Ernst Gideon Von Laudon - Seven Years' War

Seven Years' War

His next active service, still under Trenck, was in the Silesian mountains in 1745, in which campaign he greatly distinguished himself as a leader of light troops. He was present also at the Battle of Soor. He retired shortly afterwards, owing to his distaste for the lawless habits of his comrades in the irregulars, and after long waiting in poverty for a regular commission he was at last made a captain in one of the frontier regiments, spending the next ten years in half-military, half-administrative work in the Karlovac district on the Military Frontier. At Bunić, where he was stationed, he built a church and planted an oak forest now called by his name. He had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel when the outbreak of the Seven Years' War called him again into the field. From this point began his fame as a soldier. At first rejected by General Wilhelm Reinhard von Neipperg, he soon was promoted colonel at the behest of Chancellor Wenzel Anton Kaunitz and distinguished himself repeatedly. In 1757 he fought in Bohemia and Saxony under Field Marshal Maximilian Ulysses Browne and became a Generalfeldwachtmeister (major-general of cavalry) as well as a knight of the newly founded Maria Theresa Military Order.

In the campaign of 1758 came his first opportunity for fighting an action as a commander-in-chief, and he used it so well that Frederick the Great was obliged to give up the siege of Olomouc and retire into Bohemia (Battle of Domašov, June 30). He was rewarded with the grade of lieutenant-field-marshal and having again shown himself an active and daring commander in the campaign of Hochkirch, he was created a Freiherr in the Austrian nobility by Maria Theresa and in the peerage of the Holy Roman Empire by her husband the emperor Francis. Maria Theresa gave him, further, the grand cross of the order she had founded and an estate near Kutná Hora in Bohemia.

He was placed in command of the Austrian contingent sent to join the Russians on the Oder, and participated in Kunersdorf under Pyotr Saltykov where a joint Russo-Austrian contingent won a great victory. As a result Laudon was promoted Feldzeugmeister and made commander-in-chief in Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia. In 1760 he destroyed a whole corps of Frederick's army under Fouqué at Landshut and stormed the important fortress of Glatz. In 1760 he sustained a severe reverse at Frederick's hands in the Battle of Liegnitz (August 15, 1760), which action led to bitter controversy with Daun and Lacy, the commanders of the main army, who, Laudon claimed, had left his corps unsupported. In 1761 he operated, as usual, in Silesia, but he found his Russian allies as timid as they had been after Kunersdorf, and all attempts against Frederick's entrenched camp of Bunzelwitz failed. He brilliantly seized his one fleeting opportunity, however, and stormed Schweidnitz on the night of September 30/October 1, 1761. His tireless activity continued to the end of the war, in conspicuous contrast with the temporizing strategy of Daun and Lacy. The student of the later campaigns of the Seven Years' War will probably admit that there was need of more aggressiveness than Daun displayed, and of more caution than suited Laudon's genius. But neither recognized this, and the last three years of the war are marked by an ever-increasing friction between the "Fabius" and the "Marcellus," as they were called, of the Austrian army.