volume 1, chapter 1-2.

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1740-1741. The War of the Succession: Faithlessness of the King of Prussia. The Macaulay verdict.

"From no quarter did the young queen of Hungary receive stronger assurances of friendship and support than from the King of Prussia. Yet the King of Prussia, the 'Anti-Machiavel,' had already fully determined to commit the great crime of violating his plighted faith, of robbing the ally whom he was bound to defend, and of plunging all Europe into a long, bloody, and desolating war, and all this for no end whatever except that he might extend his dominions and see his name in the gazettes. He determined to assemble a great army with speed and secrecy, to invade Silesia before Maria Theresa should be apprized of his design, and to add that rich province to his kingdom. ... Without any declaration of war, without any demand for reparation, in the very act of pouring forth compliments and assurances of good will, Frederic commenced hostilities. Many thousands of his troops were actually in Silesia before the Queen of Hungary knew that he had set up any claim to any part of her territories. At length he sent her a message which could be regarded only as an insult. If she would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said, stand by her against any power which should try to deprive her of her other dominions: as if he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if his new promise could be of more value than the old one. It was the depth of winter. The cold was severe, and the roads deep in mire. But the Prussians pressed on. Resistance was impossible. The Austrian army was then neither numerous nor efficient. The small portion of that army which lay in Silesia was unprepared for hostilities. Glogau was blockaded; Breslau opened its gates; Ohlau was evacuated. A few scattered garrisons still held out; but the whole open country was subjugated: no enemy ventured to encounter the king in the field; and, before the end of January, 1741, he returned to receive the congratulations of his subjects at Berlin. {214} Had the Silesian question been merely a question between Frederic and Maria Theresa it would be impossible to acquit the Prussian king of gross perfidy. But when we consider the effects which his policy produced, and could not fail to produce, on the whole community of civilized nations, we are compelled to pronounce a condemnation still more severe. ... The selfish rapacity of the king of Prussia gave the signal to his neighbours. ... The evils produced by this wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and, in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America. Silesia had been occupied without a battle; but the Austrian troops were advancing to the relief of the fortresses which still held out. In the spring Frederic rejoined his army. He had seen little of war, and had never commanded any great body of men in the field. ... Frederic's first battle was fought at Molwitz [April 10, 1741], and never did the career of a great commander open in a more inauspicious manner. His army was victorious. Not only, however, did he not establish his title to the character of an able general, but he was so unfortunate as to make it doubtful whether he possessed the vulgar courage of a soldier. The cavalry, which he commanded in person, was put to flight. Unaccustomed to the tumult and carnage of a field of battle, he lost his self-possession, and listened too readily to those who urged him to save himself. His English gray carried him many miles from the field, while Schwerin, though wounded in two places, manfully upheld the day. The skill of the old Field-Marshal and the steadiness of the Prussian battalions prevailed, and the Austrian army was driven from the field with the loss of 8,000 men. The news was carried late at night to a mill in which the king had taken shelter. It gave him a bitter pang. He was successful; but he owed his success to dispositions which others had made, and to the valour of men who had fought while he was flying. So unpromising was the first appearance of the greatest warrior of that age."

_Lord Macaulay, Frederic the Great (Essays, volume 4)._

AUSTRIA: A. D. 1741 (April-May). The War of the Succession: French responsibility. The Carlyle verdict.

"The battle of Mollwitz went off like a signal shot among the Nations; intimating that they were, one and all, to go battling. Which they did, with a witness; making a terrible thing of it, over all the world, for above seven years to come. ... Not that Mollwitz kindled Europe; Europe was already kindled for some two years past;--especially since the late Kaiser died, and his Pragmatic Sanction was superadded to the other troubles afoot. But ever since that image of Jenkins's Ear had at last blazed up in the slow English brain, like a fiery constellation or Sign in the Heavens, symbolic of such injustices and unendurabilities, and had lighted the Spanish-English War [see ENGLAND: A. D. 1739-1741], Europe was slowly but pretty surely taking fire. France 'could not see Spain humbled,' she said: England (in its own dim feeling, and also in the fact of things), could not do at all without considerably humbling Spain. France, endlessly interested in that Spanish-English matter, was already sending out fleets, firing shots,--almost, or altogether, putting her hand in it. 'In which case, will not, must not, Austria help us?' thought England,--and was asking, daily, at Vienna ... when the late Kaiser died. ... But if not as cause, then as signal, or as signal and cause together (which it properly was), the Battle of Mollwitz gave the finishing stroke and set all in motion. ... For directly on the back of Mollwitz, there ensued, first, an explosion of Diplomatic activity, such as was never seen before; Excellencies from the four winds taking wing towards Friedrich; and talking and insinuating, and fencing and fugling, after their sort, in that Silesian camp of his, the centre being there. A universal rookery of Diplomatists, whose loud cackle is now as if gone mad to us; their work wholly fallen putrescent and avoidable, dead to all creatures. And secondly, in the train of that, there ensued a universal European War, the French and the English being chief parties in it; which abounds in battles and feats of arms, spirited but delirious, and cannot be got stilled for seven or eight years to come; and in which Friedrich and his War swim only as an intermittent Episode henceforth. ... The first point to be noted is, Where did it originate? To which the answer mainly is ... with Monseigneur, the Maréchal de Belleisle principally; with the ambitious cupidities and baseless vanities of the French Court and Nation, as represented by Belleisle. ... The English-Spanish War had a basis to stand on in this Universe. The like had the Prussian-Austrian one; so all men now admit. If Friedrich had not business there, what man ever had in an enterprise he ventured on? Friedrich, after such trial and proof as has seldom been, got his claims on Schlesien allowed by the Destinies. ... Friedrich had business in this War; and Maria Theresa versus Friedrich had likewise cause to appear in Court, and do her utmost pleading against him. But if we ask, What Belleisle or France and Louis XV. had to do there? the answer is rigorously Nothing. Their own windy vanities, ambitions, sanctioned not by fact and the Almighty Powers, but by Phantasm and the babble of Versailles; transcendent self-conceit, intrinsically insane; pretensions over their fellow-creatures which were without basis anywhere in Nature, except in the French brain; it was this that brought Belleisle and France into a German War. And Belleisle and France having gone into an Anti-Pragmatic War, the unlucky George and his England were dragged into a Pragmatic one,--quitting their own business, on the Spanish Main, and hurrying to Germany,--in terror as at Doomsday, and zeal to save the Keystone of Nature there. That is the notable point in regard to this War: That France is to be called the author of it, who, alone of all the parties, had no business there whatever."

_T. Carlyle, History of Friedrich II.,