buoyant in their own fat, well ballasted
astern; and not need such swimming for life. "What a laggard
notion," thinks his Majesty; "notion in ten pair of breeches, so to
speak!" This stirring up of the Dutch, which lasts year on year,
and almost beats Lord Stair, Lord Carteret, and our chief Artists,
is itself a thing like few! One of his Britannic Majesty's great
difficulties;--insuperable he never could admit it to be.
"Surely you are a Sea-Power, ye valiant Dutch; the OTHER Sea-Power?
Bound by Barrier Treaty, Treaty of Vienna, and Law of Nature
itself, to rise with us against the fatal designs of France;
fatal to your Dutch Barrier, first of all; if the Liberties of
Mankind were indifferent to you! How is it that you will not?"
The Dutch cannot say how. France rocks them in security, by oily-
mouthed Diplomatists, Fenelon and others: "Would not touch a stone
of your Barrier, for the world, ye admirable Dutch neighbors:
on our honor, thrice and four times, No!" They have an eloquent Van
Hoey of their own at Paris; renowned in Newspapers: "Nothing but
friendship here!" reports Van Hoey always; and the Dutch answer his
Britannic Majesty: "Hm, rise? Well then, if we must!"--but sit
always still.

Nowhere in Political Mechanics have I seen such a Problem as this
of hoisting to their feet the heavy-bottomed Dutch. The cunningest
leverage, every sort of Diplomatic block-and-tackle, Carteret and
Stair themselves running over to help in critical seasons, is
applied; to almost no purpose. Pull long, pull strong, pull all
together,--see, the heavy Dutch do stir; some four inches of
daylight fairly visible below them: bear a hand, oh, bear a hand!--
Pooh, the Dutch flap down again, as low as ever. As low,--unless
(by Diplomatic art) you have WEDGED them at the four inches higher;
which, after the first time or two, is generally done. At the long
last, partially in 1743 (upon which his Britannic Majesty drew
sword), completely in 1747, the Dutch were got to their feet;--
unfortunately good for nothing when they were! Without them his
Britannic Majesty durst not venture. Hidden in those dust-bins,
there is nothing so absurd, or which would be so wearisome, did it
not at last become slightly ludicrous, as this of hoisting
the Dutch.

Difficulty SECOND, which in enormity of magnitude might be reckoned
first, as in order of time it ranks both first and last, is:
The case of dear Hanover; case involved in mere insolubilities.
Our own dear Hanover, which (were there nothing more in it) is
liable, from that Camp at Gottin, to be slit in pieces at a
moment's warning! No drawing sword against a nefarious Prussia, on
those terms. The Camp at Gottin holds George in checkmate. And then
finally, in this same Autumn, 1741, when a Maillebois with his 40
or 50,000 French (the Leftward or western of those Two Belleisle
Armies), threatening our Hanover from another side, crossed the
Lower Rhine--But let us not anticipate. The case of Hanover, which
everybody saw to be his Majesty's vulnerable point, was the
constant open door of France and her machinations, and a never-
ending theme of angry eloquences in the English Parliament as well.

So that the case of Hanover proved insoluble throughout, and was
like a perpetual running sore. Oh the pamphleteerings, the
denouncings, the complainings, satirical and elegiac, which
grounded themselves on Hanover, the CASE OF THE HANOVER FORCES, and
innumerable other Hanoverian cases, griefs and difficulties!
So pungently vital to somnambulant mankind at that epoch; to us
fallen dead as carrion, and unendurable to think of. My friends, if
you send for Gentlemen from Hanover, you must take them with
Hanover adhering more or less; and ought not to quarrel with your
bargain, which you reckoned so divine! No doubt, it is singular to
see a Britannic Majesty neglecting his own Spanish War, the one
real business he has at present; and running about over all the
world; busy, soul, body and breeches-pocket, in other people's
wars; egging on other fighting, whispering every likely fellow he
can meet, "Won't you perhaps fight? Here is for you, if so!"--hand
to breeches-pocket accompanying the word. But it must be said, and
ought to be better known than in our day it is, His Majesty's
Ministers, and the English State-Doctors generally, were precisely
of the same mind. TO them too the Austrian Quarrel was everything,
their own poor Spanish Quarrel nothing; and the complaint they make
of his Majesty is rather that he does not rush rapidly enough, with
brandished sword, as well as with guineas raining from him, into
this one indispensable business. "Owing to his fears for Hanover!"
say they, with indignation, with no end of suspicion, angry
pamphleteering and covert eloquence, "within those walls"
and without.

The suspicion of Hanover's checking his Majesty's Pragmatic
velocity is altogether well founded; and there need no more be said
on that Hanover score. Be it well understood and admitted, Hanover
was the Britannic Majesty's beloved son; and the British Empire his
opulent milk-cow. Richest of milk-cows; staff of one's life, for
grand purposes and small; beautiful big animal, not to be provoked;
but to be stroked and milked:--Friends, if you will do a Glorious
Revolution of that kind, and burn such an amount of tar upon it,
why eat sour herbs for an inevitable corollary therefrom! And let
my present readers understand, at any rate, that,--except in
Wapping, Bristol and among the simple instinctive classes (with
whom, it is true, go Pitt and some illustrious figures),--political
England generally, whatever of England had Parliamentary discourse
of reason, and did Pamphlets, Despatches, Harangues, went greatly
along with his Majesty in that Pragmatic Business. And be the blame
of delirium laid on the right back, where it ought to lie, not on
the wrong, which has enough to bear of its own. And go not into
that dust-whirlwind of extinct stupidities, O reader:--what reader
would, except for didactic objects? Know only that it does of a
truth whirl there; and fancy always, if you can, that certain
things and Human Figures, a Friedrich, a Chatham and some others,
have it for their Life-Element. Which, I often think, is their
principal misfortune with Posterity; said Life-Element having gone
to such an unutterable condition for gods and men.

"One other thing surprises us in those Old Pamphlets," says my
Constitutional Friend: "How the phrase, 'Cause of Liberty' ever and
anon turns up, with great though extinct emphasis, evidently
sincere. After groping, one is astonished to find it means Support
of the House of Austria; keeping of the Hapsburgs entire in their
old Possessions among mankind! That, to our great-grandfathers, was
the 'Cause of Liberty;'--said 'Cause' being, with us again,
Electoral Suffrage and other things; a notably different
definition, perhaps still wider of the mark.

"Our great-grandfathers lived in perpetual terror that they would
be devoured by France; that French ambition would overset the
Celestial Balance, and proceed next to eat the British Nation.
Stand upon your guard then, one would have said: Look to your
ships, to your defences, to your industries; to your virtues first
of all,--your VIRTUTES, manhoods, conformities to the Divine Law
appointed you; which are the great and indeed sole strength to any
Man or Nation! Discipline yourselves, wisely, in all kinds;
more and more, till there be no anarchic fibre left in you.
Unanarchic, disciplined at all points, you might then, I should
say, with supreme composure, let France, and the whole World at its
back, try what they could do upon you and the unique little Island
you are so lucky as to live in?--Foolish mortals: what Potentiality
of Battle, think you (not against France only, but against Satanas
and the Ministers of Chaos generally), would a poor Friedrich
Wilhelm, not to speak of better, have got out of such a Possession,
had it been his to put in drill! And drill is not of soldiers only;
though perhaps of soldiers first and most indispensably of all;
since 'without Being,' as my Friend Oliver was wont to say, 'Well-
being is not possible.' There is military drill; there is
industrial, economic, spiritual; gradually there are all kinds of
drill, of wise discipline, of peremptory mandate become effective
everywhere, 'OBEY the Laws of Heaven, or else disappear from these
latitudes!' Ah me, if one dealt in day-dreams, and prophecies of an
England grown celestial,--celestial she should be, not in gold
nuggets, continents all of beef, and seas all of beer, Abolition of
Pain, and Paradise to All and Sundry, but in that quite different
fashion; and there, I should say, THERE were the magnificent Hope
to indulge in! That were to me the 'Cause of Liberty;' and any the
smallest contribution towards that kind of 'Liberty ' were a
sacred thing!--

"Belleisle again may, if he pleases, call his the Cause of
Sovereignty. A Sovereign Louis, it would appear, has not governing
enough to do within his own French borders, but feels called to
undertake Germany as well;--a gentleman with an immense governing
faculty, it would appear? Truly, good reader, I am sick of heart,
contemplating those empty sovereign mountebanks, and empty
antagonist ditto, with their Causes of Liberty and Causes of Anti-
Liberty; and cannot but wish that we had got the ashes of that
World-Explosion, of 1789, well riddled and smelted, and the poor
World were quit of a great many things!"--

My Constitutional Historian of England, musing on Belleisle and his
Anti-Pragmatic industries and grandiosities,--"how Chief-Bully
Belleisle stept down into the ring as a gay Volunteer, and foolish
Chief-Defender George had to follow dismally heroic, as a Conscript
of Fate,"--drops these words: in regard to the Wages they
respectively had:--

"Nations that go into War without business there, are sure of
getting business as they proceed; and if the beginning were
phantasms,--especially phantasms of the hoping, self-conceited
kind,--the results for them are apt to be extremely real! As was
the case with the French in this War, and those following, in which
his Britannic Majesty played chief counter-tenor. From 1741, in
King Friedrich's First War, onwards to Friedrich's Third War,
1756-1763, the volunteer French found a great deal of work lying
ready for them,--gratuitous on their part, from the beginning.
And the results to them came out, first completely visible, in the
World-Miracles of 1789, and the years following!

"Nations, again, may be driven upon War by phantasm TERRORS, and go
into it, in sorrow of heart, not gayety of heart; and that is a
shade better. And one always pities a poor Nation, in such case;--
as the very Destinies rather do, and judge it more mercifully.
Nay, the poor bewildered Nation may, among its brain-phantasms,
have something of reality and sanity inarticulately stirring it
withal. It may have a real ordinance of Heaven to accomplish on
those terms:--and IF so, it will sometimes, in the most chaotic
circuitous ways, through endless hazards, at a hundred or a hundred
thousand times the natural expense, ultimately get it done!
This was the case of the poor English in those Wars.

"They were Wars extraneous to England little less than to France;
neither Nation had real business in them; and they seem to us now a
very mad object on the part of both. But they were not gratuitously
gone into, on the part of England; far from that. England undertook
them, with its big heart very sorrowful, strange spectralities
bewildering it; and managed them (as men do sleep-walking) with a
gloomy solidity of purpose, with a heavy-laden energy, and, on the
whole, with a depth of stupidity, which were very great. Yet look
at the respective net results. France lies down to rot into grand
Spontaneous-Combustion, Apotheosis of Sansculottism, and much else;
which still lasts, to her own great peril, and the great affliction
of neighbors. Poor England, after such enormous stumbling among the
chimney-pots, and somnambulism over all the world for twenty years,
finds on awakening, that she is arrived, after all, where she
wished to be, and a good deal farther! Finds that her own important
little errand is somehow or other, done;--and, in short, that
'Jenkins's Ear [as she named the thing] HAS been avenged,' and the
Ocean Highways 'opened' and a good deal more, in a most signal way!
For the Eternal Providences--little as poor Dryasdust now knows of
it, mumbling and maundering that sad stuff of his--do rule; and the
great soul of the world, I assure you once more, is JUST.
And always for a Nation, as for a man, it is very behooveful to be
honest, to be modest, however stupid!"--

By this time, however,--Mollwitz having fallen out, and Belleisle
being evidently on the steps,--his Britannic Majesty recognizes
clearly, and insists upon it, strengthened by his Harringtons and
everybody of discernment, That, nefarious or not, this Friedrich
will require to be bargained with. That, far from breaking in upon
him, and partitioning him (how far from it!), there is no
conceivable method of saving the Celestial Balances till HE be
satisfied, in some way. This is the one step his Britannic Majesty
has yet made, out of these his choking imbroglios; and truly this
is one. Hyndford, his best negotiator, is on the road for
Friedrich's Camp; Robinson at Vienna, has been directed to say and
insist, "Bargain with that man; he must be bargained with, if our
Cause of Liberty is to be saved at all?"--

And now, having opened the dust-bin so far, that the reader's fancy
might be stirred without affliction to his lungs and eyes, let us
shut it down again,--might we but hope forever! That is too fond a
hope. But the background or sustaining element made imaginable,
the few events deserving memory may surely go on at a much
swifter pace.

Chapter II.

CAMP OF STREHLEN.

Friedrich's Silesian Camps this Summer, Camp of Strehlen chiefly,
were among the strangest places in the world. Friedrich, as we have
often noticed, did not much pursue the defeated Austrians, at or
near Mollwitz, or press them towards flat ruin in their Silesian
business: it is clear he anxiously wished a bargain without farther
exasperation; and hoped he might get it by judicious patience.
Brieg he took, with that fine outburst of bombardment, which did
not last a week: but Brieg once his, he fell quiet again; kept
encamping, here there, in that Mollwitz-Neisse region, for above
three months to come; not doing much, beyond the indispensable;
negotiating much, or rather negotiated with, and waiting on events.
[In Camp of Mollwitz (nearer Brieg than the Battle-field was) till
28th May (after the Battle seven weeks); then to Camp at Grotkau
(28th May-9th June, twelve days); thence (9th June) to Friedewalde,
Herrnsdorf; to Strehlen (21st June-20th August, nine or ten weeks
in all). See Helden-Geschichte, i. 924, ii. 931;
Rodenbeck, Orlich, &c.]

Both Armies were reinforcing themselves; and Friedrich's, for
obvious reasons, in the first weeks especially, became much the
stronger. Once in May, and again afterwards, weary of the pace
things went at, he had resolved on having Neisse at once;
on attacking Neipperg in his strong camp there, and cutting short
the tedious janglings and uncertainties. He advanced to Grotkau
accordingly, some twelve or fifteen miles nearer Neisse (28th May,
--stayed till 9th June), quite within wind of Neipperg and his
outposts; but found still, on closer inspection, that he had better
wait;--and do so withal at a greater distance from Neipperg and his
Pandour Swarms. He drew back therefore to Strehlen, northwestward,
rather farther from Neisse than before; and lay encamped there for
nine or ten weeks to come. Not till the beginning of August did
there fall out any military event (Pandour skirmishing in plenty,
hut nothing to call an event); and not till the end of August any
that pointed to conclusive results. As it was at Strehlen where
mostly these Diplomacies went on, and the Camp of Strehlen was the
final and every way the main one, it may stand as the
representative of these Diplomatizing Camps to us, and figure as
the sole one which in fact it nearly was.

Strehlen is a pleasant little Town, nestled prettily among its
granite Hills, the steeple of it visible from Mollwitz; some
twenty-five miles west of Brieg, some thirty south of Breslau, and
about as far northwest of Neisse: there Friedrich and his Prussians
lie, under canvas mainly, with outposts and detachments sprinkled
about under roofs:--a Camp of Strehlen, more or less imaginable by
the reader. And worth his imagining; such a Camp, if not for
soldiering, yet for negotiating and wagging of diplomatic wigs, as
there never was before. Here, strangely shifted hither, is the
centre of European Politics all Summer. From the utmost ends of
Europe come Ambassadors to Strehlen: from Spain, France, England,
Denmark, Holland,--there are sometimes nine at once, how many
successively and in total I never knew. [ Helden-
Geschichte, i. 932.] They lodge generally in Breslau;
but are always running over to Strehlen. There sits, properly
speaking, the general Secret Parliament of Europe; and from most
Countries, except Austria, representatives attend at Strehlen, or
go and come between Breslau and Strehlen, submissive to the evils
of field-life, when need is. A surprising thing enough to mankind,
and big as the world in its own day; though gone now to small
bulk,--one Human Figure pretty much all that is left of memorable
in it to mankind and us.

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