32 THE SILESIAN WARS, 1740-5
the halt, and they laboured under the further disadvantage of being
interleaved with isolated battalions of grenadiers, who got in their
way. The Schulenburg Dragoons (D 3; see Map 1, p. 341) had already
been shaken by their experiences in the skirmish at Baumgarten, and
they now fled without more ado. Frederick was with the Winterfeldt
grenadier battalion (5/21) only a short distance along the line, and
he set off with the Leib-Carabiniers (C 11) in the hope of staving off
the collapse. He was already too late, and he was borne away with
the mass of struggling cavalry along the front of the first line of the
army.
These events left the Winterfeldt and Bolstern (3/22) grenadiers
isolated on the far right of the line, and they blazed away to front and
rear on friend and foe alike. A perhaps more valuable service was
performed by the Kleist grenadiers (1/25) and a single battalion of
Anhalt-Dessau (10), which, although they had been stranded be-
tween the two Prussian lines of battle during the muddled deploy-
ment, were now well placed to prevent the Austrians from penetrat-
ing the interval.
What happened next is difficult to reconstruct with any convic-
tion, but it is evident that Romer's cavaliy, although broken into
groups, returned to the attack on at least two occasions. The fighting
was certainly intense. Romer and the Prussian General of Cavalry
Schulenburg were killed at this confused stage of the proceedings. The
king's friend, Count Chasot, was intent on throttling an Austrian
officer, but before he could finish the work he was wounded in the
head by a sword cut, and both he and his intended victim fell to the
ground.
Schwerin now advised Frederick that he ought to absent himself
from the scene. The field-marshal had noticed that the Prussian line
had opened fire without orders, and his experienced tactical judg-
ment told him that things were in danger of getting out of control
(Schwerin, 1928, 141). Frederick probably needed little prompting,
for he was alarmed by the sequence of sudden reverses. At about
4 p.m. the king therefore took some important papers from his bag-
gage, and he galloped from the field on a fresh and powerful grey
horse.
Frederick and his party of companions rode almost without rest
through the evening and the early hours of the night to the supposed
shelter of Oppeln. They found that the town gates were shut, and
when they announced that they were Prussians they came under fire
from a force of fifty Austrian hussars which had got there before
them. Frederick pulled his horse around and was off before the
Austrians could open the gates. The mathematician Maupertuis and
other slow-moving members of his suite were overtaken by the