86
THE ARMED CAMP, 1745-56
about 'the pleasure of humiliating, or rather annihilating Saxony'
..Q pebruaiy 1756, PC 12125) - a sentiment very inadequately trans-
lated by one of Frederick's admirers as 'reducing Saxony to a political
nullity' (Herrmann, 1895, 245).
The hostile testimony of Frederick's officers is cumulatively
impressive, even when we have made every allowance for their
jealousy of Winterfeldt, and the fact that they were excluded from
the innermost processes of the king's thought. The courtier Lehndorff,
little Count Podewils the minister of foreign affairs, the veterans
Gaudi, Kalkreuth, Retzow and Warnery, and the royal brother Henry
all believed that the war was an unnecessary one, and most of them
ascribed it to the sinister power of Winterfeldt (Warnery, 1788, 214;
Retzow, 1802, I, 53-4; Kalkreuth, 1840, II, 120; Naude, 1888, 235;
Jany, 1901, I. Heft 3, 21; Lehndorff, 1907, 336; Lehndorff, 1910-13, I,
249). Indeed, Winterfeldt's ambitions extended well beyond the
confines of Saxony to the creation of a new Protestant German
Empire, a dream which came to an end in June 1757.'I am convinced',
wrote Warnery, 'that if the King of Prussia had won the battle of
Kolin, he would have sought to bring the Hereditary Lands of Maria
Theresa under his dominion' (Warnery, 1785-91, II, 310; see also
Warnery, 1788, 12; Bleckwenn, 1978, 190).
Ultimately the 'guilt' for the Seven Years War is one of those
intractable questions which depend on how widely we draw the
boundaries of our inquiry. Most immediately, Frederick was justified
in acting on the reports which reached him from The Hague, to the
effect that the Austrians, Russians and French planned to attack him
in the following spring. A wide perspective brings to light a little more
of the ambitions and hatreds of Frederick and his confidant Winter-
feldt, and reveals that by seizing the military initiative Frederick
created the conditions which made it possible for Austria to complete
the alliance.
Allied statesmen, like the Russian chancellor Bestuzhev, rightly
suspected that Frederick believed that the period of Prussian expan-
sion was not yet over. When we look at Frederick's career as a whole,
we will recall not only the events of 1756, but the invasions of Herstal
and Silesia in 1740, and the claims which he lodged to north-east
Bohemia in 1742 and 1744. In other words our hero emerges as the
prime begetter of violence in Central Europe in the middle of the
eighteenth centuiy.
!n military terms, the arguments for undertaking a pre-emptive
attack on Saxony were irrefutable. The Saxon change of sides in 1744
ad shown Frederick how dangerous it was to leave a hostile or even a
neutral power astride the central Elbe. 'I was also determined to gain