tion, while I
not only accepted it upon their word, but have also, in conformity with
their instructions, negotiated at Versailles, and at Vienna. After all
these steps, they would have me contradict myself, break my word, and
entirely ruin my estate, as well as my honour. Did you ever know
your brother guilty of such things? True it is, I have, as you say,
sacrificed my all; or rather, I have been sacrificed. The only thing
left me is my honour; and in the unhappy contrast of our situations, I
lament both you and myself, that it should be from you, my dear brother,
I should receive the cruel advice to give up my honour. I cannot listen
to it: I cannot recede from my promise. My troops, therefore, must
return home, agreeably to what the duke of Cumberland and the Hanoverian
ministry stipulated with regard to me in the strongest manner. I am
afraid that the true circumstances of things are concealed from you. Not
to detain your express too long, I shall send you, by the post, copies
of all I have written to the Hanoverian ministry. It will grieve your
honest heart to read it. I am, with a heart almost broken, yet full of
tenderness for you, your, &c. "Blanckenbourg, Nov. 27,1757."]

[Footnote 467: Note 3 P, p. 467. A detail of the cruelties committed by
those barbarians cannot be read without horror. They not only burned
a great number of villages, but they ravished, rifled, murdered, and
mutilated the inhabitants, without distinction of age or sex, without
any other provocation or incitement than brutal lust and wantonness of
barbarity. They even violated the sepulchres of the dead, which have
been held sacred among the most savage nations. At Camin and Breckholtz
they forced open the graves and sepulchral vaults, and stripped the
bodies of generals Schlaberndorf and Ruitz, which had been deposited
there. But the collected force of their vengeance was discharged against
Custrin, the capital of the New Marche of Brandenburgh, situated at
the conflux of the Warta and the Oder, about fifteen English miles from
Franckfort. The particulars of the disaster that befel this city, are
particularly related in the following extracts from a letter written by
an inhabitant and eye-witness.

"On the thirteenth of August, about three o'clock in the afternoon, a
sudden report was spread that a body of Russian hussars and cossacks
appeared in sight of the little suburb. All the people were immediately
in motion, and the whole city wa