Denmark’s bishops with him, before they set him free, that he
would not seek revenge. But once he was back in his own, he sent
to Pope Gregory, asking him to loose him from an oath wrung from
him while he was helpless in the power of bandits. And the Pope
responded that to keep faith with traitors was no man’s duty. Then
back he rode over the River Eider into the enemy’s land—for they
had stripped Denmark of all her hard-won possessions south of
the ancient border of the kingdom, except Esthland and Rügen—and
with him went every man who could bear arms in all the nation.
He crushed the Black Count who tried to block his way, and at
Bornhöved met the German allies who had gathered from far and
near to give him battle. Well they knew that if Valdemar won, the
reckoning would be terrible. All day they fought, and victory
seemed to lean toward the Danes, when the base Holsteiners, the
Danish rear-guard whom the enemy had bought to betray their king,
turned their spears upon his army, and decided the day. The battle
ended in utter rout of Valdemar’s forces. Four thousand Danish men
were slain. The King himself fell wounded on the field, his eye
pierced by an arrow, and would have fallen into the hands of the
enemy once more but for an unknown German knight, who took him upon
his horse and bore him in the night over unfrequented paths to
Kiel, where he was safe.
“But all men said that this great hurt befell the King because that
he brake the oath he swore upon the sacred body of the Lord.”
The wars of Valdemar were over, but his sorrows were not. Four
years later the crushing blow fell when Dagmar’s son, who was
crowned king to succeed him, lost his life while hunting. With him,
says the folk-song, died the hope of Denmark. The King had other
sons, but to Dagmar’s boy the people had given their love from
the first, as they had to his gentle mother. The old King and his
people grieved together.
But Valdemar rose above his sorrows. Great as he had been in the
days of victory, he was greater still in adversity. The country
was torn by the wars of three-score years, and in need of rest.
He gave his last days to healing the wounds the sword had struck.
Valdemar, the Victor, became Valdemar, the Law-giver. The laws of
the country had hitherto made themselves. They were the outgrowths
of the people’s ancient customs, passed down by word of mouth
through the generations, and confirmed on Thing from time to time.
King Valdemar gave Denmark her first written laws that judged
between man and man, in at least one of her provinces clear down
into our day. “With law shall land be built” begins his code. “The
law,” it says, “must be honest, just, reasonable, and according to
the ways of the people. It must meet their needs, and speak plainly
so that all men may know and understand what the law is. It is not
to be made in any man’s favor, but for the needs of all them who
live in the land.” That is its purpose, and “no man shall judge
(condemn) the law which the King has given and the country chosen;
neither shall he (the King) take it back without the will of the
people.” That tells the story of Valdemar’s day, and of the people
who are so near of kin with ourselves. They were not sovereign
and subjects; they were a chosen king and a free people, working
together “with law land to build.”
King Valdemar was married twice. The folk-song represents Dagmar as
urging the King with her dying breath
“that Bengerd, my lord, that base bad dame you never to wife
will take.”
Bengerd, or Berengaria, was a Portuguese princess whom Valdemar
married in spite of the warning, two years later. As the people had
loved the fair Dagmar, so they hated the proud Southern beauty,
whether with reason or not. The story of her “morning gift,” as it
has come down to us through the mists of time, is very different
from the other. She asks the King, so the ballad has it, to give
her Samsö, a great and fertile island, and “a golden crown[9] for
every maid,” but he tells her not to be quite so greedy:
There be full many an honest maid with not dry bread to eat.
Undismayed, Bengerd objects that Danish women have no business
to wear silken gowns, and that a good horse is not for a peasant
lad. The King replies patiently that what a woman can buy she may
wear for him, and that he will not take the lad’s horse if he can
feed it. Bengerd is not satisfied. “Let bar the land with iron
chains” is her next proposal, that neither man nor woman enter
it without paying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish
kings have never had need of such measures, and never will. He is
plainly getting bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the
husbandman more than “two oxen and a cow,” he loses his temper, and
presumably there is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is
fiction, bred of the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that
is certain. She was a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful
that many hundreds of years after, when her grave was opened, the
delicate oval of her skull excited admiration yet. But the people
hated her. Twenty generations after her death it was their custom
when passing her grave to spit on it with the exclamation “Out upon
thee, Bengerd! God bless the King of Denmark”; for in good or evil
days they never wavered in their love and admiration for the king
who was a son of the first Valdemar, and the heir of his greatness
and of that of the sainted Absalon. Tradition has it that Bengerd
was killed in battle, having gone with her husband on one of his
campaigns. “It was not heard in any place,” says the folk-song
wickedly, “that any one grieved for her.” But the King mourned for
his beautiful queen to the end of his days.
Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the
affection of his lonely old age. Erik he chose as his successor,
and to keep his brothers loyal to him he gave them great fiefs and
thus, unknowing, brought on the very trouble he sought to avoid,
and set his foot on the path that led to Denmark’s dismemberment
after centuries of bloody wars. For to his second son Abel he gave
Slesvig, and Abel, when his brother became king, sought alliance
with the Holstein count Adolf,[10] the very one who had led the
Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhöved. The result was a war
between the brothers that raged seven years, and laid waste the
land. Worse was to follow, for Abel was only “Abel in name, but
Cain in deed.” But happily the old King’s eyes were closed then,
and he was spared the sight of one brother murdering the other for
the kingdom.
Some foreboding of this seems to have troubled him in his last
years. It is related that once when he was mounting his horse to go
hunting he fell into a deep reverie, and remained standing with his
foot in the stirrup a long time, while his men wondered, not daring
to disturb him. At last one of them went to remind him that the
sun was low in the west. The King awoke from his dream, and bade
him go at once to a wise old hermit who lived in a distant part of
the country. “Ask him,” he said, “what King Valdemar was thinking
of just now, and bring me his answer.” The knight went away on his
strange errand, and found the hermit. And this was the message he
brought back: “Your lord and master pondered as he stood by his
horse, how his sons would fare when he was dead. Tell him that war
and discord they shall have, but kings they will all be.” When the
King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his
sons and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded
with them to keep the peace. But though they promised, he was
barely in his grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land. The
climax was reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with
fair words and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave
him over to his men to do with “as they pleased.” They understood
their master only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in
an open boat, and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say
his prayers. They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in
the deep.
Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent
of his brother’s blood, and took the crown after him. But the foul
crime was soon avenged. Within a few years he was himself slain
by a peasant in a rising of his own people. For a while his body
lay unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred
in the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it. “Such turmoil
arose in the church by night that the monks could not chant their
vigils,” and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a
swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost. But
clear down to our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the
fratricide was seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black
and on a white horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and
blue flames burned over the sea where they vanished. That was how
the superstition of the people judged the man whom the nobles and
the priests made king, red-handed.
Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last.
His end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse.
Hardly yet forty years old, he died—poisoned, it was said, by the
Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail
in the Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the
penitents going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all
Valdemar’s four sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But
kings they all were.
Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps
between his two queens. Dagmar’s grave was disturbed in the late
middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark’s
best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she
had worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of
time into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is,
its chief and priceless treasure. There also is a braid of Queen
Bengerd’s hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855.
The people’s hate had followed her even there, and would not let
her rest. The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a
round stone dropped into the place made for her head. Otherwise her
grave was undisturbed.
“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men,” says
the old chronicle of King Valdemar’s death, and black clouds were
gathering ominously even then over the land. But in storm and
stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung
loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.
Footnotes:
[7] Pronounced as Strangle, with the l left out.
[8] Pronounced Reebe, in two syllables.
[9] A coin, probably.
[10] That was the beginning of the Slesvig-Holstein question that
troubled Europe to our day; for the fashion set by Abel other
rulers of his dukedom followed, and by degrees Slesvig came to
be reckoned with the German duchies, whereas up till then it had
always been South-Jutland, a part of Denmark proper.
HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID
On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning
finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon
which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with
unceasing clamor and strife. The heart of the peninsula, quite
one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren,
melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the
hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd
tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his
endless stocking. The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking,
together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and
was thought capable of sustaining. A great change has taken place
within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear
sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot
of Denmark. The story of that unique achievement reads like the
tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years’
sleep by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the
slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.
[Illustration: THE HEATH AS IT WAS FIFTY YEARS AGO]
Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and
desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling
landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it
remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain
with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in
the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the
only human habitation in sight some heath boer’s ling-thatched hut,
flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep
of the pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep
their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between
steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to
escape from the universal blight. Over it all broods the silence of
the desert, drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift
way to the secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and
anemone hide under the heather, witness that forests grew here in
the long ago. In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a
strange pageant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea
and shore, forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and
castles and spires of distant churches—the witchery of the heath
that speaks in the tales and superstitions of its simple people.
High in the blue soars the lark, singing its song of home and
hope to its nesting mate. This is the heath which, denying to the
hardest toil all but the barest living, has given of its poetry to
the Danish tongue some of its sweetest songs.
But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that
make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil. The
heath had known such in the dim past. It had not always been a
desert. The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes
strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients,
which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages
stood, bear witness to it. Great battles account for their share,
and some of them were fought in historic times. On Grathe Heath the
young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend. Alone
and hunted, the beaten man sought refuge, Saxo tells us, behind a
stump, where he was found and slain by one of the King’s axemen. A
chapel was built on the spot. More than seven centuries later (in
1892) they dug there, and found the bones of a man with skull split
in two.
The stump behind which the wretched Svend hid was probably the last
representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile
moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they
fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with
here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to
escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket
near the hamlet of Taulund—the name itself tells of long-forgotten
groves—and the story runs among the people yet that once squirrels
jumped from tree to tree without touching ground all the way from
Taulund to Gjellerup church, a stretch of more than five miles to
which the wild things of the woods have long been strangers. In the
shelter of the old forests men dwelt through ages, and made the
land yield them a living. Some cairns that have been explored span
over more than a thousand years. They were built in the stone age,
and served the people of the bronze and iron ages successively as
burial-places, doubtless the same tribes who thus occupied their
homesteads from generation to generation. That they were farmers,
not nomads, is proved by the clear impression of grains of wheat
and barley in their burial urns. The seeds strayed into the clay
and were burned away, but the impression abides, and tells the
story.
Clear down to historic times there was a thrifty population in many
of the now barren spots. But a change was slowly creeping over
the landscape. The country was torn by long and bloody wars. The
big men fought for the land and the little ones paid the score,
as they always do. They were hunted from house and home. Next the
wild hordes of the Holstein counts overran Jutland. Its towns were
burned, the country laid waste. Great fires swept the forests.
What ravaging armies had left was burned in the smelteries. In the
sandy crust of the heath there is iron, and swords and spears were
the grim need of that day. The smelteries are only names now. They
went, but they took the forests with them, and where the ground was
cleared the west wind broke through, and ruin followed fast. Last
of all came the Black Death, and set its seal of desolation upon
it all. When it had passed, the country was a huge graveyard. The
heath had moved in. Rovers and smugglers found refuge there; honest
folk shunned it. Under the heather the old landmarks are sometimes
found yet, and deep ruts made by wheels that long since ceased to
turn.
In the Eighteenth Century men began to think of reclamation. A
thousand German colonists were called in and settled on the heath,
but it was stronger than they, and they drifted away until scarce
half a hundred families remained. The Government tried its hand,
but there was no one who knew just how, and only discouragement
resulted. Then came the war with Germany in 1864, that lost to
Denmark a third of her territory. The country lay prostrate under
the crushing blow. But it rose above defeat and disaster, and once
more expectant eyes were turned toward the ancient domain that had
slipped from its grasp. “What was lost without must be won within”
became the national slogan. And this time the man for the task was
at hand.
Enrico Mylius Dalgas was by the accident of birth an Italian, his
father being the Danish consul in Naples; by descent a Frenchman;
by choice and training a Dane, typical of the best in that people.
He came of the Huguenot stock that left France after the repeal of
the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and scattered over Europe, to the great
good of every land in which it settled. They had been tillers of
the soil from the beginning, and at least two of the family, who
found homes in Denmark, made in their day notable contributions to
the cause of advanced, sensible husbandry. Enrico’s father, though
a merchant, had an open eye for the interests which in later years
claimed the son’s life-work. In the diary of a journey through
Sweden he makes indignant comment upon the reckless way in which
the people of that country dealt with their forests. That he was
also a man of resolution is shown by an incident of the time when
Jew-baiting was having its sorry day in Denmark. An innkeeper
mistook the dark-skinned little man for a Jew, and set before him
a spoiled ham, retorting contemptuously, when protest was made,
that it was “good enough for a Sheeny.” Without further parley
Mr. Dalgas seized the hot ham by its shank and beat the fellow
with it till he cried for mercy. The son tells of the first school
he attended, when he was but five years old. It was kept by the
widow of one of Napoleon’s generals, a militant lady who every
morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers
flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats,
and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was
wont to do after a battle. For the dunces there was a corner strewn
with dried peas on which they were made to kneel with long-eared
donkey caps adorning their luckless heads. Very likely it was after
an insult of this kind that Enrico decided to elope to America with
his baby sister. They were found down by the harbor bargaining
with some fishermen to take them over to Capri _en route_ for the
land of freedom. The elder Dalgas died while the children were yet
little, and the widow went back to Denmark to bring up her boys
there.
They were poor, and the change from the genial skies of sunny Italy
to the bleak North did not make it any easier for them. Enrico’s
teacher saw it, and gave him his overcoat to be made over. But
the boys spotted it and squared accounts with their teacher by
snowballing the wearer of the big green plaid until he was glad to
leave it at home, and go without. He was in the military school
when war broke out with Germany in 1848. Both of his brothers
volunteered, and fell in battle. Enrico was ordered out as
lieutenant, and put on the shoulder-straps joyfully, to the great
scandal of his godfather in Milan, who sympathized with the German
cause. When the young soldier refused to resign he not only cut him
off in his will, but took away a pension of four hundred kroner
he had given his mother in her widowhood. If he had thoughts of
bringing them over by such means, he found out his mistake. Mother
and son were made of sterner stuff. Dalgas fought twice for his
country, the last time in 1864, as a captain of engineers.
It was no ordinary class, the one of 1851 that resumed its studies
in the military high school. Two of the students did not answer
roll-call; their names were written among the nation’s heroic dead.
Some had scars and wore the cross for valor in battle. All were
first lieutenants, to be graduated as captains. Dalgas had himself
transferred from the artillery to the engineers, and was detailed
as road inspector. So the opportunity of his life came to him.
There were few railways in those days; the highways were still the
great arteries of traffic. Dalgas built roads that crossed the
heath, and he learned to know it and the strong and independent,
if narrow, people who clung to it with such a tenacious grip. He
had a natural liking for practical geology and for the chemistry
of the soil, and the deep cuts which his roads sometimes made gave
him the best of chances for following his bent. The heath lay as
an open book before him, and he studied it with delight. He found
the traces of the old forests, and noted their extent. Occasionally
the pickaxe uncovered peat deposits of unsuspected depth and
value. Sometimes the line led across the lean fields, and damages
had to be discussed and assessed. He learned the point of view
of the heath farmer, sympathized with his struggles, and gained
his confidence. Best of all, he found a man of his own mind, a
lawyer by the name of Morville, himself a descendant of the exiled
Huguenots. It is not a little curious that when the way was cleared
for the Heath Society’s great work, in its formal organization with
M. Mourier-Petersen, a large landowner, as their associate in its
management, the three men who for a quarter of a century planned
the work and marked out the groove in which it was to run were
all of that strong stock which is by no means the most common in
Denmark.
With his lawyer friend Captain Dalgas tramped the heath far and
wide for ten years. Then their talks had matured a plan. Dalgas
wrote to the Copenhagen newspapers that the heath could be
reclaimed, and suggested that it should be done by the State. They
laughed at him. “Nothing better could have happened,” he said in
after years, “for it made us turn to the people themselves, and
that was the road to success, though we did not know it.” In the
spring of 1866 a hundred men, little and big landowners most of
them, met at his call, and organized the Heath Society[11] with the
object of reclaiming the moor. Dalgas became its managing director.