the man were to disappear, that he might become the self-sacrificing prince of his people, the foremost servant of his State, and the hero of a nation.  No lust of conquest made him take the field this time; it had long been plain to him that he was fighting for his own life and that of his State.  But his determination had grown only the stronger.  Like the stormwind he purposed to dash into the clouds which were collecting from all sides about his head, and to break up the thunderbolts through the energy of an irresistible attack, before they were discharged.  He had never been conquered up to this time.  His enemies had been beaten every time he had fallen upon them with his terrible instrument—­the army.  Herein lay his only hope.  If his well-tried power did not fail him now, he might save his State.

But in the very first conflict with his old enemy, the Austrians, he saw that they, too, had learned from him and were changed.  He exerted his strength to the utmost, and at Kollin it failed him.  The 18th of June, 1757, is the most momentous day in Frederick’s life.  There happened on that day what twice more in this war snatched victory from him—­the general had underestimated his enemy and had expected the impossible from his own brave army.  After a short period of stupefaction Frederick arose with new strength.  Instead of an aggressive war, he had been forced to wage a desperate war of defense.  His foes attacked his little country from all sides.  He entered upon a death struggle with every great power of the Continent, master of only four million men and a defeated army.  Now his talent as general showed itself as he escaped the enemy after defeats and again attacked in the most unexpected quarters and beat them, faced first one army and then another, unsurpassed in his dispositions, inexhaustible in expedients, unequaled as leader of troops in battle.  So he stood, one against five—­Austrians, Russians, French, any one of whom was his superior in strength, and at the same time against the Swedes and the Imperial troops.  For five years he struggled thus against armies far larger than his own—­every spring in danger of being crushed merely by numbers, every autumn free again.  A loud cry of admiration and sympathy ran through Europe; and among those who gave the loudest praise, although reluctantly, were his most bitter enemies.  Now, in these years of changing fortune, when the King himself experienced such bitter vicissitudes of the fortune of war, his generalship was the astonishment of all the armies of Europe.  How, always the more rapid and skilful, he managed to establish his lines against his opponents; how so often he outflanked in an oblique position the weakest wing of the enemy, forced it back, and put it to rout; how his cavalry, which, newly organized, had become the strongest in the world, dashed in fury upon the foe, broke their ranks, scattered their battalions:  all this was celebrated everywhere as a new advance