[Footnote: In this lecture free use has been made of recent writers-- Mitchell, Chapman, Vehse, Freytag and Ranke, as well as of the older authorities. To Chapman's excellent Life of Gustavus Adolphus we are under special obligations. In some passages it has been closely followed. Colonel Mitchell has also supplied some remarks and touches, such as are to be found only in a military writer.]
AN EPISODE OF THE THIRTY YEARS' WAR.
The Thirty Years' War is an old story, but its interest has been recently revived. The conflict between Austria and German Independence commenced in the struggle of the Protestant Princes against Charles V., and, continued on those battle-fields, was renewed and decided at Sadowa. At Sadowa Germany was fighting for unity as well as for independence. But in the Thirty Years' War it was Austria that with her Croats, the Jesuits who inspired her councils, and her Spanish allies, sought to impose a unity of death, against which Protestant Germany struggled, preserving herself for a unity of life which, opened by the victories of Frederick the Great, and, more nobly promoted by the great uprising of the nation against the tyranny of Napoleon, was finally accomplished at Sadowa, and ratified against French jealousy at Sedan. Costly has been the achievement; lavish has been the expenditure of German blood, severe the sufferings of the German people. It is the lot of all who aspire high--no man or nation ever was dandled into greatness.
The Thirty Years' War was a real world-contest. Austria and Spain drew after them all the powers of reaction; all the powers of liberty and progress were arrayed on the other side. The half-barbarous races that lay between civilized Europe and Turkey mingled in the conflict: Turkey herself was drawn diplomatically into the vortex. In the mines of Mexico and Peru the Indian toiled to furnish both the Austrian and Spanish hosts. The Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded the struggle, long remained the Public Law of Europe.
Half religious, half political, in its character, this war stands midway between the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and the political wars of the eighteenth. France took the political view; and, while she crushed her own Huguenots at home, supported the German Protestants against the House of Austria. Even the Pope, Urban VIII., more politician than churchman, more careful of Peter's patrimony than of Peter's creed, went with France to the Protestant side. With the princes, as usual, political motives were the strongest, with the people religious motives. The politics were to a sad extent those of Machiavelli and the Jesuit; but above the meaner characters who crowd the scene rise at least two grand forms.
In a military point of view, the Thirty Years' War will bear no comparison with that which has just run its marvellous course. The armies were small, seldom exceeding thirty thousand. Tilly thought forty thousand the largest number which a general could handle, while Von Moltke has handled half a million. There was no regular commissariat, there were no railroads, there were no good roads, there were no accurate maps, there was no trained staff. The general had to be everything and to do everything himself. The financial resources of the powers were small: their regular revenues soon failed; and they had to fly for loans to great banking houses, such as that of the Fuggers at Augsburgh, so that the money power became the arbiter even of Imperial elections. The country on which the armies lived was soon eaten up by their rapine. Hence the feebleness of the operations, the absence of anything which Von Moltke would call strategy: and hence again the cruel length of the war, a whole generation of German agony.
But if the war was weak, not so were the warriors. On the Imperial side especially, they were types of a class of men, the most terrible perhaps, as well as the vilest, who ever plied the soldier's trade: of those mercenary bands, _soldados_, in the literal and original sense of the term, free companions, _condottieri_, lansquenets, who came between the feudal militia and the standing armies of modern times. In the wars of Italy and the Low Countries, under Alva and Parma and Freundsberg, these men had opened new abysses of cruelty and lust in human nature. They were the lineal representatives of the Great Companies which ravaged France in the time of Edward III. They were near of kin to the buccaneers, and Scott's Bertram Risingham is the portrait of a lansquenet as well as of a rover of the Spanish Main. Many of them were Croats, a race well known through all history in the ranks of Austrian tyranny, and Walloons, a name synonymous with that of hired butcher and marauder.
But with Croats and Walloons were mingled Germans, Spaniards, Italians, Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen, outcasts of every land, bearing the devil's stamp on faces of every complexion, blaspheming in all European and some non-European tongues. Their only country was the camp; their cause booty; their king the bandit general who contracted for their blood. Of attachment to religious principle they had usually just enough to make them prefer murdering and plundering in the name of the Virgin to murdering and plundering in the name of the Gospel, but outcasts of all nominal creeds were found together in their camps. Even the dignity of hatred was wanting to their conflicts, for they changed sides without scruple, and the comrade of yesterday was the foeman of to-day, and again the comrade of the morrow. The only moral salt which kept the carcass of their villainy from rotting was a military code of honour, embodying the freemasonry of the soldier's trade and having as one of its articles the duel with all the forms--an improvement at any rate upon assassination. A stronger contrast there cannot be than that between these men and the citizen soldiers whom Germany the other day sent forth to defend their country and their hearths. The soldier had a language of his own, polyglot as the elements of the band, and garnished with unearthly oaths: and the void left by religion in his soul was filled with wild superstitions, bullet charming and spells against bullets, the natural reflection in dark hearts of the blind chance which since the introduction of firearms seemed to decide the soldier's fate. Having no home but the camp, he carried with him his family, a she wolf and her cubs, cruel and marauding as himself; and the numbers and unwieldiness of every army were doubled by a train of waggons full of women and children sitting on heaps of booty. It was not, we may guess, as ministering angels that these women went among the wounded after a battle. The chiefs made vast fortunes. Common soldiers sometimes drew a great prize; left the standard for a time and lived like princes; but the fiend's gold soon found its way back to the giver through the Jews who prowled in the wake of war, or at the gambling table which was the central object in every camp. When fortune smiled, when pay was good, when a rich city had been stormed, the soldier's life was in its way a merry one; his camp was full of roystering revelry; he, his lady and his charger glittered with not over-tasteful finery, the lady sometimes with finery stripped from the altars. Then, glass in hand he might joyously cry, "The sharp sword is my farm and plundering is my plough; earth is my bed, the sky my covering, this cloak is my house, this wine my paradise;" or chant the doggerel stave which said that "when a soldier was born three boors were given him, one to find him food, another to find him a comely lass, a third to go to perdition in his stead." But when the country had been eaten up, when the burghers held the city stoutly, when the money-kings refused to advance the war kings any more gold, the soldier shared the miseries which he inflicted, and, unless he was of iron, sank under his hardships, unpitied by his stronger comrades; for the rule of that world was woe to the weak. Terrible then were the mutinies. Fearful was the position of the commander. We cannot altogether resist the romance which attaches to the life of these men, many a one among whom could have told a tale as wild as that with which Othello, the hero of their tribe, won his Desdemona, in whose love he finds the countercharm of his wandering life. But what sort of war such a soldiery made, may be easily imagined. Its treatment of the people and the country wherever it marched, as minutely described by trustworthy witnesses, was literally fiendish. Germany did not recover the effects for two hundred years.
A century had passed since the first preaching of Luther. Jesuitism, working from its great seminary at Ingoldstadt, and backed by Austria, had won back many, especially among the princes and nobility, to the Church of Rome; but in the main the Germans, like the other Teutons, were still Protestant even in the hereditary domains of the House of Austria. The rival religions stood facing each other within the nominal unity of the Empire, in a state of uneasy truce and compromise, questions about ecclesiastical domains and religious privileges still open; formularies styled of concord proving formularies of discord; no mediating authority being able to make church authority and liberty of private judgment, Reaction and Progress, the Spirit of the Past and the Spirit of the Future lie down in real peace together. The Protestants had formed an Evangelical Union, their opponents a Catholic League, of which Maximilian, Elector of Bavaria, a pupil of the Jesuits, was chief. The Protestants were ill prepared for the struggle. There was fatal division between the Lutherans and the Calvinists, Luther himself having said in his haste that he hated a Calvinist more than a Papist. The great Protestant princes were lukewarm and weak-kneed: like the Tudor nobility of England, they clung much more firmly to the lands which they had taken from the Catholics than to the faith in the name of which the lands were taken; and as powers of order, naturally alarmed by the disorders which attended the great religious revolution, they were politically inclined to the Imperial side. The lesser nobility and gentry, staunch Protestants for the most part, had shown no capacity for vigorous and united action since their premature attempt under Arnold Von Sickingen. On the peasantry, also staunch Protestants, still weighed the reaction produced by the Peasants' war and the excesses of the Anabaptists. In the free cities there was a strong burgher element ready to fight for Protestantism and liberty; but even in the free cities wealth was Conservative, and to the Rothschilds of the day the cause which offered high interest and good security was the cause of Heaven.
The smouldering fire burst into a flame in Bohemia, a kingdom of the House of Austria, and a member of the Empire, but peopled by hot, impulsive Sclavs, jealous of their nationality, as well as of their Protestant faith--Bohemia, whither the spark of Wycliffism had passed along the electric chain of common universities by which mediaeval Christendom was bound, and where it had kindled first the martyr fire of John Huss and Jerome of Prague, then the fiercer conflagration of the Hussite war. In that romantic city by the Moldau, with its strange, half Oriental beauty, where Jesuitism now reigns supreme, and St. John Nepemuch is the popular divinity, Protestantism and Jesuitism then lay in jealous neighbourhood, Protestantism supported by the native nobility, from anarchical propensity as well as from religious conviction; Jesuitism patronized and furtively aided by the intrusive Austrian power. From the Emperor Rudolph II., the Protestants had obtained a charter of religious liberties. But Rudolph's successor, Ferdinand II., was the Philip II. of Germany in bigotry, though not in cruelty. In his youth, after a pilgrimage to Loretto, he had vowed at the feet of the Pope to restore Catholicism at the hazard of his life. He was a pupil of the Jesuits, almost worshipped priests, was passionately devoted to the ceremonies of his religion, delighting even in the functions of an acolyte, and, as he said, preferred a desert to an empire full of heretics. He had, moreover, before his accession to the throne, come into collision with Protestantism where it was triumphant, and had found in its violence too good an excuse for his bigotry. It was inevitable that as King of Bohemia he should attempt to narrow the Protestant liberties. The hot Czech blood took fire, the fierceness of political turbulence mingled with that of religious zeal, and at a council held at Prague, in the old palace of the Bohemian kings, Martiniz and Slavata, the most hated of Ferdinand's creatures, were thrown out of a window in what was called good Bohemian fashion, and only by a marvellous accident escaped with their lives. The first blow was struck, the signal was given for thirty years of havoc. Insurrection flamed up in Bohemia. At the head of the insurgents, Count Thurn rushed on Vienna. The Emperor was saved only by a miracle, as Jesuitism averred,--as Rationalism says, by the arrival of Dampierre's Imperial horse. He suffered a fright which must have made him more than ever prefer a desert to an empire full of heretics. By a vote of the States of Bohemia the crown was taken from Ferdinand and offered to Frederic, Elector Palatine. Frederic was married to the bright and fascinating Princess Elizabeth of England, the darling of Protestant hearts; other qualifications for that crown of peril he had none. But in an evil hour he accepted the offer. Soon his unfitness appeared. A foreigner, he could not rein the restive and hard mouthed Czech nobility, a Calvinist and a pupil of the Huguenots, he unwisely let loose Calvinist iconoclasm among a people who clung to their ancient images though they had renounced their ancient faith. Supinely he allowed Austria and the Catholic League to raise their Croats and Walloons with the ready aid, so valuable in that age of unready finance, of Spanish gold. Supinely he saw the storm gather and roll towards him. Supinely he lingered in his palace, while on the White Hill, a name fatal in Protestant annals, his army, filled with his own discouragement, was broken by the combined forces of the Empire, under Bucquoi, and of the Catholic League, under Count Tilly. Still there was hope in resistance, yet Frederic fled. He was in great danger, say his apologists. It was to face a great danger, and show others how to face it, that he had come there. Let a man, before he takes the crown of Bohemia, look well into his own heart. Then followed a scaffold scene like that of Egmont and Horn, but on a larger scale. Ferdinand, it seems, hesitated to shed blood, but his confessor quelled his scruples. Before the City Hall of Prague, and near the Thein Church, bearing the Hussite emblems of the chalice and sword, amidst stern military pomp, the Emperor presiding in the person of his High Commissioner, twenty- four victims of high rank were led forth to death. Just as the executions commenced a bright rainbow spanned the sky. To the victims it seemed an assurance of Heaven's mercy. To the more far-reaching eye of history it may seem to have been an assurance that, dark as the sky then was, the flood of Reaction should no more cover the earth. But dark the sky was: the counter-reformation rode on the wings of victory, and with ruthless cruelty, through Bohemia, through Moravia, through Austria Proper, which had shown sympathy with the Bohemian revolt. The lands of the Protestant nobility were confiscated, the nobility itself crushed; in its place was erected a new nobility of courtiers, foreigners, military adventurers devoted to the Empire and to Catholicism, the seed of the Metternichs.
For ten years the tide ran steadily against Protestantism and German Independence. The Protestants were without cohesion, without powerful chiefs. Count Mansfeldt was a brilliant soldier, with a strong dash of the robber. Christian of Brunswick was a brave knight errant, fighting, as his motto had it, for God and for Elizabeth of Bohemia. But neither of them had any great or stable force at his back, and if a ray of victory shone for a moment on their standards, it was soon lost in gloom. In Frederick, ex-king of Bohemia, was no help; and his charming queen could only win for him hearts like that of Christian of Brunswick. The great Protestant Princes of the North, Saxony and Brandenburgh, twin pillars of the cause that should have been, were not only lukewarm, timorous, superstitiously afraid of taking part against the Emperor, but they were sybarites, or rather sots, to whose gross hearts no noble thought could find its way. Their inaction was almost justified by the conduct of the Protestant chiefs, whose councils were full of folly and selfishness, whose policy seemed mere anarchy, and who too often made war like buccaneers. The Evangelical Union, in which Lutheranism and political quietism prevailed, refused its aid to the Calvinist and usurping King of Bohemia. Among foreign powers, England was divided in will, the nation being enthusiastically for Protestantism and Elizabeth of Bohemia, while the Court leant to the side of order and hankered after the Spanish marriage. France was not divided in will: her single will was that of Richelieu, who, to weaken Austria, fanned the flame of civil war in Germany, as he did in England, but lent no decisive aid. Bethlem Gabor, the Evangelical Prince of Transylvania, led semi- barbarous hosts, useful as auxiliaries, but incapable of bearing the main brunt of the struggle; and he was trammelled by his allegiance to his suzerain, the Sultan. The Catholic League was served by a first-rate general in the person of Tilly; the Empire by a first-rate general and first-rate statesman in the person of Wallenstein. The Palatinate was conquered, and the Electorate was transferred by Imperial fiat to Maximilian of Bavaria, the head of the Catholic League, whereby a majority was given to the Catholics in the hitherto equally-divided College of Electors. An Imperial Edict of Restitution went forth, restoring to Catholicism all that it had lost by conversion within the last seventy years. Over all Germany, Jesuits and Capuchins swarmed with the mandates of reaction in their hands. The King of Denmark tardily took up arms only to be overthrown by Tilly at Lutter, and again at Wolgast by Wallenstein. The Catholic and Imperial armies were on the northern seas. Wallenstein, made Admiral of the Empire, was preparing a basis of maritime operations against the Protestant kingdoms of Scandinavia, against the last asylum of Protestantism and Liberty in Holland. Germany, with all its intellect and all its hopes, was on the point of becoming a second Spain. Teutonism was all but enslaved to the Croat. The double star of the House of Austria seemed with baleful aspect to dominate in the sky, and to threaten with extinction European liberty and progress. One bright spot alone remained amidst the gloom. By the side of the brave burghers who beat back the Prince of Parma from the cities of Holland, a place must be made in history for the brave burghers who beat back Wallenstein from Stralsund, after he had sworn, in his grand, impious way, that he would take it though it were bound by a chain to Heaven. The eyes of all Protestants were turned, says Richelieu, like those of sailors, towards the North. And from the North a deliverer came. On Midsummer day, 1630, a bright day in the annals of Protestantism, of Germany, and, as Protestants and Germans must believe, of human liberty and progress, Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, landed at Penemunde, on the Pomeranian coast, and knelt down on the shore to give thanks to God for his safe passage; then showed at once his knowledge of the art of war and of the soldier's heart, by himself taking spade in hand, and commencing the entrenchment of his camp. Gustavus was the grandson of that Gustavus Vasa who had broken at once the bonds of Denmark and of Rome, and had made Sweden independent and Lutheran. He was the son of that Charles Vasa who had defeated the counter-reformation. Devoted from his childhood to the Protestant cause, hardily trained in a country where even the palace was the abode of thrift and self-denial, his mind enlarged by a liberal education, in regard for which, amidst her poverty, as in general character and habits of her people, his Sweden greatly resembled Scotland; his imagination stimulated by the wild scenery, the dark forests, the starry nights of Scandinavia; gifted by nature both in mind and body; the young king had already shown himself a hero. He had waged grim war with the powers of the icy north; he bore several scars, proofs of a valour only too great for the vast interests which depended on his life; he had been a successful innovator in tactics, or rather a successful restorer of the military science of the Romans. But the best of his military innovations were discipline and religion. His discipline redeemed the war from savagery, and made it again, so far as war, and war in that iron age could be, a school of humanity and self-control. In religion he was himself not an ascetic saint, there is one light passage at least in his early life: and at Augsburg they show a ruff plucked from his neck by a fair Augsburger at the crisis of a very brisk flirtation. But he was devout, and he inspired his army with his devotion. The traveller is still struck with the prayer and hymn which open and close the march of the soldiers of Gustavus. Schools for the soldiers' children were held in his camp. It is true that the besetting sin of the Swedes, and of all dwellers in cold countries, is disclosed by the article in his military code directed against the drunkenness of army chaplains.
Sir Thomas Roe, the most sagacious of the English diplomatists of that age, wrote of Gustavus to James I.--"The king hath solemnly protested that he will not depose arms till he hath spoken one word for your majesty in Germany (that was his own phrase), and glory will contend with policy in his resolution; for he hath unlimited thoughts, and is the likeliest instrument for God to work by in Europe. We have often observed great alterations to follow great spirits, as if they were fitted for the times. Certainly, _ambit fortunam Caesaris_: he thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him, and doth thus oblige prosperity."
Gustavus justified his landing in Germany by a manifesto setting forth hostile acts of the Emperor against him in Poland. No doubt there was a technical _casus belli_. But, morally, the landing of Gustavus was a glorious breach of the principle of non-intervention. He came to save the world. He was not the less a fit instrument for God to work by because it was likely that he would rule the world when he had saved it.
"A snow king!" tittered the courtiers of Vienna, "he will soon melt away." He soon began to prove to them, both in war and diplomacy, that his melting would be slow. Richelieu at last ventured on a treaty of alliance. Charles I., now on the throne of England, and angry at having been jilted by Spain, also entered into a treaty, and sent British auxiliaries, who, though soon reduced in numbers by sickness, always formed a substantial part of the armies of Gustavus, and in battle and storm earned their full share of the honour of his campaigns. Many British volunteers had already joined the standard of Mansfeldt and other Protestant chiefs; and if some of these men were mere soldiers of the Dugald Dalghetty type, some were the Garibaldians of their day, and brought back at once enthusiasm and military skill from German battlefields to Marston and Naseby. Diplomacy, aided by a little gentle pressure, drew Saxony and Brandenburgh to the better cause, now that the better cause was so strong. But while they dallied and haggled one more great disaster was added to the sum of Protestant calamity. Magdeburgh, the queen of Protestant cities, the citadel of North German liberty, fell--fell with Gustavus and rescue near--and nameless atrocities were perpetrated by the ferocious bands of the Empire on innocents of all ages and both sexes, whose cry goes up against bloodthirsty fanaticism for ever. A shriek of horror rang through the Protestant world, not without reproaches against Gustavus, who cleared himself by words, and was soon to clear himself better by deeds.
Count Tilly was now in sole command on the Catholic and Imperial side. Wallenstein had been dismissed. A military Richelieu, an absolutist in politics, an indifferentist in religion, caring at least for the religious quarrel only as it affected the political question, he aimed at crushing the independence of all the princes, Catholic as well as Protestant, and making the Emperor, or rather Wallenstein in the name of the Imperial devotee, as much master of Germany as the Spanish king was of Spain. But the disclosure of this policy, and the towering pride of its author had alarmed the Catholic princes, and produced a reaction similar to that caused by the absolutist encroachments of Charles V. Aided by the Jesuits, who marked in Wallenstein a statesman whose policy was independent of theirs, and who, if not a traitor to the faith, was at least a bad persecutor, Maximilian and his confederates forced the Emperor to remove Wallenstein from command. The great man received the bearers of the mandate with stately courtesy, with princely hospitality, showed them that he had read in the stars the predominance of Maximilian over Ferdinand, slightly glanced at the Emperor's weakness, then withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded, so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North, scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.
When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony, drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror, for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.
In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had introduced a more open order--he had lightened the musket, dispensed with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the Imperial masses.
The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order--infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks--upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns--Gustavus with the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail- clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.
On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise--and whatever his reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede. Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head, the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile. Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt. Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.
Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man. He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince- Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies of the House of Austria,--to this height had the landless and obscure adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong. Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved, who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder; he was lavishly munificent, as one who knew that those who play a deep game must lay down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one of them--even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of faith in his as in their hearts; though, while the common soldier raised the fiend to charm bullets, or bought spells and amulets of a quack at Nuremburg or Augsburg, Seni, the first astrologer of the age, explored the sympathizing stars for the august destiny of the Duke of Friedland. Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other the indifferentist, without faith except in his star. On the one side was as much good, perhaps, as has ever appeared in the form of a conqueror, on the other side the majesty of evil. Gustavus was young, his frame was vigorous and active, though inclined to corpulence, his complexion fair, his hair golden, his eye blue and merry, his countenance frank as day, and the image of a heart which had felt the kindest influences of love and friendship. Wallenstein was past his prime, his frame was tall, spare, somewhat bowed by pain, his complexion dark, his eye black and piercing, his look that of a man who trod slippery paths with deadly rivals at his side, and of whose many letters not one is to a friend. But, opposites in all else, the two champions were well matched in power. Perhaps there is hardly such another duel in history. Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to encounter Cromwell.
The market for the great adventurer's services having risen so high, the price which he asked was large--a principality in hand, a province to be conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised. The court suggested that if the emperor's son, the King of Hungary, were put over Wallenstein's head, his name would be a tower of strength, but Wallenstein answered with a blasphemous frankness which must have made the ears of courtiers tingle. He would be emperor of the army; he would be emperor in the matter of confiscations. The last article shows how he won the soldier's heart. Perhaps in framing his terms, he gave something to his wounded pride. If he did, the luxury cost him dear, for here he trod upon the serpent that stung his life.
The career of Gustavus was at once arrested, and he took shelter against the storm in an entrenched camp protected by three hundred cannon under the walls of Nuremberg--Nuremberg the eldest daughter of the German Reformation, the Florence of Germany in art, wealth and freedom, then the beautiful home of early commerce, now its romantic tomb. The desolation of her grass-grown streets dates from that terrible day. The Swedish lines were scarcely completed when Wallenstein appeared with all his power, and sweeping past, entrenched himself four miles from his enemy in a position the key of which were the wooded hill and old castle of the Altenberg. Those who chance to visit that spot may fancy there Wallenstein's camp as it is in Schiller, ringing with the boisterous revelry of its wild and motley bands. And they may fancy the sudden silence, the awe of men who knew no other awe, as in his well-known dress, the laced buff coat with crimson scarf, and the grey hat with crimson plume, Wallenstein rode by. Week after week and month after month these two heavy clouds of war hung close together, and Europe looked for the bursting of the storm. But famine was to do Wallenstein's work; and by famine and the pestilence, bred by the horrible state of the camp, at last his work was done. The utmost limit of deadly inaction for the Swedes arrived. Discipline and honour gave way, and could scarcely be restored by the passionate eloquence of Gustavus. Oxenstiern brought large reinforcements; and on the 24th August Wallenstein saw-- with grim pleasure he must have seen--Gustavus advancing to attack him in his lines. By five hundred at a time--there was room for no more in the narrow path of death--the Swedes scaled the flashing and thundering Altenberg. They scaled it again and again through a long summer's day. Once it was all but won. But at evening the Nurembergers saw their hero and protector retiring, for the first time defeated, from the field. Yet Gustavus had not lost the confidence of his soldiers. He had shared their danger and had spared their blood. In ten hours' hard fighting he had lost only 2,000 men. But Wallenstein might well shower upon his wounded soldiers the only balm for the wounds of men fighting without a country or a cause. He might well write to the emperor: "The King of Sweden has blunted his horns a good deal. Henceforth the title of Invincible belongs not to him, but to your Majesty." No doubt Ferdinand thought it did.
Gustavus now broke up and marched on Bavaria, abandoning the great Protestant city, with the memory of Magdeburg in his heart. But Nuremberg was not to share the fate of Magdeburg. The Imperial army was not in a condition to form the siege. It had suffered as much as that of Gustavus. That such troops should have been held together in such extremity proves their general's power of command. Wallenstein soon gladdened the eyes of the Nurembergers by firing his camp, and declining to follow the lure into Bavaria, marched on Saxony, joined another Imperial army under Pappenheim and took Leipsic.
To save Saxony Gustavus left Bavaria half conquered. As he hurried to the rescue, the people on his line of march knelt to kiss the hem of his garment, the sheath of his delivering sword, and could scarcely be prevented from adoring him as a god. His religious spirit was filled with a presentiment that the idol in which they trusted would be soon laid low. On the 14th of November he was leaving a strongly entrenched camp, at Naumberg, where the Imperialists fancied, the season being so far advanced, he intended to remain, when news reached his ear like the sight which struck Wellington's eye as it ranged over Marmont's army on the morning of Salamanca. [Footnote: We owe the parallel, we believe, to an article by Lord Ellesmere, in the _Quarterly Review_.] The impetuous Pappenheim, ever anxious for separate command, had persuaded an Imperial council of war to detach him with a large force against Halle. The rest of the Imperialists, under Wallenstein, were quartered in the villages around Lutzen, close within the king's reach, and unaware of his approach. "The Lord," cried Gustavus, "has delivered him into my hand," and at once he swooped upon his prey.
"Break up and march with every man and gun. The enemy is advancing hither. He is already at the pass by the hollow road." So wrote Wallenstein to Pappenheim. The letter is still preserved, stained with Pappenheim's life-blood. But, in that mortal race, Pappenheim stood no chance. Halle was a long day's march off, and the troopers, whom Pappenheim could lead gallantly, but could not control, after taking the town had dispersed to plunder. Yet the Swede's great opportunity was lost. Lutzen, though in sight, proved not so near as flattering guides and eager eyes had made it. The deep-banked Rippach, its bridge all too narrow for the impetuous columns, the roads heavy from rain, delayed the march. A skirmish with some Imperial cavalry under Isolani wasted minutes when minutes were years; and the short November day was at an end when the Swede reached the plain of Lutzen.
No military advantage marks the spot where the storm overtook the Duke of Friedland. He was caught like a traveller in a tempest off a shelterless plain, and had nothing for it but to bide the brunt. What could be done with ditches, two windmills, a mud wall, a small canal, he did, moving from point to point during the long night; and before morning all his troops, except Pappenheim's division, had come in and were in line.
When the morning broke a heavy fog lay on the ground. Historians have not failed to remark that there is a sympathy in things, and that the day was loath to dawn which was to be the last day of Gustavus. But if Nature sympathized with Gustavus, she chose a bad mode of showing her sympathy, for while the fog prevented the Swedes from advancing, part of Pappenheim's corps arrived. After prayers, the king and all his army sang Luther's hymn, "Our God is a strong tower"--the Marseillaise of the militant Reformation. Then Gustavus mounted his horse, and addressed the different divisions, adjuring them by their victorious name, by the memory of the Breitenfeld, by the great cause whose issue hung upon their swords, to fight well for that cause, for their country and their God. His heart was uplifted at Lutzen, with that Hebrew fervour which uplifted the heart of Cromwell at Dunbar. Old wounds made it irksome to him to wear a cuirass. "God," he said, "shall be my armour this day".
Wallenstein has been much belied if he thought of anything that morning more religious than the order of battle, which has been preserved, drawn up by his own hand, and in which his troops are seen still formed in heavy masses, in contrast to the lighter formations of Gustavus. He was carried down his lines in a litter being crippled by gout, which the surgeons of that day had tried to cure by cutting into the flesh. But when the action began, he placed his mangled foot in a stirrup lined with silk, and mounted the small charger, the skin of which is still shown in the deserted palace of his pride. We may be sure that confidence sat undisturbed upon his brow; but in his heart he must have felt that though he had brave men around him, the Swedes, fighting for their cause under their king, were more than men; and that in the balance of battle then held out, his scale had kicked the beam. There can hardly be a harder trial for human fortitude than to command in a great action on the weaker side. Villeneuve was a brave man, though an unfortunate admiral, but he owned that his heart sank within him at Trafalgar when he saw Nelson bearing down.
"God with us," was the Swedish battle cry. On the other side the words "Jesu-Maria" passed round, as twenty-five thousand of the most godless and lawless ruffians the world ever saw, stood to the arms which they had imbrued in the blood not of soldiers only, but of women and children of captured towns. Doubtless many a wild Walloon and savage Croat, many a fierce Spaniard and cruel Italian, who had butchered and tortured at Magdeburg, was here come to bite the dust. These men were children of the camp and the battlefield, long familiar with every form of death, yet, had they known what a day was now before them, they might have felt like a recruit on the morning of his first field. Some were afterwards broken or beheaded for misconduct before the enemy; others earned rich rewards. Most paid, like men of honour, the price for which they were allowed to glut every lust and revel in every kind of crime.
At nine the sky began to clear, straggling shots told that the armies were catching sight of each other, and a red glare broke the mist, where the Imperialists had set fire to Lutzen to cover their right. At ten Gustavus placed himself at the head of his cavalry. War has now changed; and the telescope is the general's sword. Yet we cannot help feeling that the gallant king, who cast in his own life with the lives of the peasants he had drawn from their Swedish homes, is a nobler figure than the great Emperor who, on the same plains, two centuries afterwards, ordered to their death the masses of youthful valour sent by a ruthless conscription to feed the vanity of a heart of clay. The Swedes, after the manner of war in that fierce and hardy age, fell at once with their main force on the whole of the Imperial line. On the left, after a murderous struggle, they gained ground and took the enemy's guns. But on the right the Imperialists held firm, and while Gustavus was carrying victory with him to that quarter, Wallenstein restored the day upon the right. Again Gustavus hurried to that part of the field. Again the Imperialists gave way, and Gustavus, uncovering his head, thanked God for his victory. At this moment it seems the mist returned. The Swedes were confused and lost their advantage. A horse, too well known, ran riderless down their line, and when their cavalry next advanced, they found the stripped and mangled body of their king. According to the most credible witness, Gustavus who had galloped forward to see how his advantage might be best followed up, got too near the enemy, was shot first in the arm, then in the back, and fell from his horse. A party of Imperial cuirassiers came up, and learning from the wounded man himself who he was, finished the work of death. They then stripped the body for proofs of their great enemy's fate and relics of the mighty slain. Dark reports of treason were spread abroad, and one of these reports followed the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was with Gustavus that day, through his questionable life to his unhappy end. In those times a great man could scarcely die without suspicion of foul play, and in all times men are unwilling to believe that a life on which the destiny of a cause or a nation hangs can be swept away by the blind, indiscriminate hand of common death.
Gustavus dead, the first thought of his officers was retreat; and that thought was his best eulogy. Their second thought was revenge. Yet so great was the discouragement that one Swedish colonel refused to advance, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar cut him down with his own hand. Again the struggle began, and with all the morning's fury. Wallenstein had used his respite well. He knew that his great antagonist was dead, and that he was now the master-spirit on the field. And with friendly night near, and victory within his grasp, he directed in person the most desperate combat, prodigal of the life on which, according to his enemies, his treasonable projects hung. Yet the day was again going against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the exhaustion. For six hours almost every man in both armies had borne the terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered; their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still moved along their lines, unhurt, grazed and even marked by the storm of death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest, and as darkness fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off, leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.
The judgment of a cause by battle is dreadful. Dreadful it must have seemed to all who were within sight or hearing of the field of Lutzen when that battle was over. But it is not altogether irrational and blind. Providence does not visibly interpose in favour of the right. The stars in their courses do not now fight for the good cause. At Lutzen they fought against it. But the good cause is its own star. The strength given to the spirit of the Swedes by religious enthusiasm, the strength given to their bodies by the comparative purity of their lives, enabled them, when the bravest and hardiest ruffians were exhausted in spirit and body, to make that last effort which won the day.
_Te Deum_ was sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than any victory. For humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it good to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to that time had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles XII.
Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a Christian warrior, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahe, daughter of a Swedish nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg, also renowned for beauty. The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness, admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love still is, there is no more rivalry in love.
The death of Gustavus was the death of his great antagonist. Gustavus gone, Wallenstein was no longer indispensable, and he was far more formidable than ever. Lutzen had abated nothing either of his pride or power. He went forth again from Prague to resume command in almost imperial pomp. The army was completely in his hands. He negotiated as an independent power, and was carrying into effect a policy of his own, which seems to have been one of peace for the empire with amnesty and toleration, and which certainly crossed the policy of the Jesuits and Spain, now dominant in the Imperial councils. No doubt the great adventurer also intended that his own grandeur should be augmented and secured. Whether his proceedings gave his master just cause for alarm remains a mystery. The word, however, went forth against him, and in Austrian fashion, a friendly correspondence being kept up with him when he had been secretly deposed and his command transferred to another. Finding himself denounced and outlawed, he resolved to throw himself on the Swedes. He had arrived at Eger, a frontier fortress of Bohemia. It was a night apt for crime, dark and stormy, when Gordon, a Scotch Calvinist, in the Imperial service (for Wallenstein's camp welcomed adventurers of all creeds), and commandant of Eger, received the most faithful of Wallenstein's officers, Terzka, Kinsky, Illo and Neumann, at supper in the citadel. The social meal was over, the wine cup was going round; misgiving, if any misgiving there was, had yielded to comradeship and good cheer, when the door opened and death, in the shape of a party of Irish troopers, stalked in. The conspirators sprang from the side of their victims, and shouting, "Long live the Emperor," ranged themselves with drawn swords against the wall, while the assassins overturned the table and did their work. Wallenstein, as usual, was not at the banquet. He was, indeed, in no condition for revelry. Gout had shattered his stately form, reduced his bold handwriting to a feeble scrawl, probably shaken his powerful mind, though it could rally itself, as at Lutzen, for a decisive hour; and, perhaps, if his enemies could have waited, the course of nature might have spared them the very high price which they paid for his blood. He had just dismissed his astrologer, Seni, into whose mouth the romance of history does not fail to put prophetic warnings, his valet was carrying away the golden salver, on which his night draught had been brought to him, and he was about to lie down, when he was drawn to the window by the noise of Butler's regiment surrounding his quarters, and by the shrieks of the Countesses Terzka and Kinsky, who were wailing for their murdered husbands. A moment afterwards the Irish Captain Devereux burst into the room, followed by his fellow-assassins shouting, "Rebels, rebels!" Devereux himself, with a halbert in his hand, rushed up to Wallenstein, and cried, "Villain, you are to die!" True to his own majesty the great man spread out his arms, received the weapon in his breast, and fell dead without a word. But as thought at such moments is swift, no doubt he saw it all--saw the dark conclave of Italians and Spaniards sitting at Vienna--knew that the murderer before him was the hand and not the head--read at once his own doom and the doom of his grand designs for Germany and Friedland. His body was wrapped in a carpet, carried in Gordon's carriage to the citadel, and there left for a day with those of his murdered friends in the court-yard, then huddled into a hastily constructed coffin, the legs of the corpse being broken to force it in. Different obsequies from those of Gustavus, but perhaps equally appropriate, at least equally characteristic of the cause which the dead man served.
Did Friedland desire to be more than Friedland, to unite some shadow of command with the substance, to wear some crown of tinsel, as well as the crown of power? We do not know, we know only that his ways were dark, that his ambition was vast, and that he was thwarting the policy of the Jesuits and Spain. Great efforts were made in vain to get up a case against his memory; recourse was had to torture, the use of which always proves that no good evidence is forthcoming; absurd charges were included in the indictment, such as that of having failed to pursue and destroy the Swedish army after Lutzen. The three thousand masses which Ferdinand caused to be sung for Wallenstein's soul, whether they benefited his soul or not, have benefited his fame, for they seem like the weak self-betrayal of an uneasy conscience, vainly seeking to stifle infamy and appease the injured shade. Assassination itself condemns all who take part in it or are accomplices in it, and Ferdinand, who rewarded the assassins of Wallenstein, was at least an accomplice after the fact. Vast as Wallenstein's ambition was, even for him age and gout must have begun to close the possibilities of life, and he cannot have been made restless by the pangs of abortive genius, for he had played the grandest part upon the grandest stage. He had done enough, it would seem, to make repose welcome, and his retirement would not have been dull. Often in his letters his mind turns from the camp and council to his own domains, his rising palaces, his farms, his gardens, his schools, his manufactures, the Italian civilization which the student of Padua was trying to create in Bohemian wilds, the little empire in the administration of which he showed that he might have been a good Emperor on a larger scale. Against his Imperial master he is probably entitled at least to a verdict of not proven, and to the sympathy due to vast services requited by murder. Against accusing humanity his plea is far weaker, or rather he has no plea but one of extenuation. If there is a gloomy majesty about him the fascination of which we cannot help owning, if he was the noblest spirit that served evil, still it was evil that he served. The bandit hordes which he led were the scourges of the defenceless people, and in making war support war he set the evil example which was followed by Napoleon on a greater scale, and perhaps with more guilt, because in a more moral age. If in any measure he fell a martyr to a policy of toleration, his memory may be credited with the sacrifice. His toleration was that of indifference, not that of a Christian; yet the passages of his letters in which he pleads for milder methods of conversion, and claims for widows an exemption from the extremities of persecution, seem preserved by his better angel to shed a ray of brightness on his lurid name. Of his importance in history there can be no doubt. Take your stand on the battle field of Lutzen. To the North all was rescued by Gustavus, to the South all was held till yesterday by the darker genius of Wallenstein.
Like the mystic bark in the Mort d'Arthur, the ship which carried the remains of Gustavus from the German shore bore away heroism as well as the hero. Gustavus left great captains in Bernard of Weimar, Banner, Horn, Wrangel and Tortensohn; in the last, perhaps, a captain equal to himself. He left in Oxenstierna the greatest statesman and diplomatist of the age. But the guiding light, the grand aim, the ennobling influence were gone. The Swedes sank almost to the level of the vile element around, and a torture used by the buccaneers to extract confessions of hidden treasure bore the name of the Swedish draught. The last grand figure left the scene in Wallenstein. Nothing remained but mean ferocity and rapine, coarse filibustering among the soldiers, among the statesmen and diplomatists filibustering a little more refined. All high motives and interests were dead. The din of controversy which at the outset accompanied the firing of the cannon, and proved that the cannon was being fired in a great cause, had long since sunk into silence. Yet for fourteen years after the death of Wallenstein this soulless, aimless drama of horror and agony dragged on. Every part of Germany was repeatedly laid under heavy war contributions, and swept through by pillage, murder, rape and arson. For thirty years all countries, even those of the Cossack and the Stradiot, sent their worst sons to the scene of butchery and plunder. It may be doubted whether such desolation ever fell upon any civilized and cultivated country. When the war began Germany was rich and prosperous, full of smiling villages, of goodly cities, of flourishing universities, of active industry, of invention and discovery, of literature and learning, of happiness, of progress, of national energy and hope. At its close she was a material and moral wilderness. In a district, selected as a fair average specimen of the effects of the war, it is found that of the inhabitants three-fourths, of the cattle four-fifths had perished. For thirty years the husbandman never sowed with any confidence that he should reap; the seed-corn was no doubt often consumed by the reckless troopers or the starving peasantry; and if foreign countries had been able to supply food there were no railroads to bring it. The villages through whole provinces were burnt or pulled down to supply materials for the huts of the soldiery; the people hid themselves in dens and caves of the earth, took to the woods and mountains, where many of them remained swelling the multitude of brigands. When they could they wreaked upon the lansquenets a vengeance as dreadful as what they had suffered, and were thus degraded to the same level of ferocity. Moral life was broken up. The Germany of Luther with its order and piety and domestic virtue, with its old ways and customs, even with its fashions of dress and furniture, perished almost as though it had been swallowed by an earthquake. The nation would hardly have survived had it not been for the desperate tenacity with which the peasant clung to his own soil, and the efforts of the pastors, men of contracted views, of dogmatic habits of mind, and of a somewhat narrow and sour morality, but staunch and faithful in the hour of need, who continued to preach and pray amidst blackened ruins to the miserable remnants of their flocks, and sustained something of moral order and of social life.
Hence in the succeeding centuries, the political nullity of the German nation, the absence of any strong popular element to make head against the petty despotism of the princes, and launch Germany in the career of progress. Hence the backwardness and torpor of the Teutonic race in its original seat, while elsewhere it led the world. Hence, while England was producing Chathams and Burkes, Germany was producing the great musical composers. Hence when the movement came it was rather intellectual than political, rather a movement of the universities than of the nation.
At last, nothing being left for the armies to devour, the masters of the armies began to think of peace. The diplomatists went to work, and in true diplomatic fashion. Two years they spent in formalities and haggling, while Germany was swarming with disbanded lansquenets. It was then that old Oxenstierna said to his son, who had modestly declined an ambassadorship on the ground of inexperience, "Thou knowest not, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed." The object of all the parties to the negotiations was acquisition of territory at the expense of their neighbours, and the treaty of Westphalia, though, as we have said, it was long the Public Law of Europe, was an embodiment, not of principles of justice or of the rights of nations, but of the relative force and cunning of what are happily called the powers. France obtained, as the fruit of the diplomatic skill with which she had prolonged the agony of Germany, a portion of the territory which she has recently disgorged. The independence of Germany was saved; and though it was not a national independence, but an independence of petty despotisms, it was redemption from Austrian and Jesuit bondage for the present, with the hope of national independence in the future. When Gustavus broke the Imperial line at Lutzen, Luther and Loyola might have turned in their graves. Luther had still two centuries and a half to wait, so much difference in the course of history, in spite of all our philosophies and our general laws, may be made by an arrow shot at a venture, a wandering breath of pestilence, a random bullet, a wreath of mist lingering on one of the world's battlefields. But Luther has conquered at last. Would that he had conquered by other means than war-- war with all its sufferings, with all its passions, with the hatred, the revenge, the evil pride which it leaves behind it. But he has conquered, and his victory opens a new and, so far as we can see, a happier era for Europe.
[The end]
Goldwin Smith's essay: The Great Duel Of The Seventeenth Century