Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (36 page)

Although the emergence of the Nymphenburg coalition served Frederick’s interests in 1741, his commitment to it was half-hearted. He did not wish to see Austria dismembered and he certainly had no desire to see Saxony or Bavaria aggrandized at Austria’s expense. After the spring campaign, his money was running out fast and he had no intention of being dragged into further adventures by a coalition whose objectives he did not share. In the summer of 1742, Frederick abandoned his coalition partners and signed a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Treaty of Breslau and a supplementary agreement signed in Berlin, Brandenburg-Prussia agreed to abstain from further campaigning in return for formally acknowledged possession of Silesia.

During the following twenty-four months, Frederick stayed outside the fight, monitoring its progress and making various military improvements. In August 1744, when the balance tipped back in Austria’s favour and a renewed counter-offensive against Silesia seemed likely, he re-entered the fray, scoring two further impressive victories at Hohenfriedeberg (June 1745) and Soor (September 1745). In December 1745, following a further Prussian victory at Kesselsdorf, Frederick once again left the Nymphenburg allies in the lurch to sign a separate peace with Austria. Under the terms of the Peace of Dresden, he agreed to withdraw once again from the war in return for a renewed ratification of his possession of Silesia. Having won two Silesian wars (1740–42 and 1744–5), Prussia would remain a non-combatant throughout the remainder of the War of the Austrian Succession. The Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle, signed in October 1748, formally ended the war and reconfirmed
Prussian ownership of Silesia with an international guarantee signed by Britain and France.

Frederick had pulled off an extraordinary coup. For the first time, a lesser German principality had successfully challenged Habsburg primacy within the Empire to place itself on an equal footing with Vienna. In this, the army created by Frederick’s father played a crucial role. The Prussian victories of the first two Silesian wars were due above all to the discipline and striking power of Frederick William’s infantry. At the battle of Mollwitz (10 April 1741) in southern Silesia, for example, the Prussians initially lost control of the field after an Austrian cavalry charge against the Prussian right-flank cavalry. So great was the panic and confusion among the Prussian horsemen that Frederick was prevailed upon by his experienced commander General Kurt Christoph von Schwerin to flee the field – an incident that would often be retold and embellished by his enemies. But in the meanwhile, the infantry, packed in their lines between the two Prussian flanks, unaware that the king had left the field, moved forward in perfect order, ‘like moving walls’, according to an Austrian observer, using their coordinated weapon drill to concentrate firepower against the Austrian infantry lines and sweeping all before them. By evening, it was clear that the Prussians, despite heavy casualties, controlled the field.

This was hardly a triumph of resolute leadership, but it demonstrated the potency of the weapon fashioned by Frederick William I. The battle of Chotusitz on the Bohemian-Moravian border (17 May 1742) exhibited some analogous features: on this occasion the Prussian cavalry was worsted by the Austrian horse early on in the action; it was the infantry, deploying with rigour and flexibility on uneven terrain, that broke the Austrian lines with tightly focused enfilade fire. Frederick’s rather inept dispositions on the eve of the battle gave as yet little hint of the strategic talent for which he would later be celebrated. At Hohenfriedeberg, perhaps the most decisive of the battles fought during the Second Silesian War, Frederick was more securely in control of events and showed an impressive ability to tailor his plans to changing conditions on the field. Here too, the decisive strokes were delivered by the infantry, advancing three ranks deep towards the Austrian and Saxon lines, shoulder to shoulder with sword bayonets fixed, at the regulation speed of ninety paces a minute, slowing to seventy as they closed with the enemy – relentless, unstoppable.
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Frederick had opened hostilities in December 1740 with a spontaneous and unprovoked attack, and historians of the later twentieth century viewing these events through the lenses of two world wars have sometimes seen Frederick’s invasion as an unexampled act of criminal aggression.
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Yet there was nothing exceptional in the context of contemporary power politics about an attack of this kind on another’s territory – one need point only to the long history of French aggressions in Belgium and the western German lands, or the seizure of the island of Gibraltar by an Anglo-Dutch raiding force in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession, or, closer to home, to the bold partition plans of Saxony and Bavaria. One impressive feature of Frederick’s war planning was his capacity to stay focused on a specific, circumscribed objective (in this case the acquisition of Silesia) and not to be seduced by allies or good fortune into gambling for higher stakes. This helps to explain why Prussia spent fewer years at war during Frederick’s reign than any major European power.
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What amazed contemporaries about Frederick’s Silesian adventure was the combination of its speed and success with the apparent mismatch between the two opponents – Prussia, a third-rank player in the European system, and Austria, the leading dynasty of the Holy Roman Empire and an established member of the great-power club. Prussia’s achievement seemed all the more striking for the fact that it contrasted so sharply with the contemporary fortunes of Bavaria and Saxony. The Bavarians suffered a chain of defeats, in the course of which the Elector Charles Albert was forced to seek refuge outside his country. The Saxons fared little better; having found that there was nothing to gain through their collaboration with the League of Nymphenburg, they changed sides to fight with the Austrians in 1743, in time to stand against Prussia on the losing side at Hohenfriedeberg. This unimpressive record cast the Prussian success in sharp relief. In 1740, Prussia had been just one – and certainly not the wealthiest – of a group of German territorial states with the potential to transcend their status within the Holy Roman Empire. But by 1748, Prussia had pulled ahead, eclipsing its closest German rivals.

It was by no means clear, however, that Frederick would succeed in holding on to his booty. The taking of Silesia had created a new and potentially very dangerous situation. The Austrians absolutely refused to be reconciled to the loss of the monarchy’s richest province, and
declined to sign the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, because it formalized Prussian possession of the stolen province. The creation of an anti-Prussian coalition capable of prising Silesia out of Frederick’s hands and thrusting Prussia back into the ranks of the lesser German territories now became the leitmotif of Habsburg policy. Russia could already be counted on: alarmed at Prussia’s unexpected military success, Tsaritsa Elisabeth and her chief minister, Chancellor Alexis P. Bestuzhev-Riumin, came to see Brandenburg-Prussia as a rival for influence in the eastern Baltic and a potential block to Russian westward expansion. In 1746, the Russians signed an alliance with Vienna; one of its secret clauses foresaw the partition of the Hohenzollern monarchy.
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So powerful was the Habsburg fixation with Silesia that it brought about a fundamental reorientation of Austrian foreign policy. In the spring of 1749, Maria Theresa convened a meeting of the Privy Conference (
Geheime Konferenz
) whose purpose was to sort out the implications of the Silesian disaster. Present at the meeting was a brilliant young minister, the 37-year-old Count Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz. Kaunitz argued for a fundamental policy rethink. Austria’s traditional dynastic ally was Britain and her traditional foe was France. But a detached look at the history of the British alliance, Kaunitz argued, showed that it had yielded little of real use to the Habsburg monarchy. Only the year before, the British had played an ignominious role in the negotiations at Aix-la-Chapelle, pressing the Austrians to accept its loss as irreversible and hurrying to guarantee Prussian possession of Silesia. The root of the problem, Kaunitz argued, lay in the fact that the geopolitical interests of a maritime power such as Britain and those of a continental power such as Austria were objectively too divergent to sustain an alliance. The interests of the monarchy thus demanded that Vienna abandon her unreliable British ally and sue instead for the friendship of France.

This was a radical stance in the Austrian setting, not only because it involved a transformation of the traditional alliance structure, but also because it was grounded in a new kind of reasoning framed not in terms of dynastic authority and tradition, but of the ‘natural interests’ of a state, as defined by its geopolitical position and the immediate security needs of its territory.
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Kaunitz was the only participant at the Privy Conference debate of 1749 to take this position; the others, all of whom were older than he, shrank from his extreme conclusions. Yet it was Kaunitz’s view that Maria Theresa chose to adopt, and he was duly sent
off to work towards a French alliance as ambassador to the court at Versailles. In 1753 he was appointed state chancellor with responsibility for the Habsburg monarchy’s foreign policy. The Silesian shock thus dislodged Habsburg foreign policy from the web of assumptions in which it had traditionally been embedded.

The Seven Years War (1756–63) that followed happened because these Austrian and Russian calculations became entangled with the escalating global conflict between Britain and France. During 1755, there were skirmishes between British and French troops in the remote watery plains of the Ohio river valley. As London and Paris drifted back into open war, King George II of Britain looked to prevent Prussia, an ally of France, from falling upon Hanover, the king’s German homeland. Just as the French had used the Swedes to menace the Brandenburgers in Pomerania in the early 1670s, the British now offered to finance Russian troop and naval deployments along the borders of East Prussia. The details were set out in the Convention of St Petersburg, which was agreed (though not yet ratified) in September 1755.

Frederick II was deeply alarmed at this threat on his eastern frontier – he was well aware of Russian designs on East Prussia and always tended to overestimate Russian power. Desperate to alleviate the pressure on his eastern frontier, he entered into a curiously open-ended agreement with Britain, the Convention of Westminster of 16 January 1756. The British agreed to withdraw their offer of subsidies from the Russians and the two states decided to undertake joint defensive action in Germany in the event that France should attack Hanover. This was a hasty and ill-judged move on Frederick’s part. He did not take the trouble to consult his French allies, although he ought to have guessed that this unforeseen pact with France’s traditional enemy would infuriate the court at Versailles and drive the French into the arms of the Habsburgs. Frederick’s panic reflex of January 1756 exposed the weakness of a decision-making system that depended exclusively on the moods and perceptions of one man.

Prussia’s position now unravelled with perilous speed. The news of the Convention of Westminster sparked fury at the French court, and Louis XV responded by accepting the Austrian offer of a defensive alliance (the First Treaty of Versailles, 1 May 1756), under which each of the two parties was obliged to provide 24,000 troops to the other in the event of its coming under attack. The withdrawal of the British
subsidy offer also enraged Elisabeth of Russia, who agreed in April 1756 to join in an anti-Prussian coalition. Over the next few months, it was the Russians who were the driving force towards war; while Maria Theresa took care to confine her preparations to relatively inconspicuous measures, the Russians made no effort to conceal their military build-up. Frederick now found himself encircled by a coalition of three powerful enemies whose joint offensive, he believed, would be launched in the spring of 1757. When the king demanded categorical assurances from Maria Theresa to the effect that she was not combining against him and had no intention of starting an offensive, her answers were ominously equivocal. Frederick now resolved to strike first, rather than waiting for his enemies to take the initiative. On 29 August 1756, Prussian troops invaded the Electorate of Saxony.

Here was another totally unexpected and profoundly shocking Prussian initiative, and the king was alone in deciding upon it. To a certain extent, the invasion was based upon a misapprehension of Saxon policy. Frederick believed (wrongly) that Saxony had joined the coalition against him and had his officers search the Saxon state papers (in vain) for documentary proof. But his action also served broader strategic objectives. In his
Anti-Machiavel
, published shortly after his accession to the throne, Frederick had delineated three types of ethically permissible war: the defensive war, the war to pursue just rights, and the ‘war of precaution’, in which a prince discovers that his enemies are preparing military action and decides to launch a pre-emptive strike so as not to forgo the advantages of opening hostilities on his own terms.
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The invasion of Saxony clearly fell into the third category. It allowed Frederick to start the war before his opponents had amassed the full strength of their forces. It provided him with control of a strategically sensitive area that would otherwise almost certainly have been used as a forward base – only eighty kilometres from Berlin – for enemy offensives. Saxony was also of considerable economic value; it was ruthlessly milked during the war, supplying more than one-third of Prussia’s entire military expenditure, though it is difficult to establish how heavily the issue of finance and resources weighed in Frederick’s calculations.

The invasion of Saxony might have been defensible in purely strategic terms, but its political impact was nothing short of disastrous. The anti-Prussian coalition acquired the momentum of self-righteous outrage. Russia had already put an offensive construction upon the alliance,
but the French had not. They might well have remained neutral if Frederick had bided his time and become the victim of an unprovoked attack by either the Austrians or the Russians. Instead, France and Austria now contracted a Second Treaty of Versailles (1 May 1757) with an openly offensive character, in which France promised to supply 129,000 troops and 12 million livres each year until the recovery of Silesia had been accomplished (France was to be rewarded with control of Austrian Belgium). The Russians joined the offensive alliance with a further 80,000 troops (they planned to annex Polish Courland to Russia and compensate a Russian-controlled Poland with East Prussia); the territories of the Holy Roman Empire put forward an imperial army of 40,000 men; even the Swedes joined in, in the hope of grabbing back some or all of Pomerania.