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post-office of the Austrian Netherlands. Ostend and Nieuport, by order
of her imperial majesty, received each of them a French garrison; the
former on the nineteenth of July, and the latter next day, under the
command of M. de la Motte, upon whose arrival the Austrian troops
evacuated those places; though the empress-queen still reserved to
herself, in both of them, the full and free exercise of all her rights
of sovereignty; to which purpose an oath was administered to the French
commandant by her majesty's minister-plenipotentiary for the government
of the Low-Countries. At the same time, their imperial and most
christian majesties notified to the magistracy of Hamburgh, that they
must not admit any English men of war, or transports, into their
port, on pain of having a French garrison imposed on them. The city
of Gueldres, which had been blocked up by the French ever since
the beginning of summer, was forced by famine to capitulate on the
twenty-fourth of August, and the garrison marched out with all the
honours of war, in order to be conducted to Berlin; but so many of them
deserted, that when they passed by Cologn, the whole garrison consisted
only of the commandant and forty-seven men. By the surrender of this
place the whole country lay open to the French and their allies quite
up to Magdeburgh; and the empress-queen immediately received two hundred
thousand crowns from the revenues of Cleves and la Marcke alone. To
return to the affairs more immediately relating to the king of Prussia.
The advanced posts of the prince of Anhault-Dessau at Pirna were
attacked, on the tenth of August, by a body of hussars and other
irregular troops of the Austrians; but the Prussians soon obliged them
to retire, with the loss of several men and two pieces of cannon. On the
nineteenth of the same month, early in the morning, a great number of
Austrian pan-dours surrounded a little town called Gotliebe, in which a
Prussian garrison was quartered, with a design to take it by surprise.
The pandours attacked it on all sides, and in the beginning killed
twenty-three Prussians, and wounded many; but the Prussians having
rallied, repulsed the assailants with great loss. These, however, were
but a sort of preludes to much more decisive actions which happened soon
after. Silesia, which had hitherto been undisturbed this year, began now
to feel the effects of war. Baron Jahnus, an Austrian colonel, entering
that country with only an handful