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Updated: May 20, 2025
Through rough wild country, the southern slope of the Giant Mountains, goes that slow pursuit, or the main stream of it, where Friedrich in person is; intricate savage regions, cut by precipitous rocks and soaking quagmires, shaggy with woods: watershed between the Upper Elbe and Middle Oder; Glatz on our left, with the rain of its mountains gathering to a Neisse River, eastward, which we know; and on their west or hither side, to a Mietau, Adler, Aupa and other many-branched feeders of the Elbe.
The garrison consisted only of one hundred and twenty men from the garrison regiment, the rest being dispersed in the county of Glatz, and four officers, their commanders, three of whom were in my interest. Everything was prepared; swords and pistols were concealed in the oven which was in my prison. We intended to give liberty to all the prisoners, and retire with drums beating into Bohemia.
We take that Fortress," say the Vienna people; "it is next on the file after Glatz. Neisse taken; thence northward, cleaning the Country as we go; Brieg, Schweidnitz, Glogau, probably Breslau itself in some good interim: there are but Four Fortresses to do; and the thing is finished. Let the King, one to three, and Loudon in command against him, try if he can hinder it!"
Friedrich sends to Silesia for reinforcements of his own, which he can depend upon. Sends to Silesia, to Glatz and the Young Dessauer; nay to Brandenburg and the Old Dessauer? ultimately. Finding Roth would not yield, he has sent to Dresden for Siege-Artillery: Polish Majesty there, titular "King of Moravia," answers that he cannot meet the expense of carriage.
Had I, at this critical moment, possessed a prudent and intelligent friend, who could have calmed my impatience, nothing perhaps might have been more easy than to have obtained pardon from the King, by proving my innocence; or, it may be, than to have induced him to punish my enemies. But the officers who then were at Glatz fed the flame of discontent.
In Jagerndorf, an open Town, are only some three or four thousand men, 'with three field-pieces, and as much powder as will charge them forty times. Happily these proved only the Pandour outskirts of Neipperg's Army, scouring about to reconnoitre, and not difficult to beat; the real body of it is ascertained to be at Freudenthal, fifteen miles to westward, southwestward; making towards Neisse, it is guessed, by the other or western road, which is the nearer to Glatz and to the Austrian force there.
Their army, weak as it was in numbers, was placed under the command of a French general. The Prussian fortresses, with the exception of Colberg, Graudenz, Schweidnitz, Neisse, and Glatz, were already garrisoned with French troops, or, like Pillau near Koenigsberg, newly occupied by them. In Berlin, the French had unlimited sway.
The two comrades were encamped upon the snow, exhausted with their long march, hopefully peering here and there after the Bohemian boundary. "Great God! what is that? Are not those the towers of Glatz? and that dark spectre which raises itself so threateningly against the horizon, is not that the citadel?" And so it was.
My colonel read the letter I wrote; and also that which I received, immediately after it was brought. The day after the receipt of this letter I was, as I have before said, unheard, unaccused, unjudged, conducted like a criminal from the army, by fifty hussars, and imprisoned in the fortress of Glatz.
The little town in which Frederick had practised was called Plassenberg an der Heuscheuer, that is, Plassenberg by the Heuscheuer Mountains, a range in the county of Glatz where excellent sandstone is quarried. The people of the district loved Frederick both as a man and a physician.
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