“It may be safely reckoned,” so the King informed the Berlin public a week later, “that our loss does not exceed 3000 men.... These disasters are sometimes inevitable in the great game of chance which we call war.” The hour of disaster had again proved Frederick superior to the shrewdest blows of Fate. At the moment when the Austrians, creeping through the darkness, began to butcher his men in their tents, he proved himself once more a hero. Disdaining to order a retreat, he extricated his army from its terrible position and formed a new line only half a league to the rear. Daun, who had lost more than 6000 men, entrenched himself on the field, and was soon plying his old trade of circumspectly hanging upon the skirts of the foe. Within ten days of the battle Frederick robbed him of the fruits of victory by marching round him once more. He flung himself between Daun and the besiegers of Neisse, and Silesia was saved. Daun’s counterstroke was, as was almost inevitable, an invasion of Saxony while Frederick’s back was turned. He alarmed Dresden, but was once more frustrated by Prussian speed. Frederick hurried back in time to save both Saxony and its capital. In mid-December he went into winter quarters at Breslau, master of dominions as broad as when he had quitted the city nine months before. [Illustration: PLAN OF HOCHKIRCH, OCTOBER 14, 1758.] In those months he had, however, lost much that cannot be marked upon the map. Faithful officers by hundreds, trained soldiers by thousands, hard-wrung thalers by millions had been sacrificed, and nothing but glory and a respite had been gained. No lands outside Ost-Preussen were as yet conquered by foreign kings, but many had been wasted by foreign armies, and some, at the dictate of urgent need, by their own defenders. These losses weighed upon Frederick, whose task it was to gather men and money for next year. But as a man he had cause for more poignant grief, for Death had knocked hard at the door of his own household. The loss of his heir, Augustus William, once his father’s favourite, now the victim of Frederick’s cruelty, probably afflicted him only because Prince Henry avenged it by refusing to see him except on business. But the death of Wilhelmina, who died on the eve of Hochkirch, was the most crushing calamity of his life. “Great God, my Sister of Baireuth!” scrawled the afflicted King as postscript to a brief despatch in cipher to his brother Henry. The message is more pregnant than much fine writing. “The death of Her Highness the Margravine of Baireuth embarrasses me with regard to His Majesty the King more than all war matters,” wrote the faithful Eichel from Dresden on the day after Frederick received the news, “since I can judge how highly afflicting and crushing it must be to him. Councillor Coeper writes to me yesterday that although every care was taken to prepare His Majesty gradually for sad tidings it has none the less made an