316 FREDERICK AND WAR
assaults, Frederick strove by every means he could to disperse the
enemy concentrations from the hilltop posts. One of the first clues as
to the way he was thinking came from his conversation with Catt on
15 November 1759, when he talked about the means that were open to
him to persuade Daun to leave Dresden and its craggy heights (Catt,
1884, 257). Immediately afterwards, he sent Kleist coursing through
northern Bohemia, and he posted Finck on the plateau of Maxen in
the immediate rear of the Austrians.
The new strategies and tactics were exploited to almost their full
potential in the summer of 1762, when it was a matter of prising Daun
from his hilltop positions overlooking Schweidnitz:
I am facing 82,000 men, and I have only 76,000 at my disposal.
This would not be so embarrassing if the enemy (thanks to our
succession of misfortunes) had not been given the opportunity
to occupy all the advantageous ground. We cannot think of
attacking them, without putting our fortunes rashly at stake.
We must resort to the diversions. (To Henry, 31 May, PC 13742)We have already seen how Frederick's elaborate programme of raids
and demonstrations persuaded the Austrians to abandon their out-
lying positions, and reduced their main concentration to a manage-
able size of less than 30,000 men. When it came to planning the
assault on the Austrian rearward position at Burkersdorf, Frederick
placed the corps of Wied and the brigades of Mollendorff and Knob-
loch in advance of the operation in front of the chosen sector of the
Austrian lines, and he did not require them' to make the assault
immediately after a long and exhausting flank march. Likewise he
positioned his massive artillery reserve on a static site at the foot of
the hills, and told it to do all its work from there.
Finally, on the morning of 21 June 1762, the Prussian artillery
opened up to devastating moral effect, and the groupings of infantry
(which had been given precise timings and objectives) worked for-
ward under cover of the je-entrants which led into the right flank of
the Austrian position. We have moved very far indeed from the
parade-like battles of the first campaigns of the Seven Years War (see
p. 240).
In his writings and correspondence after the war, Frederick held
to the artillery-based tactics and the strategy of diversion. Once again
he toyed with the idea of blanketing the enemy's initial fire with the
free battalions (Testament Politique', 1768, in Frederick, 1920, 163),
and yet once more he did nothing about it in actual operations, when
hostilities returned in the War of the Bavarian Succession. The
problem had less to do with tactics than with the fact that the