People of the Book

by David Stacton

  The commander on the other side, Pappenheim, a good man, died that day too. He was driven out of the battlefield in a coach, holding his hand against his wound, saying, “Tell Wallenstein, giving him no title of Highness, Excellency, or General, that what I have received is enough for my purpose; but tell him, too, that I have preserved the Catholic religion and made the Emperor a free man.”

  Neither of these was among Wallenstein’s aims.

  As for Gustavus, dying, which he had not expected, turned out to be an easy matter, attended by loss but not by grief. His men were driven back. This was the Småland regiment. He was alone among aliens.

  He was not astonished. And in a way it was a blessing. It got things over with. He had gone down in a thrash of arms and legs and hoofs, in the full smell of leather and earth loam. It was a sting, a pause, a pain, and then the onsurge of the inevitable, like a slack tide through his veins. He felt it all going quietly away, without indignation, without remorse, without anything but its own dim, fast panic. Berserkers go this way, he supposed. There was a cold burn around each wound, but the abrasions of being dragged across the ground were what hurt most. It was inevitable now.

  At the last moment we strain to see. “My God, my God,” he said. It is the name of loss. Beautiful world, good-bye. He had never felt younger. It was not so bad, except that one would like to see them again just once more. In death lies our sole immortality.

  His last sensation was not a sight, or a memory, but a smell. A cordite smell. Like Ariadne’s thread, it meant a return from the Minotaur, and then it broke, like a spider web jostled on a winter evening, the granite walls went up and up, black water lapped at the landing stage, where am I, the light grew dimmer. Someone stepped up and shot him through the back of the head. This is called the coup de grâce, it seems a silly term; he was in no misery, for he had chosen his death. The inevitable is in no wise a painful or a miserable thing. On the contrary, it makes us feel much better. We are in command again.

  There was a moment of involuntarily respectful hesitation, but bodies when dead are stripped. The ritual murderers closed in to take their trophies. His buff waistcoat was sent to Vienna. A common soldier took the reputedly magical sword. General Holk had the offer of his ring and spurs, and did not refuse it. He got them at a bargain. His watch was worth a hundred pounds. A man called Schneeburg, a lieutenant of cavalry, took the gold chain from around his neck, which he had habitually worn. As for the great pale Turquoise of Sweden, whose origin is unknown, nobody knows who took it, and it has never been found. It is the stone of balance, of safety, of truth, and of the sky; it is a charm against falling. It disappeared.

  Men so seldom kill a man of worth that when they do, there is a pause. They consider. Then, unwilling to face the consequences of what they have done, they forget. Of all the physiological mechanisms which make life possible, that is the most merciful: they forget. The greedy and the vigorous having gone, the timid took away his clothes, and left what was left of him there naked in his shirt.

  The battle lasted nine hours. The King’s horse was seen galloping about riderless. Panic forced the Swedes back. Fabricius, the King’s pastor, had come into the field to offer what consolation he could to the more seriously wounded troops. A member of the field chancery shouted to him, in passing. “Rex vulneratus est. Fugiendum est … nostra fuga provocabimus omnes ad fugiendum.” These things go down better in Latin.

  But Gustavus had always been prudent to choose for his entourage men of a parallel intransigence. Instead of picking up his skirts, Fabricius bullied a handful of men into standing around him, and began to sing that useful Psalm, “Sustain us by Thy mighty Word.” This attracted hundreds, and with the help of George Fleetwood, an officer whose comment on Lützen was “Had not our foote stood like a wall, there had not a man of us come off alyve, they being certen twyce our number, and our horse did but poorly,” he soon had the Swedes driving back the other way, pelted from behind by a stentorous volley of Psalms and Sermons, imprecations, curses, two bags of dry powder, and anything else he could think of.

  “Steinberg,” said Gustavus once to one of his generals, “I find great consolation in perusing the word of God: princes themselves must acknowledge that the evil demon spreads the most artful snares for those who fancy they lie under no obligation to render an account to their own consciences, and their fellow creatures.” This was Fabricius’ view. When he saw an artful snare, he plucked it up and heaved it back across the enemy lines, where it had come from.

  So the Swedes won, though the Great King was dead. Even so, the rejoicing on the opposite side was great. In Whitehall, it was feared the rumor was not true, and an order was given that nothing should be said in praise of the late ally in the press or, if possible, from the pulpit, for among the people Gustavus had been popular. Richelieu said the death was a triumph for the French cause. He was disconcerted, annoyed, and relieved. In Copenhagen the chancellor, Kristian Friis, locked himself up for two days, to mourn. In Vienna the Emperor contented himself with the explosion of a few rockets. At Brussels a thanksgiving service was held at St. Gudule. The Spaniards ran up a mock-tragedy pageant in 24 acts, entitled The Death of the King of Sweden, which took twelve nights to perform, and lit bonfires on every hill they controlled, from Flanders to Madrid and Mantua.

  21

  For a little after death—it is like the potter’s wheel; the vessel is finished, but the wheel continues to spin—the spirits of the dead remain among us. That night there was silence in both camps, each guilty. And then the search parties went out.

  The battlefield looked like a horse knacker’s yard. To anyone who admires man’s will, there is nothing worse than death in a jumble. There were even some bodies hanging from a cart like gobs of yellow fat. It was a horse knacker’s yard. Torchlight did not help. These bodies are brought in at night so as not to offend horse lovers; the chimneys smoke just outside town; or sometimes, in the gray of dawn, you may pass the wagon clattering across the cobbles so it may not be there when the blinds go up. For death is an empty street. “If you want to die, you will have to pay for it,” and “All our games are funeral games.” Post mortem nihil est ipsaque mors nihil.

  It is a pretty place, Lützen. It is like Kent, but the woods are darker, the hursts are lower and less unexpected, the sea of grass has a calmer roll. It is always waiting, for many battles have been fought there. If this one cannot kill us, there will be another one. There was once a trod here. The peasants say it is still used. The cromlech is falsely said to be that of Arminius, for of their ancient leaders his is the only name the savants have to hand. Over Lützen hung not just the leaden smoke of battle, but the awesome silence of a clock stopped. Though no one said so, each knew what he would find.

  It was enlightening to go from face to face like that, with a crackling torch. Sometimes there was no face, only the black blood of a cavity. The flames sobbed. So did the dying, here and there. Like mystics when away from the body, the suddenly struck down show too much white of eye. It is too baroque to be sincere, or so they say, who are themselves not baroque and who do not wish to say that they have seen it. After rigor mortis there is an abrupt, final, physiological sigh. And this in natural deaths is the worst to be alone with. But violent death is a form of rape spiritual. In violent death they collapse where they are flung. Experience has done with them. There is no question of a second going. They have been shot.

  To search face by face, like that, is to go through a plaster gallery of involuntary suicide, in both senses of the word morgue. It also means arrogance. It shows how the coroner has kept his records by the river. Even Charon must keep accounts. He is paid by the soul. These masks are a warning to the curious set along the corridor, between the windows, by an artist, a gentleman, an amateur, a collector of expression, interested only in those moments when pride has had its stop. Like the faces of the sleeping, the faces of the dead make us sorry that a love like that is not possible. We have seen the Medusa in the
mirror. We do not dare to look her in the face. For death is a mirror. We can never look in our own. And there is nothing at the back whatsoever. The back is blank. We go from face to face. Some are hideous, but it is amazing how many are beautiful: we see them, then, as they could have been.

  There were a great many dead at Lützen; it had been a successful campaign. Here a cannon, here a hand had been abandoned, or a cuirass glinted empty. Occasionally someone begged to be shot, and if he had chosen his interlocutor wisely, or if he seemed to mean it, there was a shot right after. These things were forbidden, but in the dark men are sometimes kind, if they know the patient well enough at a glance, perform a doctor’s private mercy, and never think of it again. It would be foolish to attempt to legislate such things; to do so would be to deprive the world of mercy. So no officer that night saw more than he was asked.

  The watchman on the church tower of Lützen village had an extensive view of the dark, and thought the torches a shimmer of fireflies, which in some countries are thought to be the souls of the friendly dead, come back from the other side to ease the rupture from the loved one. Who in the fields on a firefly night has not been aware of something out there, waiting, not unpleasantly? It is the spirits of the dead watching. They are not unkind; they are redolent of the warmth of long summer evenings when, willy-nilly, all the world must go for its stroll.

  There was a bog mist gathering. As the watchman peered down into darkness, the fireflies ceased their hovering. The searchers had found him.

  That man who had been so lively living was only a stiffened and then limber body now. They bore him back to camp. It was a coronach. The last of the chieftains by common acclaim was a corpse. The only proper tribute would have been cornflowers in a grubby fist, brought by a child, bonfires beside the sea, and a ship launched westward, burning. Instead the body was borne to Weissenfels.

  There was a state funeral. There were several state funerals. The Germans seemed apologetic, the Swedes angry, the Scots mercenaries, some of whom had been through this before in the highlands, outraged and sad. It was the death of a world. This man had come down from the north, to show the past was still possible. From Julius to him, the cord stretched taut, and now it was slack again. King who was a King is the totem of his people. And now it was time for the new men to arise.

  In Vienna they said that Antichrist was dead, and quoted Psalms 46, Omnes gentes, plaudite, and 67, Exurgat Deus. “The princes are gathered together, with the God of Abraham: for the strong gods of the earth are exceedingly exalted”; and “As smoke vanisheth, so let them vanish away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God.” In the Germanies the preachers mounted the pulpits, and spoke instead of Joshua. How dishonest men are, in the honesty of their grief.

  As Alexander consigned to posterity the Ptolemys, the Antigonids, the Seleucids, and the Antipaters, who, after his death, founded kingdoms, so did Gustavus leave to mankind the Saxe-Weimars, the Horns, the Banérs, the Tortensons, the Knyphausens, who gave signs neither of distress nor of dismay. These were his generals. The war was to continue yet some sixteen years. In particular he bequeathed to the world Oxenstierna, who sat in a room—or perhaps, more properly, the world to him.

  22

  He sat in a room. It is the room we all come to, if ever we loved anyone. It does not matter what room. It is indescribable, for nobody who sits in it has ever noticed what it contains. It was somewhere on the road to Frankfort; the news reached him there on the 21st of November.

  Grief is like a rash of the skin. It breaks out beyond our control. Then it goes again, without a doctor. In that itch the world stops; it will go its usual way presently. For the moment it does not. Nowhere in the world is there a single clock that ticks. And out of this moment comes a changed self, a stranger, a doppelgänger. And what shall we say of men who cast no shadow on the earth?

  Gustavus’ jaunty, discrete profile paraded in the shadow of a candle, on the far wall. We are becalmed. We have lost either our master or our chief mate. It does not matter which; each is indispensable, and is as old as ships.

  But when the decks are half seas over, and the waves loom out of nowhere and rush greedy down the stairs and into the cuddy, into the wardroom, when the master is dead, when the crew is dead, that does not mean the ship goes down. It is not that easy to founder. We are all Flying Dutchmen in these seas. She runs her course. She creaks. She rights herself. She will long be a hulk in these waters, a danger to navigation, a solid myth; but never dead until a bell rings on ’Change. She has drifted south. She has sighted polar ice. Her ropes and rigging are heavy with hoarfrost. She runs before the wind; if her wheel was not lashed, it spins.

  And everywhere is that taste of death in life, the taste of salt. The truth is seventy fathoms down in stormy seas as well as smooth; neither changes that sounding, like a green and bloated face. The fittings corrode. But if she can still make headway, sometimes one of the crew takes over. He is God’s appointed. Why? Because usurpation is his by right. His naked feet grip, wet, the deck. Since no one else rose to the responsibility, he has only to issue his orders and put on shoes.

  In the state cabin of a mean inn on the road to Frankfort, Oxenstierna sat alone in a chair. The soughing of pine crowns is like the soughing of the sea. He, too, remembered that parting in the glade, a thing as inevitable as had been their first meeting; which was, indeed, the inherent meaning of that first meeting. They had known it then. They knew it now. “He thinks the ship cannot sink that carries him.” Nor, thought Oxenstierna, has it. I shall bring us to fair haven, and give these great men their shaking, so soon as we reach port. A bargain is a bargain.

  Oh God, I want to cry. Why can I not cry? And the tears welled down his cheeks, but that was not crying. What he had in mind was the enraged bellow of ultimate loss.

  We are people of the Book. Did the King, my late master, never read in that book of his:

  II.i.8: … to whom may be applied the lines of Lucan, “When the lives and safety of so many nations depend upon yours, and so great a portion of the world has chosen you for its head; it is cruelty to expose yourself wilfully to death.”

  Had not the Book itself been found in his traveling carriage, in his tent, well thumbed? Who is this fool called Huig de Groot?

  It is usually the fearless and all-conquering commander who survives, the troops who die. And better so.

  In a funeral ode—it could be called nothing else—Oxenstierna was the first to use the epithet Great Gustavus, the first to point out Augustus was that name’s anagram. But Agrippa predeceased his master. He had that favor. I survived. These griefs are best private. In our real griefs it is not an audience we want, but something as warm and anonymous as a human hand, to haul us up out of the Kraken, to jerk us out of the womb, to die holding. How few are human: most are too smooth.

  As in old allegorical portraits, it is the hand of heaven; it descends, blenched, from a cloud, it is there, it belongs to no one. It is the hand of God, who is not a person, and yet He has a hand.

  And there are the memories, the treasures of Trollheim, the things the böyg is there to protect. Once, when we were both young—for yes, we both were young once—we were caught in a castle that caught fire. We had to jump into the moat. It was slimy and oozy. It had almost no water in it. “Give me your hand,” said His Majesty. I gave him my hand. His own hand, though ten years younger than mine, was hard and chapped. We pulled our legs out of the suck at each step, and somehow we reached shore. And there we rolled in the grass and laughed. My God, I was one of his guardians, when he was a minor. There had been water lilies in the moat, yellow, thick-stemmed, crawling with bugs. It had been high summer.

  He felt the sad languors of a merely physical relief. The Swedes do not weep until at least the third pint. Since he wished to weep, he sent down for hard liquor and when it came, locked his door. They were of one mind, and that not their own. It was in control of both of them. One sees why people go be
rserk. I am glad he went that way.

  In a way it was a relief to have him gone. He had been too impetuous. But then … there is the loss.

  We are always aware of the good wishes of a dead friend. He is not wholly dead till we are dead. He means us well. He is like somebody we cannot see, like St. Nicholas throwing a gold ball through a window, handing us a pen. That is his chair. He is out seeing to the horses. He will never be back. It is a shame. Once, in a crowd, we thought we saw his face, and knew it could not be true, but walked faster, and our heart gave a thump. The King was my younger brother, taller, handsomer, stronger than I, and took precedence over me. It was a pleasure.

  He is dead. He has earth on his face. He saw what he wanted to see last, last. One cannot grieve, and yet one grieves. And let me die at Föno which is where my people always die, in a low-ceilinged room, among the blue firs. My sons are a weakling lot. My wife is dead. My daughter is dead. She was not weak. I have been away so long, my dogs would not know me. But I would like there to be snow.

  It was his first sleepless night. There he sat alone in a room, vir togatus et sagatus, mother-naked, in his shift, and got as drunk as he was able.

  But the next morning his door opened and nothing of this showed. Nothing. He was respected for that. He gave orders in the King’s name. They were obeyed. He gave orders in his own name. It was all one.

  He was the heir. As for that six-year-old child, Christina, the new Queen, “Alas, alas, be things as they will, nevertheless she is the daughter of the Great Gustavus.” That was understood, too. Far to the north lies the country we have come from. These French diplomats have never seen it, and would not understand it if they had. That gives us a terrible power, the power of principle, the power of the unknown.