276 THE WAR OF THE BAVARIAN SUCCESSION, 1778-9
which was the period of greatest effort in the Seven Years War. Maria
Theresa had always been opposed to the war, as we have seen, and the
peaceful accommodation, which she had failed to achieve through
the missions of Baron Thugut, was finally accomplished by the
mediation of France and Russia in the spring of 1779. An armistice
came into effect along the borders in the second week in March, and
on 13 May the Peace of Teschen brought hostilities to a formal end.
Out of all their gains in Bavaria, the Austrians retained only the
little 'quarter' between the rivers Danube, Inn and Salzach.
Thus a diplomatic triumph for Frederick succeeded a defensive
victory for the Austrians in the field. His demoralised army streamed
home, its ranks depleted by more than 30,000 men through disease
and a desertion greater than in the whole of the Seven Years War.
Any passably serious book which sets out to trace Frederick's career
will always be a lengthy one; the temptation must be, as the
monarch's life draws to its close, to pass rapidly over the months of
the War of the Bavarian Succession. The narrative-minded biog-
rapher finds nothing to compare with the sustained excitements of
the Seven Years War, and the seeker after military sensation is
unmoved by a positional confrontation in which combat casualties
were numbered in their hundreds, instead of by the tens of thousands
who fell on the single day of Torgau. Likewise professional historians
prefer to fix their attention on the war that was proceeding on the far
side of the Atlantic, or to set the scene for the cataclysm that was
going to overtake Europe in the 1790s.
Frederick's admirers have needed little prompting to take their
cue from the old king, who could write in 1781 about the lack of
promotion 'during a long period of peace like the present one, which
has lasted nearly twenty years' ('Instruction fur die Inspecteurs der
Infanterie', Oeuvres, XXX, 361). In other words, he liked to think
that no real war had ever supervened in 1778. It seemed almost
blasphemous to Cogniazzo and others to suggest that the feeble
motions of the Prussians could have been determined by anything
other than political considerations (Pilati di Tassulo, 1784, 136;
Cogniazzo, 1788-91, IV, 307, 331).
This convenient explanation does not correspond to the earnest-
ness of Frederick's tactical schemes, which were the culmination of a
line of development which originated in the middle of the Seven
Years War (see p. 315). If we did not have a great battle, it was simply
because Frederick was so slow at getting his howitzers into position.
Nor does the notion of'armed negotiation' (Ranke) accord with
the aggressive plans of campaign, which were at least as ambitious as
anything which Frederick hatched between 1756 and 1758. We may
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