218 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63as it destroys all the hopes she had of seeing Saxony delivered from the
Prussians' (report to the Duke of Newcastle, 17 November, British
Library, Add. MSS 32,914).
Torgau has left us with probably more unanswered questions
than any other of Frederick's great engagements. As we have seen,
Frederick's contemporaries harboured doubts, which have still not
been fully put at rest, concerning the motivation for the battle,
Frederick's part in the management, and the number of casualties.
The official relation was singularly uninformative, as the king him-
self admitted (PC 12505).
In particular we remain in ignorance of the task assigned to
Zieten, and speculation on this head has therefore ranged unchecked.
Napoleon, for example, declared that Frederick deserved to have
been beaten for splitting his forces, whereas Clausewitz, Hans Del-
briick, Walter Elze and Eberhard Kessel have deduced that the king
was exploring a new form of dispersed battle (Kessel, 1937, 1; see also
p. 314 of the present work). For the same reason we shall never know
whether Gaudi was right when he claimed that Frederick had ruined
the plan by attacking one and a half hours before an agreed time
(Koser, 1901, 287).
Warnery was probably mistaken in his belief that Frederick left
the battle when the issue was still in doubt. However, Frederick's role
in the last stages was an unusually passive one, and the division of the
forces into two parts prevented him from exercising his usual style of
leadership. The Garde had been assigned to Zieten's wing, and the
men could not understand why they had not seen the king at their
head during the battle. The next day Frederick stopped at one of their
outposts:
After a little while the king unbuttoned his blue overcoat, since
the heat of the watch fire was making him uncomfortable.
During this process the grenadiers saw a bullet drop from his
clothing, and they noticed that a shot had grazed his chest.
Now they were seized with admiration and they called out:
'You are the same Old Fritz! You share all our dangers! We shall
willingly lay down our lives for you! Long live the king! Long
live the king!' (Anon., 1786, IV, 349)Only on 6 November, three days after the battle, did the Prussian
army march up the Elbe from Torgau to Strehla. The next day
Frederick nearly caught Lacy's corps on the west bank of the Elbe at
Meissen. However, this expert gentleman made his escape in the nick
of time and the main Austrian army made an undisturbed retreat to
Dresden, where the enemy stood fast and reoccupied the celebrated
position of the Plauensche-Grund.