and tactical precision, unheard of in his time. The foreign military
gentry who were allowed now and then to look on were amazed--and,
even so, they did not get to see the real thing. These masses of
troops wheeled and deployed, they developed the famous oblique
battle-order, invented by the King, in eight various formations, with
a mathematical accuracy that would have made old Prince Eugene, who
had once patronized the Prince at Philippsburg, doubt his own eyes.
And there reigned throughout a practical spirit which was quite the
opposite of amateurish enthusiasm. There were no splendid encampments
and display manœuvres, as in other countries, where huge assemblages
of troops came together in time of peace and went harmlessly through
their exercises. Frederick held manœuvres on a large scale each year
at Spandau or Potsdam; and these forced advances over heavy ground,
these actions on the plain, these river crossings and assaults, these
varied and whole-hearted attacks on the problem of how a superior
enemy--it seemed one reckoned with a superior enemy, possibly with a
combination of enemies?--can be rolled up on the flank and destroyed;
they were all trials of war, in bitter earnest and quite undisguised,
carried out with the sole end and aim of visualizing the actual
conflict and familiarizing officers and troops with the details of
the bloody business. And an aggressive spirit, a purpose of swift and
lively action, was inoculated by every possible means into the blood
of these troops--contrary to the fashion of the time and bordering on
the uncivilized. Frederick had only contempt for the refined methods of
making war as practised in his century--those “capital generals, who
have spent whole campaigns in various manœuvres, without one being able
to get the better of the other--which earned them high praise from the
General Staff.” He despised too the entrenched position, which was held
in such great regard. Battle, at all costs! Force the enemy to fight;
battles must be decisive, that is what they are for. Attack, attack!
_Attaquez donc toujours!_ A bayonet charge is his passion, he was the
first to regulate the details of its execution. “Don’t shoot more than
you need, and, above all, not too soon! At twenty, even ten paces from
the enemy, let off a good stiff salvo under his nose and then give it
him in the ribs with the bayonet.” Then the cavalry: “The King herewith
forbids all officers of cavalry, on pain of disgrace and cassation,
ever to let themselves be attacked in any action; for Prussians must
always attack the enemy.” At a hand-gallop? No, in full career. “Then,
in close formation, they must spur their horses on, at the top of
their lungs, as they charge.” “At the top of their lungs.” “Under
their noses.” “Give it them in the ribs.” It all sounds so savage, so
reckless, so extreme, so inordinate, so violent! The man must be bent
on a ruthless offensive and thinking of nothing else. Is it possible
for anyone to trust him?
Alas, no, probably not. Probably it was not possible, even if anyone
had wanted to--again, quite apart from any measures taken against
him! This king was much too secretive and dissembling; reserved
even with his intimates, or, rather, he had no intimates. Never to
be communicative, never to let anyone guess his thoughts, such was
his first principle as a ruler. He stated it quite frankly one day,
himself: “If I thought,” he said, “that my shirt or my skin knew
anything of my intentions, I would tear them off.” A savage way of
putting it--and very expressive of his extreme and obstinate intention
to keep his own counsel. What could be accomplished by diplomatic
methods, with such a king? The foreign gentlemen found him inscrutable.
His moderation, his neutrality, his good intentions--nobody believed
in them, and he knew that they did not. He said: “In Vienna they take
me for an irreconcilable enemy of the house of Austria; in London they
think me far more restless, more ambitious, richer than I am. Bestuchev
[the Russian imperial chancellor] believes that I am plotting mischief;
in Versailles they say I am falling asleep over my interests. They are
all mistaken. But what makes for trouble is that these misapprehensions
may have evil consequences. What must be done is to anticipate
[?] these consequences, and relieve Europe of her preconception.”
_Pre_-conception? Why, it was a _post_-conception, a conception formed
after the two Silesian wars. Again, perhaps he was speaking quite
sincerely, and merely deceived himself on the score of the danger he
himself was to Europe? A puzzle to everybody, was he perhaps one to
himself as well?
He led a singular life--it contrasted with any and every monarchical
habit of the time. In summer he got up at three o’clock. But three
o’clock is the time to go to bed, when God has placed you in a position
to enjoy life! Scarcely was his hair combed when he began to govern.
Did he govern well? Certainly he governed with a suspiciousness,
a self-will, a despotism which could only be called boundless and
extravagant, and which entered into everything, the smallest as well
as the greatest field, and deprived the work of others of all dignity.
He so loved work that he took it all to himself, and left his servants
not enough; or, rather, what remained was irksome and petty, and he
spied on and scolded and humiliated them even at that. “_Cette race
maudite_” (thus, rightly or wrongly, he called the whole of humanity)
would, he was convinced, begin to deceive him and defraud the State if
it got the least chance; and his complete lack of confidence had at
least this much good about it, that his officials had to reckon with
the fact that the King would see and examine everything, his subjects
might be certain that their complaints and petitions did come before
him instead of falling under the table. He never let anything be lost
sight of, he gave himself pain over the smallest detail.
Yes, self-willed and despotic he certainly was; up to the most
grandiose and down to the pettiest sense of those words. Nobody dared
travel without his permission; in granting which, the King decreed
the amount of the journey money, down to a farthing: for the burgher
so much, for the junker a little more. He awed and astonished all
the world by operations that had something superhuman and fantastic
about them, such as erecting mighty dams to fight the power of the
sea and to wrench from it strips of land which had for centuries been
its prey. Or he ploughed the marshes, turned bogs into fields, set
ten thousand spades to work to make canals through the swamps of the
Oderbruch--callous toward the suffering of his labourers, who might
all die off of swamp-fever, so long as they were sacrificed to the
future and to his impatient will. If a stranger wanted a good seat at
a parade, he had to write to the King, and the King answered in his
own hand. Yet it was this very king who one day declared that he would
no longer sit silent and endure the obsolete abuses and formalities in
the administration of justice; he would mix in and attack the problem
himself--and straightway he created the common law of the land, a great
and bold reform, a model of reason and fair-mindedness, which all other
countries were fain to study and admire.
The army, the administration, service at home and abroad. That was
not all. He “mixed into” other matters too, and did not stop with
“mixing.” He was his own finance minister (obstinately stingy here;
extravagant there, where it was a matter of some large and it might
be impossible scheme or other), his own minister for agriculture (who
simply refused to believe, because Linnæus and others said so, that
the potato was a poisonous plant, and arbitrarily insisted that it be
planted), his own minister for commerce (and as such conservative,
walking in his father’s footsteps, with prohibited schedules and
protection and monopolies, his main idea being that the money should
stop in the country), his own minister of works and mines, his own lord
chamberlain, and what not besides?--for when a man lives separated from
his wife and gets up at three o’clock in the morning, he can get a lot
done in the course of the day.
It took a king like this, a man who could work as he could, to show
the full meaning of the word “despotism.” Until his time no one had
grasped its significance. But the despotism he created was _a new_
kind. He was an enlightened despot--which means that his subjects might
think and say what they liked, provided that he, on his side, might do
as he chose--an arrangement which it must be admitted was useful to
both parties. Religions meant little or nothing to him, he despised
them all. Persecuted irreligion found an asylum and even an official
status in his kingdom. Lampoons, satires, libels directed against him,
moved him not at all. He did not fear brains: his love of them was
balanced by his scorn--so long as they were not backed by any power.
On being told that one of his subjects had criticized him, he asked:
“Has he a hundred thousand men? Then what do you want me to do with
him?” Which was cynical, of course. And, indeed, he did have a cynical
cast of mind, which betrayed itself even in his dress, that got dirtier
and shabbier as time went on; and in the kind of diversions he chose:
the habitual blasphemies at his supper parties, the dry, malicious
pleasure he had in goading on the literary men and philosophers whom he
found in food, in “embroiling” them in disputes and quarrels with each
other. Even his mania for work, was there not something cynical, arid,
inhuman, misanthropic, about it too, to any healthy and right human
sense? For a healthy and right human sense understands--and understood
in Frederick’s time too--that career and accomplishment are not all of
life; that life has its purely human claims and duties of happiness, to
neglect which may be a greater sin than a little easy-goingness toward
oneself and others in the matter of one’s work; and again, according to
the healthy and right human sense, nobody can be called a harmonious
personality who does not understand how to satisfy the just claims of
both sides of life. And this king did not, he had no comprehension of
these facts, though surely a king ought to know them as well as other
people. His insane industry, his insistence on merit and getting things
done, was ascetic and somehow horrible in its nature. He hated monks,
of course, as he hated all religious and clergy; but he was rather like
a monk himself, a monk in a blue soldier coat and yellow waistcoat
always spotted with snuff. And he was a cynical old bachelor, and a
good share of his ill feeling and his uncanniness had surely to do
with his relations with the female sex, which were as a matter of fact
no relations at all, and pretty incomprehensible even to his own age,
highly capricious as that was in its attitude toward sex matters.
He had been, as I said, rather a dissipated youth. When he was fifteen
years old, he visited the luxurious court of Dresden, where he liked
it not a little, and fell in love head over ears with the Countess
Orselska, the daughter and favourite of Augustus II; but the King,
who was somewhat jealous, offered him instead the Countess Formera,
a well-shaped damsel, displaying her first in the guise of a living
picture. This lady accordingly became Frederick’s first mistress.
Afterwards he got hold of the Orselska as well. Such tales are legion:
for instance, there is one about the Freifrau von Wreech, whom he used
to visit when he was at Küstrin, and who supplied him with candles
and books, and even with money, which he is supposed never to have
refunded, though Frau von Wreech gave birth to a child which her
husband never acknowledged. Then there was the daughter of a Potsdam
precentor, who was publicly whipped and sent to the house of correction
“for life.” And in Ruppin and Rheinsberg he had his fill of debauchery;
but Seckendorff wrote to Prince Eugene that “it seemed the body was
not strong enough for the demands made upon it by the desires, and
the Crown Prince appears to seek in his dissipations a reputation for
gallantry rather than to gratify actual sinful inclinations.” All
which might be true and might not. But it is certain that none of
these affairs had anything to do with passion in any higher or deeper
sense, any more than they had with genuine feeling or warmth of heart.
Frederick, when quite young, declared that all he wanted of women was
pleasure, and that, having enjoyed, he despised them. He had never
been in love. Then came a _malheur_; there is talk of an operation
following; and from then on something was broken in his nature. He soon
ceased to act the voluptuary; woman had played out her brief and not
too honourable rôle in his life.
Misogyny is now deep-seated in his nature. Henceforth one cannot
imagine him in any tender situation--it would seem grotesque. His
marriage, of course, was no marriage at all; but that does not signify,
since it was a forced one. It was not merely that the other sex left
him cold. He hated it, he poured scorn on it, he could not endure it
anywhere near him. His wife’s ladies complained: “We do not ask that
the King should love us; but that he simply cannot stand us--that is
hard.” The wife of his hypochondriac friend d’Argens was allowed, as
a particular favour, to live in Sans Souci; save for this the palace
was a sort of cloister. But a cloister is not quite a natural place
to live in. The Italian dancer Barberini passed for some time as the
King’s mistress; but Voltaire, on the subject of the relationship,
expressed himself thus: “_Il en était un peu amoureux parce qu’elle
avait les jambes d’un homme._” So it too was hardly the regular
thing. Frederick’s masculinity was obviously not attracted in the
orthodox way by the feminine counter-pole. Possibly the long years of
soldiering contributed to this state of things and weaned his interests
from the other sex. There are many cases of military who were or who
became women-haters. This man, brought up in an atmosphere of French
femininity, may have grown so accustomed to the maleness of camps
that at last he “could not stand the smell” of women. And this was
in the Frenchest of centuries, a woman’s century _par excellence_,
saturated with the perfume of the _Ewig-Weibliche_. His conception
of soldiership, ascetic to begin with (the highest soldier in his
command durst not in the field eat off anything but tin), made him
so anti-feminine that the soft appeal of love and marriage was quite
shut out. He did not like his officers’ marrying, he wanted them to
be cloistered warriors like himself; and expressed his view in the
witticism he made, that his officers “should find their happiness in
the sword and not in the ...” Anyhow, they should find it in the
sword. In 1778, out of the seventy-four officers of a regiment of
dragoons there was just one married.
Now why was all that? Perhaps at bottom it was not a little political.
We must not forget that the most powerful countries in Europe were at
that time ruled by women: the Empress Elizabeth, the Empress-queen
of Austria, and the Pompadour. Frederick despised and affronted them
to the point of political gaucherie. Aloud, at table, before all his
lackeys, he called them “the three first wh...s in Europe.” This though
he knew, or, rather, because he knew, that no remark of his escaped the
spies of foreign courts. In any case, the ugly word may have fitted
two of them, but certainly it did not Maria Theresa; in vituperating
that chaste and childishly high-minded woman he obviously only levelled
at the sex. The Little Mother, Elizabeth, on the other hand, did lay
herself open by her weakness for strong drink and muscular military;
but these very weaknesses were what kept her a powerful potentate,
and it was most injudicious of Frederick to make them the theme of
scurrilous little rhymes, which of course came to her ears and made
the mistress of Russia his envenomed and everlasting enemy. And why
could he not bring himself to the point of a few friendly words
with the Pompadour, after she had daintily taken pains to meet him
half-way--and considering she was the actual ruler of France? She was
only a butcher’s daughter, named Poisson, the wife of a publican and
procurer, and herself a procuress to boot. Admitted and conceded, that
was what she was. But in the first place, what is the good of being an
enlightened despot if you cannot look beyond such small matters? And
in the second, she was rather more than delicious, with that clever,
roguish little head and that billowing embroidered frock--its measured
décolletage sagely half-hiding, half-revealing delights which an
all-Christian king had known how to value. Scarcely a sign betrayed the
filth whence she came and which remained her element. She knew how to
preside discreetly over a privy council. Frederick, when he wantonly
repulsed her, was aiming at the female rather than at the concubine.
“I do not know her,” he said: “_Je ne la connais pas._” Anybody else,
in his place, would have rued that, later. Maria Theresa--foundress
of the chastity commission, pious and faithful wife--displayed more
self-control. “_Princesse et Cousine_,” she wrote; “_Madame ma très
chère Sœur_”--it sounds scandalous, but it had to be done, for
Silesia’s sake. As for Frederick’s bearing toward the Empress-queen
herself, it sets in the clearest light his callousness where the sex
was concerned. All the chroniclers and critics, chivalrous before
everything else, speak of his behaviour as abominable.
There is a beautiful portrait drawing of the Empress-queen, by Meytens,
in the copperplate collection in Berlin. There is the sumptuous rococo
head, majestic and sturdy at once, proud and naïve: the pure brow,
with a little diadem above it crowning the powdered hair that falls in
curls upon the royal shoulders. There is the double chin, childishly
dignified, the clear eyes, the powerful hooked nose, the wholesome
mouth, full without being coarse. Her voice is said to have had a
compelling charm. Court and people idolized her. She reigned in the
fear of God, piously, patriarchally, comfortably. To her husband, Franz
of Lorraine, a famous petticoat-chaser, she was a loyal wedded wife,
conniving at all his shortcomings. When he died, she turned to his
sobbing mistress, Princess Auersperg, and said: “My dear Princess, we
have both lost much.” She was as good-natured as that. When her son,
Duke Leopold of Tuscany, made her a grandmother for the first time,
she was so beside herself for joy that she ran in her night-dress
through the castle corridors to the Burgtheater, where there was a
performance. Leaning out over the balcony of the royal box she called
down into the house: “Poldy’s got a baby! And, to cap the climax, on
my wedding-anniversary! Isn’t he a love?” We hear her call, we share
the rapture of her audience. She was not yet four-and-twenty when her
father died and bequeathed her the burden of the crown. Her health
tottered beneath the defeat of Mollwitz and the ensuing crisis; for,
to add to everything else, she was with child. “For all my realms were
the field of battle,” she later wrote, “and I knew not where I could
be brought to bed in peace.” Yet with what lofty spirit, what touching
courage, she bore herself! Still weak from her lying-in, on her arm the
infant whom in tears and troubles she had brought into the world, the
crown of Saint Stephen on her head, she stood in Pressburg before the
assembly of the Empire and summoned the chivalry of her Hungary to the
defence of her insulted majesty. And the magnates--one can see them--in
frenzied enthusiasm swung their crooked sabres and pressed round the
throne with the cry: “We will die for our King, Maria Theresa!” But
Frederick was without bowels of feeling for this majestic weakness;
probably the pale maternity of his enemy only added fuel to the
flames of his masculinity, and rather roused disgust than reverence.
Throughout the long, inhuman struggle to which the two Silesian wars
were the prelude, the thought that he was dealing with women never left
him a moment. It recurs in countless of his utterances of that time;
who knows if the shameful thought of being defeated by three women was
not what stiffened his back? At the thanksgiving service after the
victory of Mollwitz he gave out the text from I Timothy ii. 12: “But
I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man,
but to be silent.”--Maria Theresa, when she heard about it, was not a
little wroth. She had a name for him, at once childish and oracular;
it seems to show that her woman’s intuition pierced the secret of his
character. She never named him save as “the bad man.” The bad man. Yes,
that he was, with the emphasis as much on man as on bad. The mysteries
of sex are very profound, never will they be quite explained. Was it
that this king could not endure women because he was such a bad man, or
that he was such a bad man because he could not endure women? A riddle
not to be unriddled. But that the two things were somehow dependent on
each other--of that I feel certain.
“The bad man”: he was that to everybody, though it was Maria Theresa
who by preference and from the depths of her heart gave him the name.
There was always a whispering and a plotting and a conspiring round
about him--defensively, of course, in the end, and as precautionary
measures--all directed against him; he had always to realize it,
even when he knew nothing specific; and he parried, as well as he
could, ten years long. Yes, we must agree that during all that time
he was, diplomatically speaking, on the defensive against his worse
nature--though one might, indeed, get the impression that even this
behaviour was dictated by sheer malice and in order to lead honest
people by the nose.... To sum up, the constellation of great powers was
at that time as follows:
The traditional, three-hundred-year-old rivalry between France and
Austria was a settled factor, a political constant, which it seemed
would have to be reckoned with to all eternity. It had brought France
and Prussia together and the alliance of June 1744 had still up to ’56
to run. But that alliance had become rather loose and unreliable, after
Frederick withdrew--prematurely, in the view of France--from the War
of the Succession. As for England, her hostility toward France was if
possible even more venerable than that country’s toward Austria. France
loomed large upon the continent, France had a fleet, overseas interests
(there were disputes in America, more precisely in Canada)--in short,
quite enough to make England keep a sharp eye on her. And George II
could endure Frederick as little as anybody else. He too, though not
a female, had been satirized in an epigram. And so England clave to
Russia, where the amateur of strong drink and muscular soldiers sat
enthroned; and did this with especial reference to Prussia; Prussia
being still regarded as an ally of France, and in a position, in case
of war between the latter and the English, to attack England on her
continental heel of Achilles--in other words, Hanover.... The attitude
of Saxon Poland was particularly curious, involved, and timid--under
an Augustus anything but Strong, or, rather, under his prime minister
and head of the Cabinet, Count Brühl, a great spender, a great roué and
intriguer, who presently ruined the country financially and after that
politically too. This man possessed two hundred pairs of shoes, eight
hundred embroidered night-shirts, five hundred suits of clothes, one
hundred and two watches, eight hundred and forty-three tobacco-boxes,
eighty-seven rings, fifty-seven smelling-bottles, twenty-nine coaches,
and fifteen hundred wigs. But I digress.--On Sweden Frederick thought
he could count, his sister Ulrike being crown princess there. French
influence, also, was paramount in that country--that is, it drew
subsidies from France.