The Prussians were compelled to raise the siege of Prague, and to retreat with precipitation.  Bohemia was speedily evacuated by the Prussian troops.  The queen was now determined to crush Frederic entirely, so that he might never rise again.  His kingdom was to be taken from him, carved up, and apportioned out between Austria, Sweden, Poland and Russia.

The Prussians retreated, in a broken band of but twenty-five thousand men, into the heart of Silesia, to Breslau, its beautiful and strongly fortified capital.  This city, situated upon the Oder, at its junction with the Ohlau, contained a population of nearly eighty thousand.  The fugitive troops sought refuge behind its walls, protected as they were by batteries of the heaviest artillery.  The Austrians, strengthened by the French, with an army now amounting to ninety thousand, followed closely on, and with their siege artillery commenced the cannonade of the city.  An awful scene of carnage ensued, in which the Austrians lost eight thousand men and the Prussians five thousand, when the remnant of the Prussian garrison, retreating by night through a remote gate, left the city in the hands of the Austrians.

It was now mid-winter.  But the iron-nerved Frederic, undismayed by these terrible reverses, collected the scattered fragments of his army, and, finding himself at the head of thirty thousand men, advanced to Breslau in the desperate attempt to regain his capital.  His force was so inconsiderable as to excite the ridicule of the Austrians.  Upon the approach of Frederic, Prince Charles, disdaining to hide behind the ramparts of the city on the defensive, against a foe thus insulting him with inferior numbers, marched to meet the Prussians.  The interview between Prince Charles and Frederic was short but very decisive, lasting only from the hour of dinner to the going down of a December’s sun.  The twilight of the wintry day had not yet come when seven thousand Austrians were lying mangled in death on the blood-stained snow.  Twenty thousand were made prisoners.  All the baggage of the Austrian army, the military chest, one hundred and thirty-four pieces of cannon, and fifty-nine standards fell into the hands of the victors.  For this victory Frederic paid the price of five thousand lives; but life to the poor Prussian soldier must have been a joyless scene, and death must have been a relief.

Frederic now, with triumphant banners, approached the city.  It immediately capitulated, surrendering nearly eighteen thousand soldiers, six hundred and eighty-six officers and thirteen generals as prisoners of war.  In this one storm of battle, protracted through but a few days, Maria Theresa lost fifty thousand men.  Frederic then turned upon the Russians, and drove them out of Silesia.  The same doom awaited the Swedes, and they fled precipitately to winter quarters behind the cannon of Stralsund.  Thus terminated the memorable campaign of 1757, the most memorable of the Seven Years’ War.  The Austrian army was almost annihilated; but the spirit of the strife was not subdued in any breast.