199 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63chose instead to bombard the place with a train of ten 12-pounder
cannon and four 50-pounder mortars, which were shipped upriver
from Torgau.
The bombardment of Dresden opened on 19 July. Some of the
mortar bombs were directed at the slab-like tower of the Kreuz-
Kirche, and the wooden pinnacle at the top caught fire and toppled
over, spreading flames among the neighbouring houses. Street after
street was then consumed in a conflagration which destroyed a large
area of the city. None of this made the slightest impression on the
powerful garrison of 13,900 men under the Austrian major-general
Macquire.
This episode was remembered even among Frederick's admirers
as an example of the horrors of modern warfare (Archenholtz, 1840,
II, 49; Mitchell, 1850, II, 184; Lehndorff, 1910-13, I, 247-S). The
Prussians claimed that they had seen Austrian observers, or even
cannon, on the Kreuz-Kirche tower, and the royal secretary Eichel
wrote a confused and embarrassed letter to the foreign minister
Finckenstein, trying to persuade him that the artillery had been
aiming at the fortifications, not the city, but that it had been difficult
to observe the fall of the bombs (PC 12257). Frederick was neither a
saint nor a pyromaniac. In all probability he had ordered the city to
be bombarded, never expecting, after the limited effects of the
bombardment of Prague in 1757, that Dresden would prove to be so
inflammable.
It was too dangerous for the Prussians to maintain the siege of
Dresden much longer, for on the evening of 18 July Daun and the
main Austrian army had reached the heights to the east of the Elbe
and established contact with the city. On the dark night of 21 July the
Prussians were evacuating their guns from the batteries when they
came under attack from a body of Austrian troops which Daun had
pushed across the river. The covering force (a battalion of Prinz
Ferdinand, and the first and second battalions of Anhalt-Bernburg)
was put to flight, and only with difficulty were the survivors able to
break through to the Grosser-Garten.
Frederick held the army close under Dresden for seven days more,
hoping in vain that Daun would come out to fight. Meanwhile his ire
fell on the Bernburgers. The soldiers had to yield up their swords and
the officers and NCOs were made to cut the lace from their hats.
Likewise Frederick heaped rebukes on the cringing necks of the
engineers and the officers of the artillery. All the time the real blame
rested with the king, as Retzow points out: 'A simple bombardment
was powerless to compel a strongly garrisoned fortress to surrender,
especially when an enemy army of relief was at hand. Frederick must
have known as much from a number of historical examples, and more