At Lützen

I WAS not quite easy in mind when I stood on the tower of St. Stephen’s Church, in Vienna, to find that what I sought most eagerly in the superb landscape was not the steep Kahlenberg, not the plumy woods of Schönbrunn, not the Danube pouring grandly eastward, nor the picturesque city at my feet; but the little hamlet just outside the suburbs, and the wide-stretching grain-field close by, turning yellow under the July sun, where were fought the battles of Aspern and Wagram. Nor was I quite easy when I set out to climb the St. Gotthard Pass, to find that although the valley below Airolo was so green with fertile pasture, and from the glaciers above me the heavens were pricked so boldly by the splintered peaks, I was thinking most where it was precisely that old Suwarrow dug the grave and threatened to bury himself, when his army refused to follow him; then how he must have looked when he had subdued them, riding forward in his sheep-skin, or whatever rude Russian dress he wore, this uncouth hero who needed no scratching to be proved Tartar, while his loving host pressed after him into every deathyielding terror that man or nature could throw across his path.

That I had good reason for my uneasiness, on second thoughts, I do not believe. Nor do I believe it is just for you, my high-toned friend, to censure me as somewhat low and brutal, when I confess that of all one can see in Europe, nothing thrilled me quite so much as the great historic battle-fields. Nothing deserves so to interest man as man himself; and what spots, after all, are so closely and nobly connected with man as the spots where he has fought? That we are what we are, indeed that we are at all, — that any race is what it is or is at all, — was settled on certain great fields of decision to which we as well as every race can point back. And then, for another thing, are we not so made that nothing absorbs us like a spectacle of pain and pathos? Tragedy enchants, while it shocks. The field of battle is tragedy the most shocking; is it doing indignity to our puzzling nature to say it is tragedy most enchanting? Then here, again: once at midnight, in the light of our bivouac-fire, our captain told us in low tones that next day we were to fight. He was a rude fellow, but the word or two he spoke to us was about duty. And I well remember what the men said, as we looked by the fire-light to see if the rifles were in order. They would go into fire because duty said, “ Save the country! ” and when, soon after, the steeply - sloping angle of the enemy’s works came into view, ominously red in the morning light, and crowned with smoke and fire, while the air hummed about our ears as if swarming with angry bees, and this one and that one fell, I believe there was scarcely one who, as he pulled his cap close down and pushed ahead in the skirmishline, was not thinking of duty. They were boys from farm and factory, not greatly better, to say the most, than their fellows anywhere; and we may be sure that thought of duty has always much to do with the going forward of weaponed men amongst the weapons. Men do fight, no doubt, from mere recklessness, from hope of plunder or glory; and sometimes they have been whipped to it. But more often, when they go where one out of every four or five is likely to fall, it is with the nobler motive uppermost, and felt with a burning earnestness, too, which only the breath of the near - at - hand death can fan up. No! there is reason enough why battlefields should be, as they are, places of pilgrimage. The remoteness of the struggle hardly diminishes the interest with which we visit its scene; Marathon is as sacred as if the Greeks conquered there last year. Nor, on the other hand, do we need poetic haze from a century or two of intervening time; Gettysburg was a consecrated spot to all the world before its dead were buried. There need be no charm of nature; there are tracts of mere sand in dreary Brandenburg, where old Frederick, with Prussia in his hand, supple and tough as if plaited into a nation out of whip-cord, scourged the world; and these tracts are precious. On the other hand, the grandest natural features seem almost dwarfed and paltry beside this overmastering interest. On the top of the Grimsel Pass there is a melancholy, lonely lake which touches the spirit as much as the Rhone glacier close by, or the soaring FinsterAarhorn, —the Todter See (Sea of the Dead), beneath whose waters are buried soldiers who fell in battle there on the Alpine crags. Had I defined all this, I need not have felt uneasy on St. Stephen’s spire or the St. Gotthard. We are not necessarily brutal if our feet turn with especial willingness toward battlefields. There man is most in earnest; his sense of duty perhaps at its best; the sacrifice greatest, for it is life. Theirs are the most momentous decisions for weal or woe; theirs the tragedy beyond all other tremendous and solemn. It is right that the blood which has soaked them should possess an alchemy to make their acres golden to us.

Crabb Robinson, in his Diary, gives a report of a singular judgment of Wieland respecting Luther, which he had from him in a conversation at Weimar in 1801. Wieland, a freethinker, declared that the Reformation had been “ an evil and not a good; it had retarded the progress of philosophy for centuries. There were some wise men among the Italians, who, if they had been permitted, would have effected a salutary reform. Luther ruined everything by making the people a party to what might have been left to the scholars. Had he not come forward with his furious knock-down attacks on the church, and excited a succession of horrible wars in Europe, liberty, science, and humanity would slowly have made their way, Melanchthon and Erasmus were on the right road, but the violence of the age was triumphant.” It so happens that this passage falls in my way when I am studying details of the Thirty Years’ War; and this circumstance, no doubt, helps me to think that there is a certain plausibility in Wieland’s view, and to wish that some good schol ar would follow it out, and see if here too, as in the case of so many other historic figures, there is not reason for reversing the verdict of the world. Goethe had a similar notion about Luther. But whatever judgment may come to be put on Luther’s work, the man himself must always tower heroic.

In the Castle of Coburg, next in interest to Luther’s room (for here as everywhere the burly, God-worshiping devilfighter subordinates everything to himself) , is a great hall in which hang side by side the life-size portraits of two martial figures. Both wear the military dress of two hundred years ago. One portrait represents a man of tall, large frame, with light hair, large intense blue eyes, a full lower face with the pointed mustaches and chin-beard of the time, in attire of blue and buff set off with pointlace; a man, one would say, of action rather than thought, with a full store of impetuous will, and sound stomach and muscles to carry out purposes with. The healthful countenance, too, has suggestions of warm temper, but also of joviality; and one thinks that the capacious doublet might upon occasion shake mightily with laughter, — a figure of bearing most manly, frank, and winning. The other person is also tall but meagre, in gloomy attire, with hair dark but showing a tinge of red; a complexion somewhat sallow; a deeply wrinkled forehead, high rather than broad; and small, sparkling eyes; a countenance and mien that repel approach, as the open face and bearing of the companion picture court it. One is Gustavus Adolphus, the other Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, the eminent leaders on the two sides in a struggle the longest and most cruel that Europe has ever known. Hung about the hall are arms and armor from the Thirty Years’ War, in which they played their part; the steel caps and corselets, the pikes and muskets, dented with battle blows and still gleaming as they gleamed before the eyes of these men in life. A purer fame than that of Gustavus, hero never left behind. If there was in his motive a taint of selfishness, history has been silent about it. He was chaste, tolerant,¹ devout, fearless. No man was ever more loved. Wallenstein, who contrasts with him as black with white, almost, is even more impressive; as saturnine and inscrutable as Gustavus was cheerful and frank. Although leader of the Catholics, he was religionless as his rival was religious; given over to mysterious superstitions, for want of a better faith; a practicer of magic and patron of astrology; a man of such genius that the world gave way before him marvelously, until he came to be believed by others, and perhaps fancied himself, a sort of superhuman being with a charmed life. He was not so much cruel and treacherous, as persuaded that he was absolved from ordinary human obligations; and he seemed often shielded in a wonderful way against the operation of natural laws. On his character and the events of his career the lights fall so weirdly that from that time to this he has fascinated painters and poets. He is the hero of what Carlyle calls the greatest tragedy of the eighteenth century, the Wallenstein of Schiller. In the new Pinacothek at Munich, which contains perhaps the best paintings of our day, there is no one more striking than that by Piloty of the murdered Wallenstein lying in his blood, while over him stands his astrologer Seni. Still more remarkable is that other modern picture of Wallenstein entering the fortress of Eger, where the assassination is to take place, in which the circumstances, although only those of an ordinary military cavalcade, have been made in an indefinable way to convey the impression of boding evil.

Through the lowering heavens swoops a raven; the backs of the rank of troopers preceding the duke’s litter somehow suggest the thought that the world’s favor is averted; while the form and visage of Colonel Buttler, the instrument of the murder about to take place, riding darkly behind, though, when examined, only those of a fierce chieftain of the period, indescribably bring to mind an avenging fury. Wallenstein by a strange force, while he repelled, subdued men about him by the thousand. Half the world Gustavus drew by love, the other half Wallenstein held overwhelmed by an inexplicable awe. The two men contrast in history most picturesquely, as in the two portraits at Coburg. They confronted one another in the devastated plains of Germany like the two opposite poles of a magnet, the one attracting, the other repelling and yet subjecting, the whole world swayed by force from the one or the other.

The slopes of the hill that descend from the Castle of Coburg are to-day pleasure-grounds. In 1632 they were white for a time with the tents of Wallenstein’s imperialists, beleaguering here a brave garrison of Swedes whom the king had thrown into the fortress. Breaking up his camp in the fall, Wallenstein swept northward in a devastating march to Leipsie. A short day’s journey will take the traveler through the wide tract seared by the gloomy and silent soldier, dealing as he went with spells and charms. I reached Leipsic on a day of doubtful weather, and went soon to the old tower of the Pleissenburg, the citadel of the town, and looked out from the summit into the wide plains of Saxony. The castellan went with me to the summit, and between the showers pointed out the memorable spots. Carlyle rather coarsely calls this neighborhood “ the bull-ring of the nations,” from the number of great battles that have here been fought. The field of Jena, where the French shattered the Prussian power in 1806, is not so far away that the cannon-thunder from there might not have been heard at Leipsic; and Rossbach, perhaps Frederick’s most memorable field, where Prussia shattered France in 1757, is hardly out of sight. Ten miles away, again, is the village of Gross Görschen, where in the spring of 1813 Napoleon smote the Russians and Prussians, and did something to win back the prestige lost during the Russian campaign. All about the city and within it, took place in the fall of 1813 the mighty “ battle of the nations,” in which seven hundred thousand combatants took part. The environing fields where this was fought lay all in the deepest peace, as I looked down upon them; in the distance the rainbows among the mist; near at hand the broad levels, green and dripping with the abundant moisture. The grain stood everywhere, the country stretching smooth and unbroken almost as natural prairie, to the verge of the horizon. A straight line of poplars or fruit-trees here and there marked a high-road; now and then there was a clump of wood, or the compact roofs and steeple of a village. I could see the monument, surmounted by a cocked hat, where Napoleon stood on the decisive day, while Macdonald, Angereau, and Regnier fought in front of him, outnumbered two to one; and the castellan told how the cannonade (from some say two thousand pieces) sounded into his childish ears, coming muffled, as he sat shut up with his frightened mother in the city, his chin moving, as he represented the booming, like a man’s whose teeth chatter with cold.

Following the old man’s pointing finger again, I saw just beyond the city’s suburbs the steeple and windmill of Breitenfeld, where in the Thirty Years’ War the Swede Torstenson, a cripple who was carried about in a litter, and yet one of the most vigorous of commanders, defeated the army of the Austrian Kaiser; and where a few years before, on the same ground, fierce old Tilly first suffered defeat, and Gustavus Adolphus first made his greatness felt. To this hour, in old New-England families, any piece of especial deviltry is “ like old Tilly; ” and probably the phrase comes clear from the Puritans of 1631, who, like the rest of the Protestant world, were made to stand aghast by the sack of Magdeburg. But there is pathos as well as horror in the story of the unrelenting old tiger. He was brave and faithful and honest as he was cruel, and, in spite of all his plundering, died poor. At Dresden you may see his bâton, the pearl and gilding as tarnished as its former possessor s fame. A singular figure he must have been: generally in a Spanish doublet of bright green satin with slashed sleeves; on his head a little cocked hat, from which a red ostrich feather hung down his back; under this a long nose, withered cheeks, and a heavy white mustache; for he was past seventy. But it was more thrilling to me even than Breitenfeld, when, looking westward, I saw dimly through the mist the little steeple of Lützen, ten miles distant, where Gustavus Adolphus fell.

Leaving the tower of the Pleissenburg, I took the train to Markranstätt, a village in the suburbs, from which it was my plan to walk the league to Lützen in the long summer twilight, crossing the battle - field on the way. The high - road runs as it did two hundred years ago, broad, white, and smooth. That evening it had been washed clean by the rain, and cherry - trees full of ripening fruit stood in fullest freshness on either hand. On the far-extending fields each side the grain stood high; barley, wheat, rye, and oats rolled out in parallel strips. It was after sunset when the Lützen Eilwagen went past with its passengers; the pedestrians disappeared one after another, and soon I was the solitary footman. The dusk kept deepening as I sauntered forward, my mind filled with thoughts of the struggle whose scene I was soon to behold. It was a dark day in November, 1632, when a heavy triple boom of cannon-thunder from Weissenfels, ten miles westward, apprised Wallenstein, lying at Leipsic, that the Austrian general at that outpost had caught sight of the advancing Swedes. Defoe, in the littleknown Memoirs of a Cavalier, has so photographed this stormy time that his story was long believed to come from an eye-witness. His hero, then a captive with Wallenstein in Leipsic, says, “ We that were prisoners fancied the imperial soldiers went unwillingly out, for the very name of the King of Sweden was become terrible to them.” “Rugged, surly fellows they were,” he declares. “ Their faces had an air of hardy courage, mangled with wounds and scars; their armor showed the bruises of musket-bullets and the rust of the winter storms. I observed of them their clothes were always dirty, but their arms were clean and bright; they were used to camp in the open fields and sleep in the frosts and rain; their horses were strong and hardy, like themselves, and well taught their exercises.” It is not hard to draw a picture of Gustavus’s army as it advanced. It was a mixed host of twenty thousand. The best warriors were Swedes, men yellow - haired and florid, marching with the vigor of troops used to success and confident in their leader; not a straggler, not a plunderer. They wore, some suits of leather, others of cloth. They carried pikes or flintlock muskets. One regiment was in buff, and so known as the yellow regiment; others were in blue, others in white. There was powerful cavalry, the riders half-way between the steel-covered knight of former warfare and the modern horsemen. The cannon (they were the first “field batteries”) were singularly enough composed of cylinders of iron cast thin for lightness, then wound round tightly with rope from breech to muzzle, and covered at last with boiled leather. There were Germans as well as Swedes, and among these rode as leader a young man of twenty - eight, who, however, for ten years already had been a warrior of fame, and was destined to be yet more famous. His portrait, too, hangs by that of his teacher in war and friend, Gustavus, at Coburg, the features most handsome, and a profusion of curling brown hair falling upon the shoulders. His rusted sword, too, with that of the king, hangs upon a pillar in the Wartburg, by the side of the pulpit from which Luther used to preach. It was Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar. There were also whole troops of English and Scotch, for the fame of the king drew recruits from every Protestant land, who no doubt sometimes, among psalms, hummed the quaint recruiting song which antiquaries tell us had a great popularity at the period, and did much to stimulate enlistment: —

The king himself had a wide-brimmed hat, in which he sometimes wore a feather of green, and a suit made in great part from buff leather, with hoots of wide, slouching tops. His nobles, Horn, Banier, Torstenson, famous then and afterwards, martial in aspect but not splendid, rode beside him. As he swept along the column, the blue-eyed youths from Smaland and Gothland, and the darker Finns, grave and selfwilled, at that time his subjects, looked at him with love and pride, and marched firmly along the muddy road, where they sank sometimes to the knee.

Here is a racy bit of prose from the hand that gave us Robinson Crusoe, that will let us into what had just before been the life of this army. Gustavus is about to cross the Lech, where Tilly receives his death-wound: —

“ The king resolved to go and view the situation of the enemy. His Majesty went out the 2d of April with a strong party of horse, which I had the honor to command; we marched as near as we could to the banks of the river, not to be too much exposed to the enemy’s cannon, and having gained a little height, where the whole course of the river might be seen, the king halted and commanded to draw up. The king alighted, and, calling me to him, examined every reach and turning of the river by his glass, but finding the river run a long and almost straight course, he could find no place which he liked; but at last, turning himself north and looking down the stream, he found the river, fetching a long reach, double short upon itself, making a round and very narrow point. ‘ There’s a point will do our business,’ says the king, ‘ and if the ground be good, I ’ll pass there, let Tilly do his worst. ’

“ He immediately ordered a small party of horse to view the ground, and to bring him word particularly how high the bank was on each side and at the point; ‘ And he shall have fifty dollars,’ says the king, ‘ that will bring me word how deep the water is.’ I asked his Majesty leave to let me go, which he would by no means allow of; but as the party was drawing out, a sergeant of dragoons told the king, if he pleased to let him go disguised as a boor he would bring him an account of everything he desired. The king liked the notion well enough, and the fellow, being very well acquainted with the country, puts on a plowman’s habit and went away immediately with a long pole upon his shoulder; the horse lay all this while in the woods, and the king stood undiscerned by the enemy on the little hill aforesaid. The dragoon with his long pole comes boldly down to the bank of the river, and calling to the sentinels which Tilly had placed on the other bank, talked with them, asked them if they could not help him over the river, and pretended he wanted to come to them. At last, being come to the point where, as I said, the river makes a short turn, he stands parleying with them a great while, and sometimes pretending to wade over, he puts his long pole into the water; then, finding it pretty shallow, he pulls off his hose and goes in, still thrusting in his pole before him, till being gotten up to his middle he could reach beyond him, where it was too deep, and so, shaking his head, comes back again. The soldiers on the other side, laughing at him, asked him if he could swim. He said no. ‘ Why, you fool, you,’ says one of the sentinels, ‘ the channel of the river is twenty feet deep.’ ‘ How do you know that? ’ says the dragoon. ‘ Why, our engineer,’ says he, ‘ measured it yesterday.’ This was what he wanted, but, not yet fully satisfied, ‘ Ay, but,’ says he, ‘ maybe it may not be very broad, and if one of you would wade in to meet me till I could reach you with my pole, I’d give him half a ducat to pull me over.’ The innocent way of his discourse so deluded the soldiers that one of them immediately strips and goes in up to the shoulders, and our dragoon goes in on this side to meet him; but the stream took the other soldier away, and he, being a good swimmer, came swimming over to this side. The dragoon was then in a great deal of pain for fear of being discovered, and was once going to kill the fellow and make off; but at last resolved to carry on the humor, and having entertained the fellow with a tale of a tub, about the Swedes stealing his oats, the fellow, being cold, wanted to be gone, and as he was willing to be rid of him, pretended to be very sorry he could not get over the river, and so makes off.

“ By this, however, he learned both the depth and breadth of the channel, the bottom and nature of both shores, and everything the king wanted to know. We could see him from the hill by our glasses very plain, and could see the soldier naked with him. Says the king,

‘ He will certainly be discovered and knocked on the head from the other side; he is a fool,’ says the king, ‘ if he does not kill the fellow and run off; ’ but when the dragoon told his tale, the king was extremely well satisfied with him, gave him one hundred dollars, and made him a quartermaster to a troop of cuirassiers. ”

This had taken place in April. It was now November, and the army, the cool quartermaster, no doubt, with his troop of cuirassiers, — unless the poor fellow was in the number of those who laid down their lives at Nuremberg in the summer, — was pressing on to meet a foe that had long eluded them.

By nightfall, that 5th of November, the Swedes were at Lützen; and in the fields just beyond, the “rugged, surly fellows” of the host of Wallenstein lay waiting, the skirmishers, who had been watching the Protestant march, retiring upon the main body. Gustavus led his army south of the village in a circuit, until he had gained its eastern end, drawing it up at last in two lines a few yards south of the high - road. In the centre stood the foot, upon which, perhaps, the king especially relied; to the left were the Germans under their Duke Bernhard; to the right he rode himself, at the head of the Swedish horse. In the rear was a reserve commanded by a Scotchman; the artillery were placed along the whole front. On the side of the imperialists, but a few rods removed, beyond the road in the darkness, there was sufficient vigilance. Wallenstein had made the ditches broader that lined both sides of the road, and filled them with skirmishers. In the centre of his line, just north of the highroad, a battery of large guns was placed, the infantry close behind in large brigades. Opposite Duke Bernhard, near a windmill, was a larger battery. At the other end of his line were cavalry, and a quantity of servants and campfollowers whom Wallenstein compelled to arm and stand in the lines, that the Swedes might be deceived as to his strength. As Gustavus had Horn and Banier, so Wallenstein had, as lieutenants, Piccolomini and Poppenheim; though the latter had been dispatched with a portion of the army on an expedition. Gustavus’s army numbered twenty thousand; that of Wallenstein was probably greater, and couriers were dispatched to recall Poppenheim, riding through the night as if for life. “ The enemy is marching hitherward,” wrote Wallenstein. “ Break up instantly with every man and gun, so as to arrive here early in the morning. P. S. He is already at the pass and hollow road.” One may still see this note in the archives at Vienna, stained with the blood of Poppenheim, who had it on him when he received his mortal wound. The poets have filled the shadows of that eight before the battle with romance. The silent Wallenstein had consulted the stars before deciding to engage, and been assured by his astrologer that the planets threatened destruction to Gustavus in November. As he slept on the field in the midst of the desultory firing of the outposts, a dream came to him. Schiller makes him to say, —

When the late dawn came, the two armies lay wet and chilled, shrouded in a mist that was loath to rise; and it was not until eleven in the forenoon that it was clear enough for the Swedes to see the imperialist position. Then at length the king, a head taller than those of his retinue, mounted his superb white charger, a creature of superior size and beauty, said to have been thrown in his way by his enemies that he might become a more conspicuous mark, and rode from troop to troop clad simply in his suit of buff leather. I saw at Dresden the armor he left behind at Weissenfels, and which, had he worn it, might have saved his life. Plates of steel, brown in hue, the head-piece and corselet made to fit an ample brow and breast; but these the king, too intrepidly, threw aside. He alighted, knelt before his whole army, who also knelt, and, with uncovered head, prayed.² Then, accompanied stormily by the drums and trumpets of all the regiments, the thousands sang the great psalm of Luther, “ Ein 'feste Burg ist unser Gott,” the powerful tones of the king ringing highest. Was it ever more memorably sung? Then followed a hymn which the king himself had written, “ Fear not, little flock.” Here is a verse of it, as given by Gfrörer: —

Most simple and manly it was in its piety. The south wind, then blowing, carried the thunder of the soldiers’ voices to the hostile lines. The hymn died away; the voices of the priests, too, who had been celebrating mass in the other host, became silent. Then came the shouts of the Swedish captains commanding the assault. The cannon on both sides opened with fury, and over the stubble of the bare field, with pike and musket, the foot sprang forward. To the ditch it was only a few steps, and there the enemy met them with obstinacy. The king sprang from his horse, when the vigor of the attack appeared for a moment to slacken, caught a partisan from the hand of a soldier, and went himself to the front, chiding them as he hurried through their ranks, and bidding them “ Stand firm at least some minutes longer, and have the curiosity to see your master die in the manner he ought and the manner he chooses.” ⁴ At length the enemy were dislodged; the host of men, pursuers and pursued, streamed across the high-road into the farther field. The dark host of Piecolomini’s cuirassiers charged toward them. “Grapple with these black fellows !” cried the king to the colonel of the Finland horse. There was clash and tumult; in another moment the smoking battery at Wallenstein’s centre was in Swedish hands, and presently three of the brigades of infantry were in confusion. Wallenstein himself here came riding forward on the red steed which he mounted as the fight became hot. His usual dress in the field, which he probably wore on this day, was a coat of elk-skin, a red scarf, a richly embroidered cloak of scarlet, a gray hat with red feathers, and about his neck the order of the Golden Fleece.⁵ Behind him galloped a body of chosen horse, who obeyed him as if he had been a demi-god.

Wallenstein’s dress was again and again shot through. Step by step the Swedes were forced backward, the cannon recaptured. The battle became a wild mêlée where the intermingled combatants fought for the most part with pike and musket-butt, until at length the assailants were driven beyond the road once more, and stood at last, a broken company, on the ground from which they had advanced. Lützen, close by, was now in flames, and Bernhard’s Germans were sorely harassed by the fire of the guns from the windmill. The king, however, charging at the head of the Swedish horse, threw into confusion the imperialist left; then, hearing of Bernhard’s danger and the repulse of the centre, he set out on the gallop to stay the reverse. His horse was powerful. He leaped the ditches at the roadside, the regiment of Smalanders galloping after him. His pace, however, was so rapid that he left them behind, and only one or two of his retinue could keep up with him. He was near-sighted, and in his ardor went too near the enemy’s line. “ That must be one of their leaders,” said an imperialist corporal, “ fire upon him. ” There was shooting at close quarters, and a ball pierced the king’s arm. Faint with pain he reeled a little in the saddle. “ The king is bleeding! the king is bleeding!” cried the approaching dragoons. Leaning upon the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, Gustavus besought him to get him to one side. They avoided the press by a little détour, which, however, carried them again too near the enemy. There was further firing; the pallid and tottering king gasped out, “ My God! ray God! ” and fell from his horse, pierced through and through. His foot hung in the stirrup, and his horse, likewise wounded, dragged him farther among the enemy, where he was again shot, exclaiming, as he gave up the ghost, “My God! my God! Alas, my poor queen! ” A murderous fight took place over his body as he lay. Now the Croats were in possession, swarthy ruffians, such as one sees still in Austrian uniforms in the towns along the Danube, as he goes toward Vienna. Now the Swedes had the advantage, only to be driven off again, until the heap of bodies grew high above the king, and neither friend nor foe knew longer where he lay. The body had been stripped, however, and the doublet, pierced with bullet-holes and stained with blood, is still shown at Vienna. A turquoise of extraordinary size which he wore attached to a chain, one of the crown jewels of Sweden, has never been recovered. The white steed, covered with blood and mad with his wounds, galloping along the line, gave the army the first intimation that misfortune had befallen the king. There was some talk of retreat, but Duke Bernhard, himself wounded in the arm, rode to the front. In the presence of the army, for the moment appalled, he ran through aud through with his sword the commander of the Smalanders, who had guarded the king too negligently. The Swedes, recovering heart in a moment, before the decision of the new leader, stormed madly forward; the voice of the kind’s blood seemed to cry to them from the ground; and German and Scot, Hollander and Englishman, were not far behind. Over the road again they poured in a torrent; the battery, already taken and retaken, smutched and heated with incessant discharge, was again in their hands. The guns at the windmill were captured; troop after troop, put utterly to rout, fled toward Leipsic. In vain Piccolomini exposed himself until seven horses were killed under him, and he was wet with his own blood. The spell of Wallenstein himself seemed broken. The powder wagons in the rear roared into the air in a sudden explosion, raining balls and bursting bombs in every direction. All was on the brink of utter rout, when, with galloping hoofs and corselets reflecting the late afternoon light, the horse of Poppenheim, six fierce, fresh regiments, rushed upon the field; their leader rode ahead, a most impetuous chieftain, whose brow, it was said, when he was on fire with battle, bore in deep crimson the mark of two sabres crossed, I saw at Dresden the bâton which he carried as field - marshal, and now, no doubt, while the fighting sabres were flaming on his forehead, pointed forward to mark the path for his troopers. The Swedes were outnumbered and exhausted by their successes, but a fight of utter recklessness went forward. The ghost of the dead king seemed to hover in the battle - smoke. With a sort of demon grandeur, Wallenstein, in his red attire, towered in the tumult, with an eye that burned upon the fray with, as his host had some reason to think, a supernatural flame. His retinue were all shot down; a cannon-ball tore the spur from his heel; several musket-balls were found to have lodged in the folds of his dress. It was a confusion of blood, shrieks, prayers, curses. “ It was wonderful to see how [among the Swedes] the whole yellow regiment, after half an hour, in the same beautiful order in which it had stood, living, lay dead by its arms,” ⁶ and the Gothland and Smaland blues had fought also to an extermination as utter. The Swedes were driven back to their position of the morning. As the twilight, however, was giving way to darkness, they advanced again, aud fought until, in the November blackness, friend could no longer be told from foe. Wallenstein, like a baffled goblin, withdrew silently in the gloom, without standards, without artillery, the soldiers almost without arms, bearing with him Poppenheim, who had saved him, at the last gasp from a mortal wound. In the darkness the Swedish colonel, Oehm, heard a voice commanding him to “ follow to Leipsic.” It was a messenger from Wallenstein, who mistook hisregiment for Hoffkirk’s imperialists; and then first the Swedes knew that the foe had yielded.⁷ One fourth of all engaged had been slain outright. And as to wounded, in the host of Wallenstein scarcely a man was unhurt. The Swedes encamped close upon the field. They hunted with lanterns among the corpses, in the low-hanging gloom, until at length they found the king, face downward, close by a great stone, naked, gashed, trampled. That great stone on the plain of Lützen long before the time of the battle had had a notoriety, perhaps been an object of some reverence. It is a solitary bowlder, brought hither by natural forces, or perhaps by human hands, to lie here alone, whence and for what no man can say. But since that day mention of the Schwedenstein comes in again and again in history and poetry, coupled with solemn lamenting, until, through association, the words to a German ear have come to have almost the sound of moaning. The king’s corpse was carried, by torchlight, accompanied by a little retinue of troopers, in an ammunition-wagon, to a village in the rear of the Swedish line, where it was laid before the altar of the little church. The village school-master tells the story; how a simple service took place, conducted by himself and a trooper yet covered with the dust and sweat of battle; then how, while the body lay at length on a table in a peasant’s house, he made a plain coffin, in which the hero was borne to his weeping queen at Weissenfels.⁸

I went alone over the plain of Lützen, the twilight deepening at every step, bearing in my mind the story I have told. The rattle of the wheels from the receding Eilwagenhad long been hushed; there was no footfall on the highway but my own. Between the rows of trees at length I saw dimly the buildings of Liitzen, and knew I had reached the spot. I waited in the road until the night had wholly set in. The moon behind a thin cloud gave a ghostly light; there was now and then a lightning flash in the horizon, and a sullen roll of thunder like the sound of distant cannon. I looked out upon the fields to the north, showing faint and mysterious, — those in which Wallenstein had lain, when in the black darkness he dreamed or awoke to deal with charms and incantations; whence on the morrow, as the mist cleared, he looked across and beheld the bareheaded Swedes upon their knees. There it was that he rode stern and calm with his invulnerable breast. I was now on the spot where the fight had been fiercest, on the broad level of the high - road, alone where those thousands had struggled. I tried to call up a vision of the swarming Norsemen, yellow-haired and vigorous, with frames and courage exercised in the woods and fiords that had nursed the sea-kings before them. It must have been just here that the yellow regiment lay dead, all ranked as they stood; and just here the blues. It was here that the cannon wheels furrowed the sod; and it was yonder that Poppenheim burst in with his sweating horses and remorseless sabres. I left the road and went down into the field to the south, in a spot where the grain had been reaped, and stood where the Protestant line stood when their hearts heaved as they prayed with the king and shook the air with their manly chanting. Here it must have been that he flung himself from his horse and went forward, pike in hand, when the foot hesitated; and now at length I came to the great stone at the foot of which they found the king’s body. It rose in the plain two feet or so above the soil, gray, indistinct under the moon, dumb but eloquent. I thought of the stain that had lain among the lichens there; the cold mist charged heavily with the sulphurous reek of the combat; the Swedes, weeping and wounded, searching wearily among the corpses with their lanterns, then at last throwing their arms, stiff with smiting, about their golden hero,⁹ stretched tall and noble just in front.

It was near midnight when I Went on at last into the deserted street of the village. The morning came, bright and cheerful. A company of merry fellows of the village climbed with me on top of the Eilwagen, on which I was to ride back to Markranstätt. These were bound for Leipsic for a holiday, for it was Sunday. Two or three were members of a band, and as they lifted up the bass - viol a string caught in the step and groaned and twanged in a dismal way. “ Jetzt geht die Musik los! ” they laughed, and some struck attitudes for dancing. As the vehicle rattled through the village, over the rough pavement, I ventured upon a remark or two to a jovial shoemaker whose place was next to mine, and who told me of a tradition that the region was once more populous than now. The fields, fresh and sweet from the rain, were full of a bright red blossom. They swept away limitless from the ancient houses of the village, the walls of many of which withstood the conflagration of the battle day, and, roofed anew, are still substantial shelters. The front of the gray Sehwedenstein had carved upon it the letters “ G. A.” and the date 1632, the initials of the king, with the year of his death. It was covered with a canopy of ornamental iron-work, and the ground in the neighborhood, for a half-acre or so, was laid out as a garden. It would have been in better taste, I thought, to leave the place wild and uncared for, as it was when the armies clashed. If there were no association with Gustavus and Wallenstein, there is enough of interest connected with this road to make it memorable. Westward here, in 1757, marched still another army, in cocked hats, with high black gaiters coming to the knee, and hair gathered in queues down the back. In the vanguard rode a man straight and stiff, with a cold gray eye in which the light glittered sharp as from a bayonet, marked as a leader by a star on his breast. So at least Kaulbach has painted him in the Treppen-Haus at Berlin. It was Frederick on his way to Rossbach, close at hand. In May, 1813, too, hither came the army of Napoleon, a slender column stretching several leagues. A little to the left they were struck suddenly on the flank by Wittgenstein and nearly cut in two. Twelve thousand Russians and Prussians died in the effort to do it, and thirteen thousand French perished to prevent it; for the line, forsaking the high-road here, swept down into the fields toward the danger, and grappled with it long and doubtfully. The young guard had bivouacked at the Schwedenstein; and it was precisely there that Napoleon, on the ground, looking at a map, started up to listen to the sudden cannonade from the southward; and presently after rode toward it on the gallop, jerking the reins in his nervous way.

At Markranstätt I went to the service in the ancient church. Again and again it has been a hospital after great battles. As if to bring to mind the scenes of pain its walls had witnessed, a huge crucifix was placed conspicuously, the life - size figure upon which was so ghastly in its pallor and wounds as to suggest the thought that it had been raised up' there at some time from among the scores of wounded that had covered the floor, and been allowed to remain. The service was that of the Protestantism that the hero king died to maintain. The circumstances were all after Luther’s pattern. Best of all were the sounding chorals, pealed out in fine volume and harmony by the united congregation. So the devout Swedes themselves might have rung them out. I was glad to hear them on the plain of Lützen, and felt that they closed my pilgrimage well.

J. K. Hosmer.