242 THE SEVEN YEARS WAR, 1756-63
The enemy were still in possession of the Prussian territoiy of
Glatz, and it took heavy pressure from Frederick, and appeals to the
military judgment of Daun, before the Austrians agreed to return to
the borders of 1756. Effectively, Glatz was traded for the Prussian
evacuation of Saxony. A treaty of peace was signed on 15 February
1763, and thus terminated 'this cruel war, so costly in blood, anguish
and devastation' (Frederick to Henry, 2 February 1763, PC 14417).After the war Frederick attributed his survival to the lack of harmony
among the allies, the short-sighted stratagems of the Austrians, who
placed the chief burden of the war on their friends, and the death of
the Empress Elizabeth, which brought about the collapse of the
Austrian alliance system (Oeuvres, V, 229). Posterity must add that
Frederick's generalship and the performance of the Prussian army
were not without some influence on the outcome.
The decidedly un-resonant name 'the Seven Years War' did not
enter usage until the early 1780s, by which time the term 'the last
war' was no longer applicable. All the dramatic connotations derived
from the realities of the event, which was 'more remarkable, bloody,
important and instructive than any other war in the history of the
world' (Muller, 1788, 92).
The emotions engendered by the war served to give a powerful
impetus to the literary cult of 'sensibility' in the German lands
(Briiggemann, 1935, passim), and endowed the Prussians with a
sustaining myth directly comparable with the one that the Frontier
came to represent for the Americans. Men of letters rejoiced that
Prussia was now decked out with a pantheon of heroes to rival any in
antiquity (Pauli, 1758-64,1, 'Vorwort'; Seidl, 1781, III, 388-9; Haller,
1796, 93).
Warnery was probably mistaken when he wrote that the war had
left 400,000 people dead without the slightest advantage to any of the
parties (1788, 533). Britain made important conquests overseas, as
Frederick pointed out in his history of the war. Negatively, Prussia
had gained a defensive victory of the first order. The Danish minister
Bernstorff had indicated in 1759: 'This war is being fought not for
some passing interest, not for a couple of fortresses or small provinces,
but for the existence or extinction of the new [Prussian] monarchy'
(Koser, 1921, III, 161). Without setting up Frederick as a proto-
Bismarck or Hitler, we must agree with his biographer Koser that 'The
Seven Years War did not indeed create Prussia's position as a great
power, but, in the face of all opposition and doubts, it consolidated
that position and won it a general acknowledgement' (ibid., II, 383).
Frederick was not at all impressed to learn that he himself was
now regarded as a figure of European renown. The admiration of the