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"What sound is that?" men asked yesterday at Brieg, forty miles off; and nobody could say, except that it was some huge Battle, fateful of Silesia and the world. Breslau had it louder; Breslau was still more anxious. That is the Prussians giving us such a beating as we never had." What news for Deblin the Shoemaker, if he is still above ground!
In Wagstadt, a town of Austrian Silesia, a boy in a red waistcoat used to play the part of Judas on the Wednesday before Good Friday.
Frederick decided that he could easily defeat the disorganized armies of Austria, so he announced to the world that the rich province of Silesia was henceforth to be his and that he proposed to take it by force of arms.
The King of Prussia exercises the power which he does over the Roman Catholic church, in her various dominions, under different concordats made with the Pope: in Silesia, under a concordat made by Buonaparte with the Pope; and in the territories on the right bank of the Rhine, under the concordat made by the former sovereigns of those countries with the Pope.
I would rather eat bread at thy kingly table, than feast at thy electoral board." Frederick accepted the Bohemian crown. The coronation was celebrated with unexampled pomp at Prague, for the nation displayed all its riches in honour of its own work. Silesia and Moravia, the adjoining provinces to Bohemia, followed their example, and did homage to Frederick.
And yet, in spite of the obvious danger from the great mountain bastion of Bohemia that stretched far away in his rear, the Emperor kept his troops spread out from Königstein to Hamburg, and ventured on long and wearying marches into Silesia, and north to Düben, which left his positions in Saxony almost at the mercy of the allied Grand Army.
Meanwhile the king of Prussia joined general Wedel on the fourth day of August, at Muhlrose, where he assumed the command of the army; but finding it greatly inferior to the enemy, he recalled general Finck, whom he had detached some time before, with a body of nine thousand men, to oppose the progress of the imperialists in Saxony; for when prince Henry joined his brother in Silesia, the army of the empire had entered that electorate.
Having thus obtained Silesia, the king of Prussia returned to his own capital, where he reformed his laws, forbade the torture of criminals, concluded a defensive alliance with England, and applied himself to the augmentation of his army. This treaty of peace with the queen of Hungary was one of the first proofs given by the king of Prussia, of the secrecy of his counsels.
The King of Prussia had just gained at Czezlaw an important victory; next day, he was negotiating with the Queen of Hungary. On the 11th of June the treaty which abandoned Silesia to Frederick II. was secretly concluded; when the signatures were exchanged at Berlin in the following month, the withdrawal of Prussia was everywhere known in Europe.
ALLIANCE AGAINST FREDERICK. Frederick the Great used the next eight years in doing what he could to encourage industry and to increase the prosperity and resources of Prussia, at the same time that he strengthened his military force. Prussia had evinced so much power in the late conflicts as to be an object of envy and apprehension. Maria Theresa was anxious to recover Silesia.
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