But such natural and even pagan good-nature is consonant with the warm wet woods and comfortable clouds of South England; it never had any place among the harsh and thrifty squires in the plains of East Prussia, the land of the East Wind.

They were peevish as well as proud, and everything they created, but especially their army, was made coherent by sheer brutality.

Discipline was cruel enough in all the eighteenth-century armies, created long after the decay of any faith or hope that could hold men together.

But the state that was first in Germany was first in ferocity.

Frederick the Great had to forbid his English admirers to follow his regiments during the campaign, lest they should discover that the most enlightened of kings had only excluded torture from law to impose it without law.