232 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63alteration of character that was noted by his admirer the British
envoy Mitchell:
I am veiy sorry to observe... that I think the king of Prussia's
temper considerably ruffled and grown more harsh since the
battle of Zorndorf; to this I impute his keeping the Russian
officers still at Ciistrin, the burning of Count Briihl's house, etc.
... I cannot think of the bombardment of Dresden without
horror, nor of other things I have seen. Misfortunes naturally
sour men's tempers, and the continuance of them at last
extinguishes humanity. (12 December 1758, 31 July 1760,
Mitchell, 1850, 1,476; II, 184)The change in appearance was shocking to Frederick's reader
Catt, who saw the king after a period of absence, and knew him only
by the fire in his eyes. The king himself was alive to the processes that
were at work. He wrote in 1760 to his beloved 'Mama', the old
Countess Sophie Caroline de Camas:I tell you, I lead a dog's life, and I suspect that only Don
Quixote has ever known this kind of existence, with its endless
disorders. It has aged me so much that you would scarcely
recognise me. My hair is completely grey on the right side of my
head. My teeth are breaking and falling out. My face is as
deeply folded as the flounces on a lady's skirt, my back is bent
like an archer's bow, and I go about as gloomy and downcast as
a Trappist monk. (Oeuvres, XVIII, 145)
These were afflictions which Frederick was prepared to sustain
indefinitely. What impelled him to ask Finckenstein to open negoti-
ations, on 6 January 1762, was not his personal distress, and not even
the bloodletting among his troops, but the collapse of the Silesian and
Pomeranian frontiers, and the approaching disintegration of the
fabric of the army and state.
The scale of acceptable losses is not a mathematical constant,
but something which must be continuously and closely redefined in a
military, political, social and economic context. The two concerns
that mattered to Frederick more than anything else were the welfare
of his core of 'useful, hard-working people', and the maintenance of
military discipline. Both were now in danger.
Frederick knew that about half a million of his subjects were
refugees. He was also aware that the system of military administra-
tion threatened to crumble as completely as that of the civilian
officials, who had been abandoned to their own devices since the
beginning of the war. In the winter of 1761-62 the captains for the first
time failed to receive the monies with which to fit out their com-