Battle of Leuthen, 1757: Frederick the Great's masterpiece

Background: Silesia slips away

Silesia was the prize of the whole war. Frederick II of Prussia had seized the rich Habsburg province in 1740, and when the Seven Years' War began, Austria, with France and Russia as allies, meant to take it back. In 1757 Frederick's invasion of Bohemia collapsed after his defeat by Daun at Kolín in June, and enemies closed in from every side.²

Frederick turned first against the French and the army of the Empire in the west, and on 5 November routed them at Rossbach. While he was away, the main Austrian army under Prince Charles of Lorraine overran Silesia. Schweidnitz fell in mid-November, and on 22 November Charles beat the Duke of Bevern's Prussians outside Breslau, the capital. Bevern was taken prisoner, and Breslau surrendered with its stores and guns.³ › Battle of Rossbach, 1757

Frederick force-marched his army east from Saxony. On 28 November he reached Parchwitz on the Oder and waited there for his scattered troops; Hans Joachim von Zieten brought in what was left of Bevern's army. The king went out of his way to lift his soldiers' spirits, and heavy guns hauled from the walls of Glogau, the famous Brummer or growlers, joined his artillery.⁴

On 3 December he gathered his generals and battalion commanders. The speech comes down to us in two versions: BritishBattles.com quotes Prince Ferdinand's report, in which the king says that in his situation he must conquer or die, while Carlyle follows Retzow's, in which he says they must beat the enemy or all perish before his batteries. Both have him telling any officer who did not want to share the danger that he could leave that evening.⁵

Armies and commanders

Prince Charles was the brother-in-law of the Empress Maria Theresa, a general whose military talents Britannica calls questionable. With him rode Leopold von Daun, the victor of Kolín; Count Lucchesi commanded the cavalry of the right, and Count Nádasdy the troops of the left. The army was a Habsburg mix of Austrians, Hungarians, Bohemians and Croats, with Bavarian and Württemberg regiments on the far left.⁶

The numbers are disputed. BritishBattles.com and Hermann Beck's account for EBSCO give about 33,000 Prussians against about 65,000 Austrians, with 167 guns against 210. Britannica gives 43,000 against 72,000. Kronoskaf's order of battle, built on the Prussian General Staff history of 1904, counts 84 Austrian battalions and 144 squadrons, about 70,000 men, against 47 and a half Prussian battalions and 133 squadrons. Every version gives the Austrians close to twice Frederick's strength.⁷

What Frederick had was quality. Most of the foreign soldiers in his ranks had deserted, and what remained was a largely native army, Pomeranians and Brandenburgers at its core. The ground itself was on his side: before the war his army had held its peacetime autumn maneuvers on these fields, and the king and his generals knew them well.⁸

The Austrians gave him his chance. Instead of waiting in the strong entrenched camp outside Breslau, Prince Charles crossed the Schweidnitzer Wasser and moved west to meet the Prussians in the open. BritishBattles.com judges that more cautious commanders such as Daun or Browne would hardly have offered Frederick that opportunity. In the Austrian camp the small Prussian army was mocked as a mere guard parade: the Potsdam guard parade in Carlyle's sources, the Berlin watch parade in BritishBattles.com's.⁹

The battle in phases

Neumarkt and Borne

On 4 December the Prussian vanguard, with the king riding at its head, stormed Neumarkt and captured the Austrian field bakery and its stores. There Frederick learned that Prince Charles had left his fieldworks and was coming toward him.¹⁰

The Prussians marched again at 5 in the morning of 5 December, over frozen fields lightly covered with snow. In the haze before the village of Borne the vanguard ran into an outpost of Saxon light horse and Austrian hussars under General Nostitz, surprised it and drove it back, taking some 550 to 600 prisoners. From a low hill near Borne, the Schönberg, Frederick could now see the whole Austrian army, drawn up in two lines more than four miles long, from Nippern in the north to Leuthen and beyond in the south.¹¹

The feint and the hidden march

The ground at Nippern, on the Austrian right, was marsh and scrub, and Frederick resolved to strike the other end. He sent his advance guard and hussars down the road toward the Austrian right, as if the whole army were deploying there. The feint worked. Lucchesi, convinced the attack would fall on him, begged for help, and the cavalry reserve and much of the cavalry of the left were sent off to his wing, miles from where the blow would land.¹²

Meanwhile the Prussian columns turned south behind a chain of low knolls that hid them from the Austrian lines, marched across the enemy's front and at about noon, past the village of Lobetinz, wheeled east beyond the Austrian left. When no attack came on his right, Prince Charles concluded that the outnumbered Prussians were slipping away. On the Austrian left, Nádasdy saw the columns appear and sent messenger after messenger to his commander at the far end of the line.¹³

The oblique attack

At about 1 p.m. the Prussian infantry went in. The battalions advanced from the right in echelon, each setting off fifty paces after the one before (fifty steps, in the drill Carlyle quotes), so that the full weight of the army fell on one end of the Austrian line. BritishBattles.com calls Leuthen the only battle in which Frederick delivered a complete attack in this oblique order, and Beck calls it the textbook example. The first blow fell on the Württemberg regiments behind an abatis, which broke after a short fight, and the Prussian grenadiers took the Austrian battery of 14 guns on the heights behind Sagschütz.¹⁴

Nádasdy threw his cavalry at Zieten's squadrons on the Prussian right, but Zieten drove it back, and the Prussian horse fell on the retreating Bavarian and Württemberg infantry. Behind the advancing battalions the heavy guns moved forward from one position to the next, a mobility of artillery that Beck counts among the keys to the victory. Austrian divisions sent down from the center arrived piecemeal, ran into the fugitives and were swept back toward Leuthen.¹⁵

Turning point: the churchyard and Driesen's charge

Prince Charles had to swing his whole army around to face south, with Leuthen at the angle of the new line. The village filled with troops, the walled churchyard was turned into a fortress, and the crowded infantry made a target for the Prussian guns on the Butterberg. The Prussian Guards stormed the village, and Möllendorf, then a captain in the Guards, led them into the churchyard. The accounts disagree on how long it held out: about half an hour by BritishBattles.com, about an hour by Kronoskaf and Carlyle.¹⁶

The church paid for it. Prussian artillery fire smashed the tower's wooden top story and spire, brought down the roofs and part of the vaulting, and wrecked the sacristy. The building stood abandoned for years and was not rebuilt until 1783.¹⁷

Then came the last Austrian chance. Late in the afternoon Lucchesi led the cavalry of the right down the line to strike the open left flank of the Prussian infantry. It was not open. General von Driesen, with the cavalry of the Prussian left, was waiting in a hollow with orders to guard that flank. He let Lucchesi ride past and charged him from the side, the Bayreuth Dragoons led the attack, and the Puttkamer Hussars struck the Austrians from behind. The Austrian cavalry was driven into its own infantry, and Lucchesi was killed.¹⁸

The Austrian line collapsed. Its infantry tried to make one more stand north of Leuthen, then broke and fled toward the bridges over the Schweidnitzer Wasser. Darkness, coming early on a December day, saved them from an immediate pursuit, but Frederick gathered a few battalions and rode on to Lissa to seize the bridge there.¹⁹

On the field, as the army stood in the dark, the soldiers began to sing the Lutheran hymn Nun danket alle Gott, Now thank we all our God, and the regiments took it up. It has been remembered ever since as the Leuthen chorale.²⁰

Aftermath

The Prussians lost about 6,000 men. BritishBattles.com gives 6,382; Kronoskaf, following the General Staff, counts 1,175 killed, 5,207 wounded and 85 taken prisoner. The Austrians lost about 22,000, more than three times as many. Britannica counts 12,000 of them as prisoners, BritishBattles.com 11,000, and Kronoskaf has some 21,500 taken on the day and in the days that followed. The captured guns numbered 116 by Carlyle's count and 131 by Kronoskaf's.²¹

The pursuit ran on into the hills toward Bohemia, and Breslau, with thousands of Austrian troops inside, was besieged. It surrendered within the month: Carlyle has the siege ending on the 19th, BritishBattles.com dates the surrender to 21 December. The Austrian army that limped back over the mountains was a fraction of the one that had conquered Silesia that autumn. Only Schweidnitz was left in Austrian hands, to be besieged the following spring.²²

Maria Theresa relieved Prince Charles of his command, and he went back to governing the Austrian Netherlands, where, in Britannica's judgment, his record was far better than on the battlefield.²³

Legacy and memory

Leuthen did not win the war. Britannica judges that the victories of Rossbach and Leuthen only partly restored Frederick's position, which stayed precarious for years, and that his handling of well-disciplined troops had saved Prussia from a situation that looked desperate after Kolín. Five more years of war followed, with Zorndorf, Hochkirch and the disaster of Kunersdorf, before the Treaty of Hubertusburg in February 1763 left Silesia in Prussian hands.²⁴ › Battle of Hochkirch, 1758

Its reputation never faded. Britannica calls it the greatest of Frederick's victories, and Beck one of the most decisive of the century. Carlyle, writing in the 1860s, thought it one of the finest feats of arms in centuries. The hymn sung in the dark took on a life of its own as a Prussian legend, and nineteenth-century painters returned to it again and again.²⁵

Visiting the battlefield today

Leuthen is today Lutynia, a village in Lower Silesia west of Wrocław. Its Gothic church of St Joseph still stands inside the stone wall with round corner bastions that was built around it in 1608 and 1609, the wall the Austrians defended in 1757. The church was rebuilt in its present form between 1867 and 1869.²⁶

By the churchyard wall stand memorial crosses to those who fell, raised in the nineteenth century. Local tradition places the Prussian breach in the wall at this spot. A building that housed a battlefield museum before World War II also survives in the village.²⁷