The King is among them; has come in hot haste, conjuring and commanding: poor Schulenburg addresses his own regiment, "Oh, shame, shame! shall it be told, then?" rallies his own regiment, and some others; charges fiercely in with them again; gets a sabre-slash across the face,--does not mind the sabre-slash, small bandaging will do;--gets a bullet through the head (or through the heart, it is not said which); [<italic> Helden-Geschichte, <end italic> i. 899.] and falls down dead; his regiment going to the winds again, and HIS care of it and of other things concluding in this honorable manner. Nothing can rally that right wing; or the more you rally, the worse it fares: they are clearly no match for Romer, these Prussian Horse. They fly along the front of their own First Line of Infantry, they fly between the two Lines; Romer chasing,--till the fire of the Infantry (intolerable to our enemies, and hitting some even of our fugitive friends) repels him.
For the notable point in all this was the conduct of the Infantry;and how it stood in these wild vortexes of ruin; impregnable, immovable, as if every man of it were stone; and steadily poured out deluges of fire,--"five Prussian shots for two Austrian:"--such is perfect discipline against imperfect; and the iron ramrod against the wooden.
The intolerable fire repels Romer, when he trenches on the Infantry: however, he captures nine of the Prussian sixty guns;has scattered their Horse to the winds; and charges again and again, hoping to break the Infantry too,--till a bullet kills him, the gallant Romer; and some other has to charge and try. It was thought, had Goldlein with his Austrian Infantry advanced to support Romer at this juncture, the Battle had been gained.
Five times, before Romer fell and after, the Austrians charged here; tried the Second Line too; tried once to take Prince Leopold in rear there. But Prince Leopold faced round, gave intolerable fire; on one face as on the other, he, or the Prussian Infantry anywhere, is not to be broken. "Prince Friedrich", one of the Margraves of Schwedt, King's Cousin, whom we did not know before, fell in these wild rallyings and wrestlings; "by a cannon-ball, at the King's hand," not said otherwise where. He had come as Volunteer, few weeks ago, out of Holland, where he was a rising General: he has met his fate here,--and Margraf Karl, his Brother, who also gets wounded, will be a mournful man to-night.
The Prussian Horse, this right wing of it, is a ruined body;boiling in wild disorder, flooding rapidly away to rearward,--which is the safest direction to retreat upon. They "sweep away the King's person with them," say some cautious people; others say, what is the fact, that Schwerin entreated, and as it were commanded, the King to go; the Battle being, to all appearance, irretrievable. Go he did, with small escort, and on a long ride,--to Oppeln, a Prussian post, thirty-five miles rearward, where there is a Bridge over the Oder and a safe country beyond. So much is indubitable; and that he despatched an Aide-de-camp to gallop into Brandenburg, and tell the Old Dessauer, "Bestir yourself! Here all seems lost!"-- and vanished from the Field, doubtless in very desperate humor. Upon which the extraneous world has babbled a good deal, "Cowardice! Wanted courage: Haha!" in its usual foolish way;not worth answer from him or from us. Friedrich's demeanor, in that disaster of his right wing, was furious despair rather; and neither Schulenburg nor Margraf Friedrich, nor any of the captains, killed or left living, was supposed to have sinned by "cowardice" in a visible degree!--Indisputable it is, though there is deep mystery upon it, the King vanishes from Mollwitz Field at this point for sixteen hours, into the regions of Myth, "into Fairyland," as would once have been said; but reappears unharmed in to-morrow's daylight: at which time, not sooner, readers shall hear what little is to be said of this obscure and much-disfigured small affair. For the present we hasten back to Mollwitz,--where the murderous thunder rages unabated all this while; the very noise of it alarming mankind for thirty miles round. At Breslau, which is thirty good miles off, horrible dull grumble was heard from the southern quarter ("still better, if you put a staff in the ground, and set your ear to it");and from the steeple-tops, there was dim cloudland of powder-smoke discernible in the horizon there. "At Liegnitz," which is twice the distance, "the earth sensibly shook," [<italic> Helden-Geschichte;<end italic> and Jordan's Letter, infra.]--at least the air did, and the nerves of men.
"Had Goldlein but advanced with his Foot, in support of gallant Romer!" say the Austrian Books. But Goldlein did not advance;nor is it certain he would have found advantage in so doing:
Goldlein, where he stands, has difficulty enough to hold his own.