fate. “I will avenge that on the Old Corporal (Tilly’s nickname),”
he cried, “if it costs my life.” Without further ado he forced the
two Electors to terms and joined the Saxon army to his own. On
September 7, 1631, fifteen months after he had landed in Germany,
he met Tilly face to face at Breitenfeld, a village just north
of Leipzig. The Emperor’s host in its brave show of silver and
plumes and gold, the plunder of many campaigns under its invincible
leader, looked with contempt upon the travel-worn Swedes in their
poor, soiled garb. The stolid Finns sat their mean but wiry little
horses very unlike Pappenheim’s dreaded Walloons, descendants of
the warlike Belgæ of Gaul who defied the Germans of old in the
forest of the Ardennes and joined Cæsar in his victorious march.
But Tilly himself was not deceived. He knew how far this enemy had
come and with what hardships cheerfully borne; how they had routed
the Russians, written laws for the Poles in their own land, and
overthrown armies and forts that barred their way. He would wait
for reënforcements; but his generals egged him on, said age had
made him timid and slow, and carried the day.
The King slept in an empty cart the night before the battle and
dreamed that he wrestled with Tilly and threw him, but that he tore
his breast with his teeth. When all was ready in the morning he
rode along the front and told his fusiliers not to shoot till they
saw the white in the enemy’s eyes, the horsemen not to dull their
swords by hacking the helmets of the Walloons: “Cut at their horses
and they will go down with them.” In the pause before the onset he
prayed with head uncovered and lowered sword, and his voice carried
to the farthest lines:
“Thou, God, in whose hands are victory and defeat, look graciously
upon thy servants. From distant lands and peaceful homes have we
come to battle for freedom, truth and thy gospel. Give us victory
for thy holy name’s sake, Amen!”
Tilly had expected the King to attack, but the fiery Pappenheim
upset his plans. The smoke of the guns drifted in the faces of the
Swedes and the King swung his army to the south to get the wind
right. In making the turn they had to cross a brook and this moment
Pappenheim chose for his charge. Like a thunderbolt his Walloons
fell upon them. The Swedish fire mowed them down like ripened grain
and checked their impetuous rush. They tried to turn the King’s
right and so outflank him; but the army turned with them and stood
like a rock. The extreme mobility of his forces was Gustav Adolf’s
great advantage in his campaigns. He revised the book of military
tactics up to date. The imperial troops were massed in solid
columns, after the old Spanish fashion, the impact of which was
hard to resist when they struck. The King’s, on the contrary, moved
in smaller bodies, quickly thrown upon the point of danger, and
his artillery was so distributed among them as to make every shot
tell on the compact body of the enemy. Whichever way Pappenheim
turned he found a firm front, bristling with guns, opposing him.
Seven times he threw himself upon the living wall; each time his
horsemen were flung back, their lines thinned and broken. The field
was strewn with their dead. Tilly, anxiously watching, threw up his
hands in despair. “This man will lose me honor and fame, and the
Emperor his lands,” he cried. The charge ended in wild flight, and
Tilly saw that he must himself attack, to turn the tide.
On the double-quick his columns of spearmen charged down the
heights, swept the Saxons from the field, and fell upon the Swedish
left. The shock was tremendous. General Gustav Horn gave back to
let his second line come up, and held the ground stubbornly against
fearful odds. Word was brought the King of his danger. With the
right wing that had crushed Pappenheim he hurried to the rescue.
In the heat of the fight the armies had changed position, and
the Swedes found themselves climbing the hill upon which Tilly’s
artillery was posted. Seeing this, the King made one of the rapid
movements that more than once won him the day. Raising the cry,
“Remember Magdeburg!” he carried the position with his Finns by a
sudden overwhelming assault, and turned the guns upon the dense
masses of the enemy fighting below.
In vain they stormed the heights. Both wings and the centre closed
in upon them, and the day was lost. Tilly fled, wounded, and
narrowly escaped capture. A captain in the Swedish army, who was
called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels
hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol. A staff
officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief. Twilight
fell upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead,
two-thirds of them the flower of the Emperor’s army. Blood-stained
and smoke-begrimed, Gustav Adolf and his men knelt on the field and
thanked God for the victory.
Had the King’s friend and adviser, Axel Oxenstjerna, been with him
he might have marched upon Vienna then, leaving the Protestant
Estates to settle their own affairs, and very likely have ended the
war. Gustav Adolf thought of Tilly who would return with another
army. Oxenstjerna saw farther, weighing things upon the scales of
the diplomatist.
“How think you we would fare,” asked the King once, when the
chancellor saw obstacles in their way which he would brush aside,
“if my fire did not thaw the chill in you?”
“But for my chill cooling your Majesty’s fire,” was his friend’s
retort, “you would have long since been burned up.” The King
laughed and owned that he was right.
Instead of bearding the Emperor in his capital he turned toward the
Rhine where millions of Protestants were praying for his coming and
where his army might find rest and abundance. The cathedral city
of Wuerzburg he took by storm. The bishop who ruled it fled at his
approach, but the full treasury of the Jesuits fell into his hands.
The Madonna of beaten gold and the twelve solid silver apostles,
famous throughout Europe, were sent to the mint and coined into
money to pay his army. In the cellar they found chests filled with
ducats. The bottom fell out of one as they carried it up and the
gold rolled out on the pavement. The soldiers swarmed to pick it
up, but a good many coins stuck to their pockets. The King saw it
and laughed: “Since you have them, boys, keep them.” The dead were
still lying in the castle yard after the siege, a number of monks
among them. The color of some of them seemed high for corpses.
“Arise from the dead,” he said waggishly, “no one will hurt you,”
and the frightened monks got upon their feet and scampered away.
Frankfort opened its gates to his victorious host and Nürnberg
received him as a heaven-sent liberator. But Tilly was in the field
with a fresh army, burning to avenge Breitenfeld. He had surprised
General Horn at Bamberg and beaten him. At the approach of the King
he camped where the river Lech joins the Danube, awaiting attack.
There was but one place to cross to get at him, and right there he
stood. The king seized Donauworth and Ulm, and under cover of the
fire of seventy guns threw a bridge across the Lech. Three hundred
Finns carrying picks and spades ran across the shaky planks upon
which the fire of Tilly’s whole artillery park was concentrated.
Once across, they burrowed in the ground like moles and, with
bullets raining upon them, threw up earthworks for shelter. Squad
after squad of volunteers followed. Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar
swam his horsemen across the river farther up-stream and took the
Bavarian troops in the flank, beating them back far enough to let
him join the Finns at the landing. The King himself was directing
the artillery on the other shore, aiming the guns with his own
hand. The Walloons, Tilly’s last hope, charged, but broke under the
withering fire. In desperation the old field-marshal seized the
standard and himself led the forlorn hope. Half-way to the bridge
he fell, one leg shattered by a cannon-ball, and panic seized his
men. The imperialists fled in the night, carrying their wounded
leader. He died on the march soon after. Men said of him that he
had served his master well.
The snow-king had not melted in the south. He was master of the
Roman empire from the Baltic to the Alps. The way to Austria and
Italy lay open before him. Protestant princes crowded to do him
homage, offering him the imperial crown. But Gustav Adolf did
not lose his head. Toward the humbled Catholics he showed only
forbearance and toleration. In Munich he visited the college of
the Jesuits, and spoke long with the rector in the Latin tongue,
assuring him of their safety as long as they kept from politics and
plotting. The armory in that city was known to be the best stocked
in all Europe and the King’s surprise was great when he found
gun-carriages in plenty, but not a single cannon. Looking about
him, he saw evidence that the floor had been hastily relaid and
remembered the “dead” monks at Würzburg. He had it taken up and a
dark vault appeared. The King looked into it.
“Arise!” he called out, “and come to judgment,” and amid shouts of
laughter willing hands brought out a hundred and forty good guns,
welcome reënforcements.
The ignorant Bavarian peasants had been told that the King was
the very anti-Christ, come to harass the world for its sins, and
carried on a cruel guerilla warfare upon his army. They waylaid the
Swedes by night on their foraging trips and maimed and murdered
those they caught with fiendish tortures. The bitterest anger
filled Gustav Adolf’s soul when upon his entry into Landshut the
burgomaster knelt at his stirrup asking mercy for his city.
“Pray not to me,” he said harshly, “but to God for yourself and for
your people, for in truth you have need.”
For once thoughts of vengeance seemed to fill his soul. “No, no!”
he thundered when the frightened burgomaster pleaded that his
townsmen should not be held accountable for the cruelty of the
country folk, “you are beasts, not men, and deserve to be wiped
from the earth with fire and sword.” From out the multitude there
came a warning voice: “Will the King now abandon the path of mercy
for the way of vengeance and visit his wrath upon these innocent
people?” No one saw the speaker. The day was oppressively hot
and the King came near fainting in the saddle. As he rode out of
the city toward the camp, a bolt of lightning struck the ground
beside him and a mighty crash of thunder rolled overhead. Pale
and thoughtful, he rode on. But Landshut was spared. That evening
General Horn brought the anxious citizens the King’s promise of
pardon.
A few weeks later tidings reached Gustav Adolf that Wallenstein
and the Elector of Bavaria were marching to effect a junction
at Nürnberg. If they took the city, his line of communication
was cut and his army threatened. Wallenstein, who was a traitor,
had been in disgrace; but he was a great general and in his dire
need Emperor Ferdinand had no one else to turn to. So he took him
back on his own terms, and in the spring he had an army of forty
thousand veterans in the field. This was the host he was leading
against Nürnberg. But the King got there first and intrenched
himself so strongly that there was no ousting him. Wallenstein
followed suit and for eleven weeks the enemies eyed one another
from their “lagers,” neither willing to risk an attack. In the
end Gustav Adolf tried, but even his Finns could not take the
impregnable heights the enemy held. At last he went away with
colors flying and bands playing, right under the enemy’s walls, in
the hope of tempting him out. But he never stirred.
When Wallenstein was sure he had gone, he burned his camp and
turned toward Saxony to punish the Elector for joining the Swedes.
A wail of anguish went up from that unhappy land and the King heard
it clear across the country. By forced marches he hurried to the
rescue of his ally, picking up Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar on the way.
At Naumburg the people crowded about him and sought to kiss or even
to touch his garments. The King looked sadly at them. “They put
their trust in me, poor weak mortal, as if I were the Almighty.
It may be that He will punish their folly soon upon the object
of their senseless idolatry.” He had come to stay, but when he
learned that Wallenstein had sent Pappenheim away to the west, thus
weakening his army, and was going into winter quarters at Lützen,
near Leipzig, a half-day’s march from the memorable Breitenfeld, he
broke camp at once and hastened to attack him. Starting early, his
army reached Lützen at nightfall on November 15, 1632.
Wallenstein believed the campaign was over for that year and the
Swedes in winter quarters, and was taken completely by surprise.
Had the King given battle that night, he would have wiped the enemy
out. Two things, in themselves of little account, delayed him: a
small brook that crossed his path, and the freshly plowed fields.
His men were tired after the long march and he decided to let them
rest. It was Wallenstein’s chance. Overnight he posted his army
north of the highway that leads from Lützen to Leipzig, dug deep
the ditches that enclosed it, and made breastworks of the dirt.
Sunrise found sheltered behind them twenty-seven thousand seasoned
veterans to whom Gustav Adolf could oppose but twenty thousand; but
he had more guns and they were better served.
As the day broke the Swedish army, drawn up in battle array,
intoned Luther’s hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God,” and cheered
the King. He wore a leathern doublet and a gray mantle. To the
pleadings of his officers that he put on armor he replied only,
“God is my armor.” “To-day,” he cried as he rode along the lines,
“will end all our hardships.” He himself took command of the right
wing, the gallant Duke Bernhard of the left. As at Breitenfeld, the
rallying cry was, “God with us!”
The King hoped to crush his enemy utterly, and the whole line
attacked at once with great fury. From the start victory leaned
toward the Swedish army. Then suddenly in the wild tumult of
battle a heavy fog settled upon the field. What followed was all
confusion. No one knows the rights of it to this day. The King led
his famous yellow and blue regiments against the enemy’s left.
“The black fellows there,” he shouted, pointing to the Emperor’s
cuirassiers in their black armor, “attack them!” Just then an
adjutant reported that his infantry was hard-pressed. “Follow me,”
he commanded, and, clapping spurs to his horse, set off at full
speed for the threatened quarter. In the fog he lost his way and
ran into the cuirassiers. His two attendants were shot down and a
bullet crushed the King’s right arm. He tried to hide the fact that
he was wounded, but pain and loss of blood made him faint and he
asked the Duke of Lauenburg who rode with him to help him out of
the crush. At that moment a fresh troop of horsemen bore down upon
them and their leader, Moritz von Falkenberg, shot the King through
the body with the exultant cry, “You I have long sought!” The words
had hardly left his lips when he fell with a bullet through his
head.
The King swayed in the saddle and lost the reins. “Save yourself,”
he whispered to the Duke, “I am done for.” The Duke put his arm
around him to support him, but the cuirassiers surged against them
and tore them apart. The King’s horse was shot in the neck and
threw its rider. Awhile he hung by the stirrup and was dragged
over the trampled field. Then the horse shook itself free and ran
through the lines, spreading the tidings of the King’s fall afar.
A German page, Leubelfing, a lad of eighteen, was alone with the
King. He sprang from his horse and tried to help him into the
saddle but had not the strength to do it. Gustav Adolf was stout
and very heavy. While he was trying to lift him some Croats rode up
and demanded the name of the wounded man. The page held his tongue,
and they ran him through. Gustav Adolf, to save him, said that
he was the King.[12] At that they shot him through the head, and
showered blows upon him. When the body was found in the night it
was naked. They had robbed and stripped him.
The King was dead. Through the Swedish ranks Duke Bernhard shouted
the tidings. “Who now cares to live? Forward, to avenge his death!”
With the blind fury of the Berserkers of old the Swedes cleared
the ditches, stormed the breastworks, and drove the foe in a panic
before them. The Duke’s arm was broken by a bullet. He hardly knew
it. With his regiment he rode down the crew of one of the enemy’s
batteries and swept on. In the midst of it all a cry resounded over
the plain that made the runaways halt and turn back.
“Pappenheim! Pappenheim is here!”
He had come with his Walloons in answer to the general’s summons.
“Where is the King?” he asked, and they pointed to the Finnish
brigade. With a mighty crash the two hosts that had met so often
before came together. Wallenstein mustered his scattered forces and
the King’s army was attacked from three sides at once. The yellow
brigade fell where it stood almost to the last man. The blue fared
little better. Slowly the Swedish infantry gave back. The battle
seemed lost.
But the tide turned once more. In the hottest fight Pappenheim
fell, pierced by three bullets. The “man of a hundred scars”
died, exulting that the King whom he hated had gone before. With
his death the Emperor’s men lost heart. The Swedes charged again
and again with unabated fury. Night closed in with Wallenstein’s
centre still unbroken; but he had lost all his guns. Under cover
of the darkness he made his escape. The King’s army camped upon
the battle-field. The carnage had been fearful; nine thousand were
slain. It was Wallenstein’s last fight. With the remnants of his
army he retreated to Bohemia, sick and sore, and spent his last
days there plotting against his master. He died by an assassin’s
hand.
The cathedrals of Vienna, Brussels, and Madrid rang with joyful
Te Deums at the news of the King’s death. The Spanish capital
celebrated the “triumph” with twelve days of bull-fighting. Emperor
Ferdinand was better than his day; he wept at the sight of the
King’s blood-stained jacket. The Protestant world trembled; its
hope and strength were gone. But the Swedish people, wiping away
their tears, resolved stoutly to carry on Gustav Adolf’s work. The
men he had trained led his armies to victory on yet many a stricken
field. Peace came at length to Europe; the last religious war had
been fought and won. Freedom of worship, liberty of conscience,
were bought at the cost of the kingliest head that ever wore a
crown. The great ruler’s life-work was done.
Gustav Adolf was in his thirty-eighth year when he fell. Of stature
he was tall and stout, a fair-haired, blue-eyed giant, stern in
war, gentle in the friendships of peace. He was a born ruler of
men. Though he was away fighting in foreign lands all the years of
his reign, he kept a firm grasp on the home affairs of his kingdom.
One traces his hand everywhere, ordering, shaping, finding ways, or
making them where there was none. The valuable mines of Sweden were
ill managed. The metal was exported in coarse pigs to Germany for
very little, worked up there, and resold to Sweden at the highest
price. He created a Board of Mines, established smelteries, and the
day came when, instead of going abroad for its munitions of war,
Sweden had for its customers half Europe. Like Christian of Denmark
with whom he disagreed, he encouraged industries and greatly
furthered trade and commerce. He built highways and canals, and he
did not forget the cause of instruction. Upon the university at
Upsala he bestowed his entire personal patrimony of three hundred
and thirteen farms as a free gift. His people honor him with cause
as the real founder of the Swedish system of education.
The master he was always. Sweden had, on one hand, a powerful,
able nobility; on the other, a strong, independent peasantry,—a
combination full of pitfalls for a weak ruler, but with equal
promise of great things under the master hand. His father had cowed
the stubborn nobles with the headsman’s axe. Gustav Adolf drew
them to him and imbued them with his own spirit. He found them a
contentious party within the state; he left them its strongest
props in the conduct of public affairs. Nor was it always with
persuasion he worked. His reward for the unjust judge has been
quoted. When the council failed to send him supplies in Germany,
pleading failure of crops as their excuse, he wrote back: “You
speak of the high prices of corn. Probably they are high because
those who have it want to profit by the need of others.” And he set
a new chief over the finances. On the other hand, he gave shape
to the relations between king and people. The Riksdag held its
sessions, but the laws that ruled it were so vague that it was no
unusual thing for men who were not members at all to attend and
join in the debates. Gustav Adolf put an abrupt end to “a state
of things that exposed Sweden to the contempt of the nations.”
As he ordered it, the initiative remained with the crown; it was
the right of the Riksdag to complain and discuss; of the King to
“choose the best” after hearing all sides.
As a young prince, Gustav Adolf fell deeply in love with Ebba
Brahe, the beautiful daughter of one of Sweden’s most powerful
noblemen. The two had been play-mates and became lovers. But the
old queen frowned upon the match. He was the coming king, she was
a subject, and the queen managed, with the help of Oxenstjerna,
who was Gustav’s best friend all through his life, to make him
give up his love. “Then I will never marry,” he cried in a burst
of tempestuous grief. But when the queen had got Ebba Brahe safely
married to one of his father’s famous generals, he wedded the
lovely sister of the Elector of Brandenburg. She adored her royal
husband, but never took kindly to Sweden, and the people did not
like her. They clung to the great king’s early love, and to this
day they linger before the picture of the beautiful Ebba in the
Stockholm castle when they come from his grave in the Riddarholm
church, while they pass the queen’s by with hardly a glance. It is
recorded that Ebba made her husband a good and dutiful wife. If her
thoughts strayed at times to the old days and what might have been,
it is not strange. In one of those moods she wrote on a window-pane
in the castle:
I am happy in my lot,
And thanks I give to God.
The queen-mother saw it and wrote under it her own version:
You wouldn’t, but you must.
’Tis the lot of the dust.
Footnotes:
[12] This is the story as the page told it. He lived two days.
KING AND SAILOR, HEROES OF COPENHAGEN
Of all the foolish wars that were ever waged, it would seem that
the one declared by Denmark against Sweden in 1657 had the least
excuse. A century before, the two countries had fought through
eight bitter years over the momentous question whether Denmark
should carry in her shield the three lions that stood for the three
Scandinavian kingdoms, the Swedish one having set up for itself
in the dissolution of the union between them, and at the end of
the fight they were where they had started: each of them kept the
whole brood. But this war was without even that excuse. Denmark
was helplessly impoverished. Her trade was ruined; the nobles were
sucking the marrow of the country. Of the freehold farms that had
been its strength scarce five thousand were left in the land. It
could hardly pay its way in days of peace. Its strongholds lay in
ruins; it had neither arms, ammunition, nor officers. On its roster
of thirty thousand men for the national defence were carried the
dead and the yet unborn, while the Swedish army of tried veterans
had gone from victory to victory under a warlike king. To cap the
climax, Copenhagen had been harassed by pestilence that had killed
one-fifth of its fifty thousand people.
So ill matched were they when a stubborn king forced a war that
could end only in disaster. When one of his councillors advised
against the folly, he caned him and sent him into exile. Yet out of
the fiery trial this king came a hero; his queen, whose pride and
wasteful vanity[13] had done its full share in bringing the country
to the verge of ruin, became the idol of the nation. In the hour
of its peril she grew to the stature of a great woman who shared
danger and hardship with her people and by her example put hope and
courage into their hearts.