The blow was more crushing than Kunersdorf, for the whisper now sped through the world that the Prussians were turning cowards. Eichel confessed that his heart was so full of bitterness and chagrin that it was quite out of his power that day to write anything in cipher. The King, who had boasted to Voltaire that he would despatch his next letter from Dresden, complained bitterly that ill-luck pursued him all his days. He strove to atone for his over-confidence by exertion, and for many weeks kept the field, defying the stern winter. He thereby averted an Austrian reconquest of Saxony, but the gates of Dresden never opened to him again. The Prussian cause and the Prussian King, thought the world, were failing together. “If you saw me, you would scarcely know me again,” Frederick wrote to Voltaire. “I am old, broken, grayheaded, wrinkled. I am losing my teeth and my gaiety.” Yet this dejected veteran alone kept together the Prussian army. That army was the sole bulwark of the State. If Frederick had in truth lost health, skill, and fortune, what hope was left to Prussia? [Illustration] [Illustration] CHAPTER IX THE END OF THE SEVEN YEARS’ WAR (1760–1763) Between the spring of 1760, when the weary Frederick braced himself to grapple anew with a task which four campaigns seemed only to have increased, and the moment when a sudden stroke of fortune was to give him rest, there intervenes a gap of time as great as that which separates his first plunge into the war from his overthrow at Kunersdorf. If we are compelled to be content with a swift review of these final phases of the struggle, we must by no means lose from sight the tenacity and adroitness of the hero upon whom every campaign laid a heavier burden than the last, and to whom every year seemed endless. After Kunersdorf and Maxen, we, who know that Frederick and Prussia did not perish, may be impatient to have done with their long agony. But Frederick himself enjoyed no such comfortable prescience. Hopes he had indeed in plenty. Denmark might join him, the Tartars might rise, the Turks, he was constantly assured, were on the very verge of attacking Austria. Now the French, now the Russians, he believed, were about to desert the coalition against him. The event testified to his courage rather than to his insight. Time brought only fresh disappointments and prospects ever more black, but the King neither flinched nor paused. Under the bludgeonings of chance his head was bloody but unbowed. “It was not the army,” said Napoleon, “that defended Prussia, seven years through, against the three greatest Powers of Europe, it was Frederick the Great.”