269 THE WAR OF THE BAVARIAN SUCCESSION, 1778-9but he believed that the Prussians must respond by building up
powerful local concentrations of their own ordnance, so as to effect a
breach in the enemy positions (PC 26399, 26433, 26458).
On 12 April Frederick established his headquarters in the village
of Schonwalde, hard under the hill fortress of Silberberg and a couple
of marches from the Bohemian border. Weeks of negotiation came to
nothing, and he wrote to his foreign minister Finckenstein: 'those
Austrian buggers are laughing at us... press them hard to give us a
categorical reply, or these swine will play us along until winter
comes, which does not suit my purposes at all' (9 June, PC 26445).
On 4 July 1778 the advance guard of the royal army made the ascent
of the stony roads leading from the County of Glatz. Next day the
Prussians made for the little stream near Nachod which marked the
Bohemian border, and Frederick ordered all the regiments to pass this
new Rubicon with beating drums and sounding music. 'The king was
standing quite alone on the Austrian side of the bridge which leads
over the river ... As the troops marched across he examined them
with the same calm confidence and sharpness of eye as if he had been
on the Parade at Potsdam' (Anon., 1884, 35). The new West Prussian
regiments were greatly impressed.
On 6 July and again the next day Frederick rode out with his light
cavalry to make his long-meditated reconnaissance in force. He
encountered no opposition as he moved west over the lightly wooded
country around Skalitz, but he discovered that the Austrians were
heavily emplaced on the avenue between the two great primeval
woods of this corner of Bohemia - the Konigreich-Wald to the north,
and the near-trackless Koniggratzer-Wald to the south. He knew this
area very well indeed, and he grasped at once the significance of the
transformations which the Austrians had worked in the neighbour-
hood since he had last passed this way in 1758. Not only had the
enemy planted a permanent fortress at Koniggratz, which, as he
already knew, gave added force to the southerly barriers of the Adler
river and the Koniggratzer-Wald, but a considerable number of troops
were now throwing up field works along the far, or western, bank of
the upper Elbe, thus denying his only access to the open country of
Bohemia beyond.
During the first ride, the inquisitive young hussars had crowded
around the king:
Frederick was no longer the monarch whom the older hussars
remembered from the Seven Years War. Sixteen years had
passed since that time, and their effect was all too evident in his
bearing, his features, and still more in something peculiar to