The most poignant monument stands on the Schönberg, a blackened granite stump defaced with colourful graffiti in Polish. You approach it from the main road by a concrete track laid, I suspect, not to give access to the monument but to a sand bunker next to it. On its eastern face you can decipher the German words "In memory of Frederick the Great's victory at Leuthen on December 5, 1757". On the reverse side you read that it was paid for by contributions from the 6th Army Corps. That corps was based in neighbouring Breslau and the monument was not erected until 1854. After the Red Army swept through Silesia in 1945, the gilded angel of victory was smashed and the plinth battered.

It is sad, but not surprising, that a memorial to an exemplary feat of arms should be in such a pitiful state. After what happened in the Second World War, the Poles, who had come into possession of Silesia for the first time, were hardly going to spend money on restoring a monument to Prussian prowess.

At Rossbach the history of the battle's memorials largely reflects the tide of war between Germany and France. The first, erected in 1766, was topped by a flame which is now in the Reichardtswerben museum. The memorial was moved from the Janusberg to nearer the village in 1796 to make way for one presented by the Prussian king's Hussar regiment. After Napoleon had wreaked revenge for Rossbach at Jena in 1806, both columns were taken down. The first fell to pieces, the second was taken to Paris and eventually found its way to the bottom of the Seine. A third memorial, of cast iron, was presented by the Prussian Third Army Corps in 1813 following the allies' defeat of Napoleon at the Battle of Leipzig. The foundation stone for the fourth, mainly funded by the Prussian state and bearing a large relief showing a mounted angel of victory riding over a prostrate French soldier, was laid in 1857, the centenary of Rossbach. That fell victim to what one might call the "own goal" of brown coal mining in 1958. 

Today, the third memorial and a mini-version of the relief, paid for by the friends and unveiled in 2001, stand in a little park on the edge of Reichardtswerben. Rather than glorifying military might, the new inscription above the relief sees the 1,500 deaths at Rossbach as an exhortation to peace; the one below reminds us of the suffering of war, "in the hope of establishing peace in Europe". Thus have attitudes towards Old Fritz's legacy swung back and forth in the two-and-a-half-centuries since his greatest triumphs.