321 FREDERICK AND WARwithstand six hundred good hussars' (Warnery, quoted in Jahns,
1889-91, III, 2, 633). Seydlitz learnt his work as Chef of a hussar
squadron in the Second Silesian War, and Frederick, throughout his
reign, was in the habit of sending parties of the heavier cavalry on
attachment to the hussars. Such an interchange was not possible in
Maria Theresa's army, where the hussar service was the tribal speci-
ality of the Hungarians.
The Prussian cavalry completed the victories at Hohenfriedeberg
and Leuthen, it decided Rossbach almost unaided, and at Zorndorf it
redressed the fortunes of the infantry. 'However the brilliance of the
cavalry gradually dimmed from the end of the Seven Years War. It
ceased to exercise the role which had been peculiarly its own since
Rocroi - that of winning battles' (Anon., 1844, 11).
It is striking that Frederick identified himself so enthusiastically
with the cavalry, whose greatest days belonged in the past, and
accommodated himself so unwillingly to the artillery, which was
growing in power with every decade. He could not bring himself to
believe that the build-up in his ordnance represented a true advance
in tactics. He sent the worst of the recruits to this arm, and he
continued to write about its officers in terms of the most bitter
contempt. He allowed the gunners no proper structure of command,
no proper chief. As a young officer of the Hanoverian artillery,
visiting Prussia in 1783, Scharnhorst was surprised at the lack of
uniformity in the ordnance, which he correctly ascribed to the lack of
supervision on the part of its royal master (Lehmann, 1886-7, I, 35).
Indeed, in the matter of artilleiy design, Frederick did not have the
Austrians' knack for striking a balance between the conflicting
requirements of hitting-power and mobility. His heavy howitzers had
a phenomenal range, but they were almost impossible to drag across
difficult country. His celebrated horse artillery, which first appeared
in 1759, raced ahead of the infantry but was too slow to keep up with
the cavalry.
The business of military engineers in the eighteenth century was
the design, building, attack and defence of fortresses. Frederick's
relations with these folk were, if possible, still worse than his rela-
tions with his gunners. Scarcely one of the Prussian engineers escaped
a period of disgrace during his career, and some underwent detention
or the threat of physical attack.
There were many reasons why Frederick got on so badly with his
technicians. He deplored the expense and weight of the artillery's
equipment, and the slow action of fortress warfare accorded ill with
his active and restless temperament. Frederick's general ideas on
gunnery and fortification, and the strategic use of strongholds, are
certainly of great importance and originality (see Duffy, 1985, for