
FORE:Monday morning the storm ceased. There was a perfect calm. For leagues the spotless snow, nearly two feet deep, covered all the extended plains. The anxiety of Frederick had been so great that for two nights he had not been able to get any sleep. He had plunged into this war with the full assurance that he was to gain victory and glory. It now seemed inevitable that he was to encounter but defeat and shame.

FORE:The reader of these pages will be oppressed with the consciousness of how vast a proportion of the miseries of humanity is caused by the cruelty of man to his brother man. This globe might be a very happy home for those who dwell upon it. But its history, during the last six thousand years, has presented one of the most appalling tragedies of which the imagination can conceive. Among all the renowned warriors of the past, but few can be found who have contributed more to fill the world with desolated homes, with the moans of the dying, with the cry of the widow and the orphan, than Frederick the Great; but he laid the foundations of an empire which is at this moment the most potent upon the globe.

FORE:General R?mer, in command of the Austrian cavalry, had crushed the right wing of the Prussians. Resolutely he followed up his victory, hotly chasing the fugitives in the wildest disorder far away to the rear, capturing nine of their guns. Who257 can imagine the scene? There were three or four thousand horsemen put to utter rout, clattering over the plain, impetuously pursued by six or seven thousand of the finest cavalry in the world, discharging pistol-shots into their flying ranks, and raining down upon them sabre-blows.

FORE:355 War is cruelty, said General Sherman; and you can not refine it. No man of refined Christian sensibilities, said the Duke of Wellington, should undertake the profession of a soldier. The exigencies of war often require things to be done from which humanity revolts. War, said Napoleon I., is the science of barbarians. One of the principal objects of Frederick in this pursuit of the Austrians through Bohemia was to lay waste the country so utterly, destroying its roads and consuming its provisions, that no Austrian army could again pass through it for the invasion of Silesia. Who can imagine the amount of woe thus inflicted upon the innocent peasants of Bohemia? Both armies were reduced to the necessity of living mainly upon the resources of the country in which they were encamped. Their foraging parties were scattered in all directions. There were frequent attacks of outposts and bloody skirmishes, in which many were slain and many were crippled for life. Each death, each wound, sent tears, and often life-long woe, to some humble cottage.

FORE:It is almost touching, Mr. Carlyle writes, to reflect how unexpectedly, like a bolt out of the blue, all this had come upon Frederick, and how it overset his fine programme for the winter at Reinsberg, and for his life generally. Not the Peaceable magnanimities, but the Warlike, are the thing appointed Frederick this winter, and mainly henceforth. Those golden or soft radiances which we saw in him, admirable to Voltaire and to Frederick, and to an esurient philanthropic world, it is not218 those, it is the steel bright or stellar kind that are to become predominant in Fredericks existence; grim hail-storms, thunders, and tornado for an existence to him instead of the opulent genialities and halcyon weather anticipated by himself and others.
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