229 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63180,000 men in the course of the war, and that scarcely one hundred
men per regiment remained of those who embarked on campaign in
1756 - which indicates a rate of survival of about one in fifteen (for
a more detailed study of the nature of the losses and combat stress at
this period, please see the author's forthcoming Experience of War in
the Age of Reason).
What accounts for damage on this scale? About 106,000 men were
killed, wounded or missing in open battle. The losses amounted to 33
per cent of the Prussian combatants at Zorndorf, about 40 per cent at
Kunersdorf, and 30 per cent or possibly much more at Torgau. There is
nothing unlikely in the story that at Silberberg in 1778 Frederick met a
widow who had lost six of her sons in the last war.
To the losses in open battle we must add the erosion occasioned
by small-scale actions, exhaustion, disease, and especially by deser-
tion. The ex-Saxon soldiers were still more likely to make off than
were the Catholics from Glatz and Upper Silesia, and the army as a
whole was thinned out whenever it prosecuted forced marches
through broken country, as on the way to Liegnitz in 1760.
Whole regiments at a time were temporarily removed from the
order of battle whenever detached corps or garrisons surrendered to
the enemy. The campaign of 1759 was particularly destructive in this
respect, and cost the Prussians no less than twenty-eight battalions
and thirty-five squadrons. Another twenty-six battalions were lost in
this way in 1760. A few of the officers eventually came back to the
army by way of exchange (Frederick effected the return of Mollen-
dorff two days after Torgau), but many others remained in captivity
until the end of the war, and the less patriotic of the soldiers were
never seen again.
Indirectly, the army was weakened by the progressive encroach-
ment of the allies on the native recruiting grounds. East Prussia and
the Prussian Rhineland were lost to the enemy outright, and Silesia,
Pomerania and the Neumark became active theatres of war, where
normal recruiting was difficult. The morale of the East Prussians,
even when they were serving in the army, was undermined by the
knowledge that their homeland was under Russian occupation.
Seeking to maintain the numerical strength of his army,
Frederick was forced into taking measures which told heavily on
morale and proficiency. Enemy prisoners and deserters were enrolled
without hesitation in the full knowledge that these folk would make
themselves scarce as soon as they escaped the eye of their NCOs. The
best of the remaining troops - the grenadier battalions and the
regiments of Brandenburg and Pomeranian musketeers - were re-
tained as far as possible with the royal army, while the detached corps
were filled out with a higher proportion of second-grade troops like