240 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63
'How goes it?' asked the king. 'Very well, thank God! The enemy
are on the run and we have really beaten them.' 'I see you are
wounded, my friend,' continued the king, and he proffered his
handkerchief. 'Bandage yourself with this.' Count Chernyshev
was riding with the king. 'Now I see,' he exclaimed, 'why men
serve Your Majesty with such zeal. You are so kind to your
soldiers!' (Anon., 1787-9, IV, 71)At the top Frederick saw the body of Hagen, lying in a pool of blood,
which was the last of the several occasions on which this young man
had come to the king's attention during the war. Early in the
afternoon Daun ordered a general retreat.
Altogether the Prussians had suffered about 1,600 casualties in
the course of the Burkersdorf action. The Austrians lost at least as
many in dead and wounded, as well as 550 men taken prisoner,but the
magnitude of Frederick's success was evident only on 22 July, when
Daun abandoned his communications with Schweidnitz and re-
treated to the highest summits of the hills. The Russians departed on
the same day, but they had by now done everything that Frederick
desired of them. On the 30th came news that Catherine would abide
by the peace, and that her husband Peter had died of a gastric
disorder. 'It is not difficult to guess what kind of seizure this must
have been' (Frederick to Finckenstein, 1 August, PC 13938).
The standard histories of the period devote scarcely a line to the
events at Burkersdorf. They were nevertheless of the greatest political
and strategic importance (more important, indeed, than the results
of a bloody day like Torgau), and they indicate new directions in
Frederick's tactical thinking:
In the description of this action we fail to hear the trumpets of
Rossbach, or the march that was sounded during the attack at
Leuthen. In the first years of the war combat was an affair of
long lines of battle, which stood under unitary command, and
advanced through the powder smoke like long ocean waves.
Burkersdorf was quite different. There the formations were
assigned operational tasks, just as in the conditions of modern
warfare. (Jany, 1907, 90-1)During the remainder of the Silesian campaign Frederick's attention
was divided between the siege of Schweidnitz and the need to keep a
watch on the exits from the Eulen-Gebirge passes, by which Daun
might attempt to break through to the relief of the fortress from the
County of Glatz.
The operation against Schweidnitz took much longer than
Frederick had expected. The fortifications were not particularly