To Pitt this Campaign 1759, in spite of bad omens at the outset, proved altogether splendid: but greatly the reverse on Friedrich's side; to whom it was the most disastrous and unfortunate he had yet made, or did ever make. Pitt at his zenith in public reputation;Friedrich never so low before, nothing seemingly but extinction near ahead, when this Year ended. The truth is, apart from his specific pieces of ill-luck, there had now begun for Friedrich a new rule of procedure, which much altered his appearance in the world. Thrice over had he tried by the aggressive or invasive method; thrice over made a plunge at the enemy's heart, hoping so to disarm or lame him: but that, with resources spent to such a degree, is what he cannot do a fourth time: he is too weak henceforth to think of that.
Prussia has always its King, and his unrivalled talent; but that is pretty much the only fixed item: Prussia VERSUS France, Austria, Russia, Sweden and the German Reich, what is it as a field of supplies for war! Except its King, these are failing, year by year;and at a rate fatally SWIFT in comparison. Friedrich cannot now do Leuthens, Rossbachs; far-shining feats of victory, which astonish all the world. His fine Prussian veterans have mostly perished;and have been replaced by new levies and recruits; who are inferior both in discipline and native quality;--though they have still, people say, a noteworthy taste of the old Prussian sort in them;and do, in fact, fight well to the last. But "it is observable,"says Retzow somewhere, and indeed it follows from the nature of the case, "that while the Prussian Army presents always its best kind of soldiers at the beginning of a war, Austria, such are its resources in population, always improves in that particular, and its best troops appear in the last campaigns." In a word, Friedrich stands on the defensive henceforth; disputing his ground inch by inch: and is reduced, more and more, to battle obscurely with a hydra-coil of enemies and impediments; and to do heroisms which make no noise in the Gazettes. And, alas, which cannot figure in History either,--what is more a sorrow to me here!
Friedrich, say all judges of soldiership and human character who have studied Friedrich sufficiently, "is greater than ever," in these four Years now coming. [Berenhorst, in Kriegskunst; Retzow; &c.] And this, I have found more and more to be a true thing; verifiable and demonstrable in time and place,--though, unluckily for us, hardly in this time or this place at all!
A thing which cannot, by any method, be made manifest to the general reader; who delights in shining summary feats, and is impatient of tedious preliminaries and investigations,--especially of MAPS, which are the indispensablest requisite of all. A thing, in short, that belongs peculiarly to soldier-students; who can undergo the dull preliminaries, most dull but most inexorably needed; and can follow out, with watchful intelligence, and with a patience not to be wearied, the multifarious topographies, details of movements and manoeuvrings, year after year, on such a Theatre of War. What is to be done with it here! If we could, by significant strokes, indicate, under features true so far as they went, the great wide fire-flood that was raging round the world;if we could, carefully omitting very many things, omit of the things intelligible and decipherable that concern Friedrich himself, nothing that had meaning: IF indeed--! But it is idle preluding. Forward again, brave reader, under such conditions as there are!
Friedrich's Winter in Breslau was of secluded, silent, sombre character, this time; nothing of stir in it but from work only:
in marked contrast with the last, and its kindly visitors and gayeties. A Friedrich given up to his manifold businesses, to his silent sorrows. "I have passed my winter like a Carthusian monk,"he writes to D'Argens: "I dine alone; I spend my life in reading and writing; and I do not sup. When one is sad, it becomes at last too burdensome to hide one's grief continually; and it is better to give way to it by oneself, than to carry one's gloom into society.
Nothing solaces me but the vigorous application required in steady and continuous labor. This distraction does force one to put away painful ideas, while it lasts: but, alas, no sooner is the work done, than these fatal companions present themselves again, as if livelier than ever. Maupertuis was right: the sum of evil does certainly surpass that of good:--but to me it is all one; I have almost nothing more to lose; and my few remaining days, what matters it much of what complexion they be?" ["Breslau, 1st March, 1759," To D'Argens ( OEuvres de Frederic,
xix. 56).]
The loss of his Wilhelmina, had there been no other grief, has darkened all his life to Friedrich. Readers are not prepared for the details of grief we could give, and the settled gloom of mind they indicate. A loss irreparable and immeasurable; the light of life, the one loved heart that loved him, gone. His passionate appeals to Voltaire to celebrate for him in verse his lost treasure, and at least make her virtues immortal, are perhaps known to readers: [ODE SUR LA MORT DE S. A. S. MADAME LA PRINCESSE DEBAREITH (in OEuvres de Voltaire, xviii.
79-86): see Friedrich's Letter to him (6th November, 1758);with Voltaire's VERSES in Answer (next month); Friedrich's new Letter (Breslau, 23d January 1759), demanding something more,--followed by the ODE just cited (Ib. lxxii. 402; lxxviii. 82, 92;or OEuvres de Frederic, xxiii. 20-24: &c.]
alas, this is a very feeble kind of immortality, and Friedrich too well feels it such. All Winter he dwells internally on the sad matter, though soon falling silent on it to others.
The War is ever more dark and dismal to him; a wearing, harassing, nearly disgusting task; on which, however, depends life or death.
