People of the Book

by David Stacton

  “Well, go along, boy,” said the Bürgermeister, gently enough. “We have other business today.”

  Never again did Lars wish to be confronted by gentlemen in velvet hats. The shabbiest thing about it was that they meant well, and understood nothing.

  The next day he was allowed to accompany Hannale to, and to say good-bye to her in, the grounds of what had once been a béguinage. It had been taken over by some clean, good-spirited, dried-up ladies who had devoted their lives to education, spinsters and unmarriageable younger sisters mostly, of good family. It was a lay order. In front of the former convent, the béguinage spread out in a semicircle among bare trees stuck in the snow, a series of small detached immaculate huts, in which ladies of quality lived with one maid, raised vegetables, and cultivated if not sanctity, then at the least a docile patience.

  “The baker says I may come once a week,” said Lars desperately. It was the only piece of candy he had to give.

  They had never been separated. Hollow-eyed, Hannale contemplated the length of seven days, and asked to be hugged. He hugged her.

  In that first year, she only complained once. Then she asked if she might not be taken for a walk by her brother.

  “They would not let me go down to the stream by myself,” she said. She meant Wollin. And she walked softly toward it now, as though on brittle glass. They had tried to make her a town child. It didn’t suit.

  Hand in hand, they stood on the bank and watched the stream.

  25

  Oxenstierna had no use for the Book, but found it ingenious. And yet there is much to be learned from it.

  III.xxii.7: As to the causes and consequences of war, it is not within the province of a general to decide them. For concluding and conducting a war are very different things, and rest upon distinct kinds of authority. II.ii.2: At length men increasing in wickedness by their evil communications with each other, the race of Giants, that is of strong and violent men, appeared, whom the Greeks denominate by a title, signifying those who make their own hands and strength the measure of justice.

  This was true enough. So the Great Chancellor had taken hold:

  For Plato in his twelfth book on a COMMONWEALTH, justifies the prolongation of hostilities till the aggressor is reduced to submit to just and equitable terms.

  Grotius knows from example, but has he common sense? What would he do were he confronted not with an example, but with the thing itself? Turn to a powder, like any other witworm? Oxenstierna had small use for scholars.

  At his death Gustavus, besides his own, left six Swedish armies in the field and four confederate, while Wallenstein had been induced to scamper away. The Great Chancellor minced no words and, if anything, was more terrifying than had been his late master: ex boreale lux; in the cool blue-green crackling flare of that dazzling intelligence, it was as though Gustavus still rode out. Neither man appeared on the battlefield, but they went on winning anyway.

  But with the King had died the last religious propulsion of this war. It was now the plaything of Europe. Austria did not want peace. Wallenstein, sulking in a second retirement, did not want it; he wanted power. The House of France did not want it. The only man to want it was the Pope.

  The office of deciding wars and putting an end to the contentions of armies was assigned, according to Strabo, to the Druids of the Gauls, and upon the testimony of the same writer, it formed a part of the priestly functions among the Iberians,

  says Grotius complacently, II.xxiii.8. One can almost see him bustling from open book to open book and peering over the top of his spectacles. No doubt he is a gentleman, but he has inky fingers.

  Urban VIII was not thanked for his efforts. Instead, during a riot in the consistory, Cardinal Borgia (of the Spanish branch) openly accused him of forgetting the welfare of the Church. Another, unable to say anything for rage, mottled in shot silk, tore up his biretta and flung the pieces in His Holiness’s face. The Swiss Guard had to get Urban out of there by means of crossed pike staves batted before him. He was not the first leader to be better intentioned than his followers. Urban VIII was no fool of an idealist, but unfortunately neither was he clever. So he had to recant and praise the bigotry.

  Though he had never said what the building was for, Gustavus had left behind excellent blueprints. Of course he had: Axel had drawn them up. When it came to a gyre, Oxenstierna had a higher soar and a swifter pounce than almost anyone. When France looked north, he looked south, from higher ground, an unexpected viewpoint but a useful one.

  But then the Great Chancellor, in common with most men of ability, did not so much enjoy his work as disappear joyously into the kitchen and tie his apron on, in order the faster to cook the goose. His vision was not blurred by the ancestral hatreds of France and Austria. He wanted Pomerania for Sweden; to get it, he would have to go on winning wars, and since he could not pay his armies, France would have to. Apart from that, he was impartial. He looked coolly south. Europeans are so accustomed to stare the other way, it never occurs to them how easily they may be maneuvered, if held by the handles from behind.

  Three times the peoples of the North have swept down on the world: the first when they colonized Russia, Ireland, England, Iceland, Groenland, and then Normandy and Sicily; the second, under Gustavus; the third, under Charles XII, but that was merely the misadventure of an individual child. Three times they marched down the telescope, as through a ringing brass tunnel, right for the eyepiece, and there was no way to stop them, because they were looking the other way and had the wind behind them. There may be, perhaps, one day a fourth.

  It exasperated Richelieu out of his wits. The man addresses me as an equal, and what is worse, it is not possible to answer back. Oxenstierna plowed on, though that smile to himself was gallows humor. He had no use for recipes. Recipes exist for the convenience of non-cooks. Measure how you will, you may get it right, but you will never get the same smack a born cook can, with one glance over her glasses at the recipe—ah yes, cardamom, I suppose that means turmeric, too—and fling the thing together. It is empiric. A pinch cannot be written out, but is none the less exact for that. The only way to get the same flavor is never to do the same thing the same way twice. It is an art, and the arts do not wait upon occasions; they are occasions in themselves.

  To be a statesman or a cook, it is necessary first to remember that no two geese are ever quite the same. So at the Council of Heilbronn he managed to do the German princelings to a turn, which was greatly to his credit, for it had been an uncertain oven. Later there was dancing. Oxenstierna, though a ponderous, slow-moving man, came out of the kitchen long enough to lead the next dance. In fact, he was so gracious as to call it. All one has to do is master the figure; among other things, he settled all squabbles as to precedence at the council table by resourcefully removing the chairs, a device which hitherto had occurred to no living statesman. John George of Saxony sulked and stayed away. His abstention did no more damage to the Protestant cause than to put Oxenstierna at the head of it instead of himself.

  With the French, the Great Chancellor was less successful. Nobody is ever successful with the French. La Gloire does not permit it, and tends to ignore what it cannot prevent. And France, though as usual bankrupt, was also, as usual, vastly rich, whereas Sweden was a poor country, though solvent.

  The French Envoy, Feuquières, had been given the wrong instructions. In Paris it was known only that Gustavus was dead, not that Oxenstierna was so very much alive.

  But those sent on the Devil’s errands must know their business, otherwise they become the Devil’s share. One look at the Great Chancellor, and Feuquières changed his plans.

  It was instructive to compare the two leaders. Richelieu had a tendency to produce himself, like a rabbit out of a hat, with suave assurance. His walk was a pussy glide. Oxenstierna did not walk; he stalked, arms akimbo. He could not be rattled, and when he lost his temper, it was a matter of paying out the line so as not to lose the fish. Whereas, as we know, the French prefe
r to muddy the waters, the better to purloin it.

  Feuquières, stubbornly forced back (but to a prepared position), granted Oxenstierna everything he wanted, and then nullified it all by inducing the German princelings to recognize French co-direction of the war, and by paying subsidies not direct to the Chancellor, but to the councils of confederated princes making up the Heilbronn league.

  The war could now go on forever, or at any rate for so long as Richelieu wished, for no matter how many victories Oxenstierna’s armies might win, he could never win the last one, until such time as the French consented to pay for it. Richelieu had at last created his climate, standing whimsically, a cardinal under an oiled silk parasol, in an induced spring shower.

  The Book had been first published in Paris. Before learning to hate him, the Cardinal had tried to hire its author, and had, of course, read it.

  II.xv.5: Treaties founded upon obligations added to those of the law of nature are either equal or unequal. Equal treaties are those by which equal advantages are secured on both sides … where one of the parties is inferior in dignity, they are called INJUNCTIONS, or INJUNCTIONS ATTACHED TO COVENANTS. Demosthenes, in his speech on the liberty of the Rhodians, says, “all nations ought to guard against forming such leagues as approaching too near to servitude.”

  Also, II. xviii. 2:

  We need not have recourse to lawyers to understand what is so well expressed [by Virgil], who says, “I look upon every country as foreign, which owns not the sway of our sceptre” (Aenead: vii.369).

  Grotius was a lawyer. One may not learn much from reading, but one learns what others think they know. So much for Grotius.

  It turned out not to be quite that easy.

  26

  Wallenstein was the next man caught. His method to assure victory was to have hanged, drawn, quartered, or shot those of his generals who had been defeated. It was not a wise method. To degrade officers is a safe and easy means of vengeance. But to kill outright your own assistants has the only result that one day when you tug the bell pull, it comes away rotted in your hand. There is no one left.

  He had not learned much, but he had learned fear, for he now realized what he had before ignored, that though others die first while the flames rise during Ragnarök, Odinn who sits alone in the great hall must die too, for it is Götterdämmerung. Once the wolf has got out, there can be no escape.

  He sat not in a great hall, but in a small, bleak, whitewashed room, waiting. He was a poor Odinn, He was more in the Loki style. He had not the guts to blow his brains out. For the worst man in the smallest, darkest room shares with humanity that dilatant, hope, so when the door is opened, he is so blinded by the light he cannot save himself: he cannot blow his brains out.

  So it was necessary to have him murdered. This was in February of 1634, with a soft warm hiss of snow prowling the air outside his window aimlessly. It was a month of marching songs. The peasants had put into the mouth of General Holk, one of his commanders, a little ditty of that kind:

  Gewissen hin, Gewissen hier,

  Ich acht viel mehr die zeitlich Ehr,

  Dien nicht um Glauben, dien um Gelt,

  Gott geb, wie es geh in jener Welt.

  (Conscience here, conscience there,

  I only care for worldly honors,

  Why fight for faith, I fight for gold,

  If God wills, we will all walk into the other World.)

  Somehow that old Roman soldiers’ song (to be found in Flavius Vopiscus), Tantum vini nemo habet quantum fudit sanguinis, sounded warmer.

  He was afraid.

  *

  Wallenstein—properly Waldstein, the old stone in the woods, for people resemble their names—had lost his way. During his later years his signature got smaller, and smaller, and smaller, until he could not write it any more. He was a man of the Renaissance born too far north, a modern man, cruel and bitter and dark and incomplete, with etiquette but no manners, grandeur but no taste, hatred but no love with which to back it up; he was afraid to love. For that might touch him. But in one way he was not a modern: he was not superficial. His mind was not a filing cabinet, but a cold procession of straight corridors without windows, for, the first great bureaucrat of recent times, he liked people in cages but no view, except a Waldreich of his own. He was a good everything except a man. Hate in a strong man invigorates the hated. But the hate of someone hollow sucks the air out, it is as vacuous as merely breeding.

  He had lost his health. It was not so much that he feared assassins as that he feared they might not be there. He missed the attention. A name for the ages cannot be engraved on the head of a pin. But these days he seemed to feel that if he could get his signature small enough, then everything would be all right. In other words, he was stooping to pass under his own yoke, a burden he found intolerable. He would see no one, and had reserved for himself the maniac’s privilege: he would die last. Now day had come, he looked at it with weary horror, and could not say when. For he was the quarry waiting to be dispatched, the last of the breed, the auerhuhn—not everyone can afford to hunt it; there is therefore a distinction in coming back with empty hands.

  Wallenstein was of the envious, futile men, for there is nothing they want. Give it them, and they look disappointed. The world is a spiritual debate, and if we have no souls, we have nothing to argue with. We can only howl and keep the score with this world’s goods, invariably one play behind. He was a man of business. They have their limitations, they know nothing of men but their greed, and get purple in the face when you suggest that any other motive moves them. You do not have to own a thing to love it. The best-loved things own themselves.

  He was superstitious. He kept no dog by him, lest it get up, horripilate, and growl at something that wasn’t there. He believed in the existence of black rainbows. He had been born at Hermaniče, September 4, 1583, at four in the afternoon, under the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. Kepler, who later cast his horoscope, found him restless, exacting, impatient, fond of novelty, greedy, dishonest, lusting for power, unloving and unloved, quarrelsome, unpredictable, treacherous, friendless, cruel. It was all true. And sitting back in his chair, Kepler said to himself, But why? and hated the Chaldeans more for that reason than he did the Pope for a more practical one. “And he will not live very long,” added Kepler, and again enraged, for he was of a scientific turn of mind, wondered how he could be so sure of that, when Harvey had proved the circulation of the blood only yesterday. Beyond the boundaries of the unknown lies the unknowable, like a glimpse of the frozen advancing cliffs of sea water from the north coast of Iceland, in the winter, while Leviathan heaves between. And even to see that, you must withstand winds of the 9th force, white fiery particles, and spray. When they come closer, you can see that there is something moving out there, though you cannot see what. Perhaps for this reason the old Icelanders referred to the Christian cult figure, Jesus, as Hvíta-Kristr, White Christ.

  It made him indignant, for only science can be true. He had doubted too much to doubt that.

  *

  In Vienna, they hesitated. They were afraid to kill Wallenstein. Though he had shrunk, he had over him the exoskeletal dome of his prestige, paper but tensile, to keep the world away. Fortunately, there are some men in this world who are stupid enough for rewards to stop at nothing, and so to debar themselves from their advancement, for if they do as we wish, they can scarcely expect to be received in Vienna.

  Wallenstein waited, wearing black, as became a gentleman. Other nations gave us their riches. Spain gave us her austerity. So gentlemen still wear black. So do storm troopers. Before the Inquisition, they did not. He was a great denier. Denial, too, is a form of prayer. Like the Emperor, he was a fanatic, though the one did not ask, and the other did not know, why. In certain houses, though there are no ghosts, it is unwise to face certain doors.

  His dismissal was published. He had been forced to flee. He was no longer of any use to his employers. Upstairs in his bedroom, in a coaching stop on the ro
ad, called Eger, he heard a noise downstairs, a man scream (Trčka, his aide, by the timbre), a battering of rifle butts, and turning to the door, thought, So this is how it happens, how sordid, tried to ask for mercy, but could not get the words out. The dagger went in smoothly, and that was all.

  An Irishman who had been hired to stab him wanted to throw the body splattering out the window, but his accomplice, an Englishman called Devereux, with the concern for appearances so marked in that race, said No, roll him in a carpet, which was done, but the carpet was soon soggy and spewed from both ends. Nonetheless, it was more seemly.

  Now black and white were dead, the war was gray. It is the color of those sisters who, stopping to pass an eye and a tooth among them, control man’s fate. They have shrunken, withered thighs. After the death of the Green Man comes the death of the Black.

  27

  The armies were beginning to break up and to march against each other. “One German is worth ten Swedes,” said Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, who had proved insubordinate and was trying to make his own arrangements with the French. Alas, it was the other way around; there were twenty Germans to one Swede, their worth had nothing to do with it. Typhus and bubonic plague had broken out. There was that grimly popular thing, the cholera toast, engraved with a diamond on your lead-crystal glass: “I drink to you today, for I shall die tomorrow.” Nobody knew much of this was caused by a little hopping flea you could squash between your thumb and fingernail. Instead, they stripped the bodies and wore the clothes, Nessus, Hercules, and Deïanira, a follower in that camp.