Page:The Annual Register 1758.djvu/31

 About 40,000 of the Austrian army took refuge in Prague. The rest fled different ways. The King of Prussia lost no time to invest the place, and to cut off all succours. If on one hand such an immense garrison made an attack unadviseable, on the other that formidable number itself feemed to make the reduction of the place by famine the more certain. The King of Prussia not relying folely on this, prepared to bombard the town. On the 29th of May, at midnight, after a most dreadful form of rain and thunder, as if it were to display how much more ruinous the malice of men may be, than the greatest terrors of nature, on the signal of a rocket, four batteries, which discharged every twenty-four hours two hundred and eighty-eight bombs, besides a vast multitude of red hot balls, began to pour destruction on that unfortunate city, which was soon in flames in every part. The garrison made a vigorous defence, and one well conducted and desperate sally: but they were repulsed with great loss. The principal magistrates, burghers, and clergy, feeing their city on the point of being reduced to an heap of rubbish, made the most moving supplications to the commander to listen to terms. The commander was deaf to their prayers. Twelve thousand of the most useless mouths were driven out of the city. The Prussians forced them in again. The affairs of the Empress seemed verging to inevitable destruction; a whole army was upon the point of surrendering prisoners of war; the capital of Bohemia on the point of being taken, and with it all the rest of that flourishing kingdom. The sanguine friends of the King of Prussia began to compute the distance to Vienna.

In this desperate situation of affairs, Leopold Count Daun entered on the stage, and began to turn the fortune of the war. This general never had commanded in chief before; but he was formed, by a long course of experience in various parts of Europe, under the greatest generals, and in the most illustrious scenes of action. Though of a very noble family, he had without the least assistance from court favour, risen insensibly by the slow gradation of mere merit, with much esteem and without any noise. This general arrived within a few miles of Prague, the day after the great battle. He collected the fugitive parties of the Austrian army, and retired to a post of great strength, from whence he fed the troops in Prague with hopes of relief. But as no man better understood the superiority of the Prussian troops, and as he was sensible of the impression which the late defeat had left upon his men, he carefully avoided to precipitate matters by an hasty action. He knew that the situation he had chosen would embarrass the Prussians; that a large party of their army must be always employed to watch him; that this would weaken their efforts against the great body shut up in Prague, whilst his own forces gained time to recover their spirits, and to increase in strength by the daily succours, which his court exerted all their powers to send him: with these ideas he waited in his intrenched camp at Colin, to act as events should direct.

The King of Prussia was not less fenfible than Count Daun of the effect of this conduct. He determined at all adventures to dislodge him from the post he held; but whether it was that the king feared to weaken his army, which had actually an