COMFORTS OF WAR.
Struck senseless by a piece of falling timber, as I have related, I
lay in a state of blessed unconsciousness of the horrors and of the
carnage around me; but I can still remember the gradual struggling
back to life again, and a partial relapse into insensibility--a
vibrating of the pendulum, as it were, between life and inanity,
while many a strange vision floated around me.
My home came before me, and the pleasant voices of other days were in
my ears, mingling with the hum of bees, and the rustling leaves of my
native forests. I wept with joy to find my feet again on the purple
heather--again on Scottish earth; but that joy was tinged with fear
and doubt, lest the vision would pass away; for the distant and the
present--the past and the future--were conflicting for place and
coherence in my mind. I beheld my own home, and the roof beneath
which my mother bore me into this world of sorrow; the morning sun
seemed to redden the walls of the old grey tower, that rose above the
woods of Scottish pine; its dun smoke was curling in the pure air of
the mountains. Then methought I was at sea in a small shallop, and I
felt the waters heaving beneath me. The Sutors of Cromartie, whose
ivied fronts of rock--the home of the sea-bird--guard the _Portus
Salutis_ of the ancients, rose before me, with their bases wreathed
in surf; mists came around me; the shore receded, and I felt myself
alone on the ocean. Farther and farther the boat went seaward, and
the shore diminished to a speck. I was feeble and unable to use hand
or voice, and I felt that the moment was approaching when I would
perish, and the waters close over me.
Then the current of the tide seemed to turn again; the boat was
wafted slowly towards the shore; emotions of joy and pain arose
within me; old voices came to my ear, and among them were the soft
tones of Ernestine. I strove to speak, but my tongue was feeble and
fettered; and I tried vainly to embrace her through the mist that
enveloped us.
Her voice became more distinct--the shore was very close then; the
visionary boat grounded; I felt her hands upon me, and awoke from a
stupor, to find myself in the military hospital of Eckernfiörd, with
Ernestine kneeling beside me, pale as death--pale as the dead
soldiers near us; but bathing my temples with some cool and aromatic
essence.
Now, I have no doubt that the imaginary shore from which I seemed to
recede, and again approached, was this world; and that in reality my
spirit hovered between time and eternity; for, as Doctor Pennicuik
informed me afterwards, the contusion on my head, notwithstanding my
bonnet of steel, was a very severe one, being upon the very place
where I was struck before.
The dead, half stripped, with eyes unclosed and glazed, and with
their coagulated blood forming black pools among the straw on which
they lay, were stretched at intervals between the wounded and dying.
One of the former was a muscular Highlander from the braes of
Lochaber, whose breast was gored by three pike wounds; another, close
by me also, was a handsome young chevalier of Montgomerie's French
musketeers, whose head had been partially fractured by a spirole
shot, and his brains were actually oozing over his eyes.
Father d'Eydel had taken off his masquerading doublet, tucked up his
shirt sleeves, and like a thoroughly good, but somewhat long-legged
and long-armed Samaritan, was dressing wounds and bruises, tying up
cuts and slashes, distributing food, refreshments, clean shirts, and
dry straw, with a celerity that made old Pennicuik of that Ilk, our
chirurgeon-general, declare him well worth a dozen of doctors.
A bed being found for me in an adjacent house, Ian and Phadrig Mhor
took me up between them, as if I had been a child, and conveyed me
there. Being anxious to have some conversation with Ernestine, I
would not permit them to undress me, but lay on the mattress in my
doublet and kilt, with a plaid spread over me; and after kind old
Sandy Pennicuik (afterwards chief _Medico_ to the Scottish army which
invaded England) had dressed my wound, the dear girl was permitted to
visit me for a half hour, during which she gave me a brief sketch of
her adventures; but, to avoid agitating me unnecessarily, concealed
for the present the mystery which involved the fate of Gabrielle.
The half hour during which we were permitted to be alone, passed like
a minute; and yet the excitement of it nearly put me into a fever.
In fact, Pennicuik fully expected that it would do so; but believed,
as he afterwards said, that if the interview was withheld, a fever
from vexation might prove more fatal. We embraced each other
repeatedly, with that full and impassioned tenderness which the
dangers we had both encountered and escaped, and the separation we
had endured, made more endearing to us than ever.
For a time we could do nothing but sigh and utter tender
appellations, which would seem very droll even to lovers if
transferred to paper; although, moreover, none but lovers could
understand them.
"Ah! these wars are frightful!" said poor Ernestine, when she had
related all her escapes, and heard all mine. "On one side, I tremble
for the loss of my father; on the other, for the loss of you."
"But weep no more, Ernestine; a happy time is in store for us all."
"For such scenes as these--for this town with its shattered walls and
corpse-strewn streets--you have left those quiet glens and silent
hills, of which I have heard my poor father often speak with so much
rapture and regret."
"Ay, Ernestine," said I; "but on those blue hills, where the mountain
bee sucks the honey from the purple heath, and the white butterfly
floats over the yellow broom bells; and in those green glens, where
the hirsels graze and the sheep bleat by the whimpling burn, or the
smoke of the sequestered cottage ascends through the summer
woods--the din of war is often heard, and the gleds and corbies are
summoned to a feast from the four winds of heaven. The cross of fire
gleams across the country, flung from hand to hand; the war-pipe
rings from the echoing rock; the beacon blazes on the muster-place,
and the clink of arms with the fierce slogan rise among the lonely
hills; tribe pours forth against tribe, with banners waving and
pibroch yelling; the heather is in flames--the flocks are seized--the
valley is strewn with dead--the cottage is sheeted with fire, and the
green sod drenched with the blood of the inmates; for the world never
saw quarrels more bitter than the hereditary feuds of our Scottish
clans; and while the human heart and the human mind are constituted
as they now are, there will be wars and crimes, the sack of cities,
and the rush of armies; for men are but men, Ernestine, all the world
over."
Three days we remained at Eckernfiörd, burying the dead, collecting
provisions, curing the wounded, or embarking them for Zealand.
Thanks to the skill of Dr. Pennicuik, and the sisterly attentions of
Ernestine, I was able to attend parade on the evening of the fourth
day; but I was so ghastly and pale, that one would have imagined all
the experiments of the college of physicians had been tried upon me.
So M'Alpine told me, on seeing me almost staggering at the head of my
company, and added, "On my honour, Rollo, I did not expect to see you
again after hearing that you were wounded; for I thought our Danish
doctors would soon do the rest."
"They are much obliged to you for your high opinion of their skill,
Angus," said I; "but I have been under the hands, not of a
Copenhagener, but a barber-chirurgeon, regularly graduated at King
James' College, in the good town of Edinburgh--hence my rapid
recovery, perhaps."
Ernestine had by this time informed me of the manner in which she
believed Gabrielle had been betrayed into the hands of Merodé; and
that she was only some ten or twelve miles distant from us, at
Fredricksort on the gulf of Kiel. I would have given the world--had
the world been mine--to have been permitted to march a wing of our
stout Highland blades to overhaul Merodé in his quarters; but King
Christian, who occupied, the house of the Herredsfoged of Wohlder,
had other objects in view; and the result of various councils of war,
which he, Ian, Count Montgomerie, the Baron Karl, and others, held
there, soon became developed.
I may mention that a party under Phadrig Mhor was despatched to the
cottage in the wood; but neither Bandolo nor dame Krümpel were found
there. After burning it to the ground, they fished the tarn for the
portmanteau, which I told them might be kept by the finders; and
Gillian M'Bane, who when at home had been an expert pearl-fisher,
after diving down once or twice, discovered its locality; the spoil
was soon hooked out, and generously distributed by him fairly and
equally among the privates of the regiment. It came to a handsome
sum per man, and many of our musketeers wore silver buttons and
silver-mounted sporrans to the end of their days.
Meanwhile the increasing preparations of the great Albrecht, Count of
Wallenstein, who had been created Duke of Friedland, Sagan, Glogau,
and Mechlenburg, General of the Baltic and Oceanic seas, compelled
Christian IV. to exert himself without delay.
Entering fully into the ambitious views of his master, the Emperor,
who, in making him Duke of Mechlenburg, had violated the laws and
trampled upon the rights of the Germanic confederation, this great
and warlike noble resolved to bend his whole energies to destroy the
political independence of Germany, exterminate the heresy of Luther,
and conquer Scandinavia. We heard that, for this gigantic project,
he was rapidly building and equipping a flotilla of ships and
gunboats at Rostock, Weimar, and other Hanse towns, which his Spanish
fleet had seized.
Lavishing by thousands florins and ducats, the spoil of ravished
kingdoms, on all sides among his reckless favourites and military
followers, he led an army a hundred thousand strong across the Elbe,
from whence it poured through Saxony and spread along the shores of
the Baltic sea. Terror, extortion, outrage, and contribution, levied
by beat of drum, at the sword's point, and the cannon's mouth,
amassed to Wallenstein in seven years, the vast sum of _sixty
thousand millions of dollars_!
Extolling his generosity, his soldiers adored him, while the ruined
burghers and rifled boors viewed him with horror and aversion. Thus,
amid wealth and rapine, conquest and desolation, splendour,
dissipation, and crime, the great army of the Empire flourished, and
rolled like a cloud of flame over Germany; while provinces became
deserts, and their people perished by famine, by disease, and by the
sword.