Buch lesen: «Hero Tales of the Far North», Seite 8

GUSTAV ADOLF, THE SNOW-KING

The city of Prague, the capital of Bohemia, went wild with excitement one spring morning in the year 1618. The Protestant Estates of Germany had met there to protest against the aggressions of the Catholic League and the bad faith of the Emperor, who had guaranteed freedom of worship in the land and had now sent two envoys to defy the meeting and declare it illegal. In the old castle they delivered their message and bade the convention disperse; and the delegates, when they had heard, seized them and their clerk and threw them out of the window "in good old Bohemian fashion." They fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a scratch, which fact was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous day as proof of their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants as evidence that the devil ever takes care of his own.

It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew the Thirty Years' War, the most terrible that ever scourged the civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and hamlets. Other states fared little better. Two centuries did not wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder, inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.

In the gloom and horror of it all a noble figure stands forth alone. It were almost worth the sufferings of a Thirty Years' War for the world to have gained a Gustav Adolf. The "snow-king" the Emperor's generals named him when he first appeared on German soil at the head of his army of Northmen, and they prophesied that he would speedily melt, once the southern sun shone upon his host. They little knew the man. He went from victory to victory, less because he was the greatest general of his day than because he, and all his army with him, believed himself charged by the Almighty with the defence of his country and of his faith. The Emperor had attacked both, the first by attempting to extend his dominion to the Baltic; but Pommerania and the Baltic provinces were regarded by the Swedish ruler as the outworks of his kingdom; and Sweden was Protestant. Hence he drew the sword. "Our brethren in the faith are sighing for deliverance from spiritual and bodily thraldom," he said to his people. "Please God, they shall not sigh long." That was his warrant. Axel Oxenstjerna, his friend and right hand who lived to finish his work, said of him, "He felt himself impelled by a mighty spirit which he was unable to resist." As warrior, king, and man, he was head and shoulders above his time. Gustav Adolf saved religious liberty to the world. He paid the price with his life, but he would have asked no better fate. A soldier of God, he met a soldier's death on the field of battle, in the hour of victory.

A man of destiny he was to his people as to himself. Long years before his birth, upon the appearance of the comet of 1577, Tycho Brahe, the astronomer, who was deep in the occultism of his day, had predicted that a prince would appear in Finland who would do great things in Germany and deliver the Protestant peoples from the oppression of the popes, and the prophecy was applied to Gustav Adolf by his subjects all through his life. He was born on December 9, 1594, old style, as they still reckon time in Russia. Very early he showed the kind of stuff he was made of. When he was yet almost a baby he was told that there were snakes in the park, and showed fight at once: "Give me a stick and I will kill them." With the years he grew into a handsome youth who read his books, knew his Seneca by heart, was fond of the poets and the great orators, and mastered eight languages, living and dead. At seventeen he buckled on the sword and put the books away, but kept Xenophon as his friend; for he was a military historian after his own heart. He was then Duke of Finland.

The King, his father, was a stern but observant man who, seeing his bent, threw him with soldiers to his heart's content, glad to have it so, for it was a warlike age. From his tenth year he let him sit in council with him and early delegated to him the duty of answering ambassadors from foreign countries. The lad was the only one who dared oppose the king when he was in a temper, and often he made peace and healed wounds struck in anger. The people worshipped the fair young prince, and his father, when he felt the palsy of old age and bodily infirmities creeping upon him and thought of his unfinished tasks, would murmur as his eyes rested upon the bonny youth: "Ille faciet—He will do it." There is still in existence a document in which he laid down to him his course as a sovereign. "First of all," he writes, "you shall fear God and honor your father and mother. Give your brothers and sisters brotherly affection; love your father's faithful servants and requite them after their due. Be gracious to your subjects; punish evil and love the good. Believe in men, but find out first what is in them. Hold by the law without respect of person."

It was good advice to a prince, and the king took it to heart. On the docket of the Supreme Court at Stockholm is a letter written by Gustav Adolf to the judges and ordered by him to be entered there, which tells them plainly that if any of them is found perverting justice to suit him, the King, or any one else, he will have him flayed alive and his hide nailed to the judgment-seat, his ears to the pillory! Not a nice way of talking to dignified judges, perhaps, but then the prescription was intended to suit the practice, if there was need.

The young king earned his spurs in a war with Denmark that came near being his last as it was his first campaign. He and his horsemen were surprised by the Danes on a winter's night as they were warming themselves by a fire built of the pews in the Wittsjö church, and they cut their way through only after a desperate fight on the frozen lake. The ice broke under the king's horse and he was going down when two of his men caught him in the nick of time. He got away with the loss of his sword, his pistols, and his gloves. "I will remember you with a crust that shall do for your bairns too," he promised one of his rescuers, a stout peasant lad, and he kept his word. Thomas Larsson's descendants a generation ago still tilled the farm the King gave him. When the trouble with Denmark was over for the time being, he settled old scores with Russia and Poland in a way that left Sweden mistress of the Baltic. In the Polish war he was wounded twice and was repeatedly in peril of his life. Once he was shot in the neck, and, as the bullet could not be removed, it ever after troubled him to wear armor. His officers pleaded with him to spare himself, but his reply was that Cæsar and Alexander did not skulk behind the lines; a general must lead if he expected his men to follow.

In this campaign he met the League's troops, sent to chase him back to his own so that Wallenstein, the leader of the imperial armies, might be "General of the Baltic Sea," unmolested. "Go to Poland," he commanded one of his lieutenants, "and drive the snow-king out; or else tell him that I shall come and do it myself." The proud soldier never knew how near he came to entertaining the snow-king as his unwilling guest then. In a fight between his rear-guard and the imperial army Gustav Adolf was disarmed and taken prisoner by two troopers. There was another prisoner who had kept his pistol. He handed it to the King behind his back and with it he shot one of his captors and brained the other. For all that they nearly got him. He saved himself only by wriggling out of his belt and leaving it in the hands of the enemy. Eight years he campaigned in Poland and Prussia, learning the arts of war. Then he was ready for his life-work. He made a truce with Poland that freed his hands for a season, and went home to Sweden.

That spring (1629) he laid before the Swedish Estates his plan of freeing the Protestants. To defend Sweden, he declared, was to defend her faith, and the Estates voted supplies for the war. To gauge fully the splendid courage of the nation it must be remembered that the whole kingdom, including Finland, had a population of only a million and a half at the time and was preparing to attack the mighty Roman empire. In the first year of the war the Swedish budget was thirteen millions of dollars, of which nine and a half went for armaments. The whole army which Gustav Adolf led into Germany numbered only 14,000 soldiers, but it was made up of Swedish veterans led by men whose names were to become famous for all time, and welded together by an unshakable belief in their commander, a rigid discipline and a religious enthusiasm that swayed master and men with a common impulse. Such a combination has in all days proven irresistible.

The King's farewell to his people—he was never to see Sweden again—moved a nation to tears. He spoke to the nobles, the clergy and to the people, admonishing them to stand together in the hard years that were coming and gave them all into the keeping of God. They stood on the beach and watched his ships sail into the sunset until they were swallowed up in glory. Then they went back home to take up the burden that was their share. On the Rügen shore the King knelt with his men and thanked God for having brought them safe across the sea, then seized a spade, and himself turned the first sod in the making of a camp. "Who prays well, fights well," he said.

He was not exactly hospitably received. The old Duke of Pommerania would have none of him, begged him to go away, and only when the King pointed to his guns and hinted that he had keys well able to open the gates of Stettin, his capital, did he give in and promise help. The other German princes, with one or two exceptions, were as cravenly short-sighted. They held meetings and denounced the Emperor and his lawless doings, but Gustav they would not help. The princes of Brandenburg and of Saxony, the two Protestant Electors of the empire, were rather disposed to hinder him, if they might, though Brandenburg was his brother-in-law. Only when the King threatened to burn the city of Berlin over his head did he listen. While he was yet laboring with them, recruiting his army and keeping it in practice by driving the enemy out of Pommerania, news reached him of the fall of Magdeburg, the strongest city in northern Germany, that had of its own free will joined his cause.

The sacking of Magdeburg is one of the black deeds of history. In a night the populous city was reduced to a heap of smoking ruins under which twenty thousand men, women, and children lay buried. Not since the fall of Jerusalem, said Pappenheim, Tilly's famous cavalry leader to whom looting and burning were things of every day, had so awful a visitation befallen a town. Only the great cathedral and a few houses near it were left standing. The history of warfare of the Christian peoples of that day reads like a horrid nightmare. The fighting armies left a trail of black desolation where they passed. "They are not made up of birds that feed on air," sneered Tilly. Peaceful husbandmen were murdered, the young women dragged away to worse than slavery, and helpless children spitted upon the lances of the wild landsknechts and tossed with a laugh into the blazing ruins of their homes. But no such foul blot cleaves to the memory of Gustav Adolf. While he lived his men were soldiers, not demons. In his tent the work of Hugo Grotius on the rights of the nations in war and peace lay beside the Bible and he knew them both by heart. When he was gone, the fame of some of his greatest generals was smirched by as vile orgies as Tilly's worst days had witnessed. It is told of John Banér, one of the most brilliant of them, that he demanded ransom of the city of Prix, past which his way led. The city fathers permitted themselves an untimely jest: "Prix giebt nichts—Prix gives nothing," they said. Banér was as brief: "Prix wird zu nichts—Prix comes to nothing," and his army wiped it out.

Grief and anger almost choked the King when he heard of Magdeburg's fate. "I will avenge that on the Old Corporal (Tilly's nickname)," he cried, "if it costs my life." Without further ado he forced the two Electors to terms and joined the Saxon army to his own. On September 7, 1631, fifteen months after he had landed in Germany, he met Tilly face to face at Breitenfeld, a village just north of Leipzig. The Emperor's host in its brave show of silver and plumes and gold, the plunder of many campaigns under its invincible leader, looked with contempt upon the travel-worn Swedes in their poor, soiled garb. The stolid Finns sat their mean but wiry little horses very unlike Pappenheim's dreaded Walloons, descendants of the warlike Belgæ of Gaul who defied the Germans of old in the forest of the Ardennes and joined Cæsar in his victorious march. But Tilly himself was not deceived. He knew how far this enemy had come and with what hardships cheerfully borne; how they had routed the Russians, written laws for the Poles in their own land, and overthrown armies and forts that barred their way. He would wait for reinforcements; but his generals egged him on, said age had made him timid and slow, and carried the day.

The King slept in an empty cart the night before the battle and dreamed that he wrestled with Tilly and threw him, but that he tore his breast with his teeth. When all was ready in the morning he rode along the front and told his fusiliers not to shoot till they saw the white in the enemy's eyes, the horsemen not to dull their swords by hacking the helmets of the Walloons: "Cut at their horses and they will go down with them." In the pause before the onset he prayed with head uncovered and lowered sword, and his voice carried to the farthest lines:

"Thou, God, in whose hands are victory and defeat, look graciously upon thy servants. From distant lands and peaceful homes have we come to battle for freedom, truth and thy gospel. Give us victory for thy holy name's sake, Amen!"

Tilly had expected the King to attack, but the fiery Pappenheim upset his plans. The smoke of the guns drifted in the faces of the Swedes and the King swung his army to the south to get the wind right. In making the turn they had to cross a brook and this moment Pappenheim chose for his charge. Like a thunderbolt his Walloons fell upon them. The Swedish fire mowed them down like ripened grain and checked their impetuous rush. They tried to turn the King's right and so outflank him; but the army turned with them and stood like a rock. The extreme mobility of his forces was Gustav Adolf's great advantage in his campaigns. He revised the book of military tactics up to date. The imperial troops were massed in solid columns, after the old Spanish fashion, the impact of which was hard to resist when they struck. The King's, on the contrary, moved in smaller bodies, quickly thrown upon the point of danger, and his artillery was so distributed among them as to make every shot tell on the compact body of the enemy. Whichever way Pappenheim turned he found a firm front, bristling with guns, opposing him. Seven times he threw himself upon the living wall; each time his horsemen were flung back, their lines thinned and broken. The field was strewn with their dead. Tilly, anxiously watching, threw up his hands in despair. "This man will lose me honor and fame, and the Emperor his lands," he cried. The charge ended in wild flight, and Tilly saw that he must himself attack, to turn the tide.

On the double-quick his columns of spearmen charged down the heights, swept the Saxons from the field, and fell upon the Swedish left. The shock was tremendous. General Gustav Horn gave back to let his second line come up, and held the ground stubbornly against fearful odds. Word was brought the King of his danger. With the right wing that had crushed Pappenheim he hurried to the rescue. In the heat of the fight the armies had changed position, and the Swedes found themselves climbing the hill upon which Tilly's artillery was posted. Seeing this, the King made one of the rapid movements that more than once won him the day. Raising the cry, "Remember Magdeburg!" he carried the position with his Finns by a sudden overwhelming assault, and turned the guns upon the dense masses of the enemy fighting below.

In vain they stormed the heights. Both wings and the centre closed in upon them, and the day was lost. Tilly fled, wounded, and narrowly escaped capture. A captain in the Swedish army, who was called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol. A staff officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief. Twilight fell upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead, two-thirds of them the flower of the Emperor's army. Blood-stained and smoke-begrimed, Gustav Adolf and his men knelt on the field and thanked God for the victory.

Had the King's friend and adviser, Axel Oxenstjerna, been with him he might have marched upon Vienna then, leaving the Protestant Estates to settle their own affairs, and very likely have ended the war. Gustav Adolf thought of Tilly who would return with another army. Oxenstjerna saw farther, weighing things upon the scales of the diplomatist.

"How think you we would fare," asked the King once, when the chancellor saw obstacles in their way which he would brush aside, "if my fire did not thaw the chill in you?"

"But for my chill cooling your Majesty's fire," was his friend's retort, "you would have long since been burned up." The King laughed and owned that he was right.

Instead of bearding the Emperor in his capital he turned toward the Rhine where millions of Protestants were praying for his coming and where his army might find rest and abundance. The cathedral city of Würzburg he took by storm. The bishop who ruled it fled at his approach, but the full treasury of the Jesuits fell into his hands. The Madonna of beaten gold and the twelve solid silver apostles, famous throughout Europe, were sent to the mint and coined into money to pay his army. In the cellar they found chests filled with ducats. The bottom fell out of one as they carried it up and the gold rolled out on the pavement. The soldiers swarmed to pick it up, but a good many coins stuck to their pockets. The King saw it and laughed: "Since you have them, boys, keep them." The dead were still lying in the castle yard after the siege, a number of monks among them. The color of some of them seemed high for corpses. "Arise from the dead," he said waggishly, "no one will hurt you," and the frightened monks got upon their feet and scampered away.

Frankfort opened its gates to his victorious host and Nürnberg received him as a heaven-sent liberator. But Tilly was in the field with a fresh army, burning to avenge Breitenfeld. He had surprised General Horn at Bamberg and beaten him. At the approach of the King he camped where the river Lech joins the Danube, awaiting attack. There was but one place to cross to get at him, and right there he stood. The king seized Donauworth and Ulm, and under cover of the fire of seventy guns threw a bridge across the Lech. Three hundred Finns carrying picks and spades ran across the shaky planks upon which the fire of Tilly's whole artillery park was concentrated. Once across, they burrowed in the ground like moles and, with bullets raining upon them, threw up earthworks for shelter. Squad after squad of volunteers followed. Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar swam his horsemen across the river farther up-stream and took the Bavarian troops in the flank, beating them back far enough to let him join the Finns at the landing. The King himself was directing the artillery on the other shore, aiming the guns with his own hand. The Walloons, Tilly's last hope, charged, but broke under the withering fire. In desperation the old field-marshal seized the standard and himself led the forlorn hope. Half-way to the bridge he fell, one leg shattered by a cannon-ball, and panic seized his men. The imperialists fled in the night, carrying their wounded leader. He died on the march soon after. Men said of him that he had served his master well.

The snow-king had not melted in the south. He was master of the Roman empire from the Baltic to the Alps. The way to Austria and Italy lay open before him. Protestant princes crowded to do him homage, offering him the imperial crown. But Gustav Adolf did not lose his head. Toward the humbled Catholics he showed only forbearance and toleration. In Munich he visited the college of the Jesuits, and spoke long with the rector in the Latin tongue, assuring him of their safety as long as they kept from politics and plotting. The armory in that city was known to be the best stocked in all Europe and the King's surprise was great when he found gun-carriages in plenty, but not a single cannon. Looking about him, he saw evidence that the floor had been hastily relaid and remembered the "dead" monks at Würzburg. He had it taken up and a dark vault appeared. The King looked into it.

"Arise!" he called out, "and come to judgment," and amid shouts of laughter willing hands brought out a hundred and forty good guns, welcome reënforcements.

The ignorant Bavarian peasants had been told that the King was the very anti-Christ, come to harass the world for its sins, and carried on a cruel guerilla warfare upon his army. They waylaid the Swedes by night on their foraging trips and maimed and murdered those they caught with fiendish tortures. The bitterest anger filled Gustav Adolf's soul when upon his entry into Landshut the burgomaster knelt at his stirrup asking mercy for his city.

"Pray not to me," he said harshly, "but to God for yourself and for your people, for in truth you have need."

For once thoughts of vengeance seemed to fill his soul. "No, no!" he thundered when the frightened burgomaster pleaded that his townsmen should not be held accountable for the cruelty of the country-folk, "you are beasts, not men, and deserve to be wiped from the earth with fire and sword." From out the multitude there came a warning voice: "Will the King now abandon the path of mercy for the way of vengeance and visit his wrath upon these innocent people?" No one saw the speaker. The day was oppressively hot and the King came near fainting in the saddle. As he rode out of the city toward the camp, a bolt of lightning struck the ground beside him and a mighty crash of thunder rolled overhead. Pale and thoughtful, he rode on. But Landshut was spared. That evening General Horn brought the anxious citizens the King's promise of pardon.

A few weeks later tidings reached Gustav Adolf that Wallenstein and the Elector of Bavaria were marching to effect a junction at Nürnberg. If they took the city, his line of communication was cut and his army threatened. Wallenstein, who was a traitor, had been in disgrace; but he was a great general and in his dire need Emperor Ferdinand had no one else to turn to. So he took him back on his own terms, and in the spring he had an army of forty thousand veterans in the field. This was the host he was leading against Nürnberg. But the King got there first and intrenched himself so strongly that there was no ousting him. Wallenstein followed suit and for eleven weeks the enemies eyed one another from their "lagers," neither willing to risk an attack. In the end Gustav Adolf tried, but even his Finns could not take the impregnable heights the enemy held. At last he went away with colors flying and bands playing, right under the enemy's walls, in the hope of tempting him out. But he never stirred.

When Wallenstein was sure he had gone, he burned his camp and turned toward Saxony to punish the Elector for joining the Swedes. A wail of anguish went up from that unhappy land and the King heard it clear across the country. By forced marches he hurried to the rescue of his ally, picking up Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar on the way. At Naumburg the people crowded about him and sought to kiss or even to touch his garments. The King looked sadly at them. "They put their trust in me, poor weak mortal, as if I were the Almighty. It may be that He will punish their folly soon upon the object of their senseless idolatry." He had come to stay, but when he learned that Wallenstein had sent Pappenheim away to the west, thus weakening his army, and was going into winter quarters at Lützen, near Leipzig, a half-day's march from the memorable Breitenfeld, he broke camp at once and hastened to attack him. Starting early, his army reached Lützen at nightfall on November 15, 1632.

Wallenstein believed the campaign was over for that year and the Swedes in winter quarters, and was taken completely by surprise. Had the King given battle that night, he would have wiped the enemy out. Two things, in themselves of little account, delayed him: a small brook that crossed his path, and the freshly plowed fields. His men were tired after the long march and he decided to let them rest. It was Wallenstein's chance. Overnight he posted his army north of the highway that leads from Lützen to Leipzig, dug deep the ditches that enclosed it, and made breastworks of the dirt. Sunrise found sheltered behind them twenty-seven thousand seasoned veterans to whom Gustav Adolf could oppose but twenty thousand; but he had more guns and they were better served.

As the day broke the Swedish army, drawn up in battle array, intoned Luther's hymn, "A mighty fortress is our God," and cheered the King. He wore a leathern doublet and a gray mantle. To the pleadings of his officers that he put on armor he replied only, "God is my armor." "To-day," he cried as he rode along the lines, "will end all our hardships." He himself took command of the right wing, the gallant Duke Bernhard of the left. As at Breitenfeld, the rallying cry was, "God with us!"

The King hoped to crush his enemy utterly, and the whole line attacked at once with great fury. From the start victory leaned toward the Swedish army. Then suddenly in the wild tumult of battle a heavy fog settled upon the field. What followed was all confusion. No one knows the rights of it to this day. The King led his famous yellow and blue regiments against the enemy's left. "The black fellows there," he shouted, pointing to the Emperor's cuirassiers in their black armor, "attack them!" Just then an adjutant reported that his infantry was hard pressed. "Follow me," he commanded, and, clapping spurs to his horse, set off at full speed for the threatened quarter. In the fog he lost his way and ran into the cuirassiers. His two attendants were shot down and a bullet crushed the King's right arm. He tried to hide the fact that he was wounded, but pain and loss of blood made him faint and he asked the Duke of Lauenburg who rode with him to help him out of the crush. At that moment a fresh troop of horsemen bore down upon them and their leader, Moritz von Falkenberg, shot the King through the body with the exultant cry, "You I have long sought!" The words had hardly left his lips when he fell with a bullet through his head.

The King swayed in the saddle and lost the reins. "Save yourself," he whispered to the Duke, "I am done for." The Duke put his arm around him to support him, but the cuirassiers surged against them and tore them apart. The King's horse was shot in the neck and threw its rider. Awhile he hung by the stirrup and was dragged over the trampled field. Then the horse shook itself free and ran through the lines, spreading the tidings of the King's fall afar.

A German page, Leubelfing, a lad of eighteen, was alone with the King. He sprang from his horse and tried to help him into the saddle but had not the strength to do it. Gustav Adolf was stout and very heavy. While he was trying to lift him some Croats rode up and demanded the name of the wounded man. The page held his tongue, and they ran him through. Gustav Adolf, to save him, said that he was the King.¹² At that they shot him through the head, and showered blows upon him. When the body was found in the night it was naked. They had robbed and stripped him.

The King was dead. Through the Swedish ranks Duke Bernhard shouted the tidings. "Who now cares to live? Forward, to avenge his death!" With the blind fury of the Berserkers of old the Swedes cleared the ditches, stormed the breastworks, and drove the foe in a panic before them. The Duke's arm was broken by a bullet. He hardly knew it. With his regiment he rode down the crew of one of the enemy's batteries and swept on. In the midst of it all a cry resounded over the plain that made the runaways halt and turn back.

"Pappenheim! Pappenheim is here!"

He had come with his Walloons in answer to the general's summons. "Where is the King?" he asked, and they pointed to the Finnish brigade. With a mighty crash the two hosts that had met so often before came together. Wallenstein mustered his scattered forces and the King's army was attacked from three sides at once. The yellow brigade fell where it stood almost to the last man. The blue fared little better. Slowly the Swedish infantry gave back. The battle seemed lost.

But the tide turned once more. In the hottest fight Pappenheim fell, pierced by three bullets. The "man of a hundred scars" died, exulting that the King whom he hated had gone before. With his death the Emperor's men lost heart. The Swedes charged again and again with unabated fury. Night closed in with Wallenstein's centre still unbroken; but he had lost all his guns. Under cover of the darkness he made his escape. The King's army camped upon the battle-field. The carnage had been fearful; nine thousand were slain. It was Wallenstein's last fight. With the remnants of his army he retreated to Bohemia, sick and sore, and spent his last days there plotting against his master. He died by an assassin's hand.