, entered the castle, where, meeting
with a number of Austrian generals and officers, he civilly saluted them
and asked, "Can one get a lodging here, too?" The Austrians might have
seized the whole party, but were so thunderstruck that they yielded
their swords, the King treating them with extreme civility.

Charles of Lorraine, weary of his unvarying ill-luck, resigned the
command and was nominated stadtholder of the Netherlands, where he
gained great popularity. At Leuthen twenty-one thousand Austrians fell
into Frederick's hands; in Breslau, which shortly afterward capitulated,
he took seventeen thousand more, so that his prisoners exceeded his army
in number.

Fresh storms rose on the horizon and threatened to overwhelm the gallant
King, who, unshaken by the approaching peril, firmly stood his ground.
The Austrians gained an excellent general in the Livonian, Gideon
Laudon, whom Frederick had refused to take into his service on account
of his extreme ugliness, and who now exerted his utmost endeavors to
avenge the insult. The great Russian army, which had until now remained
an idle spectator of the war, also set itself in motion. Frederick
advanced in the spring of 1758 against Laudon, invaded Moravia, and
besieged Olmuetz, but without success; Laudon ceaselessly harassed his
troops and seized a convoy of three hundred wagons. The King was finally
compelled to retreat, the Russians, under Fermor, crossing the Oder,
murdering and burning on their route, converting Kuestrin, which refused
to yield, into a heap of rubbish, and threatening Berlin. They were met
by the enraged King at Zorndorf.

Although numerically but half as strong as the Russians, he succeeded in
beating them, but with the loss of eleven thousand of his men, the
Russians standing like walls. The battle was carried on with the
greatest fury on both sides; no quarter was given, and men were seen,
when mortally wounded, to seize each other with their teeth as they
rolled fighting on the ground. Some of the captured Cossacks were
presented by Frederick to some of his friends with the remark, "See with
what vagabonds I am reduced to fight!" He had scarcely recovered from
this bloody victory when he was again compelled to take the field
against the Austrians, who, under Daun and Laudon, had invaded Lusatia.
He for some time watched them without hazarding an engagement, under an
idea that they were themselves too cautious and timid to venture an
attack.