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Updated: April 30, 2025
Daun was well aware that Frederick, of all things, desired to bring on a battle; but knowing that the Russians, one hundred thousand strong, under Soltikoff, were steadily approaching, he determined to wait where he was, and to allow the brunt of the fighting, for once, to fall on them. Fergus, by this time, was far away.
If Soltikoff, as Catharine implies, were the father of her son Paul, the sovereigns who have since occupied the throne of Russia are Romanoffs only in name. From this point till her death, in 1796, she entirely ignored the code of morality convenient in a society whose basis is the family.
While the four great armies, commanded by the king of Prussia, general Soltikoff, prince Henry, and count Daun, lay encamped in Lusatia, and on the borders of Silesia, watching the motions of each other, the war was carried on by detachments with great vivacity.
Catharine II. a German princess, who dethroned and put to death the grandson of Peter the Great? and does she not confess in these Memoirs that her son, the Emperor Paul, was not the son of Peter's grandson, but of Sergius Soltikoff? so that in the reigning house of Russia there is not a drop of the blood of Romanoff.
The Russian army at once marched away from Colbert; not however, as Frederick hoped, back to Poland but, in agreement with Daun, to make a rush on Berlin. One force, twenty thousand strong, crossed the Oder. The main body, under Fermor, for Soltikoff had fallen sick, moved to Frankfort; while Lacy, with fifteen thousand, marched from Silesia.
He fell prisoner in their cause, at Zorndorf, last Autumn; was stuck, like all the others, Soltikoff himself among them, into the vaulted parts of Custrin Garrison: 'I am sorry I have no Siberia for you, said Friedrich, looking, not in a benign way, on the captive Dignitaries, that hot afternoon; 'go to Custrin, and see what you have provided for yourselves! Which they had to do; nothing, for certain days, but cellarage to lodge in; King inexorable, deaf to remonstrance.
For a fortnight Frederick remained encamped, at a short distance from Breslau, waiting to see what Daun and Soltikoff intended to do. Daun was busy urging the Russians to come on. Soltikoff was sulky that Daun had failed in all his endeavours, and that the brunt of the affair was likely, again, to fall on him and his Russians. Elsewhere things had gone more favourably for the king.
Soltikoff kept one of the best houses in Moscow. I had paid her a call upon arrival. She and her husband, who was then Governor of the town, showed me great kindness. She asked me to paint the Marshal's portrait, and her daughter's, who had married Count Gregory Orloff, son of Count Vladimir.
Frederick, although secure against danger from this quarter, was threatened with still greater peril by the attempted junction of the Russians and Austrians, who had at length discovered that the advantages gained by Frederick had been mainly owing to the want of unity in his opponents. The Russians under Soltikoff, accordingly, approached the Oder.
Austria vainly offered gold; Soltikoff persisted in his intention and merely replied, "My men cannot eat gold." Frederick was now enabled, by eluding the vigilance of the Austrians, to throw himself upon Dresden, for the purpose of regaining a position indispensable to him on account of its proximity to Bohemia, Silesia, the Mere, and Saxony.
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