TWO:At three oclock in the morning of the 20th of August, and after the march of a few hours, the little army of Frederick commenced constructing a fortified camp near the poor little village of Bunzelwitz, about half way between the Silesian fortresses of Schweidnitz and Striegau. Spades were provided. Fifty thousand men were instantly employed, according to a well-matured plan, in digging and trenching. The extraordinary energies of Frederick seemed to nerve every arm. Here there was speedily reared the camp of Bunzelwitz, which has attained world-wide renown.
TWO:CHAPTER XXIX. THE THIRD CAMPAIGN OF THE SEVEN YEARS WAR. It will have been easy for you to conceive my grief when you reflect upon the loss I have had. There are some misfortunes which are reparable by constancy and courage, but there are others against which all the firmness with which one can arm ones self, and all the reasonings of philosophers, are only vain and useless attempts at consolation.121 Of the latter kind is the one with which my unhappy fate overwhelms me, at a moment the most embarrassing and the most anxious of my whole life. I have not been so sick as you have heard. My only complaints are colics, sometimes hemorrhoidal, and sometimes nephritic.
TWO:Voltaire, in his Memoirs, says that he drew up the manifesto for Frederick upon this occasion. The pretext, he writes, for this fine expedition was certain rights which his majesty pretended to have over a part of the suburbs. It was to me he committed the task of drawing up the manifesto, which I performed as well as the nature of the case would let me, never suspecting that a king, with whom I supped, and who called me his friend, could possibly be in the wrong. The affair was soon brought to a conclusion by the payment of a million of livres, which he exacted in good hard ducats, and which served to defray the expenses of his tour to Strasbourg, concerning which he complained so loudly in his poetic prose epistle.
TWO:In a word, I see all black, as if I were at the bottom of a tomb. Have some compassion on the situation I am in. Conceive that I disguise nothing from you, and yet that I do not detail to you all my embarrassments, my apprehensions, and troubles. Adieu, my dear marquis. Write to me sometimes. Do not forget a poor devil who curses ten times a day his fatal existence, and could wish he already were in those silent countries from which nobody returns with news.
