234 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63the Russians made an actual treaty of alliance. The Prussians prom-
ised to support Peter's claims in Schleswig, and they gained in return
the assistance of Chernyshev's troops for the war in Silesia.
Frederick was disappointed only in respect of his scheme for the
grand Turkish and Tartar intervention. He posted the Hungarian-
born Lieutenant-General Werner in Upper Silesia with a corps of
about 10,000 men, ready to move across the Beskids and join a force of
up to 26,000 Crimean Tartars. This bizarre assemblage was then
supposed to execute a sweep through Hungary against Vienna, 'and
so as to compel the Austrians to fall back to Vienna, you could
usefully arrange to have the Tartars (but not our men) commit far
more atrocities in Austria than elsewhere. You could burn a number
of villages around Vienna, and especially the ones belonging to the
highest aristrocracy, so that the flames may be seen from the capital
and the lords will utter loud screeches, which will plunge everything
into confusion' (to Werner, 13 April, PC 13606). In the event nothing
more was heard of the Tartar host, or the Turkish war against
Austria, and Werner did no more than make a brief and unsupported
foray into Austrian Silesia.
For the continuing war against the Austrians the king entrusted
Henry in Saxony with about 30,000 troops, and gathered between
66,000 and 72,000 under his own command in Silesia (the estimates
vary greatly). These armies were respectable only in terms of num-
bers. The regular troops comprised burnt-out and disorderly veterans
of Frederick's last campaigns, along with reinforcements from the
theatre of war against the Swedes, men returning from Russian
captivity, and recruits who began to arrive from the newly recovered
north-eastern provinces. An unusually high proportion of the total
was made of light troops - free battalions of infantry, squadrons of
irregular hussars, and the super-large regiment of mounted Bosniaks.
Morale was low throughout the army, but for once Frederick owned a
very un-Prussian advantage in the kleiner Krieg of raids and skir-
mishes, all the more so because the Austrian Croats were in poor
condition, and the enemy cavalry had been heavily cut back for
reasons of economy. Uniquely in this war, Frederick also had the
leisure to concentrate his attention on a single objective - to prise the
Austrian army from its positions around Schweidnitz, and regain this
fortress and with it the possession of southern Silesia.
Daun opposed the Prussians in Silesia with about 82,000 men.
Like Frederick, he knew that whoever was the master of Schweidnitz
at the end of the campaign could effectively dictate the terms of peace
between Austria and Prussia. In the middle of May 1762 the Austrians
left their quarters and took up positions to cover Schweidnitz and the
Eulen-Gebirge passes leading to the County of Glatz. Daun emplaced