poetry, had effectively routed the Parisian generals with German musket balls.  It was such a brilliant victory, such a humiliating defeat of the hereditary enemy, that everywhere in Germany there was hearty rejoicing.  Even where the soldiers of a State were fighting against King Frederick, the people at home in city and country rejoiced at the blows he dealt in good old German fashion.  And the longer the war lasted, the more active became the faith in the King’s invincibility, and the higher rose the confidence of the Germans.  For the first time in long, long years they now had a hero of whose military glory they could be proud—­a man who accomplished what seemed more than human.  Innumerable anecdotes about him ran through the country.  Every little touch about his calmness, good humor, kindness to individual soldiers, and the loyalty of his army, traveled hundreds of miles.  How, in danger of death, he played the flute in his tent, how his wounded soldiers sang chorals after the battle, how he took off his hat to a regiment—­he has often been imitated since—­all this was reported on the Neckar and the Rhine, was printed, and listened to with merry laughter and tears of emotion.  It was natural that poets should sing his praise.  Three of them had been in the Prussian army:  Gleim and Lessing, as secretaries of Prussian generals, and Ewald von Kleist, a favorite of the younger literary circles, as an officer, until the bullet struck him at Kunersdorf.  But still more touching for us is the loyal devotion of the Prussian people.  The old provinces, Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and Westphalia, were suffering unspeakably by the war, but the proud joy of having a share in the hero of Europe often lifted even humble men above their own sufferings.  Citizens and peasants took the field as militiamen again and again for years.  When a number of recruits from the province of Cleves and the county of Ravensberg deserted after a lost battle and returned home, the deserters were declared perjurers by their own fellow-countrymen and relatives, were excluded from the villages and driven back to the army.

Foreign opinion was no less enthusiastic.  In the Protestant cantons of Switzerland there was as warm sympathy with the King’s fate as if the descendants of the Ruetli men had never been separated from the German empire.  There were people there who were made ill by vexation when the King’s cause was in a bad way.  It was the same in England.  Every victory of the King aroused wild joy in London.  Houses were illuminated and pictures and laudatory poems offered for sale.  In Parliament Pitt announced with admiration every new deed of the great ally.  Even at Paris, in the theatres and salons, people were rather Prussian than French.  The French derided their own generals and the clique of Madame de Pompadour.  Whoever was on the side of the French arms, so Duclos reports, hardly dared to give expression to his views.  In St. Petersburg, the grand duke Peter and his party