fundamental idea, for until that was done nothing but the heather
could grow there. The west wind would not let it. But the heath
farmer shook his head. It would cost too much, and give too little
back. What he needed was water and marl. Could the captain help
them to these?—that was another matter. The little streams that
found their way into the heath and lost it there, dire need had
taught them to turn to use in their fields; not a drop escaped. But
the river that ran between deep banks was beyond their reach. Could
he show them how to harness that? Dalgas saw their point. “We are
working, not for the dead soil, but for the living men who find
homes upon it,” he told his associates, and tree planting was put
aside for the time. They turned canal diggers instead. Irrigation
became their aim and task; the engineer was in his right place.
The water was raised from the stream and led out upon the moor,
and presently grass grew in the sand which the wiry stems of the
heather had clutched so long. Green meadows lined the water-runs,
and fragrant haystacks rose. To the lean sheep was added a cow,
then two. The farmer laid by a little, and took in more land
for cultivation. That meant breaking the heath. Also, it meant
marl. The heath is lime-poor; marl is lime in the exact form in
which it best fits that sandy soil. It was known to exist in some
favored spots, but the poor heath farmer could not bring it from a
distance. So the marl borer went with the canal digger. Into every
acre he drove his auger, and mapped out his discoveries. At last
accounts he had found marl in more than seventeen hundred places,
and he is not done yet. Where there was none, Dalgas’s Society
built portable railways into the moor far enough to bring it to
nearly every farmer’s door.
It was as if a magic wand had been waved over the heath. With
water and marl, the means were at hand for fighting it and winning
out. Heads that had drooped in discouragement were raised. The
cattle keep increased, and with it came the farmer’s wealth. Marl
changes the character of the heath soil; with manure to fertilize
it there was no reason why it should not grow crops—none, except
the withering blast of the west wind. The time for Dalgas to preach
tree planting had come.
While the canal digger and marl seeker were at work, there had been
neighborhood meetings and talks at which Captain Dalgas did the
talking. When he spoke the heath boer listened, for he had learned
to look upon him as one of them. He wore no gold lace. A plain man
in every day gray tweeds, with his trousers tucked into his boots,
he spoke to plain people of things that concerned them vitally, and
in a way they could understand. So when he told them that the heath
had once been forest-clad, at least a large part of it, and pointed
them to the proofs, and that the woods could be made to grow again
to give them timber and shelter and crops, they gave heed. It was
worth trying at any rate. The shelter was the immediate thing. They
began planting hedges about their homesteads; not always wisely,
for it is not every tree that will grow in the heath. The wind
whipped and wore them, the ahl cramped their roots, and they died.
The ahl is the rusty-red crust that forms under the heather in the
course of the ages where the desert rules. Sometimes it is a loose
sandstone formation; sometimes it carries as much as twenty per
cent of iron that is absorbed from the upper layers of the sand. In
any case, it must be broken through; no tree root can do it. The
ahl, the poverty of the sand, and the wind, together make the “evil
genius” of the heath that had won until then in the century-old
fight with man. But this time he had backing, and was not minded to
give up. The Heath Society was there to counsel, to aid. And soon
the hedges took hold, and gardens grew in their shelter. There is
hardly a farm in all west Jutland to-day that has not one, even if
the moor waits just beyond the gate.
Out in the desert the Society had made a beginning with plantations
of Norway spruce. They took root, but the heather soon overwhelmed
the young plants. Not without a fight would this enemy let go its
grip upon the land. It had smothered the hardy Scotch pine in days
past, and now the spruce was in peril. Searching high and low for
something that would grow fast and grow green, Dalgas and his
associates planted dwarf pine with the spruce. Strangely, it not
only grew itself, but proved to be a real nurse for the other. The
spruce took a fresh start, and they grew vigorously together—for a
while. Then the pine outstripped its nursling, and threatened to
smother it. The spruce was the more valuable; the other was at best
little more than a shrub. The croaker raised his voice: the black
heath had turned green, but it was still heath, of no value to any
one, then or ever.
He had not reckoned with Dalgas. The captain of engineers could use
the axe as well as the spade. He cut the dwarf pine out wherever
the spruce had got its grip, and gave it light and air. And it grew
big and beautiful. The Heath Society has now over nineteen hundred
plantations that cover nearly a hundred thousand acres, and the
State and private individuals, inspired by the example it set, have
planted almost as large an area. The ghost of the heath has been
laid for all time.
Go now across the heath and see the change forty years have
wrought. You shall seek in vain the lonely shepherd with his
stocking. The stocking has grown into an organized industry. In
grandfather’s day the farmer and his household “knitted for the
taxes”; if all hands made enough in the twelvemonth to pay the
tax-gatherer, they had done well. Last year the single county of
Hammerum, of which more below, sold machine-made underwear to the
value of over a million and a half kroner. The sheep are there,
but no longer lean; no more the ling-thatched hut, but prosperous
farms backed by thrifty groves, with hollyhock and marigold in the
dooryards, heaps of gray marl in the fields, tiny rivulets of water
singing the doom of the heath in the sand; for where it comes the
heather moves out. A resolute, thrifty peasantry looks hopefully
forward. Not all of the heath is conquered yet. Roughly speaking,
thirty-three hundred square miles of heath confronted Dalgas in
1866. Just about a thousand remain for those who come after to
wrestle with; but already voices are raised pleading that some of
it be preserved untouched for its natural beauty, while yet it is
time.
Meanwhile the plow goes over fresh acres every year—once, twice,
then a deeper plowing, this time to break the stony crust, and the
heath is ready for its human mission. From the Society’s nurseries
that are scattered through the country come thousands of tiny
trees, and are set out in the furrows, two of the spruce for each
dwarf pine till the nurse has done her work. Then she is turned
into charcoal, into tar, and a score of other things of use. The
men who do the planting in summer find chopping to do in winter
in the older plantations, at good wages. Money is flowing into
the moor in the wake of the water and the marl. Roads are being
made, and every day the mail-carrier comes. In the olden time a
stranger straying into the heath often brought the first news of
the world without for weeks together. Game is coming, too,—roebuck
and deer,—in the young forests. The climate itself is changing;
more rain falls in midsummer, when it is needed. The sand-blast has
been checked, the power of the west wind broken. The shrivelled
soil once more takes up and holds the rains, and the streams will
deepen, fish leap in them as of yore. Groves of beech and oak are
springing up in the shelter of their hardier evergreen kin. “Make
the land furry,” Dalgas said, with prophetic eye beholding great
forests taking the place of sand and heather, and in his lifetime
the change was wrought that is transforming the barren moor into
the home-land of a prosperous people.
To the most unlikely of places, through the very prison doors,
his gospel of hope has made its way. For the last dozen years the
life prisoners in the Horsens penitentiary have been employed in
breaking and reforesting the heath, and their keepers report that
the effect upon them of the hard work in the open has been to
notably cheer and brighten them. The discipline has been excellent.
There have been few attempts at escape, and they have come to
nothing through the vigilance of the other prisoners.
While the population in the rest of Denmark is about stationary, in
west Jutland it grows apace. The case of Skåphus farm in the parish
of Sunds shows how this happens. Prior to 1870 this farm of three
thousand acres was rated the “biggest and poorest” in Denmark. Last
year it had dwindled to three hundred and fifty acres, but upon
its old land thirty-three homesteads had risen that kept between
them sixty-two horses and two hundred and fifty-two cows, beside
the sheep, and the manor farm was worth twice as much as before.
The town of Herning, sometimes called “the Star of the Heath,” is
the seat of Hammerum county, once the baldest and most miserable on
the Danish mainland. In 1841 twenty-one persons lived in Herning.
To-day there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome
buildings, gas, electric lighting, and paved streets. The heath is
half a dozen miles away. And this is not the result of any special
or forced industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for
an army of industrious men and women winning back the land of their
fathers by patient toil. All through the landscape one sees from
the train the black giving way to the green. Churches rear their
white gables; bells that have been silent since the Black Death
stalked through the land once more call the people to worship on
the old sites. More churches were built in the reign of “the good
King Christian,” who has just been gathered to his fathers, than in
all the centuries since the day of the Valdemars.
Bog cultivation is the Heath Society’s youngest child. The heath
is full of peat-bogs that only need the sand, so plentiful on the
uplands, to make their soil as good as the best, the muck of the
bog being all plant food, and they have a surplus of water to give
in exchange. With hope the keynote of it all, the State has taken
up the herculean task of keeping down the moving sands of the North
Sea coast. All along it is a range of dunes that in the fierce
storms of that region may change shape and place in a single night.
The “sand flight” at times reached miles inland, and threatened to
bury the farmer’s acres past recovery. Austrian fir and dwarf pine
now grow upon the white range, helping alike to keep down the sand
and to bar out the blast.
With this exception, the great change has been, is being, wrought
by the people themselves. It was for their good, in the apathy
that followed 1864, that it should be so, and Dalgas saw it. The
State aids the man who plants ten acres or more, and assumes
the obligation to preserve the forest intact; the Heath Society
sells him plants at half-price, and helps him with its advice. It
disposes annually of over thirteen million young trees. The people
do the rest, and back the Society with their support. The Danish
peasant has learned the value of coöperation since he turned dairy
farmer, and associations for irrigation, for tree planting, and
garden planting are everywhere. They even reach across the ocean.
This year a call was issued to sons of the old soil, who have found
a new home in America, to join in planting a Danish-American forest
in the desert where hill and heather hide a silvery lake in their
deep shadows and returning wanderers may rest and dream of the long
ago.
[Illustration: THE HEATH TRANSFORMED IN TWENTY-ONE YEARS]
Soldier though he was, Enrico Dalgas’s pick and spade brigade won
greater victories for Denmark than her armies in two wars. He
literally “won for his country within what she had lost without.” A
natural organizer, a hard worker who found his greatest joy in his
daily tasks, a fearless and lucid writer who yet knew how to keep
his cause out of the rancorous politics that often enough seemed
to mistake partisanship for patriotism, he was the most modest of
men. Praise he always passed up to others. At the “silver wedding”
of the Society he founded they toasted him jubilantly, but he sat
quiet a long time. When at last he arose, it was to make this
characteristic little speech:
“I thank you very much. His Excellency the Minister of the
Interior, who is present here, will see from this how much you
think of me, and possibly my recommendation that the State
make a larger contribution to the Heath Society’s treasury may
thereby acquire greater weight with him. I drink to an increased
appropriation.”
On the heath Dalgas was prophet, prince, and friend of the people.
In the crowds that flocked about his bier homespun elbowed gold
lace in the grief of a common loss. Boughs of the fragrant spruce
decked his coffin, the gift of the heath to the memory of him who
set it free.
To Dalgas apply the words of the seer with which he himself
characterized the Society that was the child of his heart and
brain: “The good men are those who plant and water,” for they add
to the happiness of mankind.
Footnotes:
[11] Danske Hedeselskab.
KING CHRISTIAN IV
[Illustration:
King Christian stood by loft - y mast In mist and
smoke; His sword was ham - mer - ing so fast, Thro’
Goth -ic helm and brain it passed; Then sank each hos-tile
hulk and mast. In mist and smoke. “Fly,”
shout-ed they, “fly, he who can! Who braves of Denmark’s
Christ- i -an, Who braves of Denmark’s Christian The stroke?”]
Deep in the beech-woods between Copenhagen and Elsinore, upon
the shore of a limpid lake, stands Frederiksborg, one of the
most beautiful castles in Europe. In its chapel the Danish kings
were crowned for two centuries, and here was born on April 12,
1577, King Christian of the Danish national hymn which Longfellow
translated into our tongue. No Danish ruler since the days of the
great Valdemars made such a mark upon his time; none lives as he
in the imagination of the people. He led armies to war and won
and lost battles; indeed, he lost more than he won on land when
matched against the great generals of that fighting era. On the sea
he sailed his own ship and was the captain of his own fleet, and
there he had no peer. He made laws in the days of peace and reigned
over a happy, prosperous land. In his old age misfortune in which
he had no share overwhelmed Denmark, but he was ever greatest in
adversity, and his courage saved the country from ruin. The great
did not love him overmuch; but to the plain people he was ever,
with all his failings, which were the failings of his day, a great,
appealing figure, and lives in their hearts, not merely in the dry
pages of musty books.
He was eleven years old when his father died, and until he came of
age the country was governed by a council of happily most able men
who, with his mother, gave him such a schooling as few kings have
had. He not only became proficient in the languages, living and
dead, and in mathematics which he put to such practical use that
he was among the greatest of architects and ship-builders; he was
the best all-round athlete among his fellows as well, and there was
some sense in the tradition that survives to this day that whoever
was touched by him in wrath did not live long, for he was very tall
with a big, strong body, and when he struck, he struck hard. He was
a dauntless sailor who knew as much about sailing a ship as any one
of his captains, and much more about building it. Danger appealed
to him always. When the spire on the great cathedral in Copenhagen
threatened to fall, he was the one who went up in it alone and gave
orders where and how to brace it.
As he grew, he sat in the council of state, learning kingcraft, and
showed there the hard-headed sense of fairness and justice that
went with him through life. He was hardly fourteen when the case
of three brothers of the powerful Friis family came before the
council. They had attacked another young nobleman in the street,
struck off one of his hands, and crippled the other. Because of
their influence, the council was for being lenient, atrocious as
the crime was. A fine was deemed sufficient. The young prince
asked if there were not some law covering the case with severer
punishment, and was told that in the province of Skaane there was
such a law that applied to serfs. But the assault had not been
committed in Skaane, and these were high noblemen.
“All the worse for them,” said the prince. “Is then a serf in
Skaane to have more rights under the law than a nobleman in the
rest of Denmark? Let the law for the serf be theirs.” And the
judgment stood.
He had barely attained his majority, when the young king was called
upon to judge between another great noble and a widow whom he sued
for 9000 daler, money he claimed to have lent to her husband. In
proof he laid before the judges two bonds bearing the signatures of
husband and wife. The widow denounced them as forgeries, but the
court decided that she must pay. She went straight to the King with
her story, assuring him that she had never heard of the debt. The
King sent for the bonds and upon close scrutiny discovered that one
of them was on paper bearing the water-mark of a mill that was not
built till two years after the date written in the bond. The noble
was arrested and the search of his house brought to light several
similar documents waiting their turn. He went to the scaffold. His
rank only aggravated his offence in the eyes of the King. No wonder
the fame of this judge spread quickly through the land.
A dozen contented years he reigned in peace, doing justice between
man and man at home. Then the curse of his house gripped him. In
two centuries, since the brief union between the three Scandinavian
kingdoms was broken by the secession of Sweden, only two of sixteen
kings in either country had gone to their rest without ripping
up the old feud. It was now Christian’s turn. The pretext was of
little account: there was always cause enough. Gustav Adolf, whose
father was then on the throne of Sweden, said in after years that
there was no one he had such hearty admiration for and whose friend
he would like so well to be as Christian IV: “The mischief is that
we are neighbors.” King Christian crossed over into Sweden and laid
siege to the strong fortress of Kalmar where he first saw actual
war and showed himself a doughty campaigner of intrepid courage.
It came near costing him his life when a cannoneer with whom he
had often talked on his rounds deserted to the enemy and picked
the King out as his especial target. Twice he killed an officer
attending upon him, but the King he never hit. It is almost a
pleasure to record that when he tried it again, in another fight,
Christian caught him and dealt with him as the traitor he was,
though the rough justice of those days is not pleasant to dwell on.
The besieged tried to create a diversion by sneaking into camp at
night and burying wax images of the King and his generals in the
earth, where they were afterwards found and spread consternation
through the army; for such things were believed to be wrought by
witchcraft and to bring bad luck to those whom they represented.
However, neither the real courage of the defenders, nor their
dallying with the black art, helped them any. King Christian
stormed the town at the head of his army and took it. The
burgomaster hid in the church, disguised as a priest, and pretended
to be shriving some women when the crash came, but it did not save
him. When the Swedish king came with a host twice the size of his
own, there was a battle royal, but Christian drove him off and laid
siege to the castle where dissension presently arose between the
garrison and its commander who was for surrendering. In the midst
of their noisy quarrel, King Christian was discovered standing upon
the wall, calmly looking on. He had climbed up alone on a rope
ladder which the sentinel let down at his bidding. At the sight
they gave it up and opened the gates, and the King wrote home,
proudly dating his letter from “our castle Kalmar.”
Its loss so angered the Swedish king who was old and sick, that he
challenged Christian to single combat, without armor. The letters
that passed between them were hardly kingly. King Christian wrote
that he had other things to do: “Better catch a doctor, old man,
and have your head-piece looked after.” Helpless anger killed Karl,
and Gustav Adolf, of whom the world was presently to hear, took the
command and the crown. After that Christian had a harder road to
hoe.
A foretaste of it came to him when he tried to surprise the
fortress of Gullberg near the present Götaborg. Its commander
was wounded early in the fight, but his wife who took his place
more than filled it. She and her women poured boiling lye upon
the attacking Danes until they lay “like scalded pigs” under the
walls. Their leader knew when he had enough and made off in haste,
with the lady commandant calling after him, “You were a little
unexpected for breakfast, but come back for dinner and we will
receive you properly.” She would not even let them take their
dead away. “Since God gave us luck to kill them,” she said, “we
will manage to bury them too.” They were very pious days after
their own fashion, and God was much on the lips of his servants.
Troubles rarely come singly. Soon after, King Christian met the
enemy unexpectedly and was so badly beaten that for the second time
he had to run for it, though he held out till nearly all his men
had fallen. His horse got mired in a swamp with the pursuers close
behind. The gay and wealthy Sir Christen Barnekow, who had been
last on the field, passed him there, and at once got down and gave
him his horse. It meant giving up his life, and when Sir Christen
could no longer follow the fleeing King he sat down on a rock with
the words, “I give the King my horse, the enemy my life, and God my
soul.” The rock is there yet and the country folk believe that the
red spots in the granite are Christen Barnekow’s blood which all
the years have not availed to wash out.
They tired of fighting at last and made it up. Sweden paid Denmark
a million daler; for the rest, things stayed as they had been
before. King Christian had shown himself no mean fighter, but the
senseless sacking and burning of town and country that was an ugly
part of those days’ warfare went against his grain, and he tried to
persuade the Swedes to agree to leave that out in future. Gustav
Adolf had not yet grown into the man he afterward became. “As to
the burning,” was his reply, “seeing that it is the usage of war,
and we enemies, why we will each have to do the best we can,” which
meant the worst. Had the two kings, who had much in common, got
together in the years of peace that followed, much misery might
have been saved Denmark, and a black page of history might read
very differently. For those were the days of the Thirty Years’ War,
in which together they might have dictated peace to harassed Europe.
Now King Christian’s ambition, his piety, for he was a sincerely
religious man, as well as his jealousy of his younger rival and of
the growing power of Sweden—so mixed are human motives—made him
yield to the entreaties of the hard-pressed Protestant princes to
take up alone their cause against the German Emperor. He had tried
for half a dozen years to make peace between them. At last he drew
the sword and went down to force it. After a year of fighting Tilly
and Wallenstein, the Emperor’s great generals, he met the former
in a decisive battle at Lutter-am-Baremberg. King Christian’s army
was beaten and put to rout. He himself fled bareheaded through the
forests of the Hartz Mountains, pursued by the enemy’s horsemen.
It was hardly necessary for the Emperor to make him promise as
the price of peace to keep out of German affairs thenceforth. His
allies had left him to fight it out alone. All their fine speeches
went for nothing when it came to the test, and King Christian rode
back to Denmark, a sadder and wiser man. It was left to Gustav
Adolf, after all, to teach the German generals the lesson they
needed.