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It was a glad New Year altogether, with every probability of its gladness continuing "all the year round." A supreme effort was made to wipe them out. The effort was futile; the cows chewed the cud under fire with inimitable nonchalance, while the goats, our whiskered pandoors, with fine satire sagaciously cocked their horns. Not that we cared.
According to the regulations that had been agreed on, the attacks were to be made at the same time, and the result ought to have been that either the King or Zieten should penetrate through the centre of the enemy at Sueptitz. But General Zieten, instead of attacking, amused himself for a considerable time with a body of pandoors, whom he encountered in the forest of Torgau.
The King himself, as he was repairing to the village of Neiden, as well to expedite orders relative to the victory as to send intelligence of it through Brandenburg and Silesia, heard the sound of a carriage near the army. The word was demanded, and the reply was "Austrian." The escort of the King fell on and took two field-pieces and a battalion of pandoors, that had lost themselves in the night.
On this movement the Prince de Deuxponts abandoned the banks of the Elbe, and retired through Duben to Leipsic. He had left Ried in the rear, in a forest between Oranienbaum and Kemberg, where this officer had taken post, with little judgment; having garnished the woods with his hussars, and posted his pandoors in the plain.
"I myself should regret this deeply. Prussia, although she taxes the population heavily, at least permits no disorders nor ill treatment of the people, no plundering of the villages; while the Austrians, Croats, and Pandoors will spread like a swarm of hornets over the land, and the state of the Saxons under their so-called rescuers will be infinitely worse than it has been under their conquerors."
The corps headed by the King met with General Ried, posted at the skirts of the forest of Torgau, with two regiments of hussars, as many dragoons, and three battalions of pandoors. Some volleys of artillery were fired, and he fell back on the right of the Imperialists.
As the lurking Croats and Pandoors had, every night, crept up through the brushwood and hollows, and skirmished with the Prussian outposts away on the right, scattered firing was not heeded much in Hochkirch.
Greatly did she admire it, it was so fine, so grand; but all that thunderous roll of rhetoric the whiskered Pandoors and the fierce Hussars, and Freedom's shriek when Kosciusko fell, and flights of bickering comets through illimitable space a kind of celestial fireworks on a stupendous scale and all the realms of ether wrapped in flames all this had produced a slight headache, a confusion or giddiness, like that which is experienced by a person looking down over a precipice, or when carried too high in a swing.
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