field of battle… In a letter from the king to his brother, Prince Henry, he says he had taken eight thousand prisoners, many standards, colours, and cannon that he had attacked with his right, et qu'il avait refusé la gauche, which had succeeded perfectly well, parce qu'il avait tourné l'ennemi."
The envoy, in his subsequent letters, collects intelligence from all quarters, and sends it in fragments.
"We have yet no relation of the victory of victories, but there are letters from the King of Prussia which say that he expected soon to be master of Breslau, and of the garrison and wounded in that town, amounting to ten thousand men. He computes the loss of the Austrians at thirty thousand… What I write is almost incredible; but two miracles, in the space of one month, two victories gained by the same handful of men – for the Prussian army, in the first action of the 5th of November, did not exceed eighteen thousand, and in the last might be from thirty to thirty-five thousand – have, I hope, restored affairs to a situation I never expected to see them in."
The merit of this diligence may be estimated from the difficulty of correspondence in those days of convulsion. In his first despatch on this subject, so important to the English cabinet, he says, —
"In case this letter should be stopped, I have prevailed with a Jew to write to his correspondent at the Hague a letter in Hebrew, which contains further particulars, &c., which he is directed forthwith to communicate to Colonel Yorke, (the British Resident with the States of Holland.)"
We then have a curious specimen of the spirit of diplomacy.
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