230 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63the homeless East Prussians, the little Catholic fusiliers from Upper
Silesia, and the brigand-like scum of the free battalions. Here we must
be all the more careful to do justice to the excellent mixed free corps
of 'Green' Kleist, and the long-suffering Pomeranian Land-
Regimenter who helped to sustain the prolonged kleiner Kiieg
against the Russians and Swedes.
The Prussian officer corps was now paying dearly for its priv-
ileges. There were some 5,500 holders of commissioned rank at the
beginning of the war; by the end, 1,500 or more had been killed, and
another 2,500 or so were wounded. Whole noble families were signifi-
cantly diminished in the slaughter. The prolific tribe of Kleist could
afford its two dozen sacrifices, but the Kameckes lost nineteen of
their number, and the Bellings forfeited twenty out of their twenty-
three males. Ultimately Frederick was compelled to recruit large
numbers of boys and bourgeois as officers, which is itself a significant
indication of how far the ranks of the corps were being thinned.
Thirty-three generals died in the first four years of the war alone,
and by the end of 1758 an entire generation of senior commanders -
Schwerin, Winterfeldt, Keith and Moritz - had passed from the scene.
Frederick lamented: 'You know how rare good generals are, and how
few I have at my disposal ... It seems as if the Austrians are
immortal, and that only our own people are dying. My generals are
passing the Styx at a furious rate of knots, and soon there will be
nobody left' (to Henry, 9 August 1758 and 16 July 1759, PC 10195,
11212). Zieten survived and he was retained with the royal army, but
Ferdinand of Brunswick was beyond recall in western Germany, and
Prince Henry and (when his health allowed) Seydlitz were usually
absent on detached commands.
The discontented Prussian general and officer, unlike the Fred-
erician private soldier, could not change his conditions of life by
deserting. Instead 'we owned a formal opposition in the Prussian
army in the Seven Years War. Whatever Frederick did was certain to
evoke denigration and disapproval in this quarter. The opposition
maintained a correspondence between its members in the various
armies, as Frederick was well aware... Occasionally he intercepted
the letters and laughed at the contents' (Zimmermann, 1790, II,
317).
Prince Henry emerged as the hero of all those who harboured
reservations about Frederick's conduct of affairs. He was bookish and
misogynistic, like his brother, but the two were separated not just by
thirteen years of age but by important matters of principle. Henry
challenged the tenets of the existing Prussian society, which held the
nobles in a kind of military servitude and excluded the middle classes
from honour (see p. 330). More important in the present context, he