TWO:
TWO:498 He is as potent and as malignant as the devil. He is also as unhappy, not knowing friendship.
TWO:307 Elsewhere, Frederick, speaking of these two winter campaigns, says: Winter campaigns are bad, and should always be avoided, except in cases of necessity. The best army in the world is liable to be ruined by them. I myself have made more winter campaigns than any general of this age. But there were reasons. In 1740 there were hardly above two Austrian regiments in Silesia, at the death of the Emperor Charles VI. Being determined to assert my right to that duchy, I had to try it at once, in winter, and carry the war, if possible, to the banks of the Neisse. Had I waited till spring, we must have begun the war between Crossen and Glogau. What was now to be gained by one march would then have cost us three or four campaigns. A sufficient reason, this, for campaigning in winter. If I did not succeed in the winter campaigns of 1742, a campaign which I made to deliver Moravia, then overrun by Austrians, it was because the French acted like fools, and the Saxons like traitors.64
TWO:To his brother Henry he wrote, I have had a bad time of it, my dear brother; our means are so eaten away; far too short for opposing the prodigious number of our enemies set against us. If we must fall, let us date our destruction from the infamous day of Maxen. My health is a little better, but I have still hmorro?des aveugles. That were nothing, however, were it not for the disquietudes I feel. For these three days I have had so terrible a cramp in continuance that I thought it would choke me. It is now a little gone. No wonder that the chagrins and continual disquietudes I live in should undermine, and at length overturn, the most robust constitution.
