THE ARMED CAMP, 174S-56 87as much ground as I could in this first campaign, and provide better
cover for my states by holding the theatre of operations as distant as
possible by carrying the war into Bohemia, if this proved at all
practicable' (Oeuvres, IV, 39).
As a prize in its own right Saxony was rich in agriculture, trade
and men of military age, and the Saxons had 'a story... that His
Prussian Majesty has often said, that the thing in the world he most
repented was that, when he was master of this country, he did not
carry off all the troops' (Lord Stormont, Dresden, 11 August 1756, PRO
SP 88/78).
For a number of years now Winterfeldt had pondered the details
of the invasion. On two occasions he had found it agreeable and
instructive to make the journey by way of Saxony to take the cure at
Karlsbad. He prospected the Bohemian passes (deciding that the
Aussig route was the most suitable), and he made a leisurely inspec-
tion of the whole of the celebrated position of Pirna and Konigstein.
He concluded that the camp was tactically strong, but that if the
Saxon army took refuge there it would soon run out of fodder for its
horses.
It was therefore on the basis of well-established contingency
plans that Frederick and Winterfeldt made arrangements to assemble
62,000 troops for the invasion and break across the Saxon border in
three main groups. They hoped, if possible, to catch the Saxon forces
before they could concentrate, and establish the Prussians in winter
quarters in northern Bohemia up to the line of the river Eger.
Meanwhile Schwerin and 23,800 men were to stand by in Silesia.
Frederick's intentions for the continuance of the war are remark-
ably vague. At heart he shared the confidence of some of the junior
officers like Ewald von Kleist, who believed that the Prussian army
was capable of confronting any eventuality (Kleist to Gleim, 20 July
1756, in Volz, 1926-7, II, 3). In fact the king had no inkling of the
weight of the counter-offensive that was going to break upon his head
after 1756. Blinded by their presuppositions, Frederick and Winter-
feldt chose to ignore the intelligence which indicated that the
Austrians and Russians had been making considerable progress in the
arts of war, and especially gunnery. Frederick dismissed the Russians
as a horde of ignorant barbarians, over the protests of Keith (Retzow,
1802, I, 182-3). He derided what he was told of the important
peacetime manoeuvres of the Austrians in the camp of Kolin in 1754
(Gisors, 1868, 103), and he roundly declared 'the Empress has no
money' (to Schwerin, 12 March 1757, PC 14367), not appreciating
that the French would lend financial help to their Austrian allies, as
well as siege technicians who could crack open the lightly built new
Prussian fortifications in Silesia.