65 THE SILESIAN WARS, 1740-5military education of the king and his troops was still incomplete,
they had shown for the first time an impressive proficiency in nearly
all of the branches of the art of war. The preliminaries of the battle
had been a personal triumph for Frederick, since the concentration of
force, the successfully sprung trap, and the overnight march
amounted to the first strategic advantage he had ever gained over the
cunning Austrians. Frederick maintained the momentum of the
advance beyond the Striegauer-Wasser, even after the locations of the
enemy turned out to be much more widely spread than he had
expected. He was therefore able to attack the allies 'in such a position
that they could only fight battalion by battalion, being never able to
engage at the same time with their whole army' (Villiers, 7 June, PRO
SP 88/65). In the further battle, all of the arms of the service lived up
to the ideal of immer vorwdrts - the two batteries of artillery which
gave support to Du Moulin's advance guard, the infantry brigade
commanders who responded to the challenge of the fluid combat, and
the cavalry which twice got the better of the Austrian horse in open
battle.
Concerning the hammer-blow which finished the action,
Frederick exclaimed: 'These men of the Bayreuth regiment are verit-
able Caesars. You can imagine what monuments would have been
raised to their honour in Ancient Rome!' (Koser, 1921, I, 500).
Interestingly enough, their intervention in no way corresponded to
the role assigned to the dragoons in the cavalry Disposition of July
1744, which was to form the second line of the cavalry and fall on the
flanks of the enemy infantry only after it had been beaten. The very
size of the Bayreuth regiment (the equivalent of a small brigade)
made it something of an oddity among the regular horse. At Hohen-
friedeberg it escaped being incorporated in the cavalry order of battle,
andlo it remained uncommitted until it launched its independent
attack head-on against the shaken but still intact regiments of
Austrian infantry. This mode of action corresponded much more
closely to that of the Napoleonic cavalry reserve than to anything
known in the middle of the eighteenth century, and it is disappoint-
ing to find that Frederick was not inspired to look any further into the
matter, except perhaps in one of the battle schemes in the Principes
Giniraux of 1748 (Oeuvres, XXVIII, 79).
After the battle Frederick established his headquarters in the tall
and rather grim palace of Rohnstock, which was to become a
favourite resort whenever he was campaigning in this part of the
world. On the morning of 5 June the kettle-drummers of the Bayreuth
Dragoons came hammering into the interior, followed by two bodies
of troopers who bore fifty captured colours and standards, which were
dipped by the successive ranks as they passed under the archway.