MARESCHAL LEHWALD ATTACKS THE RUSSIANS NEAR NORKITTEN.

Several other little skirmishes happened between straggling parties of the two armies; and the Russians went on pillaging and laying waste every thing before them, till at length the two armies having approached one another in Brandenburgh-Prussia, mareschal Lehwald, finding it impossible to spare detachments from so small a number as his was, compared to that of the enemy, to cover the wretched inhabitants from the outrages committed on them by the Russian cossacks, and other barbarians belonging to them, judged it absolutely necessary to attack their main army; and accordingly, notwithstanding his great disadvantage in almost every respect, he resolved to hazard a battle on the thirtieth of August. The Russians, consisting, as we before observed, of eighty thousand regulars, under the command of mareschal Apraxin, avoiding the open field, were intrenched in a most advantageous camp near Norkitten in Prussia. Their army was composed of four lines, each of which was guarded by an intrenchment, and the whole was defended by two hundred pieces of cannon, batteries being placed upon all the eminences. Mareschal Lehwald’s army scarcely amounted to thirty thousand men. The action began at five in the morning, and was carried on with so much vigour, that the Prussians entirely broke the whole first line of the enemy, and forced all their batteries. The prince of Holstein-Grottorp, brother to the king of Sweden, at the head of his regiment of dragoons, routed the Russian cavalry, and afterwards fell upon a regiment of grenadiers, which was cut to pieces; but when the Prussians came to the second intrenchment, mareschal Lehwald, seeing that he could not attempt to carry it without exposing his army too much, took the resolution to retire. The Prussians returned to their former camp at Velau, and the Russians remained in their present situation. The loss of the Prussians little exceeding two thousand killed and wounded, was immediately replaced out of the disciplined militia. The Russians lost a much greater number. General Lapuchin was wounded and taken prisoner, with a colonel of the Russian artillery; but the former was sent back on his parole. The Prussia*: Army had, at first, made themselves masters of above eighty pieces of cannon; but were afterwards obliged to abandon them, with eleven of their own, for want of carriages. Three Russian generals were killed; but the Prussians lost no general or officer of distinction, of which rank count Dohna was the only one that was wounded.