Ever since Zorndorf, an idea had got abroad, says Tempelhof, that the Russians would die instead of yielding; but it proved far otherwise here.

Down as far as Kunersdorf, which may be about a mile westward, the Russians are all in a whirl; at best hanging in tatters and clumps, their Officers struggling against the flight; "mixed groups you would see huddled together a hundred men deep." The Russian Left Wing is beaten: had we our cannon up here, our cavalry up here, the Russian Army were in a bad way! This is a glorious beginning; completed, I think, as far almost as Kunersdorf by one o'clock: and could the iron continue to be struck while it is at white-heat as now, the result were as good as certain.
That was Friedrich's calculation: but circumstances which he had not counted on, some which he could not count on, sadly retarded the matter.
His Left Wing (Rear Line, which should now have been Left Wing) from southward, his Right Wing from northward, and Finck farther west, were now on the instant to have simultaneously closed upon the beaten Russians, and crushed them altogether.

The Right Wing, conquerors of the Muhlberg, are here: but neither Finck nor the Left can be simultaneous with them.

Finck and his artillery are much retarded with the Flosses and poor single Bridges; and of the Left Wing there are only some Vanguard Regiments capable of helping ("who drove out the Russians from Kunersdorf Churchyard," as their first feat),--no Main Body yet for a long while.

Such impediments, such intricacies of bog and bush! The entire Wing does at last get to the southeast of Kunersdorf, free of the wood; but finds (contrary to Linden with his hunter eye) an intricate meshwork of meres and straggling lakes, two of them in the burnt Village itself; no passing of these except on narrow isthmuses, which necessitate change of rank and re-change; and our Left Wing cannot, with all its industry, "march up," that is, arrive at the enemy in fighting line, without the painfulest delays.
And then the getting forward of our cannon! On the Muhlberg itself the seventy-two Russian guns, "owing to difference of calibre," or artillery-men know what, cannot be used by us: a few light guns, Tempelhof to one of them, a poor four in all, with perhaps 100 shot to each, did, by the King's order, hasten to the top of the Muhlberg; and never did Tempelhof see a finer chance for artillery than there.