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Extended note: The Seven Years' War

The interval between the Silesian wars and the Seven Years' War was also a time of intense and highly complicated diplomatic manoeuvres affecting most of Europe and, where France and England were concerned, territories in Asia and America also. Some historians have also traced a change in the nature of warfare itself. The Silesian wars were not fought for religious ideology or political revolution, but to gain territory and resources, so that wholesale destruction and massacre were avoided, there was no point in ruining a land which Frederick hoped to make his own. The Seven Years' War, however, was essentially a struggle for Prussia's survival.

Maria Theresa still bitterly resented the loss of Silesia, and the other European powers now regarded Prussia as a threat to international stability. From 1748 onwards Maria Theresa's chief diplomatic adviser, von Kaunitz, began to lay the foundations of a coalition of powers, including France (up till then regarded as the main threat to stability, and Austria's hereditary enemy) to crush and dismember Prussia and ensure the future of the Empire. This coalition was achieved only a few weeks after Bräker's arrival in Berlin, when on 1st May 1756 France and Austria signed the Treaty of Versailles. Later, support was gained from Russia, because of the threat of a possible alliance between Prussia and Sweden, and from many of the southern and western German states. Kaunitz also succeeded in manipulating events so that Frederick made the first hostile move.

It was logical enough that this move should be directed against Saxony. Its border was uncomfortably close to Berlin, and its ruler had dynastic ties with France and Austria. Frederick had met with little resistance there during the Silesian campaigns, and may have expected the Saxon population to accept him as the Silesians had done.

The army which crossed the Saxon frontier on 29th August 1756 numbered about 70,000 men, another 80,000 having been deployed to guard Silesia and Prussia's eastern borders. The Saxon army was taken completely by surprise: Frederick took the capital, Dresden, on 10th September, the Saxons fell back on Pirna, an almost inaccessible plateau on the river Elbe, and were starved into surrender. On 28th September Frederick learnt that the Austrians under Field-Marshal Browne were, rather late in the day, coming to the rescue of their Saxon allies. On the 1st of October the Prussians beat off the Austrians below the mountain village of Lobositz, near Leitmeritz. This battle is often described in history books as a mere skirmish, or as no more than a curtain-raiser to the real war. For Bräker it was probably the most eventful day of his entire life, and it afforded him the chance, as we shall discover, to make an inconspicuous exit from the stage of history. What of his comrades who were not so lucky?

Augustus the Strong, ruler of Saxony, had tried to buy Frederick off with a promise of neutrality in the coming conflict, but Frederick was not satisfied with this and on 17th October the Saxons had to capitulate completely. (This shows that Bräker must have been mistaken in referring to the Saxons captured at Pirna as the whole of the Saxon army, since by 17th October he was far away on his long tramp back to the Toggenburg.) Frederick then took the disastrous step of enrolling by force in his own army all the rank and file of the Saxons, about 18,000 men. It appears that this was done against advice from his own officers, and was contrary to the normal practice of the time. He would have done better at least to disperse them through the whole army so that reliable native Prussians could keep an eye on them. They were not required, however, to take the field against their former allies, but were sent to garrison towns in Prussia. Before long nearly two-thirds of them had deserted, pausing only to shoot their Prussian officers, by whole battalions at a time, and many were then able to join up again with the Austrians.

The invasion of Saxony made it easy for Austria to call its allies into the war. In the next campaigning season, however, Frederick again decided to get his blow in first by invading Bohemia. Some of his troops passed again through Lobositz; eyewitnesses state that the stench of the still unburied dead from the battle six months earlier was overwhelming (Duffy, p 169). Also according to Duffy (p 219), the Itzenblitz regiment had lost about a third of its men. On 5th April

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