"[876]
[Footnote 876: Green, _History of the English People_, IV. 193
(London, 1880).]
So far, however, as concerns the war in the Germanic
countries, it was to outward seeming but a mad debauch of
blood and rapine, ending in nothing but the exhaustion of the
combatants. The havoc had been frightful. According to the
King of Prussia's reckoning, 853,000 soldiers of the various
nations had lost their lives, besides hundreds of thousands of
non-combatants who had perished from famine, exposure, disease, or
violence. And with all this waste of life not a boundary line had been
changed. The rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the
concubine had been completely foiled. Frederic had defied them all,
and had come out of the strife intact in his own hereditary dominions
and master of all that he had snatched from the Empress-Queen;
while Prussia, portioned out by her enemies as their spoil, lay depleted
indeed, and faint with deadly striving, but crowned with glory, and with
the career before her which, through tribulation and adversity, was to
lead her at last to the headship of a united Germany.
Through centuries of strife and vicissitude the French
monarchy had triumphed over nobles, parliaments, and people,
gathered to itself all the forces of the State, beamed with
illusive splendors under Louis the Great, and shone with the
phosphorescence of decay under his contemptible successor;
till now, robbed of prestige, burdened with debt, and mined
with corruption, it was moving swiftly and more swiftly towards
the abyss of ruin.
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