The Thirty Years War

by C. V. Wedgwood

  But Axel Oxenstierna discouraged a too rapid conclusion of terms, not trusting his enemies. ‘The Bavarian duke’, he said, ‘is like the Wallensteiner . . . both smooth and false.’[162] Wallenstein too was against the treaty, confident now in his military superiority and knowing that the King’s alliances were beginning to fail. The regent of Württemberg was disaffected, the Elector of Brandenburg displeased at the conditions offered for his son’s marriage,[163] and the King could never feel sure of John George. While he remained trapped at Nuremberg, Wallenstein’s lieutenant, Holk, had invaded Saxony and was systematically devastating the country.[164]

  At Nuremberg the army, both man and beast, suffered horribly. A damp summer made the conditions worse,[165] and the shortage of food and fresh water increased the epidemic diseases always prevalent in the camp. Men and horses were dying with terrifying rapidity; the cavalry alone had diminished by nearly three-quarters.

  On September 18th the King decided to abandon the position at whatever risk. There were stories of a new peasants’ revolt in Austria and a rising of Stephen Ragoczy, Bethlen Gabor’s successor, in Transylvania.[166] Gustavus determined to march thither, for he knew that Wallenstein planned to join Holk in Saxony, and hoped that by moving south he would induce him to divide his forces.

  As his army marched away, Maximilian once again urged Wallenstein to attack, and once again the general disregarded him.[167] He had a more subtle plan. With the joint armies he intended to race for Saxony; thus either he would come upon John George and Arnim alone and force them to make terms, or he would draw Gustavus off from Austria. But Maximilian had had enough of Wallenstein’s plans, and he retired with the rags of his army sulkily to defend Bavaria.

  Annoyed, but still set on his original plan, Wallenstein turned north-eastwards, sending word to Holk and Pappenheim, who was on the Weser, to join him. Three armies thus converged upon John George at once. If Gustavus could have trusted the Elector and his general to fight to the last ditch, he might have continued his march on Vienna. But two months ago he had been informed that Arnim had an understanding with the enemy, and John George had spluttered in his cups that he was tired of the King of Sweden’s dangerous alliance.[168] In any case the Elector had not the martyr’s temperament; from Dresden he could see his people’s villages blazing to heaven—torches to light his drinking bouts, mocked the imperial soldiery[169]—and on October 9th he wrote imploring the King’s help.[170] Gustavus had not waited for the entreaty; he was already on his way.

  On October 22nd he was again in Nuremberg, and could not resist the temptation of turning aside to visit Wallenstein’s deserted encampment; all activity was long since silent, but he was sickened there to find the wounded, famished and untended, crawling among the bodies of dead men and beasts.[171] Later he saw the Chancellor Oxenstierna and gave him full instructions for the administration and taxation of the occupied country against the winter. On November 2nd at Arnstadt, he found Bernard of Saxe-Weimar and his troops. There, also, before marching on Leipzig, which had already surrendered to Holk, he wrote to his Chancellor. The winter was coming on, the third winter in Germany, and Gustavus intended to use it to establish his position by law as well as arms. Oxenstierna was to call a meeting of the four Circles occupied by Swedish troops, those of the Upper and Lower Rhine, of Swabia and Franconia, in order to give the Corpus Evangelicorum legal existence and establish the King as its first president.[172]

  On November 6th, Wallenstein and Pappenheim joined forces. Gustavus hesitated; he had little more than sixteen thousand men, his cavalry were very weak, and John George showed no sign of joining him. Four thousand horses had been left dead on the march alone.[173] The imperialists, on the other hand, had twenty-six thousand men. But on the 15th some Croatian prisoners told the King that Wallenstein, apparently thinking the Swedes dared not risk a battle, had sent Pappenheim on to Halle.[174] The occasion could not be lost; hastening forward, Gustavus surprised the imperialists, late in the evening, entrenched in the little town of Lützen, fifteen miles west of Leipzig. It was too dark to try the issue, and Wallenstein, forewarned in the late afternoon of the King’s advance, sent a scout pelting after Pappenheim to bring him back.[175] All that night his men worked, setting up batteries in the orchards which flanked the walls of the town, and throwing up hasty earth-works, moving out to their lines by torchlight in the small hours,[176] while Gustavus and his men slept about a mile south-east of Lützen, under the sky in the cold November fields.[177]

  The morning of November 16th broke fair, but a thick mist gathered over the flat, sodden country at about ten o’clock and continued for the rest of the day.[178] The ground was perfectly flat, the fields stretching away, almost without cover save for an occasional straggling hedge, on either side of the main road as far as eye could see. The road ran roughly east and west; north of it there was a ditch, and a little farther back three windmills. Between the ditch and the windmills, having Lützen on his right, Wallenstein drew up his forces, placing a line of musketeers in the ditch, whence they could shoot upwards at the bellies of the Swedish horses when they charged. He did not depart from the time-honoured formation, placing his cavalry on the wings, his infantry in the centre, his artillery in front of the infantry. Owing to Pappenheim’s absence he had only between twelve and fifteen thousand men, very ill-armed he subsequently asserted,[179] and to improve the appearance of his reduced forces he herded the camp followers out of the town, grouped them together loosely in squares, the men in front, provided them with a few standards and hoped that in the grey distance the Swedes would take them for a powerful reserve.

  The King drew up his troops on the south side of the road, having the town of Lützen a little in front of him and to the left. His right wing was against a small plantation of trees. He formed his troops once again in the manner which had been so successful at Breitenfeld, he himself commanding on the right wing and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar on the left; but the disposition of the battle, unlike Breitenfeld, was entirely in his hands, and both left and right wings were drawn up in the Swedish fashion. On the farther side of the road Holk faced the King, Wallenstein himself was opposite Saxe-Weimar.[180]

  As was his custom, the King prayed before the whole army, asking the blessing of God on the Protestant Cause. This was at about eight o’clock and the firing had already begun, but not for two hours did either army move. The Swedes once or twice attempted a feint attack to draw Wallenstein out of his position, but in vain, and at last at ten o’clock, just as the mist was coming up, the King on the right wing charged Holk’s cavalry. A sharp contest ensued at the ditch, from which the musketeers were eventually ousted, and in a desperate struggle the imperial horse were driven back on the guns, while the terrified ‘reserves’ of camp-followers broke and fled, leaving the baggage unattended and the tracehorses unsecured.[181] But on the farther side of the battle Wallenstein had set fire to Lützen, and the smoke blew across Bernard’s lines. Under cover of this the Croatian cavalry on this wing charged against Bernard’s half-blinded men. His troops were bolder than the Saxons had been at Breitenfeld, and stood their ground until the King came galloping across to encourage them.

  From that moment the mist and smoke, which cut off one side of the conflict from the other and divided troop from troop, seemed to blow across the very memories of the observers. It may have been at noon, or not until evening, that Pappenheim appeared on Wallenstein’s left wing and at once charged the flank of the victorious Swedes, forcing them back over the ditch which they had so hardly won. At some moment in this attack Pappenheim received that bullet in the lung which sent him, choking blood, to die in his coach on the Leipzig road. Towards midday the King of Sweden’s horse, riderless and wild with pain from a neck-wound, was seen plunging across the field. The imperialists shouted that Gustavus was dead. Octavio Piccolomini swore he had seen him stretched on the ground. Holk spread the news. But on the Swedish side the officers denied it, desperate lest it might be true. It could not
be denied for ever, for the King was no longer leading them, and to his army this had but one meaning.

  Bernard of Saxe-Weimar took command. On the right wing his troops swept forward once again, driving Wallenstein’s men back on to flaming Lützen; wheeling, they then charged the centre and seized the batteries at the windmills. On the right, frantic at their King’s death, the soldiers cleared the long-contested ditch once again, and put Pappenheim’s fierce but unreliable cavalry to flight. Three horses were shot under Octavio Piccolomini as he tried to rally them; seven times he was grazed by bullets, but never by word or sign let it be known. At nightfall Wallenstein, crippled with gout, raging with pain and mortification, drew off under cover of darkness to Halle. Exhausted, his men fell and slept by the way, while all night long he sent scouts to find out who was left that could fight. An English captain, roused from the sleep of exhaustion in a ditch, his head propped against his horse’s flank, indicated three officers of his company lying close by, but thought there were no other survivors. If there were, he had lost them.[182] Tracehorses were gone, so that the baggage and artillery had to be left, and Holk appears to have been the only man in the imperial army who regarded the engagement as a victory.[183]

  In the dank November darkness the Swedes were seeking the body of their King. They found him at last; he had been shot between the ear and the right eye, the wound that killed him, but he had other wounds, a dagger thrust and a shot in the side, two bullets in the arm and one—which caused great rumour of treachery—in the back. He lay on what had been the enemy’s side of the contested ditch, naked, under a heap of dead. That night, over his whole camp, among Swedes and Germans, Scots, English, Irish, Poles, French, and Dutch, among mercenaries as among his subjects, there hung the silence of unutterable sorrow.[184]

  8.

  ‘He thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him,’ Sir Thomas Roe had said, and in that last year of crowning victories all Europe had conspired to think the same. Friends and enemies alike could not conceive that the King should be dead. The first news of Lützen on the Protestant side concealed the shattering fact, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar deliberately reported only that the King was wounded.[185] Not until November 21st did Oxenstierna know the truth, and for the first time in his life he passed the long night sleepless, grappling with his sorrow.[186] The Queen heard on her way back to Sweden and gave way to a storm of grief. At Vienna, Ferdinand received the news with tears of mingled relief and sorrow,[187] for the quality of the Swedish King was of a kind that he could not but admire; he had done greatly for the Protestants what Ferdinand had tried and failed to do for the Catholics. At Strasbourg men and women who had never set eyes on his face, living, sobbed aloud at the service for his death.[188] They carried the body to Weissenfels, the King going in death, as in life, in the midst of his army between the foot and the horse.[189]

  Whatever opinion men might have of the King’s motives, his greatness no one could or did deny. But after the first shock his death came as a relief rather than a loss to the majority of his allies. There were even rumours that he had been shot down by one of his own party or by Richelieu’s orders. So signal had been his good fortune until this time, that men could not believe he had met the common fate of a soldier in the field. Others saw the direct intervention of God, saying that the Almighty had laid his finger upon him in the critical moment at which he would have ceased to be the liberator and become the conqueror of Germany.

  His German allies might wonder if this were true. Had he ever, after all, been anything but a conqueror? He had rolled back the tide of Ferdinand’s advance when no one else could, but the price he had asked was a high one. Playing for safety, setting the precarious peace of their land above the freedom of their faith, the Germans had for the most part yielded to imperial tyranny without forcible protest. It was weak, it was cowardly, it was unconstructive, but of the two evils it was their choice, and whatever contempt the hardy Swede might feel for those who dared not defend their religion, he might at least have admitted that they had a better right to choose than he. He had made unwilling heroes and unwilling victims—the Electors of Brandenburg and Saxony, the thirty thousand people of Magdeburg. He had given the Protestant Cause once again a tradition to fight for; he had made bells ring from end to end of Germany, hearts overflow with gratitude, and eyes with tears. But when the bells had clanged into silence and the Golden King had passed on his way, was there much cause left for rejoicing?

  The Saxons had paid for the Breitenfeld campaign by a dismal loss in population through famine, plague and blight.[190] At Magdeburg, Pappenheim had burnt what was left of the town when he evacuated it in the spring of 1632, and the Swedish troops who came in shared the want of the few survivors living in cellars and dug-outs among the ruins.[191] The Alsatian town of Hagenau, three times occupied in eighteen months, lamented: ‘We have had blue-coats and red-coats and now come the yellow-coats. God have pity on us.’[192] At Frankfort-on-the-Oder after a fighting capture which filled the streets with the imperialist dead, pestilence broke out to demoralize the civilian inhabitants.[193] At Stettin and Spandau the Swedes had left the plague, in the towns of Durlach and Lorch, at Würzburg and in the whole province of Württemberg; at Bamberg the bodies lay unburied in the streets, and on both banks of the Rhine there was famine, so that the peasants from miles around came to Mainz to work on the fortifications for a little bread.[194] The harvest of 1632 promised well, but in Bavaria and Swabia the passing troops trampled it down: in Bavaria there was neither corn left to grind nor seed to sow for the year to come; plague and famine wiped out whole villages, mad dogs attacked their masters, and the authorities posted men with guns to shoot down the raving victims before they could contaminate their fellows; hungry wolves abandoned the woods and mountains to roam through the deserted hamlets, devouring the dying and the dead.[195] At Nuremberg, shut in between Wallenstein and the Swedes and crowded with fugitives, they had buried close upon a hundred daily.[196]

  The King’s discipline had broken down as his army grew[197] and the nucleus of picked soldiers lessened in proportion; but apart from bad discipline, he plundered as no man had plundered before in that conflict, because he plundered systematically to destroy the resources of his enemies. ‘Your Grace would not recognize our poor Bavaria’, wrote Maximilian to his brother. Villages and convents had gone up in flames, priests, monks and burghers had been tortured and killed at Fuerstenfeld, at Diessen, at Benediktbeuern, in the Ettal.[198]

  Moreover, the distress of the defeated imperial soldiery found an outlet in increased brutality; Maximilian’s merciless command of no quarter for the stragglers or wounded of the Swedish army[199] was interpreted to cover all who resisted. When the imperialists took Kempten they shot down the burgomaster, set fire to seventy houses, drove some of the inhabitants into the river and slaughtered man, woman and child who came in their way, so that the city became the Magdeburg of the south.[200] At Hagenau plague and want made the soldiers prey even upon each other, and the healthy would plunder their stricken comrades and throw them out, naked, to die in the streets.[201]

  However pusillanimous they may have seemed to Gustavus, the German princes did not lament without cause. ‘It is hard’, wrote the wife of George of Hesse-Darmstadt, ‘to hand over the best and most valuable places in our land to a foreign King on so new a friendship, to sacrifice thereby all our undefended country, to make enemies of the neighbours with whom we have lived at peace for countless years, to bring down the Emperor’s heavy hand and displeasure upon us, to give help to others but utterly to destroy ourselves.’[202] It was indeed hard, but it was what the King of Sweden demanded.

  ‘Should the war last longer’, wrote Arnim, ‘the Empire will be utterly destroyed. He who has an upright, honest mind must be touched to the heart: when he sees the Empire so afflicted he must yearn after peace. So it is with me. Therefore I have let no opportunity escape . . . but have urged peace both on friend and foe . . . our beloved Germany will f
all a prey to foreign people and be a pitiable example to all the world.’[203] This was not the King of Sweden’s view, but it was a more reasonable one than he would ever admit.

  The apologists of Gustavus, if such a word may be used for the admirers of an accepted hero of European history, argue that he would have made a strong and lasting peace had he lived. The case must stand on private conviction and not on evidence; he had offered terms to Wallenstein, but they were terms not likely to be accepted while the imperialists had an army in the field. He had failed to make peace at Ferdinand’s most defenceless moment in the winter of 1631–2. Gustavus was one of those born conquerors to whom peace is an ideal state, always for excellent reasons unattainable. He had never in his life made any conclusion to a war that was more than an armistice and it was hardly likely that he had changed his character in the course of his last year on earth. Age might have mellowed him but he was thirty-seven when he was killed, and Europe would have had long to wait. Nor is age so infallible a cure for the lust which stirs the blood of a fighter. Wallenstein tired at the end, but Wallenstein was ill as well as ageing, and his temperament had always been more that of the organizer than of the conqueror. History has too many records of aged warriors for the mellowing of Gustavus to seem an altogether probable theory.

  At some time during his march across Germany, the King had drawn up the so-called Norma Futurarum Actionum, a scheme for the complete reorganization of the Empire, excellent in theory but unobtainable in practice even after victory. All along, his settlement depended on the one element on which he could never count, the agreement of the German rulers. Because he had no true support among these, he never considered modifying his policy. Compromise was not of his nature, and he did not realize that peace in Germany would be impossible without it.