what he cannot do a fourth time: he is too weak henceforth
to think of that.

Prussia has always its King, and his unrivalled talent; but that is
pretty much the only fixed item: Prussia VERSUS France, Austria, Russia,
Sweden and the German Reich, what is it as a field of supplies for war!
Except its King, these are failing, year by year; and at a rate fatally
SWIFT in comparison. Friedrich cannot now do Leuthens, Rossbachs;
far-shining feats of victory, which astonish all the world. His fine
Prussian veterans have mostly perished; and have been replaced by new
levies and recruits; who are inferior both in discipline and native
quality;--though they have still, people say, a noteworthy taste of the
old Prussian sort in them; and do, in fact, fight well to the last. But
"it is observable," says Retzow somewhere, and indeed it follows from
the nature of the case, "that while the Prussian Army presents always
its best kind of soldiers at the beginning of a war, Austria, such are
its resources in population, always improves in that particular, and its
best troops appear in the last campaigns." In a word, Friedrich stands
on the defensive henceforth; disputing his ground inch by inch: and is
reduced, more and more, to battle obscurely with a hydra-coil of enemies
and impediments; and to do heroisms which make no noise in the Gazettes.
And, alas, which cannot figure in History either,--what is more a sorrow
to me here!

Friedrich, say all judges of soldiership and human character who have
studied Friedrich sufficiently, "is greater than ever," in these four
Years now coming. [Berenhorst, in _Kriegskunst;_ Retzow; &c.] And
this, I have found more and more to be a true thing; verifiable and
demonstrable in time and place,--though, unluckily for us, hardly in
this time or this place at all! A thing which cannot, by any method,
be made manifest to the general reader; who delights in shining
summary feats, and is impatient of tedious preliminaries and
investigations,--especially of MAPS, which are the indispensablest
requisite of all. A thing, in short, that belongs peculiarly to
soldier-students; who can undergo the dull preliminaries, most dull but
most inexorably needed; and can follow out, with watchful intelligence,
and with a patience not to be wearied, the multifarious topographies,
details of movements and manoeuvrings, year after year, on such a
Theatre of War. What is to be done with it here! If we could, by
significa