84
THE ARMED CAMP, 1745-56nh valley to the cold shores of the Baltic. Herbert Butterfield
(\9S5) Winfried Baumgart (1972) andTheodor Schieder (1983) made
h oic attempts to summarise the state of the argument, but we still
k tke key to understanding that can be furnished only by a
knowledge of Frederick's intentions. These ambitions remain a mat-
ter of surmise.
It has been claimed that Frederick was presented with a danger of
encirclement that was more real than he knew, and that The
revelation of the Russian war aims has given a depth of meaning to
Frederick the Great's maxim "Better to anticipate than to be antici-
pated" such as the king of Prussia himself would not have thought
possible in his lifetime' (Baumgart, 1972, 158). This perhaps leaves
out of account the gap between intentions and practicabilities. In
fact the preparations of the Russian army lagged well behind the
warlike policy of the ministers in St Petersburg, and the Russians were
in a condition to make offensive war only in August 1757, and even
then on a limited scale. Without the spur of hostilities, the Russians
would probably have taken the field much later still (Duffy, 1981,
73-5).
Likewise the first, tardy Austrian orders to mobilise the regi-
ments were issued on 16 July 1756, in response to the Prussian
preparations, and 29 August found the Austrian forces in Bohemia
and Moravia still without a single piece of mobile artillery. It
by no means suited Frederick's politics to find the Austrians so
completely unready. He had recalled Lieutenant-General Schmettau,
Field-Marshal Keith and the commander of the first battalion of the
Garde from the 'cure' at Karlsbad in Bohemia at the end of July,
and when they returned he was infuriated to find that they had
seen no trace of any Austrian military activity (Schmettau, 1806,
I, 306).
The evidence for active Saxon complicity also lacks weight.
Hertzberg, one of Frederick's ministers, had been given the job of
making propaganda out of the diplomatic documents which were
captured in Dresden, and he admitted long afterwards that his own
arguments were unconvincing. Hertzberg had known for three years
of the existence of an Austro-Russo-Saxon agreement of 1746, provid-
ing for a partition of Prussia in the event of war, but he was also aware
that the project was to be put into effect only after Frederick had
taken the initiative in opening hostilities. It remained an open
question whether it would really have been more dangerous for
Frederick to bide his time rather than precipitate matters.
Interestingly enough, Frederick's protagonists are willing to use
th^8 wmentS ab°Ut indefinitely postponable ambitions in defence of
e king when it comes to interpreting some of the more aggressively