Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20

[cahn]

Yuletide signups so far:
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D

(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)

Comments

Re: Krockow tidbits

[mildred_of_midgard]

Another Krockow tidbit I forgot, that I ran into almost immediately after in one of the military history bios, is that Heinrich's boyfriend Tauentzien was the son of a general about whom this anecdote is told. He was commanding a besieged city in Silesia in the Seven Years' War, and when the Austrian general ordered him to surrender or else there would be no mercy shown when the city was taken, that "not even a babe in its mother's womb" would be spared. To which Tauentzien père said, "I am not pregnant and neither are my soldiers," and invited the Austrians to come take the city if they could.

Oh, and he's on the obelisk. Oh, Wikipedia tells me that this is the same city, Breslau/Wroclow, that one of the Katte cousins had surrendered during a siege a couple years earlier and been cashiered over, and Tauentzien was supposed to do a better job. And succeeded!

Wikipedia also tells me this: Soon after the siege of Wroclaw, towards the end of 1760, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing entered Tauentzien's service as a secretary. He summarized the impression he received from his boss in the words: "Had the King of Prussia been so unhappy as to be able to gather his army under a tree, General Tauentzien would certainly have stood under this tree." Such an excellent opportunity to prove his efficiency, like the brief siege of Wroclaw, he never found again.