With Frederick the Great Part 27

Not until after all was over was Fergus aware of the escapes he had had. A bullet had cut away an ornament from his headdress, one of his reins had been severed at a distance of an inch or two from his hand, a bullet had pierced the tail of his coatee and buried itself in the cantle of his saddle, and the iron guard of his claymore had been pierced. However, on his return to the king after carrying a despatch, he was able to curb his own excitement and that of his horse, and to make the formal military salute as he reported, in a calm and quiet voice, that he had carried out the orders with which he had been charged.

It was with great gratification that he heard the king say that evening, as he and his staff supped together at the inn at Lissa:

"You have done exceedingly well today, Captain Drummond. I am very pleased with you. You were always at my elbow when I wanted you, and I observed that you were never flurried or excited; though indeed, there would have been good excuse for a young soldier being so, in such a hurly burly. You are over young for further promotion, for a year or two; but I must find some other way of testifying my satisfaction at your conduct."

And, indeed, when the list of promotions for bravery in the field was published, a few days later, Fergus's name appeared among those who received the decoration of the Prussian military order, an honour fully as much valued as promotion.

For a time he lost the service of Karl, who had been seriously although not dangerously wounded, just before the Austrians were driven out of Leuthen.

The news of the battle filled the Confederates with stupefaction and dismay. Prince Karl was at once recalled, and was relieved from military employment, Daun being appointed to the supreme command.

The Prince withdrew to his government of the Netherlands, and there pa.s.sed the remainder of his days in peace and quiet. His army was hunted by Ziethen's cavalry to Koeniggraetz, losing two thousand prisoners and a large amount of baggage; and thirty-seven thousand men only, of the eighty thousand that stood in battle array at Leuthen, reached the sheltering walls of the fortress, and those in so dilapidated and worn out a condition that, by the end of a week after arriving there, no less than twenty-two thousand were in hospital.

Thus, after eight months of constant and weary anxiety, Frederick, by the two heavy blows he had dealt successfully at the Confederates, stood in a far better position than he had occupied at the opening of the first campaign; when, as his enemies fondly believed, Prussia would be captured and divided without the smallest difficulty.

Frederick wintered at Breslau, whither came many visitors from Prussia, and there was a constant round of gaieties and festivity.

Frederick himself desired nothing so much as peace. Once or twice there had been some faint hope that this might be brought about by his favourite sister, Wilhelmina, who had been ceaseless in her efforts to effect it; but the two empresses and the Pompadour were alike bent on avenging themselves on the king, and the reverses that they had suffered but increased their determination to overwhelm him.

Great as Frederick's success had been, it did not blind him to the fact that his position was almost hopeless. When the war began, he had an army of a hundred and fifty thousand of the finest soldiers in the world. The two campaigns had made frightful gaps in their ranks. At Prague he had fought with eighty thousand men, at Leuthen he had but thirty thousand. His little kingdom could scarcely supply men to fill the places of those who had fallen, while his enemies had teeming populations from which to gather ample materials for fresh armies. It seemed, even to his hopeful spirit, that all this could have but one ending; and that each success, however great, weakened him more than his adversaries.

The winter's rest was, however, most welcome. For the moment there was nothing to plan, nothing to do, save to order that the drilling of the fresh levies should go on incessantly; in order that some, at least, of the terrible gaps in the army might be filled up before the campaign commenced in the spring.

1758 began badly, for early in January the Russians were on the move. The empress had dismissed, and ordered to be tried by court martial, the general who had done so little the previous year; had appointed Field Marshal Fermor to command in his place, and ordered him to advance instantly and to annex East Prussia in her name.

On the 16th of January he crossed the frontier, and six days later entered Koenigsberg and issued a proclamation to the effect that his august sovereign had now become mistress of East Prussia, and that all men of official or social position must at once take the oath of allegiance to her.

East Prussia had been devastated the year before by marauders, and its hatred of Russia was intense; but the people were powerless to resist. Some fled, leaving all behind them; but the majority were forced to take the required oath, and for a time East Prussia became a Russian province. Nevertheless its young men constantly slipped away, when opportunity offered, to join the Prussian army; and moneys were frequently collected by the impoverished people to despatch to Frederick, to aid him in his necessities.

A far greater a.s.sistance was the English subsidy of 670,000 pounds, which was paid punctually for four years, and was of supreme service to him. It was spent thriftily, and of all the enormous sums expended by this country in subsidizing foreign powers, none was ever laid out to a tenth of the advantage of the 2,680,000 pounds given to Frederick.

In the north the campaign also opened early. Ferdinand of Brunswick bestirred himself, defeated the French signally at Krefeld, and drove them headlong across the Rhine. Frederick, too, took the field early, and on the 15th of March moved from Breslau upon Schweidnitz. The siege began on the 1st of April, and on the 16th the place surrendered. Four thousand nine hundred prisoners of war were taken, with fifty-one guns and 7000 pounds in money.

Three days later Frederick, with forty thousand men, was off; deceived Daun as to his intentions, entered Moravia, and besieged Olmuetz. Keith was with him again, and Fergus had returned to his staff. The march was conducted with the marvellous precision and accuracy that characterized all Frederick's movements, but Olmuetz was a strong place and stoutly defended.

The Prussian engineers, who did not shine at siege work, opened their trenches eight hundred yards too far away. The magazines were too far off, and Daun, who as usual carefully abstained from giving battle, so cut up the convoys that, after five weeks of vain endeavours, the king was obliged to raise the siege; partly owing to the loss of the convoy that would have enabled him to take the town, which was now at its last extremity; and partly that he knew that the Russians were marching against Brandenburg.

He made a masterly retreat, struck a heavy blow at Daun by capturing and destroying his princ.i.p.al magazine, and then took up a very strong position near Koeniggraetz. Here he could have maintained himself against all Daun's a.s.saults, for his position was one that Daun had himself held and strongly fortified; but the news from the north was of so terrible a nature that he was forced to hurry thither.

The Cossacks, as the Russian army advanced, were committing most horrible atrocities; burning towns and villages, tossing men and women into the fire, plundering and murdering everywhere; and the very small Prussian force that was watching them was powerless to check the swarming marauders.

Frederick therefore, evading Daun's attempts to arrest his march, crossed the mountains into Silesia again. At Landshut he gave his army two days' rest; wrote and sent a paper to his brother Prince Henry, who was commander of the army defending Saxony from invasion, telling him that he was on the point of marching against the Russians and might well be killed; and giving him orders as to the course to be pursued, in such an event.

He left Keith, in command of forty thousand men, to hold Daun in check should the latter advance against Silesia; and he again took Fergus with him, finding the young officer's talk a pleasant means of taking his mind off the troubles that beset him.

In nine days the army, which was but fifteen thousand strong, marched from Landshut to Frankfort-on-Oder. Here the king learned that though Kuestrin, which the Russians were besieging, still held out, the town had been barbarously destroyed by the enemy.

In fierce anger the army pressed forward. The Russian army itself, officers and men, were indignant in the extreme at the brutalities committed by the Cossacks, but were powerless to restrain them; for indeed these ruffians did not hesitate to attack and kill any officer who ventured to interfere between them and their victims.

The next morning, early, Frederick reached the camp of his general Dohna; who had been watching, although unable to interfere with the Russians' proceedings. The king had a profound contempt for the Russians, in spite of the warning of Keith, who had served with them, that they were far better soldiers than they appeared to be; and he antic.i.p.ated a very easy victory over them.

Early on the 22nd of August the army from Frankfort arrived.

Dohna's strength was numerically about the same as the king's, and with his thirty thousand men Frederick had no doubt that he would make but short work of the eighty thousand Russians, of whom some twenty-seven thousand were the Cossack rabble, who were not worth being considered, in a pitched battle. Deceiving the Russians as to his intentions by opening a heavy cannonade on one of their redoubts, as if intending to ford the river there, he crossed that evening twelve miles lower down and, after some manoeuvring, faced the Russians, who had at once broken up the siege on hearing of his pa.s.sage.

Fermor sent away his baggage train to a small village called Kleinkalmin, and planted himself on a moor, where his front was covered by quagmires and the Zaborn stream. Hearing, late at night on the evening of the 24th, that Frederick was likely to be upon them the next morning, the Russian general drew out into the open ground north of Zorndorf, which stands on a bare rise surrounded by woods and quagmires, and formed his army into a great square, two miles long by one broad, with his baggage in the middle--a formation which had been found excellent by the Russians in their Turkish wars, but which was by no means well adapted to meet Frederick's methods of impetuous attack. Being ignorant as to the side upon which Frederick was likely to attack, and having decided to stand on the defensive, he adopted the methods most familiar to him.

Frederick had cut all the bridges across the rivers Warta and Oder, and believed that he should, after defeating the Russians, drive them into the angle formed by the junction of these two streams, and cause them to surrender at discretion. Unfortunately, he had not heard that the great Russian train had been sent to Kleinkalmin. Had he done so he could have seized it, and so have possessed himself of the Russian stores and all their munitions of war, and have forced them to surrender without a blow; for the Cossacks had wasted the country far and wide, and deprived it of all resources. But he and his army were so burning with indignation, and the desire to avenge the Cossack cruelties, that they made no pause, and marched in all haste right round the Russian position, so as to drive them back towards the junction of the two rivers.

[Map: Battle of Zorndorf]

Fermor's Cossacks brought him in news of Frederick's movements, which were hidden from him by the forests; and seeing that he was to be attacked on the Zorndorf side, instead of from that on which he had expected it to come, he changed his front, and swung round the line containing his best troops to meet it.

On arriving at Zorndorf, Frederick found that the Cossacks had already set the village on fire. This was no disadvantage to him, for the smoke of the burning houses rolled down towards the Russians, and so prevented them from making observation of the Prussian movements. The king rode up to the edge of the Zaborn hollow and, finding it too deep and boggy to be crossed, determined to attack at the southwest with his left and centre, placing his cavalry in rear, and throwing back his right wing.

The first division marched forward to the attack, by the west end of the flaming village. The next division, which should have been its support, marched by the east end of Zorndorf. Its road was a longer one, and there was consequently a wide gap between the two divisions. Heralded by the fire of two strong batteries--which swept the southwestern corner of the Russian quadrilateral, their crossfire ploughing its ranks with terrible effect--the first division, under Manteufel, fell upon the enemy.

The fire of the Prussian batteries had sorely shaken the Russians, and had produced lively agitation among the horses of the light baggage train in the centre of the square; and, heralding their advance with a tremendous fire of musketry, the Prussian infantry forced its way into the ma.s.s. Had the second division been close at hand, as it should have been, the victory would already have been won; but although also engaged it was not near, and Fermor poured out a torrent of horse and foot upon Manteufel's flank and front.

Without support, and surrounded, the Prussians could do nothing, and were swept back, losing twenty-four pieces of cannon; while the Russians, with shouts of victory, pressed upon them.

At this critical moment Seidlitz, with five thousand horse, dashed down upon the disordered ma.s.s of Russians, casting it into irretrievable confusion. At the same time the infantry rallied and pressed forward again.

In fifteen minutes the whole Russian army was a confused ma.s.s.

Fermor, with the Russian horse, fled to Kratsdorf and, had not the bridge there been burnt by Frederick, he would have made off, leaving his infantry to their fate. These should now, according to all rules, have surrendered; but they proved unconquerable save by death. Seidlitz's cavalry sabred them until fatigued by slaughter, the Prussian infantry poured their volleys into them, but they stood immovable and pa.s.sive, dying where they stood.

At one o'clock in the day the battle ceased for a moment. The Prussians had marched at three in the morning and, seeing that although half the Russian army had been destroyed, the other half had gradually arranged itself into a fresh front of battle, Frederick formed his forces again, and brought up his right wing for the attack on the side of the Russian quadrilateral which still stood. Forward they went, their batteries well in advance; but before the infantry came within musket range, the Russian horse and foot rushed forward to the attack, and with such force that they captured one of the batteries, took a whole battalion prisoners, and broke the centre.

Here were the regiments of Dohna, perfectly clean and well accoutred; but, being less accustomed to war than Frederick's veterans, they gave way at once before the Russian onslaught and, in spite of Frederick's efforts to prevent them, fled from the field and could not be rallied until a mile distant from it.

The veterans stood firm, however; until Seidlitz, returning from pursuit, again hurled his hors.e.m.e.n upon the Russian ma.s.ses, broke them up, and drove their cavalry in headlong flight before him.

Chapter 12: Another Step.

The Russian infantry being involved in the turmoil and confusion caused by the charge of Seidlitz, and the defeat of their cavalry, the Prussian infantry again pressed forward, pouring in a heavy fire and charging with the bayonet. Three battalions had been drawn from this very country and, maddened by the tales they had heard of Cossack cruelty, were not to be denied. The Russians, however, keeping their ranks, filling up the gaps as they were formed, and returning as best they could the fire of the Prussians, held together with sullen obstinacy. By this time the ammunition on both sides was exhausted, and now the struggle became hand to hand, bayonet against bayonet, b.u.t.t end of musket to b.u.t.t end.

Seldom has so terrible a struggle ever been witnessed. Nightfall was approaching. Foot by foot the inert Russian ma.s.s was pushed backwards. One of their generals, Demikof, collected some two thousand foot and a thousand horse, and took possession of a knoll; and Frederick ordered them to be dispersed again. Forcade was ordered to attack them with two battalions, and General Rutter to bring up the Dohna men again and take them in flank; but the latter had not recovered from their state of demoralization, and at the first cannon shot turned and ran, continuing their flight even further than before, and taking refuge in the woods. Frederick instantly dismissed Rutter from the service.

Then, as night had completely fallen, the terrible conflict ceased.

Fermor by this time, finding that there was no crossing the rivers, had returned. No regiment or battalion of his army remained in order. There was but a confused crowd, which the officers did their best to form into some sort of order, regardless of regiment or battalion. The Cossacks scoured the fields under the cover of night, plundering the dead and murdering the wounded, flames marking their path. Four hundred of them were caught at their work by the Prussian hussars, and every one killed.

Frederick sent for his tents, and the army pitched its camp, facing the Russians; but during the night the latter, having got into a sort of order, moved away to the westward and bivouacked on Drewitz Heath, facing the battle ground.

Fermor had some twenty-eight thousand men still with him, while Frederick had eighteen thousand. The former's loss had been twenty-one thousand, five hundred and twenty-nine killed, wounded, or missing; of whom eight thousand were killed. That of the Prussians was eleven thousand, three hundred and ninety, of whom three thousand six hundred and eighty were killed. Thus each side lost a third of its number in this terrible struggle.

The next morning the Russians got into better order, and drew up in order of battle. A cannonade was for some time kept up on both sides, but the armies were beyond range of artillery.