Sometimes of an evening he sent for Fergus, and chatted with him pleasantly for an hour or two, asking him many questions of his life in Scotland, and discoursing familiarly on such matters, but never making any allusion to military affairs.
On the tenth day of the march they arrived at Gorlitz, where another piece of bad news reached Frederick.

Prince Karl, after taking Schweidnitz, had fallen with sixty thousand men on Bevern.
He had crossed by five bridges across the Loe, but each column was met by a Prussian force strongly intrenched.

For the space of fifteen hours the battles had raged, over seven or eight miles of country.

Five times the Austrians had attacked, five times had they been rolled back again; but at nine o'clock at night they were successful, more or less, in four of their attacks, while the Prussian left wing, under the command of Ziethen, had driven its assailants across the river again.
During the night Bevern had drawn off, marched through Breslau, and crossed the Oder, leaving eighty cannon and eight thousand killed and wounded--a tremendous loss, indeed, when the army at daybreak had been thirty thousand strong.

Bevern himself rode out to reconnoitre, in the gray light of the morning, attended only by a groom, and fell in with an Austrian outpost.