High blazed the flames, consuming greedily these carriages which had once borne kings and princes.  The screams and fright of the inmates of the nearest houses, and the crackling of the window-glass broken by the heat were drowned by the joyous shouts of the Austrians who danced round the fire with wild delight, and accompanied the roaring of the flames with insulting and licentious songs.  And the fire seemed only to awaken their inventive powers, and excite them to fresh deeds of vandalism.  After the fire had burnt out, and only a heap of ashes told of what were once magnificent royal vehicles, the Austrians rushed back again into the building with terrific outcry, to the apartments of the royal master of the horse, Schwerin, in order to build a new bonfire with his furniture, and fill their pockets with his gold and silver ware.

In the royal stalls a great uproar arose, as they fought with each other for the horses that were there.  The strongest leaped on them and rode off furiously, to carry into other neighborhoods the terror and dismay which marked the track of the Austrians through Berlin.  Even the hospitals were not safe from their brutal rage.  They tore the sick from their beds, drove them with scoffs and insults into the streets, cut up their beds, and covered them over with the feathers.  And all this was committed not by wild barbarians, but by the regular troops of a civilized state, by Austrians, who were spurred on, by their hatred of the Prussians, to deeds of rude cruelty and beastly barbarity.  And this unlucky national hatred, which possessed the Austrian and made him forgetful of all humanity, was communicated, like an infectious plague, to the Saxons, and transformed these warriors, who were celebrated for being, next to the Prussians, the most orderly and best disciplined, into rude Jack Ketches and iconoclastic Vandals.

In the royal pleasure-palace at Charlottenburg, where Bruehl’s (Saxon) dragoons had taken up their quarters by force, they set up a new species of dragoonade, which was directed not so much against the living as against marble statues and the sacred treasures of art.  All the articles of splendor, brilliancy, and luxury which had been heaped up here, every thing which the royal love of the fine arts had collected of what was beautiful and rare, was sacrificed to their raging love of destruction.  Gilded furniture, Venetian mirrors, large porcelain vases from Japan, were smashed to pieces.  The silk tapestry was torn from the walls in shreds, the doors inlaid with beautiful wood-mosaic were broken up with clubs, the most masterly and costly paintings were cut in ribbons with knives.  To be sure, it sometimes happened that the officers rescued from the soldiers some costly vase, some rare treasure or painting, and saved it from destruction, but this was not to save the King of Prussia’s property, but to appropriate it to themselves, and carry it home with them.