ski reads; and I think still other Royal Autographs, sent
as Postscripts to that. From the Konigstein they duly fire off the two
Cannon-shot, as signal that we are coming; signal which Browne, just in
the act of departing, never heard, owing to the piping of the winds and
rattling of the rain. "Advance, my heroes!" counsel they: "You cannot
drag your ammunitions, say you; your poor couple of big guns? Here are
his Majesty's own royal horses for that service!"--and, in effect, the
royal stud is heroically flung open in this pressure; and a splashing
column of sleek quadrupeds, "150 royal draught-horses, early in the
forenoon," [Gotzinger, p. 156.] swim across to Ebenheit accordingly, if
that could encourage. And, "about noon, there is strong cannonading from
the Konigstein, as signal to Browne," who is off. Polish Majesty looking
with his spy-glass in an astonished manner. In Vain! Rutowski and his
Council of War--sitting wet in a hut of Ebenheit, with 14,000 starved
men outside, who have stood seventy-two hours of rain, for one item--see
nothing for it but "surrender on such terms as we can get."

"In fact," independently of weather and circumstances, "the Enterprise,"
says Friedrich, "was radically impossible; nobody that had known the
ground could have judged it other." Rutowski had not known it, then?
Browne never pretended to know it. Rutowski was not candid with the
conditions; the conditions never known nor candidly looked at; and
THEY are now replying to him with candor enough. From the first his
Enterprise was a final flicker of false hope; going out, as here, by
spasm, in the rigors of impossibility and flat despair.

That column of royal horses sent splashing across the River,--that was
the utmost of self-sacrifice which I find recorded of his Polish Majesty
in this matter. He was very obstinate; his Bruhl and he were. But his
conduct was not very heroic. That royal Autograph, "General Rutowski,
and ye true Saxons, attack these Prussian lines, then; sell your lives
like men" (not like Bruhl and me), must have fallen cold on the heart,
after seventy-two hours of rain! Rutowski's wet Council of War, in the
hut at Ebenheit, rain still pouring, answers unanimously, "That it were
a leading of men to the butchery;" that there is nothing for it but
surrender. Bruhl and Majesty can only answer: "Well-a-day; it must be
so, then!"--

Winterfeld, Prussian Commander hereabouts, grants Armistice, grants
liberal "wagon-lo