The war which ensued, known as the Seven Years' War from the time that it lasted, is most remarkable for its dramatic changes of fortune. Frederick began {129} by a victory in Saxony, yet more than once he was so heavily defeated that he almost gave up the fight in despair. It is said that he thought of suicide. England, when the elder Pitt was Prime Minister, gave assistance in form of large subsidies of money rather than large forces of men or arms, and without these subsidies Frederick must have given in. A mixed force of English and Hanoverians did indeed fight under the Duke of Brunswick and drove back the French from their attacks on Hanover in 1758 and again in 1759, but except for this last success everything went heavily against Frederick in the fourth year of the war. In the year following, contingents of Russian and Austrian armies were actually occupying Berlin when he fell upon the main Austrian force at Torgau on the Elbe. The victory that he there gained, over heavy odds, turned the tide of the fighting in his favour when it was at its lowest ebb. Still the struggle continued, with Frederick and his war-weary troops chiefly on the defensive, exhausted. And to that exhaustion and to his encircling foes he would in all likelihood have been compelled to own defeat, had it not been for the death at the beginning of 1762 of one of his chief enemies, the Tsarina of Russia, and the accession of a Tsar who was his friend. Russia, from a foe became an ally and carried Sweden with her. England, however, had become tired of the war and made alliance with France and Spain by the Peace of Paris in 1763, and in the same year the protagonists, or chief fighters, Prussia and Austria, themselves came to terms. Prussia retained Silesia. The final result of the seven years' fighting, with these singular alternations of victories and defeats, was to leave the map of Europe practically unchanged. From that point of view all the bloodshed had been for nothing. From another, a larger and more just point of view, {130} however, we are obliged to realise that perhaps no other one war in the whole of the story has made more difference to its future course. If we consider its effect on the Continent alone, we must realise that it laid the foundation on which the union of the German States into a compact nation was later to be built. It established Prussia in far greater strength than before, because, if she had not added to her possessions, she had at least held her own while her enemies vainly dashed themselves against her. Austria had perforce to acquiesce at length in the loss of Silesia and also in the recognition of this strong State of Northern Germany set up against her own strength in the south. Prussia was to prove the nucleus round and under which the unity of Germany should be built, and it was this war which set firm the foundations of that building.