“His Majesty bids me tell Your Royal Highness that he has cause to be very dissatisfied with you. You deserve that a court-martial should be held over you, and then you and all the generals with you would lose your heads. But His Majesty is not willing to carry the matter so far, because in the General he would not forget the Brother.” Augustus William made answer like a brave man, exculpating his generals, and requesting a strict enquiry into his own conduct. But the King replied only by putting himself at the head of his vanguard, which had now come up, and riding on with his staff past the Prince, always keeping from three to four hundred paces away from him. At Bautzen he encamped, but still kept at a distance from the fugitives, lest, suggests Eichel, their fear should contaminate his own officers. Augustus William, treated like a leper, applied for permission to go to Dresden. “The Prince may go where he will,” said Frederick to the lieutenant who bore the letter. He went to Berlin and died of a broken heart. If anything could palliate brutality to the merely unfortunate it would have been the situation in which Frederick was placed by his brother’s blunder. Despite all his efforts, the Austrians remained masters of the pass into Lusatia. With French, Swedes, Russians, and Imperialists all pressing on, it became imperative to dispose of the Austrians by a second Hohenfriedberg. But Prince Charles was not to be tempted from the strong position which Daun had chosen with his wonted skill. After three impatient weeks Frederick decided that the peril from the French was too acute to permit of further delay in trying to force the Austrians to give battle. Early in August he received the news of Cumberland’s downfall at Hastenbeck. Hanover lay at the mercy of the French under Richelieu, and when on August 25, 1757, the King turned his face towards the west, Soubise with a second French force and the army of the Empire was already at Erfurt. Frederick was determined to maintain his hold on Saxony. Bevern, he decided, must watch the Austrians, distance and fortune must account for the Russians and Swedes, while he himself undertook a march of two hundred miles to muster 20,000 men and lead them against Soubise.