Fore-arm (Austrian right wing, if still struggling and wriggling about Sterbohol) is taken in flank; shoulder-arm, or main line, the like; we have them both in flank; with their own batteries to scour them to destruction here:--the Austrian Line, throughout, is become a ruin. Has to hurl itself rapidly to rightwards, to rearwards, says Tempelhof, behind what redoubts and strong points it may have in those parts; and then, by sure stages (Tempelhof guesses three, or perhaps four), as one redoubt after another is torn from the loose grasp of it, and the stand made becomes ever weaker, and the confusion worse,--to roll pell-mell into Prag, and hastily close the door behind it. The Prussians, Sterbohol people, Mannstein-Henri people, left wing and right, are quite across the Zisca Back, on by Nussel (Prince Earl's head-quarter that was), and at the Moldau Brink again, when the thing ends. Ziethen's Hussars have been at Nussel, very busy plundering there, ever since that final charge and chase from Sterbohol. Plundering; and, I am ashamed to say, mostly drunk: "Your Majesty, I cannot rank a hundred sober,"answered Ziethen (doubtless with a kind of blush), when the King applied for them. The King himself has got to Branik, farther up stream. Part of the Austrian foot fled, leftwards, southwards, as their right wing of horse had all done, up the Moldau. About 16,000Austrians are distractedly on flight that way. Towards, the Sazawa Country; to unite with Daun, as the now advisable thing.
Near 40,000 of them are getting crammed into Prag; in spite of Prince Karl, now recovered of his cramp, and risen to the frantic pitch; who vainly struggles at the Gate against such inrush, and had even got through the Gate, conjuring and commauding, but was himself swum in again by those panic torrents of ebb-tide.
Rallying within, he again attempted, twice over, at two different points, to get out, and up the Moldau, with his broken people;but the Prussians, Nussel-Branik way, were awake to him:
"No retreat up the Moldau for you, Austrian gentlemen!" They tried by another Gate, on the other side of the River; but Keith was awake too: "In again, ye Austrian gentlemen! Closed gates here too.
What else?" Browne, from his bed of pain (death-bed, as it proved), was for a much more determined outrush: "In the dead of night, rank, deliberately adjust yourselves; storm out, one and all, and cut your way, night favoring!" That was Browne's last counsel;but that also was not taken. A really noble Browne, say all judges;died here in about six weeks,--and got away from Kriegs-Hofraths and Prince Karls, and the stupidity of neighbors, and the other ills that flesh is heir to, altogether.
At Branik the victorious King had one great disappointment:
Prince Moritz of Dessau, who should have been here long hours ago, with Keith's right wing, a fresh 15,000, to fall upon the enemy's rear;--no Moritz visible; not even now, when the business is to chase! "How is this?" "Ill luck, your Majesty!" Moritz's Pontoon Bridge would not reach across, when he tried it. That is certain:
"just three poor pontoons wanting," Rumor says:--three or more;spoiled, I am told, in some narrow road, some short-cut which Moritz had commanded for them: and now they are not; and it is as if three hundred had been spoiled. Moritz, would he die for it, cannot get his Bridge to reach: his fresh 15,000 stand futile there; not even Seidlitz with his light horse could really swim across, though he tried hard, and is fabled to have done so.
Beware of short-cuts, my Prince: your Father that is gone, what would he say of you here! It was the worst mistake Prince Moritz ever made. The Austrian Army might have been annihilated, say judges (of a sanguine temper), had Moritz been ready, at his hour, to fall on from rearward;--and where had their retreat been? As it is, the Austrian Army is not annihilated; only bottled into Prag, and will need sieging. The brightest triumph has a bar of black in it, and might always have been brighter. Here is a flying Note, which I will subjoin:--Friedrich's dispositions for the Battle, this day, are allowed to have been masterly; but there was one signal fault, thinks Retzow:
That he did not, as Schwerin counselled, wait till the morrow.
Fault which brought many in the train of it; that of his "tired soldiers," says Retzow, being only a first item, and small in comparison. "Had he waited till the morrow, those fish-ponds of Sterbohol, examined in the interim, need not have been mistaken for green meadows; Prince Moritz, with his 15,000, would have been a fact, instead of a false hope; the King might have done his marching down upon Sterbohol in the night-time, and been ready for the Austrians, flank, or even rear, at daybreak: the King might"--In reality, this fault seems to have been considerable; to have made the victory far more costly to him, and far less complete.
No doubt he had his reasons for making haste: Daun, advancing Prag-ward with 30,000, was within three marches of him; General Beck, Daun's vanguard, with a 10,000 of irregulars, did a kind of feat at Brandeis, on the Prussian post there (our Saxons deserting to him, in the heat of action), this very day, May 6th; and might, if lucky, have taken part at Ziscaberg next day. And besides these solid reasons, there was perhaps another. Retzow, who is secretly of the Opposition-party, and well worth hearing, knows personally a curious thing. He says:--"Being then [in March or April, weeks before we left Saxony]