soon as he could turn around he marched his army against Denmark,
scattered the forces that opposed him, and before news of his
advance had reached Copenhagen knocked at the gate of Denmark
demanding “speech of brother Frederik in good Swedish.” A winter
of great severity had bridged the Baltic and the sounds of the
island kingdom. In two weeks he led his army, horse, foot, and
guns, over the frozen seas where hardly a wagon had dared cross
before. Great rifts yawned in their way, and whole companies were
swallowed up; his own sleigh sank in the deep, but nothing stopped
him. Danish emissaries came pleading for peace. He met them on the
way to the capital, surrounded by his Finnish horsemen, and gave
scant ear to their speeches while he drove on. Before the city he
halted and dictated a peace so humiliating that one of the Danish
commissioners exclaimed when he came to sign, “I wish I could not
write.” Perhaps the same wish troubled the conqueror’s ambitious
dreams. The peace was broken as swiftly as made. In five months he
was back before Frederik’s capital with his whole army, while a
Swedish fleet anchored in the roadstead outside. “What difference
does it make to you,” was the contemptuous taunt flung at the
anxious envoys who sought his camp, “whether the name of your king
is Karl or Frederik so long as you are safe?” He had come to make
an end of Denmark.
Copenhagen was almost without defences. The old earth walls mounted
only six guns, with breastworks scarce knee-high. In places King
Karl could have driven his sleigh into the heart of the city at the
head of his army. But for the second time he hesitated when a swift
blow would have won all—and lost. Overnight the Danish nation awoke
to a fight for its life. King and people, till then strangers, in
that hour became one. Frederik the Third met the craven counsel
that he fly to Norway with the proud answer, “I will die in my
nest, if need be, and my wife with me.” With a shout the burghers
swore to fight to the last man. The walls of the city rose as if
by magic. Nobles and mechanics, clergy and laborers, students,
professors and sailors worked side by side; high-born women wheeled
barrows. Every tree was cut down and made into palisades. The crops
ripening in the fields were gathered in haste and the cattle driven
in. The city had been provisioned for barely a week and garrisoned
by four hundred raw recruits. Sailors from the useless ships took
out their guns and mounted them in the redoubts. Peasants flocked
in and were armed with battle-axes, clubs, and boat-hooks when the
supply of muskets gave out. When Karl Gustav drew his lines tight
he faced six thousand determined men behind strong walls. The city
stood in a ring of blazing fires. Its defenders were burning down
the houses and woods beyond the moats to clear the way for their
gunners. The King watched the sight from his horse in silence. He
knew what it meant; he had fought in the Thirty Years’ War: “Now, I
vow, we shall have fighting,” was all he said.
It was not long in coming. On the second night the garrison made
a sortie and drove back the invaders, destroying their works with
great slaughter. Night after night, and sometimes in the broad day,
they returned to the charge, overwhelming the Swedes where least
expected, capturing their guns, their supplies, and their outposts.
Short of arms and ammunition, they took them in the enemy’s
lines. In one of these raids Karl Gustav himself was all but made
prisoner. A horseman had him by the shoulder, but he wrenched
himself loose and spurred his horse into the sea where a boat from
one of the ships rescued him. The defence took on something of the
fervor of religious frenzy. Twice a day services were held on the
walls of the city; within, the men who could not bear arms, and the
women, barricaded the streets with stones and iron chains for the
last fight, were it to come. In his place on the wall every burgher
had a hundred brickbats or stones piled up for ammunition, and by
night when the enemy rained red-hot shot upon the city, he fought
with a club or spear in one hand, a torch in the other.
[Illustration:
_From a painting by Lund_
THE SIEGE OF COPENHAGEN, 1658]
Eleven weeks the battle raged by night and by day. Then a Dutch
fleet forced its way through the blockade after a fight in which
it lost six ships and two admirals. It brought food, ammunition,
and troops. The joy in the city was great. All day the church bells
were rung, and the people hailed the Dutch as the saviours of the
nation. But when they, too, would thank God for the victory and
asked for the use of the University’s hall, they were refused. They
were followers of Calvin and their heresies must not be preached
in the place set apart for teaching the doctrines of the “pure
faith,” said the professors, who were Lutheran. It was the way of
the day. The Reformation had learned little from the bigotry of the
Inquisition. The Dutchmen had to be content with the court-house.
But the siege was not over. Another hard winter closed in with the
enemy at the door, burrowing hourly nearer the outworks, and food
and fire-wood grew scarcer day by day in the hard-pressed city.
When things were at the worst pass in February, the Swedes gathered
their hosts for a final assault. In the midnight hour they came on
with white shirts drawn over their uniforms to make it hard to tell
them from the snow. Karl Gustav himself led the storming party and
at last was in the way of “getting speech of brother Frederik,” for
the Danish King was as good as his word. He had said that he would
die in his nest, and time and again he had to be sternly reasoned
with to prevent him from exposing himself overmuch. Where the
danger was greatest he was, and beside him ever the queen, all her
frivolity gone and forgotten. She who had danced at the court fetes
and followed the hounds on the chase as if the world had no other
cares, became the very incarnation of the spirit of the bitter and
bloody struggle. All through that winter the royal couple lived in
a tent among their men, and when the alarm was sounded they were
first on foot to lead them. Now that the hour had come, they were
in the forefront of the fight.
Where the famous pleasure garden Tivoli now is, the strength of the
enemy was massed against the redoubts at the western gate. The name
of “Storm Street” tells yet of the doings of that night. King Karl
had promised to give over the captured town to be sacked by his
army three days and nights, and like hungry wolves they swarmed to
the attack, a mob of sailors and workmen with scaling ladders in
the van. The moats they crossed in spite of the gaps that had been
made in the ice to stop them, but the garrison had poured water
over the walls that froze as it ran, until they were like slippery
icebergs. A bird could have found no foothold on them. Showers of
rocks and junk and clubs fell upon the laddermen. Three times Karl
Gustav hurled his columns against them; as often they were driven
back, broken and beaten. A few gained a foothold on the walls only
to be dashed down to death. The burghers fought for their lives and
their homes. Their women carried boiling pitch and poured it over
the breastworks, and when they had no more, dragged great beams
and rolled them down upon the ladders, sweeping them clear of the
enemy. In the hottest fight Gunde Rosenkrantz, one of the king’s
councillors, trod on a fallen soldier and, looking into his face,
saw that it was his own son breathing his last. He bent over and
kissed him, and went on fighting.
In the early morning hour Karl Gustav gave the order to retreat.
The attack had failed. Many of his general officers were slain;
nearly half of his army was killed, disabled, or captured. Six
Swedish standards were taken by the Danes. The moats were filled
with the dead. The Swedes had “come in their shrouds.” The guns
of the city thundered out a triple salute of triumph and the
people sang Te Deums on the walls. Their hardships were not over.
Fifteen months yet the city was invested and the home of daily
privation; but their greatest peril was past. Copenhagen was saved,
and with it the nation; the people had found itself and its king.
That autumn a second Swedish army under the veteran Stenbock was
massacred in the island of Fyen, and Karl Gustav exclaimed when
the beaten general brought him the news, “Since the devil took the
sheep he might have taken the buck too.” He never got over it.
Three months later he lay dead, and the siege of Copenhagen was
raised in May, 1660. It had lasted twenty months.
* * * * *
Seven score years and one passed, and the morning of Holy
Thursday[14] saw a British fleet sailing slowly up the deep before
Copenhagen, the deck of every ship bristling with guns, their
crews at quarters, Lord Nelson’s signal to “close for action”
flying from the top of the flag-ship _Elephant_. Between the fleet
and the shore lay a line of dismantled hulks on which men with
steady eyes and stout hearts were guarding Denmark’s honor. Once
more it had been jeopardized by foolish counsel in high places.
Danish statesmen had trifled and temporized while England, facing
all Europe alone in the fight for her life, made ready to strike
a decisive blow against the Armed Neutrality that threatened
her supremacy on the sea. Once more the city had been caught
unprepared, defenceless, and once more its people rose as one man
to meet the danger. But it was too late. Outside, in the Sound, a
fleet as great as that led by Nelson waited, should he fail, to
finish his work. That was to destroy the Danish ships, if need
be to bombard the city and so detach Denmark from the coalition
of England’s foes. So she chose to consider such as were not her
declared friends.
Denmark had no fighting ships at home to pit against her. Her
sailors were away serving in the merchant marine. She had no
practised gunners, nothing but a huddle of dismantled vessels
in her navy-yard, most of them half-rotten hulks without masts.
Those that had standing rigging were even worse, for none of them
had sails and the falling spars in battle lumbered up the decks
and menaced the crew. But such as they were she made the most of
them. Eighteen hulks were hauled into the channel and moored head
and stern. Where they lay they could not be moved. Only the guns
on one side were therefore of use, while the enemy could turn and
manœuvre. They were manned by farm lads, mechanics, students,
enlisted in haste, not one of whom had ever smelt powder, and these
were matched against Nelson’s grim veterans. Even their commander,
J. Olfert Fischer, had not been under fire before that day, for
Denmark had had peace for eighty years. But his father had served
as a midshipman with Tordenskjold and the son did not flinch,
outnumbered though his force was, two to one, in men and guns.
The sun shone fair upon the blue waters as the great fleet of
thirty-odd fighting ships sailed up from the south. From the city’s
walls and towers a mighty multitude watched it come, unmindful of
peril from shot and shell; the Danish line was not half a mile
away. In the churches whose bells were still ringing when the first
gun was fired from the block-ship _Prövestenen_, the old men and
women prayed through the long day, for there were few homes in
Copenhagen that did not have son, brother, or friend fighting out
there. A single gun answered the challenge, now two and three at
once, then broadside crashed upon broadside with deafening roar.
When at length all was quiet a tremendous report shook the city. It
was the flag-ship _Dannebrog_ that blew up. She was on fire with
only three serviceable guns left when she struck her colors, but no
ship of her name might sail with an enemy’s prize crew on board,
and she did not.
The story of that bloody day has been told many times. Briton and
Dane hoist their flags on April 2 with equal right, for never was
challenge met with more dauntless valor. Lord Nelson owned that of
all the hundred and five battles he had fought this was hottest.
On the _Monarch_, which for hours was under the most galling fire
from the Danish ships, two hundred and twenty of the crew were
killed or wounded. “There was not a single man standing,” wrote a
young officer on board of her, “the whole way from the mainmast
forward, a district containing eight guns a side, some of which
were run out ready for firing, others lay dismounted, and others
remained as they were after recoiling.... I hastened down the fore
ladder to the lower deck and felt really relieved to find somebody
alive.” The slaughter on the Danish ships was even greater. More
than one-fifth of their entire strength of a little over five
thousand men were slain or wounded. Of the eighteen hulls they
lost thirteen, but only one were the British able to take home
with them. The rest were literally shot to pieces and were burned
where they lay. As one after another was silenced, those yet alive
on board spiked their last guns, if indeed there were any left
worth the trouble, threw their powder overboard and made, for the
shore. Twice the Danish Admiral abandoned his burning ship, the
last time taking up his post in the island battery Tre Kroner.
Each time one of the old hulls was crushed, a Briton pushed into
the hole made in the line and raked the remaining ones fore and
aft until their decks were like huge shambles. The block-ship
_Indfödsretten_ bore the concentrated fire of five frigates and
two smaller vessels throughout most of the battle. Her chief was
killed. When the news reached head-quarters on shore, Captain von
Schrödersee, an old naval officer who had been retired because of
ill health, volunteered to take his place. He was rowed out, but
as he came over the side of the ship a cannon-ball cut him in two.
_Prövestenen_, as it was the first to fire a shot, held out also
to the last. One-fourth of her crew lay dead, and her flag had
been shot away three times when the decks threatened to cave in
and Captain Lassen spiked his last guns and left the wreck to be
burned. All through the fight she was the target of ninety guns to
which she could oppose only twenty-nine of her own sixty.
Nelson had promised Admiral Parker to finish the fight in an hour.
When the battle had lasted three, Parker signalled to him to stop.
Every school-boy knows the story of how Lord Nelson put the glass
to his blind eye and, remarking that he could see no signal, kept
right on. In the end he had to resort to stratagem to force a truce
so that he might disentangle some of his ships that were drifting
into great danger in the narrow channel. The ruse succeeded. Crown
Prince Frederik, moved by compassion for the wounded whom Nelson
threatened to burn with the captured hulks if firing did not stop,
ordered hostilities to cease without consulting the Admiral of
the fleet, and the battle was over. Denmark’s honor was saved.
“Nothing,” wrote our own Captain Mahan, “could place a nation’s
warlike fame higher than did her great deeds that day.” All else
was lost; for “there had come upon Denmark one of those days of
judgment to which nations are liable who neglect in time of peace
to prepare for war.” It had been long coming, but it had overtaken
her at last and found all the bars down.
Alongside the _Dannebrog_ throughout her fight with Nelson’s
flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the _Elephant’s_ side
until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it
away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty
guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant. The name of
Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken.
Barely graduated from the Naval Academy, he was but eighteen when
the need of officers thrust the command of “Floating Battery No.
1” upon him. So gallantly did he acquit himself that Nelson took
notice of the young man who, every time a broadside crashed into
his ship or overhead, swung his cocked hat and led his men in a
lusty cheer. When after the battle he met the Crown Prince on
shore, the English commander asked to be introduced to his youthful
adversary. “You ought to make an admiral of him,” he said, and
Prince Frederik smiled: “If I were to make admirals of all my brave
officers, I should have no captains or lieutenants left.” When the
_Dannebrog_ drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes
cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke. Having
neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but
luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and
he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and
twenty-nine dead or wounded. The people received him as a conqueror
returning with victory. His youth and splendid valor aroused the
enthusiasm of the whole country. Wherever he went crowds flocked to
see him as the hero of “Holy Thursday’s Battle.” Especially was he
the young people’s idol. Sailor that he was, he was “the friend of
all pretty girls,” sang the poet of that day. He danced and made
merry with them, but the one of them all on whom his heart was set,
so runs the story, would have none of him, and sent him away to
foreign parts, a saddened lover.
Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain. “I did my duty,” he
wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of
Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on
the anniversary day of the battle, “and I have whole limbs which I
least expected. The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I
behaved well.” He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his
country’s enemy, and this time to the death.
In the summer of 1807, England was advised that by the treaty of
Tilsit Russia and Prussia had secretly joined Napoleon in his
purpose of finally crushing his mortal enemy by uniting all the
fleets of Europe against her, Denmark’s too, by compulsion if
persuasion failed. Without warning a British fleet swooped down
upon the unsuspecting nation, busy with the pursuits of peace,
bombarded and burned Copenhagen when the Commandant refused to
deliver the ships into the hands of the robbers as a “pledge of
peace,” and carried away ships, supplies, even the carpenters’
tools in the navy-yard. Nothing was spared. Seventy vessels,
sixteen of them ships of the line, fell into their hands, and
supplies that filled ninety-two transports beside. A single
fighting ship was left to Denmark of all her fleet,—the _Prince
Christian Frederik_ of sixty-eight guns. She happened to be away in
a Norwegian port and so escaped. Willemoes was on leave serving in
the Russian navy, but hastened home when news came of the burning
of Copenhagen, and found a berth under Captain Jessen.
On March 22, 1808, the _Prince Christian_, so she was popularly
called, hunting a British frigate that was making Danish waters
insecure, met in the Kattegat the _Stately_ and the _Nassau_,
each like herself of sixty-eight guns. The _Nassau_ was the old
_Holsteen_, renamed,—the single prize the victors had carried home
from the battle of Copenhagen. Three British frigates were working
up to join them. The coast of Seeland was near, but wind and tide
cut off escape to the Sound. Captain Jessen ran his ship in close
under the shore so that at the last he might beach her, and awaited
the enemy there.
The sun had set, but the night was clear when the fight between the
three ships began. With one on either side, hardly a pistol-shot
away, Jessen returned shot for shot, giving as good as they sent,
and with such success that at the end of an hour and a half the
Britons dropped astern to make repairs. The _Prince Christian_
drifted, helpless, with rudder shot to pieces, half a wreck,
rigging all gone, and a number of her guns demolished. But when the
enemy returned he was hailed with a cheer and a broadside, and the
fight was on once more. This time they were three to one; one of
the British frigates of forty-four guns had come up and joined in.
When the hull of the _Prince Christian_ was literally knocked to
pieces, and of her 576 men 69 lay dead and 137 wounded, including
the chief and all of his officers who were yet alive, Captain
Jessen determined as a last desperate chance to run one of his
opponents down and board her with what remained of his crew. But
his officers showed him that it was impossible; the ship could not
be manœuvred. There was a momentary lull in the fire and out of
the night came a cry, “Strike your colors!” The Danish reply was a
hurrah and a volley from all the standing guns. Three broad-sides
crashed into the doomed ship in quick succession, and the battle
was over. The _Prince Christian_ stood upon the shore, a wreck.
Young Willemoes was spared the grief of seeing the last Danish
man-of-war strike its flag. In the hottest of the fight, as he
jumped upon a gun the better to locate the enemy in the gloom, a
cannon-ball took off the top of his head. He fell into the arms
of a fellow officer with the muttered words, “Oh God! my head—my
country!” and was dead. In his report of the fight Captain Jessen
wrote against his name: “Fell in battle—honored as he is missed.”
They made his grave on shore with the fallen sailors, and as the
sea washed up other bodies they were buried with them.
The British captured the wreck, but they could only set fire to it
after removing the wounded. In the night it blew up where it stood.
That was the end of the last ship of Denmark’s proud navy.
Footnotes:
[13] It is of record that Queen Sofie Amalie used one-third of the
annual revenues of the country for her household. The menu of a
single “rustic dinner” of the court mentions 200 courses and nearly
as many kinds of preserves and dessert, served on gold, with wines
in corresponding abundance.
[14] The battle of Copenhagen was fought April 2, 1801.
THE TROOPER WHO WON A WAR ALONE
Jens Kofoed was the name of a trooper who served in the disastrous
war of Denmark against Sweden in Karl Gustav’s day. He came from
the island of Bornholm in the Baltic, where he tilled a farm in
days of peace. When his troop went into winter quarters, he got a
furlough to go home to receive the new baby that was expected about
Christmas. Most of his comrades were going home for the holidays,
and their captain made no objection. The Swedish king was fighting
in far-off Poland, and no one dreamed that he would come over the
ice with his army in the depth of winter to reckon with Denmark. So
Jens Kofoed took ship with the promise that he would be back in two
weeks. But they were to be two long weeks. They did not hear of him
again for many moons, and then strange tidings came of his doings.
Single-handed he had bearded the Swedish lion, and downed it in a
fair fight—strangest of all, almost without bloodshed.
The winter storms blew hard, and it was Christmas eve when he made
land, but he came in time to receive, not one new heir, but twin
baby girls. Then there were six of them, counting Jens and his
wife, and a merry Christmas they all had together. On Twelfth Night
the little ones were christened, and then the trooper bethought
himself of his promise to get back soon. The storms had ceased, but
worse had befallen; the sea was frozen over as far as eye reached,
and the island was cut off from all communication with the outer
world. There was nothing for it but to wait. It proved the longest
and hardest winter any one then living could remember. Easter was
at hand before the ice broke up, and let a fishing smack slip
over to Ystad, on the mainland. It came back with news that set
the whole island wondering. Peace had been made, and Denmark had
ceded all its ancient provinces east of the Öresund to Karl Gustav.
Ystad itself and Skaane, the province in which Jens Kofoed had been
campaigning, were Swedish now, and so was Bornholm. All unknown
to its people, the island had changed hands in the game of war
overnight, as it were. A Swedish garrison was coming over presently
to take charge.
When Jens Kofoed heard it, he sat down and thought things over.
If there was peace, his old captain had no use for him, that was
certain; but there might be need of him at home. What would happen
there, no one could tell. And there were the wife and children to
take care of. The upshot of it all was that he stayed. Only, to be
on the safe side, he got the Burgomaster and the Aldermen in his
home town, Hasle, to set it down in writing that he could not have
got back to his troop for all he might have tried. Kofoed, it will
be seen, was a man with a head on his shoulders, which was well,
for presently he had need of it.