On 22 November 1757 the main Austrian army under Prince Charles of Lorraine attacked the Prussian army of the Duke of Bevern in its entrenched camp outside Breslau (today Wrocław), behind the marshy Lohe stream. After a day of heavy fighting the Prussians withdrew across the Oder in the night. Bevern was captured soon after, and Breslau surrendered. Frederick the Great, hurrying east from his victory at Rossbach, retook Silesia at Leuthen on 5 December.
Silesia slipping away
While Frederick fought the French and the armies of the Holy Roman Empire in Saxony in the autumn of 1757, he left Bevern to hold Silesia, the province over which Prussia and Austria had been fighting since 1740. Thomas Carlyle, in his history of Frederick, describes Bevern posting his army of some 30,000 on the south side of Breslau at the start of October, with the marshy Lohe in front and the Oder behind. In mid-November the great fortress of Schweidnitz surrendered to the Austrians after a short siege, and Frederick, who had set out from Leipzig on 13 November with about 13,000 men, learned of its fall on the march.1
Across the Lohe
On 22 November Charles of Lorraine attacked with about 60,000 men, according to Carlyle, crossing the Lohe on five bridges and launching five main attacks along a front of several miles. The accounts differ on the timing. Carlyle has the Austrians moving off at three in the morning and the fighting lasting until nine at night, while the key to a French plan of the battle engraved around 1789, now in the Royal Collection, says the cannonade began between nine and ten in the morning and the battle lasted from one o'clock until evening.2
Carlyle writes that the Austrians took the Lohe and the forward Prussian villages in front of the center and right, while on the Prussian left Hans Joachim von Ziethen drove them back across the stream. That night Bevern rejected a counterattack and led his army through Breslau to the far bank of the Oder, leaving, by Carlyle's count, 80 guns and 5,000 killed and wounded. Within days Bevern rode into an Austrian outpost while reconnoitering and was taken prisoner, and the Prussian army marched away toward Glogau. Breslau's commandant, General Lestwitz, surrendered the city without a fight; Carlyle says that of a garrison of over 4,000, mostly Silesian recruits, barely 500 marched out with him.3
The road to Leuthen
Frederick joined Ziethen and the remains of Bevern's army on 2 December. On 5 December, at Leuthen west of Breslau, he attacked an Austrian army nearly twice his size and routed it. According to a study on WarHistory.org, about two-thirds of his troops had been part of Bevern's beaten force; Frederick lost some 6,000 men, inflicted 10,000 killed and wounded and took more than 12,000 prisoners, and Breslau with its Austrian garrison capitulated later in December. The defeat of 22 November had lasted barely two weeks.4
