138 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63
trians: 'Everything is going splendidly here, but I am veiy worried by
a rumour which has come to me from Lusatia. I don't know what to
make of it. They write to me from Dresden that you have been killed,
and from Berlin that you received a cut in the shoulder' (PC 9336).
Within a matter of hours came news that Winterfeldt and many of his
men had been lying dead for a week, after a detachment under his
command had been overwhelmed by the Austrians at Moys.
Frederick took the loss of Winterfeldt much more to heart than
that of Schwerin. Towards the end of his life he was talking with a
young officer when the conversation turned to the action at Moys.
Frederick burst out: ' "That was where Winterfeldt was killed! He
was a good man - a man of soul - he was my friend!" His great eyes
brimmed with tears as he looked towards the window. He opened the
casement, and stood there some time before he turned back to Riichel
and sent him on his way with a perceptible softening in his voice:
"Goodnight, I am obliged to you" ' (Varnhagen von Ense, 1836, 233).
On 17 September, the day of Seydlitz's brilliant coup at Gotha,
Frederick was informed that the soriy chapter of the Hanoverian
campaign had ended in a capitulation to the French at Kloster-Zeven.
The army of the Due de Richelieu was now free to help Soubise and
Hildburghausen in central Germany. As a precaution against Riche-
lieu, Frederick had already sent Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick on the
14th with six battalions and eleven squadrons to protect Halle. Prince
Moritz of Anhalt-Dessau was simultaneously dispatched with ten
battalions and ten squadrons to the Elbe to cover Brandenburg and
the important bridge at Torgau against the Austrians.
Annoyingly enough the French and the troops of the Reichs-
armee in Thuringia persisted in hanging just out of Frederick's reach.
He fell back on 27 September from Erfurt to Buttelstadt, but failed to
tempt the allies any further west than Gotha. On 11 October the
Prussian army executed a further retreat to the little town of Eckarts-
berga. The rain turned the road into red clay mud, and Frederick's
temper was not improved by reports that the Austrians were sending
a raiding corps against Berlin. Frederick ordered the detachments of
Ferdinand and Moritz to do what they could to head off the enemy,
and on the 12th he dispatched Seydlitz and the Szekely Hussars to
help them. All of Frederick's composure had disappeared. In the
evening he took up the text of Racine's tragedy Mithridate, and
through the windows of his lodging he could be seen declaiming the
lines with dramatic passion.
Frederick left Field-Marshal Keith with a small corps to hold the
line of the Saale against the allies, and he hastened with the advance
guard north-east by way of Leipzig and Torgau to save the capital. On
the 19th he learnt that the Austrians had occupied Berlin on the 16th,