Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/625

 THE SEVEN YEARS* WAR.] FRANCE 589 57-53. l! tie of hbach. ruined them in a battle which cost him almost nothing, and was over in an hour and a half. Hosbach was one of the decisive battles of the world, little as it has been thought of by history. Perhaps it has never happened, before or since, that so hollow and slight a contest has produced such great results. At first it seemed like a mere comedy ; the crowd of French captive regiments, the spoils of the camp, the bewilderment of the captors, the &quot; host of cooks and players, of wigmakers and wigs and hairdressers, the parasols and cases of lavender water,&quot; the absurdly incon gruous lumber with which the young French nobles had prepared for war, contrasted strangely with the gaunt and tattered soldiers of Frederick the Great, grim with war, privations, and forced marches. A shout of merriment rang through Germany, and was re-echoed from France herself. The light-hearted French were far from being depressed or vexed by the defeat ; in the middle of the 18th century France was utterly indifferent as to glory, and the country saw in Dettingen and Rosbach not its own defeat, but the discomfiture of the frivolous noblesse ; to the temper of the times these glaring instances of noble incapacity were rather pleasant than not. The effects of the battle on England were also very marked. It was there seen that Frederick s cause was not hopeless ; and the English Government at once refused to be bound by the convention of Kloster-Zeven, appointing as commander- in-chief, in placo of the duke of Cumberland, the vigorous and able Ferdinand, duke of Brunswick, one of the best soldiers of the age, who won and thoroughly deserved the respect and confidence even of Frederick the Great. Hitherto England had sent over nothing but money and the duke; now Pitt undertook to bring 20,000 English men into the field, and henceforth England holds a prin cipal place in the French side of the Seven Years War. The greatest, however, of the results of the battle of Ros bach was its effect on public and national feeling in north Germany. Hitherto all men of cultivation and thought had turned to France for inspiration ; all men of taste and fashion regarded France as the arbiter of their destinies in dress and manners ; the French language was alone polite in courts and good society; the German tongue was counted rude and barbarous ; Frederick the Great himself, the very champion of Germany against France, of modern free dom of thought against his Catholic opponents, the odd &quot; Protestantium Defensor &quot; of his medals, could never bring himself to speak or write German if it could be avoided. But after Rosbach the older fashion passed away ; French manners, which before had seemed so beautiful, were now seen to be corrupt and frivolous ; the slower Germans saw that their own manners and tongue were wortli something ; from the battle of Rosbach begins that upspringing of a national life in north Germany, which finds immediate expression in the splendid new-born literature of the day, of which the most direct and marked example is the Minna von Barnhelm of Lessing. In this way, then, the battle of Rosbach is an epoch in the national history of Europe. It restored the fortunes of Frederick the Great, and roused a new sense of national patriotism in the North -German peoples. After 1757 the Seven Years War may be considered as Inving two chief theatres, that of Frederick against Austria, and that of England with Hanover and Brunswick against France and the lesser German princes, the &quot; army of the circles.&quot; It is with the latter only that we have to do. In 1758 France made great efforts to reorganize her armies, and fit them for decisive action in Low Germany. A new commander-in-chief, the count of Clermont, a weak offshoot of the great house of Conde, replaced Richelieu ; Soubise, whose favour at court endured to the end of the reign of Louis XV., and who was the only courtier who ventured to escort that monarch s remains to the grave, was placed 1758. at the head of a new army. Under these two generals the court hoped to achieve good results in this campaign. Tho two main armies were directed, the one towards the Rhine, the other towards the Weser; that of the Rhine, under Clermont, had the strong position of Wesel, now in French hands, as a base of operation, and proposed to push on thence into Hanover, joining the other army under Soubise, which was to advance along the Weser through the Hessian country. Before, however, they could draw their scattered forces together, the new general of the allies, Ferdinand of Brunswick, was on them, and iu a campaign which Frederick the Great did not hesitate to compare with that of Turenne in Alsace, he succeeded in dislodging Cler mont from Brunswick. He speedily cleared the line of tho Weser, recovering Minden, and driving the French under Clermont to the westward. They made no stand, and when they reached the Rhine at Diisseldorf, succeeded in crossing the river only with heavy loss of prisoners, for Ferdinand stuck to their skirts like an avenging fury, and at last caught them at Crefeld, a little town between the Rhine and the Meuse, not far from Diisseldorf, where he inflicted on them a defeat which covered Clermont with discredit, and utterly ruined the prospects of the campaign. The Germans had now driven the French out of Hanover, Brunswick, and the Rhine provinces ; Clermont was re called, and withdrew into private life. He and his antago nist Ferdinand were both freemasons, and both had sym pathies with the philosophical and political ferment of the age ; yet the masonic brotherhood had not hindered Ferdinand from punishing him very severely in this cam paign. Marshal Contades, a really good general, was sent to take command of the beaten forces ; and Soubise, having won the battle of Sondershausen, and having taken Cassel, threatened Ferdinand s rear, while a reorganized army under Contades endangered his communications on the Rhine ; they were twice as numerous as the forces he could bring against them, and he was obliged to draw back on Miinster, giving up the whole left bank of the Rhine. There he hindered the junction of the two French armies, and compelled Contades to retreat again beyond the Rhine ; while Soubise withdrew to the Maine, and lay for the winter about Frankfort and Hanau. So ended the German cam paign of 1758, into which the French Government had thrown all its strength, and had once more got in return nothing but discredit, while the other interests of the country had been left to drift to ruin. The English fleets harassed the coasts of France, destroyed ships, burnt build ing-yards, took Cherbourg, and paralysed her whole naval force. Abroad, she did nothing for the vital contests her sons were waging ; the English took Senegal on one hand, and, in spite of the ability of Montcalm, mastered Fort Du Quesne on the Ohio, and Louisburg, which they renamed Pittsburg. At the same time the struggle in India, which Aflairsin had begun to turn against France, was restored by the bril- India. liatit courage of an Irish Jacobite, Lally, whom the French court named governor general. On his arrival he at once effected wonders, recovering the ground the French had lost ; he vaunted thab no Englishman should be left in the Peninsula. But Lally, brave and brilliant as he was, was also harsh and impetuous, arousing ill-will even by his good qualities. Nothing offended his subordinates BO much as his refusal to allow them to pillage at will ; and the bright opening of his career in India was very soon clouded over by disputes and iasubordination among his officers, which foretold a coming failure. The mishaps of 1758 on every side at last awoke the Abbe Bernis from his dreams of security and glory, and that obsequious churchman, the henchman of Pompadour, in his cowardly alarm, instead of trying to repair the evil done,