On 3 November 1760 Frederick the Great of Prussia attacked the Austrian army of Field Marshal Leopold von Daun in its fortified camp on the heights west of Torgau, on the Elbe in Saxony. His own attack from the north ran into the heaviest artillery fire its veterans had ever known, a spent bullet struck him senseless in the saddle, and by dusk he believed the battle lost and rode back to a village church to spend the night. Then General Hans Joachim von Zieten's corps found an unguarded causeway and stormed the Süptitz heights from the south, and in the night the Austrians retreated across the Elbe. Prussia won, at the cost of about 16,700 men by the most cited count.
A camp too strong to attack head on
The Seven Years' War grew out of Austria's wish to win back Silesia, which Frederick had seized in the 1740s. Allied with Britain, Prussia faced Austria, France, Russia and Saxony. At the end of October 1760 Daun withdrew into a strong camp on the ridge west of Torgau, a position Prussian troops had held themselves in 1759. Frederick could not leave the Austrians sitting on the food, money and recruits of Saxony, and looked for a decisive battle.1
The south face of the ridge was steep and covered in vineyards, a marshy ditch called the Rohrgraben ran along its foot, and ponds closed the ground toward the town, so, in the Seven Years War Project's judgment, a frontal attack promised to be as costly as the disaster at Kunersdorf the year before. Frederick split his army. He led the larger part on a wide march through the Dommitzsch forest, nearly 18 km by the Seven Years War Project's reckoning and fourteen miles by Carlyle's, to fall on the Austrians from the north, while Zieten was to attack the heights from the south. British Battles and the Seven Years War Project both give Daun 275 guns, but the sizes of the armies differ: British Battles gives about 48,500 Prussians against 52,000 Austrians and Saxons, while the Seven Years War Project counts 44,000 Prussians in the camp before the march against about 55,000 Austrians.2
Ten grenadier battalions against 275 guns
The march went wrong. A local guide sent the king's column down the wrong track, toward Elsnig instead of Neiden, the columns became tangled, and the cavalry fell behind on the narrow forest roads. Warned by skirmishes in the woods, Daun turned his army to face in every direction behind massed guns. Around 2 p.m., hearing cannon fire from the south and believing that Zieten was already heavily engaged, the king attacked at once with ten battalions of grenadiers, the best of his infantry, before the rest of his army had come up.3
The Austrian artillery broke the attack before the grenadiers came within musket range. In the din, by the Seven Years War Project's account, the king cried to his aides in French: “What a terrible cannonade! Have you ever heard the like?” Carlyle, drawing on the Prussian historians Tempelhof and Archenholz, gives his words as “What an infernal fire! Did you ever hear such a cannonade before? I never”. The Seven Years War Project says almost half of the grenadiers were left dead or wounded, and British Battles says two thirds, within minutes. Further infantry attacks and cavalry charges followed and were thrown back, and by about 5 p.m. the Prussians were falling back everywhere and the king gave the battle up for lost.4
The king struck down
In this phase Frederick himself was hit by a musket ball. British Battles says it was a spent round that did not go through his clothing but knocked him senseless, and that his adjutant, Captain Georg von Berenhorst, caught him as he slumped from the saddle; the Seven Years War Project says the ball was stopped by the double layer of velvet in his coat, and that Berenhorst and the king's small escort led him out of the line of fire. Carlyle writes that Frederick later told his brother Prince Henry that the pelisse he was wearing had saved his life.5
Berenhorst believed he had saved the king's life, and British Battles says he resented that Frederick showed him no gratitude. Carlyle repeats a story, which he says he could neither confirm nor deny, that the king came round, saw Berenhorst bending over him and told him to go and gather runaways. Believing his army beaten, Frederick rode back to the village of Elsnig. The manor house was full of wounded officers of both armies, so he spent the night in the little church, using the altar, as Carlyle quotes it, “by way of writing-table” and its steps as a seat.6
Daun was out of the fight too. Hit in the leg, or in the foot according to British Battles, he stayed in the saddle directing counterattacks until the wound forced him to be carried from the field.7
Zieten at dusk
Zieten had spent the afternoon in an artillery duel with the Austrian corps of General Lacy. Why he did not press his attack sooner is one of the most debated questions of the battle, since Frederick's instructions to him were given orally and in confidence. Late in the day he turned his corps west against Süptitz. In the falling darkness a Prussian officer found an unguarded causeway between two ponds below the heights. He told Lieutenant-Colonel Möllendorf, and the brigade of General Saldern crossed it and climbed onto the ridge. From the other side General Hülsen, an old man without a horse, led two fresh regiments and the rallied survivors of the northern attack in again riding astride a gun, and according to the Seven Years War Project he shouted “Pull!” to the men around him.8
Without Daun, the Austrians could not hold the heights. The last shots were fired around 9 p.m., and after midnight their army withdrew through Torgau and across the Elbe on bridges of boats toward Dresden. Carlyle describes soldiers of both armies sharing the fires in the woods through the bitter night, waiting for daylight to show who were the prisoners and who the captors. The news of victory reached Frederick in the church at Elsnig. Later anecdote books had the king wandering among the soldiers' fires before dawn and meeting Zieten in the woods with embraces; Carlyle called that story “evidently mythical, though dramatic”.9
The cost, and the road to peace
According to the Seven Years War Project, Frederick forbade the publication of his losses. It cites the historian Curt Jany's figure of 16,670 Prussian casualties, the number British Battles also gives, and notes that another historian, Hans Bleckwenn, put them at around 24,700. By Jany's count, the Seven Years War Project adds, that was more than a third of the army and half of its infantry. Austrian losses are given as 15,897 by the Seven Years War Project, including more than 7,000 prisoners, with 49 guns lost, while British Battles gives 8,500 killed and wounded and 7,000 captured.10
The Austrian army was not destroyed, Daun kept Dresden, and Frederick held the rest of Saxony for the winter. British Battles argues that the battle's effect on Prussia's enemies was greater than its result on the map: the Austrian chancellor Kaunitz began to despair of recovering the lost lands and to advise a negotiated peace. The war ended with the Peace of Hubertusburg between Prussia, Austria and Saxony, signed on 15 February 1763, which left Silesia with Prussia.11
Also on 3 November
In 1918 Austria-Hungary signed the armistice of Villa Giusti with the Allies, after its army on the Italian front had collapsed in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto; the ceasefire took effect the next day. The battle is told on our 24 October page.12
The same day in Kiel, a military patrol fired on a demonstration of sailors and workers demanding the release of sailors arrested after mutinies against the navy's order for a last sortie against the British fleet. The German Historical Museum gives seven killed, and Renate and Klaus Kuhl's account adds 29 wounded, two of whom died later. By the evening of 4 November Kiel was in the rebels' hands, and within days revolutionary councils had formed in almost every German city. How the war ended is told in our article on how World War One ended.13
Also on this day
- 1867: Battle of Mentana. Italian volunteers under Giuseppe Garibaldi, trying to seize Rome, clashed near the village of Mentana with French and Papal troops defending the Papal States.
