Read "History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Volume 13" by Thomas Carlyle online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
In actual loss of men or of ground, the results of that Chotusitz Affair were not of decisive nature. But it had been fought with obstinacy; with great fury on the Austrian side (who, as it were, had a bet upon it ever since February 25th), Britannic George, and all the world, looking on: and, in dispiritment and discredit to the beaten party, its results were considerable. The voice of all the world, declaring through its Gazetteer Editors, "You cannot beat those Prussians! " voice confirmed by one's own sad thoughts: -- in such sounding of the rams horns round one's Jericho, there is always a strange influence (what is called panic, as if Pan or some god were in it), and one's Jericho is the apter to fall!
Among the Austrian Prisoners, there was a General Pallandt, mortally wounded too; whom Friedrich, according to custom, treated with his best humanity, though all help was hopeless to poor Pallandt. Calling one day at Pallandt's sick-couch, Friedrich was so sympathetic, humane and noble, that Pallandt was touched by it; and said, "What a pity your noble Majesty and my noble Queen should ruin one another, for a set of French intruders, who play false even to your Majesty! " "False? " Friedrich inquires farther: Pallandt, a man familiar at Court, has seen a Letter from Fleury to the Queen of Hungary, conclusive as to Fleury's good faith; will undertake, if permitted, to get his Majesty a sight of it. Friedrich permits; the Fleury letter comes; to the effect: "Make peace with us, O Queen; with your Prussian neighbor you shall make -- what suits you! " Friedrich read; learned conclusively, what perhaps he had already as good as known otherwise; and drew the inference. [_Helden-Geschichte,_ ii. 633; Hormayr, _Anemonen,_ ii. 186; Adelung, iii. A, 149 n.] Actual copy of this letter the most ardent Gazetteer curiosity could not attain to, at that epoch; but the Pallandt story seems to have been true; -- and as to the Fleury letter in such circumstances, copies of various Fleury letters to the like purport are still public enough; and Fleury's private intentions, already guessed at by Friedrich, are in our time a secret to nobody that inquires about them.