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When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony,
drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of
Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when
the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the
forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of
Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count
Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was
one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the
Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled
forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely
attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a
long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his
only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired
in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a
Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could
boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as
well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror,
for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the
massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of
cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the
butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword
in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was
Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty
years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of
the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the
leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.

In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was
an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that
in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the
musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole
vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and
manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in
heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had
introduced a more open order--he had lightened the musket, dispensed
with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the
flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their
carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a
real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the
Imperial masses.

The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over
the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans
of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order--infantry in the centre,
cavalry on the flanks--upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain
of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns--Gustavus with
the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As
they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed
upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns
deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt
that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left
arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came
through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were
raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old
school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with
modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in
reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was
filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail-
clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the
clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly
ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern
battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre
and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by
the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops
manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when
the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their
fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was
complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for
the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable
commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew
the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.

On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still
regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise--and whatever his
reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore
but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian
forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede.
Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come
as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of
war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the
cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is
broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head,
the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a
fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All
fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by
his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people
accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better
world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no
doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding
himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak
and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile.
Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt.
Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have
been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne
dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as
beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city
of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city
of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the
Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more
and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few
marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant
chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.

Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly
had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and
fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend
upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the
Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between
the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it
were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose
trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The
secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man
himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary
bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was
formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage
and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer
portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace
in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good
Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth
was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein
had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a
traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on
which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in
view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving
on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on
the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its
command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was
subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been
called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his
death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man.
He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the
path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of
his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his
character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince-
Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies
of the House of Austria,--to this height had the landless and obscure
adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by
the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and
heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains and hearts were strong.
Highest he stood among the uncrowned heads of Europe, and dreaded by the
crowned. We wonder how the boisterous soldiers can have loved a chief
who was so far from being a comrade, a being so disdainful and reserved,
who at the sumptuous table kept by his officers never appeared, never
joined in the revelry, even in the camp lived alone, punished intrusion
on his haughty privacy as a crime. But his name was victory and plunder;
he was lavishly munificent, as one who knew that those who play a deep
game must lay down heavy stakes, his eye was quick to discern, his hand
prompt to reward the merit of the buccaneer; and those who followed his
soaring fortunes knew that they would share them. If he was prompt to
reward, he was also stern in punishment, and a certain arbitrariness
both in reward and punishment made the soldier feel that the commander's
will was law. If Wallenstein was not the boon companion of the
mercenaries, he was their divinity, and he was himself essentially one
of them--even his superstition was theirs, and filled the same void of
faith in his as in their hearts; though, while the common soldier raised
the fiend to charm bullets, or bought spells and amulets of a quack at
Nuremburg or Augsburg, Seni, the first astrologer of the age, explored
the sympathizing stars for the august destiny of the Duke of Friedland.
Like Uriel and Satan in Paradise Lost, Gustavus and Wallenstein stood
opposed to each other. On one side was the enthusiast, on the other the
mighty gamester, playing the great game of his life without emotion, by
intensity of thought alone. On one side was the crusader, on the other
the indifferentist, without faith except in his star. On the one side
was as much good, perhaps, as has ever appeared in the form of a
conqueror, on the other side the majesty of evil. Gustavus was young,
his frame was vigorous and active, though inclined to corpulence, his
complexion fair, his hair golden, his eye blue and merry, his
countenance frank as day, and the image of a heart which had felt the
kindest influences of love and friendship. Wallenstein was past his
prime, his frame was tall, spare, somewhat bowed by pain, his complexion
dark, his eye black and piercing, his look that of a man who trod
slippery paths with deadly rivals at his side, and of whose many letters
not one is to a friend. But, opposites in all else, the two champions
were well matched in power. Perhaps there is hardly such another duel in
history. Such another there would have been if Strafford had lived to
encounter Cromwell.

The market for the great adventurer's services having risen so high, the
price which he asked was large--a principality in hand, a province to be
conquered, supreme command of the army which he had raised. The court
suggested that if the emperor's son, the King of Hungary, were put over
Wallenstein's head, his name would be a tower of strength, but
Wallenstein answered with a blasphemous frankness which must have made
the ears of courtiers tingle. He would be emperor of the army; he would
be emperor in the matter of confiscations. The last article shows how he
won the soldier's heart. Perhaps in framing his terms, he gave something
to his wounded pride. If he did, the luxury cost him dear, for here he
trod upon the serpent that stung his life.

The career of Gustavus was at once arrested, and he took shelter against
the storm in an entrenched camp protected by three hundred cannon under
the walls of Nuremberg--Nuremberg the eldest daughter of the German
Reformation, the Florence of Germany in art, wealth and freedom, then
the beautiful home of early commerce, now its romantic tomb. The
desolation of her grass-grown streets dates from that terrible day. The
Swedish lines were scarcely completed when Wallenstein appeared with all
his power, and sweeping past, entrenched himself four miles from his
enemy in a position the key of which were the wooded hill and old castle
of the Altenberg. Those who chance to visit that spot may fancy there
Wallenstein's camp as it is in Schiller, ringing with the boisterous
revelry of its wild and motley bands. And they may fancy the sudden
silence, the awe of men who knew no other awe, as in his well-known
dress, the laced buff coat with crimson scarf, and the grey hat with
crimson plume, Wallenstein rode by. Week after week and month after
month these two heavy clouds of war hung close together, and Europe
looked for the bursting of the storm. But famine was to do Wallenstein's
work; and by famine and the pestilence, bred by the horrible state of
the camp, at last his work was done. The utmost limit of deadly inaction
for the Swedes arrived. Discipline and honour gave way, and could
scarcely be restored by the passionate eloquence of Gustavus. Oxenstiern
brought large reinforcements; and on the 24th August Wallenstein saw--
with grim pleasure he must have seen--Gustavus advancing to attack him
in his lines. By five hundred at a time--there was room for no more in
the narrow path of death--the Swedes scaled the flashing and thundering
Altenberg. They scaled it again and again through a long summer's day.
Once it was all but won. But at evening the Nurembergers saw their hero
and protector retiring, for the first time defeated, from the field. Yet
Gustavus had not lost the confidence of his soldiers. He had shared
their danger and had spared their blood. In ten hours' hard fighting he
had lost only 2,000 men. But Wallenstein might well shower upon his
wounded soldiers the only balm for the wounds of men fighting without a
country or a cause. He might well write to the emperor: "The King of
Sweden has blunted his horns a good deal. Henceforth the title of
Invincible belongs not to him, but to your Majesty." No doubt Ferdinand
thought it did.

Gustavus now broke up and marched on Bavaria, abandoning the great
Protestant city, with the memory of Magdeburg in his heart. But
Nuremberg was not to share the fate of Magdeburg. The Imperial army was
not in a condition to form the siege. It had suffered as much as that of
Gustavus. That such troops should have been held together in such
extremity proves their general's power of command. Wallenstein soon
gladdened the eyes of the Nurembergers by firing his camp, and declining
to follow the lure into Bavaria, marched on Saxony, joined another
Imperial army under Pappenheim and took Leipsic.

To save Saxony Gustavus left Bavaria half conquered. As he hurried to
the rescue, the people on his line of march knelt to kiss the hem of his
garment, the sheath of his delivering sword, and could scarcely be
prevented from adoring him as a god. His religious spirit was filled
with a presentiment that the idol in which they trusted would be soon
laid low. On the 14th of November he was leaving a strongly entrenched
camp, at Naumberg, where the Imperialists fancied, the season being so
far advanced, he intended to remain, when news reached his ear like the
sight which struck Wellington's eye as it ranged over Marmont's army on
the morning of Salamanca. [Footnote: We owe the parallel, we believe, to
an article by Lord Ellesmere, in the _Quarterly Review_.] The
impetuous Pappenheim, ever anxious for separate command, had persuaded
an Imperial council of war to detach him with a large force against
Halle. The rest of the Imperialists, under Wallenstein, were quartered
in the villages around Lutzen, close within the king's reach, and
unaware of his approach. "The Lord," cried Gustavus, "has delivered him
into my hand," and at once he swooped upon his prey.

"Break up and march with every man and gun. The enemy is advancing
hither. He is already at the pass by the hollow road." So wrote
Wallenstein to Pappenheim. The letter is still preserved, stained with
Pappenheim's life-blood. But, in that mortal race, Pappenheim stood no
chance. Halle was a long day's march off, and the troopers, whom
Pappenheim could lead gallantly, but could not control, after taking the
town had dispersed to plunder. Yet the Swede's great opportunity was
lost. Lutzen, though in sight, proved not so near as flattering guides
and eager eyes had made it. The deep-banked Rippach, its bridge all too
narrow for the impetuous columns, the roads heavy from rain, delayed the
march. A skirmish with some Imperial cavalry under Isolani wasted
minutes when minutes were years; and the short November day was at an
end when the Swede reached the plain of Lutzen.

No military advantage marks the spot where the storm overtook the Duke
of Friedland. He was caught like a traveller in a tempest off a
shelterless plain, and had nothing for it but to bide the brunt. What
could be done with ditches, two windmills, a mud wall, a small canal, he
did, moving from point to point during the long night; and before
morning all his troops, except Pappenheim's division, had come in and
were in line.

When the morning broke a heavy fog lay on the ground. Historians have
not failed to remark that there is a sympathy in things, and that the
day was loath to dawn which was to be the last day of Gustavus. But if
Nature sympathized with Gustavus, she chose a bad mode of showing her
sympathy, for while the fog prevented the Swedes from advancing, part of
Pappenheim's corps arrived. After prayers, the king and all his army
sang Luther's hymn, "Our God is a strong tower"--the Marseillaise of the
militant Reformation. Then Gustavus mounted his horse, and addressed the
different divisions, adjuring them by their victorious name, by the
memory of the Breitenfeld, by the great cause whose issue hung upon
their swords, to fight well for that cause, for their country and their
God. His heart was uplifted at Lutzen, with that Hebrew fervour which
uplifted the heart of Cromwell at Dunbar. Old wounds made it irksome to
him to wear a cuirass. "God," he said, "shall be my armour this day".

Wallenstein has been much belied if he thought of anything that morning
more religious than the order of battle, which has been preserved, drawn
up by his own hand, and in which his troops are seen still formed in
heavy masses, in contrast to the lighter formations of Gustavus. He was
carried down his lines in a litter being crippled by gout, which the
surgeons of that day had tried to cure by cutting into the flesh. But
when the action began, he placed his mangled foot in a stirrup lined
with silk, and mounted the small charger, the skin of which is still
shown in the deserted palace of his pride. We may be sure that
confidence sat undisturbed upon his brow; but in his heart he must have
felt that though he had brave men around him, the Swedes, fighting for
their cause under their king, were more than men; and that in the
balance of battle then held out, his scale had kicked the beam. There
can hardly be a harder trial for human fortitude than to command in a
great action on the weaker side. Villeneuve was a brave man, though an
unfortunate admiral, but he owned that his heart sank within him at
Trafalgar when he saw Nelson bearing down.

"God with us," was the Swedish battle cry. On the other side the words
"Jesu-Maria" passed round, as twenty-five thousand of the most godless
and lawless ruffians the world ever saw, stood to the arms which they
had imbrued in the blood not of soldiers only, but of women and children
of captured towns. Doubtless many a wild Walloon and savage Croat, many
a fierce Spaniard and cruel Italian, who had butchered and tortured at
Magdeburg, was here come to bite the dust. These men were children of
the camp and the battlefield, long familiar with every form of death,
yet, had they known what a day was now before them, they might have felt
like a recruit on the morning of his first field. Some were afterwards
broken or beheaded for misconduct before the enemy; others earned rich
rewards. Most paid, like men of honour, the price for which they were
allowed to glut every lust and revel in every kind of crime.

At nine the sky began to clear, straggling shots told that the armies
were catching sight of each other, and a red glare broke the mist, where
the Imperialists had set fire to Lutzen to cover their right. At ten
Gustavus placed himself at the head of his cavalry. War has now changed;
and the telescope is the general's sword. Yet we cannot help feeling
that the gallant king, who cast in his own life with the lives of the
peasants he had drawn from their Swedish homes, is a nobler figure than
the great Emperor who, on the same plains, two centuries afterwards,
ordered to their death the masses of youthful valour sent by a ruthless
conscription to feed the vanity of a heart of clay. The Swedes, after
the manner of war in that fierce and hardy age, fell at once with their
main force on the whole of the Imperial line. On the left, after a
murderous struggle, they gained ground and took the enemy's guns. But on
the right the Imperialists held firm, and while Gustavus was carrying
victory with him to that quarter, Wallenstein restored the day upon the
right. Again Gustavus hurried to that part of the field. Again the
Imperialists gave way, and Gustavus, uncovering his head, thanked God
for his victory. At this moment it seems the mist returned. The Swedes
were confused and lost their advantage. A horse, too well known, ran
riderless down their line, and when their cavalry next advanced, they
found the stripped and mangled body of their king. According to the most
credible witness, Gustavus who had galloped forward to see how his
advantage might be best followed up, got too near the enemy, was shot
first in the arm, then in the back, and fell from his horse. A party of
Imperial cuirassiers came up, and learning from the wounded man himself
who he was, finished the work of death. They then stripped the body for
proofs of their great enemy's fate and relics of the mighty slain. Dark
reports of treason were spread abroad, and one of these reports followed
the Duke of Saxe-Lauenburg, who was with Gustavus that day, through his
questionable life to his unhappy end. In those times a great man could
scarcely die without suspicion of foul play, and in all times men are
unwilling to believe that a life on which the destiny of a cause or a
nation hangs can be swept away by the blind, indiscriminate hand of
common death.

Gustavus dead, the first thought of his officers was retreat; and that
thought was his best eulogy. Their second thought was revenge. Yet so
great was the discouragement that one Swedish colonel refused to
advance, and Bernard of Saxe-Weimar cut him down with his own hand.
Again the struggle began, and with all the morning's fury. Wallenstein
had used his respite well. He knew that his great antagonist was dead,
and that he was now the master-spirit on the field. And with friendly
night near, and victory within his grasp, he directed in person the most
desperate combat, prodigal of the life on which, according to his
enemies, his treasonable projects hung. Yet the day was again going
against him, when the remainder of Pappenheim's corps arrived, and the
road was once more opened to victory by a charge which cost Pappenheim
his own life. At four o'clock the battle was at its last gasp. The
carnage had been fearful on both sides, and as fearful was the
exhaustion. For six hours almost every man in both armies had borne the
terrible excitement of mortal combat with pike and sword; and four times
that excitement had been strained by general charges to its highest
pitch. The Imperialists held their ground, but confused and shattered;
their constancy sustained only by that commanding presence which still
moved along their lines, unhurt, grazed and even marked by the storm of
death through which he rode. Just as the sun was setting, the Swedes
made the supreme effort which heroism alone can make. Then Wallenstein
gave the signal for retreat, welcome to the bravest, and as darkness
fell upon the field, the shattered masses of the Imperialists drew off
slowly and sullenly into the gloom. Slowly and sullenly they drew off,
leaving nothing to the victor except some guns of position; but they had
not gone far when they fell into the disorganization of defeat.

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