A Visit to Lützen in October, 1862.

By Herman Merivale.

Part I.

The Battle to the Death of Gustavus.

The Battle of Lützen, 1632, still constitutes one of the most interesting chapters in military history, notwithstanding all the gigantic additions which the annals of the last and present century have made to it. Though not precisely one of the "decisive" battles of history, for it occurred just half-way in the period of the Thirty Years' War, yet it was, in truth, the turning-point of that contest: up to that day, the event in debate was the annihilation of one party by the other; after it, the terms of separation only. To the soldier it is memorable as the last field in which the old system of tactics—that inherited from the ancients by the men of the "Renaissance"—was fairly pitted against the modern; for the modern military art may be truly described as a development only of that introduced by Gustavus Adolphus. But it is more famous as the occasion of victory and death to one of the few leading spirits of the world's history—one of the few in whom nobleness of heart and purpose, and pre-eminence of genius, were so fused together as to constitute the true character of the hero.

It was well, no doubt, for a curious posterity, that an action of this importance occurred in a civilized period, and in the heart of much-enduring and much-writing Germany, the home of "la nation écrivassière." But the result is nevertheless somewhat perplexing. The literature of Lützen would alone furnish out a small catalogue. The presses throughout Germany, France, and Italy, seem to have gone to work simultaneously and immediately on the receipt of the news. "Flying sheets," containing professed descriptions of it, swarm in every library. Preachers, Protestant and Catholic, improved the occasion from a thousand pulpits, and every one of them, that could afford it, resolved that the world should not lose the benefit of his pious eloquence. Then the caricaturist and the ballad-monger got hold of it, whose fugitive but sometimes authentic hints must be studied in the bulky republications of modern antiquaries. Nor did the interest cease when the graver class of authors came on the stage. Political historians, religious historians, dynastic historians and genealogists, topographers, biographers, all had something to say on so renowned a catastrophe, and everyone was in duty bound to add something new, of fact or speculation, to what had been ascertained by his predecessors. Next, in the last century, followed the herd of German professors and other literates, whose quaint little Latin dissertations in quarto darken so many a question, and deepen so many a paradox. These attached themselves, by predilection, to page 258 minute and curious questions of fact or credulous tradition: the mode of the King's death, "de dubia cœde Gustavi Adolphi Regis," furnished materials for many—and I have the titles of two at least under my eyes, about the king's magic sword: "de gladio magico, quocum Gustavus Adolphus in prœlio apud Lützen pugnaverit." Lastly, the Wallenstein mania, for which Schiller has to answer, produced in our own times such a number of biographies of that personage, and of controversial essays on the questionable points of his history, garnished with original correspondence and extracts from archives, that these alone furnish a mass formidable to contemplate.

The writer of these pages must not pretend to anything like an extensive acquaintance with the vast corpus historicum of which he has just sketched (and skimmed) the circumference; but he has read enough to find himself bewildered by the utterly irreconcilable accounts of every main feature of the day. It was a stand-up fight, with little of previous manoeuvring, fought between midday and sunset, by two armies drawn out in a perfectly open field. "Daylight and champian," one would have thought, could "discover no farther." And yet this swarm of ingenious [unclear: penmer] have succeeded in obscuring the stay with a multitude of contradictions. Almost everything is disputed: the number of the combatants (to the extent of 100 per cent.); the number and arangement of regiments, and names of their commanders; the hour, place, and circumstances of the King's death; the hour of Pappenheim's arrival on the field (the critical point of the contest; nay, even the important questions, whether Wallenstein was in a litter or on horseback, with his stirrup wrapped up in silk to alleviate the pressure or his gouty limb—a device of [unclear: Charle] the Fifth, according to his [unclear: autobiograpy]; and whether Gustavus's [unclear: charger] was white, "brown-black," or "applegrey." Having referred to these [unclear: contradctions], the writer intends to waive [unclear: arther] discussion of them, and to compile the best account he can by comparison of authorities. And he can only recommend to any one who may be as curious as himself, two measures: the first to procure, if he can, F. E. F. Philippi's "Death of Gustavus Adolphus," printed at Leipzig in 1832—it consists only of a hundred pages, and the author was "Steuer-rath" at Lützen, and had a pair of eyes; the next, to carry Philippi in his pocket, and visit the battle-field, which is easily reached and may be soon explored.

The little town of Lützen lies between several intersecting lines of railroad, and at some distance from each. The ordinary tourists' approach to it is consequently by carriage or omnibus from Leipzig, ten or twelve English miles away. But, for my own part, I walked to it from the station at Corbetha, on the line between Halle and Weimar—a pleasant two hours' stroll, along footpaths and cross-roads, through a land of teeming fertility, alive with the whole population of the neighbourhood busy at their potato harvest. The pedestrian crosses the Saale by a rope-ferry—here a sullen deep stream, cutting its way through strata of diluvial gravel, about the size of the Severn at Worcester; traverses the pretty bowery village of Vesta, with its aged lindens; and thence across the open plain which extends to the neighbourhood of Leipzig, and in the middle of which Lützen is placed. A rich and joyous-looking expanse of land, studded with villages and tall ungainly church steeples; here and there, bedded in the soil, one of those problematical boulders of dark-red granite which the glaciers transported hither, according to modern belief, from distant Scandinavia, and which now chiefly serve as landmarks: far in the south, the first blue outlines of the Erzgebirge faintly show themselves. Such is the aspect of the vast battle-field of Northern Germany, the scene of the greatest military events of modern history; of which it may be said, with even greater truth than of the plains round Fleurus and Waterloo, that "not an ear of corn is pure from the blood page 259 of men." For from that elevated station at Corbetha, or, still better, from the old castle tower at Merseburg, the eye embraces at once the site of that ancient victory obtained by Henry the Fowler over the Huns in A.D. 934; of the two battles of Leipzig (or Breitenfeld), in the Thirty Years' War; of Lützen, of Rossbach,¹ of Gross-Gorschen, vulgarly called the second battle of Lützen, in 1813; and may identify the church towers of some of those villages which blazed, one by one, that same year, in the three October days of the "Battle of the Nations," when, for the first and last time in authentic history, half a million of men were ranged against each other in a pitched field.

Approaching Lützen on this (western) side, the traveller is able to estimate the optical error which, as we shall presently see, misled the Swedes, and partly disconcerted their plans. The lofty old towers of the church and castle, and the high-pitched roofs, rising in an open field, and on the farther side of a slight depression in the ground, seem much nearer than they really are.

Lützen itself is a thoroughly old-fashioned forgotten-looking little Saxon town, with walls and fosse partially preserved, and the open country on all sides extending close up to them. It has now about 500 houses, and is traditionally believed to have been more considerable in old times; as indeed must have been the case, or else the municipality indulged in a fine spirit of local exaggeration when, in a report dated in 1651, they mention that Wallenstein's troops, before the great battle, set fire to the "suburbs of their city;" represented now by two or three beer-houses only, and one or two farm-granges. Passing the town, and following the road to Leipzig, for about three-quarters of an English mile, the traveller sees on his left something like an obelisk, which his imagination will fix on at once as a monument of the battle, but which is, in truth, only the chimney of an abandoned shaft for digging peat, here found in large deposits beneath the gravel. But, presently afterwards, he discovers, close on the right hand of the road, the central object of his search—the "Swedes' Stone." It stands, as we shall see, not exactly on the spot where the King is supposed to have fallen, but within a few yards of it. The stone is a rough porphyritic boulder, of the kind already described; and bears on its northern face, fronting the road, the inscription, "G. A. 1632." It is surrounded, after the kindly German fashion, with a little shrubbery and gravel walk, and surmounted by a Gothic arch of cast-iron, placed there some twenty years ago by subscription; executed in very fair taste, but injuring the simplicity of the stern old monument. It was a bold aesthetic thought of his Majesty's equerry and fellow-soldier, Jacob Erichson—though carried out with something of the roughness of execution belonging to the age—when he harnessed thirteen boors of the neighbouring village of Meuchen to this stone, which lay at some distance, and made them drag it "with sweat and tears" to its present site, from whence it looks eternally over the northern plain of Germany towards the hero's own distant Scandinavia. "Yet this is not the exact spot where the king fell," adds the narrative (Vulpius, Megalurgia Martisburgica, i.e. the Marvels of Merseburg), "but their strength was exhausted."

Arrived at the Schwedenstein, the visitor may make himself master of the details of the action, with but little difficulty, thanks to the level character of the ground and absence of hedges. No doubt there are ciceroni to be had; but, for my own part, I found that a two groschen-piece and a shake of the hand, administered to a beautiful nymph of seven, who was out potato-gathering with her family, sufficed to bring about me enough of her friends and admirers to impart all the information I wanted, and more than I could understand—although the pure Saxon dialect is a civilized one, and comprehensible, with some attention, by one who possesses

¹ Those of Jena and Auerstadt, though not actually in sight, may be added from their proximity.

page 260 only the ordinary allowance of book-German.

In order to make the battle intelligible, it is not necessary to weary the reader with much preliminary dissertation. It is enough to remember that in September, 1632, Gustavus and Wallenstein, having exhausted the country about Nuremberg, and lost great part of their armies in vainly confronting one another, parted as it were by mutual consent. The Swede moved into Bavaria; the Austrian into Saxony, where his hope was to negotiate with and win over the wavering Elector of that country. Alarmed lest this scheme should succeed, Gustavus retraced his steps with singular rapidity to Nuremberg, and

thence through Thuringia to Erfurt, which he occupied, at the end of October, just as Wallenstein was restoring Leipzig and its neighbourhood. On the 1st of November the King arrived at Naumburg, a town on the Saale, offering a commanding position, of which he prepared to avail himself by intrenchment. Wallenstein was then at Weisenfels, a few miles below, on the river. Satisfied by this proceeding of the King and by the lateness of the season, that he had no cause to dread immediate attack, he detached Pappenheim with a considerable portion of his army to Halle, in order to open a communication page 261 with the country beyond, and himself fell back from Weissenfels to Lützen. Pappenheim was detached on the 4th, and on the same day the King was made aware of it through an intercepted letter.

On the evening of the 4th of November, therefore, matters stood thus:—Wallenstein was at Lützen, covering the approach from the west to Leipzig, with a force variously estimated, but probably not less than 25,000 men;¹ Gustavus at Naumburg, sixteen English miles south-west of Lützen as the crow flies, with perhaps an equal number; Pappenheim at Halle, sixteen miles northwest of Lützen, with 15,000 or 20,000; the Saxons at Torgau, forty miles northeast of Lützen, with a force variously estimated at from 8,000 to 16,000. Under these circumstances, there were not wanting timorous councillors to advise the King to outmanoeuvre the slow Wallenstein, turn him by the south, and join the Saxons. The King at once rejected the counsel. Had he attempted it, Pappenheim and Wallenstein reuniting might have caught him in a trap; had he escaped this danger, the fidelity of the Elector was doubtful. It was obviously his business to fight Wallenstein at once, before Pappenheim could be recalled from Halle. With Gustavus, to decide and to act were almost simultaneous. He might yet surprise Wallenstein before his force was concentrated after its march from Weissenfels. At midnight of the 4th the King began to move. At ten in the morning the towers of Lützen were in sight. But this plan was defeated, in the first place, by the unexpected resistance of Solani's Croats and some artillery on the brook at Rippach; next, as Harte avers, by the optical mistake I have already mentioned, which made the Swedes believe themselves nearer Lützen than they really were. Consequently, he could not arrive at his chosen ground, east of Lützen, until too late for action. Had it been otherwise, the 5th of November, old style, would have added one more to its Protestant commemorations, and Wallenstein might have descended to British posterity as a supplementary Guy.

Wallenstein would rather have avoided fighting; but this day's delay gave him time to prepare for the contest, by sending a messenger or messengers to hurry Pappenheim's return, and by intrenching his position as well as he might. His army was drawn up on a line of about a mile and a half: its right, to the south-west, resting on the town of Lützen, which was an impediment to his being turned on that flank; his left, north-east, on the western bank of the "Flossgraben," a deep drainage ditch and mill-stream (not a canal to float timber, as Mitchell supposes); his front covered by the high-road from Lützen to Leipzig, of which he had deepened both the side ditches, and filled them with musketeers. But it is important to observe (what neither Harte nor Mitchell was aware of, but Philippi distinctly shows) that this high-road did not coincide exactly with the present. It diverged from the straight line of the present highway, close to the Schwedenstein, curved to the south, and swept back again into the present road near the point where this crosses the Flossgraben. The country-people still point out the old road, rising in a slight ridge on the corn-fields. The consequence would appear to be, that the two armies, being separated by this winding road, were not drawn up in straight lines, but the Imperialist front slightly concave, the Swedish convex; giving the latter something of that advantage which Marlborough turned to such decisive account at Ramillies. The most salient part of the Swedish line would, on this supposition, have been close to the Schwedenstein.

Wallenstein's position was, however, not a bad one, for an army of equal force

¹ Protestant writers say 40,000; Catholics, 20,000. The latter number seems very improbably low. The detachment of Pappenheim to Halle was a gross blunder at best; but we may safely assume that Wallenstein would not have ventured on it in the face of the redoubtable Swede, if his army had been thereby reduced below the number of the latter.

page 262 acting on the defensive; but his order of battle was inconceivably perverse, even according to contemporary critics. He seems to have been actuated by a resolution to proceed in direct opposition to the lessons which the Swedish victories had taught his profession. He took a step back, towards the tactics of the old Netherland wars. He is said to have conceived that Tilly lost the battle of Leipzig through adopting too loose an order: though Tilly's solid squares of infantry, or "tercias," were 2,000 strong. His own foot were drawn up in five such solid squares, of huge dimensions: four in the centre, one on his right, near the windmills. The reader may be spared the involved mathematical calculations on which these were constructed; suffice it to say that, if complete, every such square would consist of 5,000 men, pikemen and musketeers in equal numbers, and would have at the angles small projecting bastion-like formations of musketeers, so as to be shaped exactly like an ordinary quadrangular redoubt. "The manner in which the armies went to work," says Colonel Mitchell, "in the hour of battle, with their mixed masses of spearmen and musketeers, is a difficulty which historians have left undecided, and which, at this distance of time, we are not well able to explain. What were the spearmen doing, exposed, without any power of reaction, to the shots where the musketeers were engaged; and what became of the musketeers when the battle came to push of pike?" Perhaps the difficulty does not so strongly present itself to the imagination of the civilian as of the military writer; at all events, this intermixture was regularly practised in drawing up the infantry of European armies, from the invention of the musket down to that of the bayonet. Marshal Saxe, as we know, preferred the pike, thus supported, to the bayonet itself; concerning which "ricketty zizzag, our own eccentric Colonel exclaims, What will be deemed of the military intelligence of an age which could tolerate the tactical puerilities founded on the presumed use of a toy that has been brandished with bombastic fierceness for upwards of a century, and has never yet, in fair and manly fight, inflicted a mortal wound on a single man?"

In thus uniting spearmen with musketeers, Wallenstein only followed the fashion; but his enormous squares, constructed, no doubt, with a view to resist the dreaded impetuosity of the Swedes, seem to have been condemned in his own age as pedantic and unwieldy. They formed, in fact, the last appearance, on any modem stage, of the classical and mediæval phalanx; capable, no doubt, of resisting cavalry attacks, but unable to move themselves in attack or pursuit, and exposed to utter destruction when artillery could be brought to bear on them. His own artillery consisted of about eighty heavy pieces, 24-to 48-pounders, as some inform us: it was disposed in front of his troops along the whole line of the road. His cavalry were on the flanks, consisting (as then usual in the Austrian service) of four classes: cuirassiers, as they were termed, but who wore, in addition to the cuirass, the vizored helmet, gorget, brassarts, and cuisses; carbineers, with cuirass and carbine; dragoons, few in number; and light horse, then termed Croats, as in later times Hussars, on the extremities of the line—troops whose special genius lay in the line of plundering, which they executed with a vigour perhaps unequalled in military history. His right wing was strongest, as he expected on the left the almost immediate reinforcement of the Pappenheimers. His front was covered by musketeers in the deepened ditches, on both sides of the way.

Notwithstanding all the successes of the Swedes, the spirit of his army ran high. Wallenstein was still to them the unconquerable one, who had baffled, if not defeated, the Swede himself. Gorged with plunder, and made frantic by the promise of more, inflamed with that peculiar pride of mercenaries, who feel themselves for the hour elevated into the masters of princes and governments, page 263 they swore. (so, at least, said their enemies) that "if they did not win the battle, they would drive God out of heaven with their cudgels."

It might be asked why Gustavus, with his skill as a tactician and his well-trained army, did not outmanoeuvre and take in flank Wallenstein's helpless masses, instead of attacking them in front? But the answer is plain. Time was wanting for the purpose. It was necessary for him to gain his victory before Pappenheim came up. Pappenheim was to him what Blucher was to Napoleon at Waterloo; and he had not even a Grouchy to oppose to him. To have turned Wallenstein's right, with Pappenheim coming up on Wallenstein's left, would have been to march head foremost into a snare. There remained only the front attack, and for this, bloody as it must prove, he prepared himself at once.

The King passed the night of the 5th—6th, in his carriage in the open field, west of Lützen. At daybreak he crossed the country behind, or south of, Lützen, and drew up his army in a double line, facing that of Wallenstein, and south of the highroad so often mentioned. In order to effect this, part of his force had to cross the deep "Flossgraben," which forms a curve from a point south-east of Lützen to the bridge where it is (and was) crossed by the high-road so often named. Here it would seem as if Wallenstein might have checked his adversary by a bold advance; but his defensive tactics rendered this impracticable. The Swedes passed the mill-stream, and the army was drawn up, in "battalia," while the morning fog yet concealed the enemy.

The Swedish army was the very opposite of the Austrian. Everything was done to promote rapidity of movement and promptness of execution. The infantry (in the centre) was not, however, formed in line, according to modern ideas: that invention was reserved for the "old Dessauer," as the Germans call him, a century later. The system of Gustavus consisted rather in macadamizing the great blocks of the ancient army into small and compact, but still solid masses, drawn up in general six deep. The front rank was formed by the famous Swedish black, yellow, green, and blue brigades, concerning which the accounts are contradictory, whether they were so denominated from the colour of their casques, or of their jackets. Colonel Mitchell says, "The blue brigade were composed of British;" but, it is to be feared, without authority. The British, especially the Scots, formed a very important portion of the so-called Swedish army, but they are not particularly mentioned in the accounts of Lützen. The second line, or reserve, was chiefly composed of German infantry. The cavalry were placed on the flanks: Swedes on the right, towards the Flossgraben; Germans on the left, nearest to Lützen. The Swedes seem to have had only two classes of cavalry: cuirassiers, armed with the light cuirass, carbine, and broadsword; dragoons, with musket and sabre. The German horse are described as carrying, in addition to other weapons, a hammer hooked at one end, to drag the enemy off his horse. Platoons of musketry, 100 to 150 strong, were posted between the squadrons; and this is the only rational sense in which we can understand the plan of "mingling cavalry with infantry," attributed by some military writers to Gustavus—a plan which, if carried out in any literal sense, could only have had the effect of crippling the movements of the cavalry altogether. The artillery was stationed along the front, and consisted of only twenty heavy pieces, and about eighty of the common Swedish "flying artillery," 4-pounders only, we are told.¹ In like manner, the pikes of the Swedes were five feet shorter than those of their antagonists, and the carbines and muskets lighter. The whole army is variously estimated at from 11,000 to 16,000 infantry, 9,000 to 12,000 cavalry.

¹ The king's famous "leathern cannon," which have puzzled modern tacticians almost as much as they astonished his enemies, do not seem to have been used at Lützen. Probably the invention never got beyond the character of an experiment.

page 264 Bernard of Saxe Weimar, and Marshal Knyphausen, commanded the Germans. The Swedes were led on by the King in person. A more gallant army never entered into action; and yet its experienced generals remarked with regret, that these were not the same invincible Swedes who had crossed the Baltic and conquered at Leipzig. Battles and marches, detachments and garrisons, and, above all, the camp-fevers of Nuremberg, had thinned the ranks of those veterans, and they were replaced by recruits who had learnt little as yet from their comrades, except their martial ardour.

At eleven in the morning the heavy fog dissipated, and each army beheld the faces of the other. The artillery began to play, but seemingly with no great effect. Wallenstein's cannon, we are told, were pointed too high, and harmed the Swedes but little. The Swedish were doubtless better served, but it is singular that so little is said of the havoc which they might be expected to have made in Wallenstein's helpless quadrangles. At length the Swedish infantry charged, in the centre. They forced their way across the ditches and the road, broke by the suddenness of their attack two of Wallenstein's squares, and enlangered a third, when the cuirassies of Wallenstein's right wing charged in support of their infantry; the Swedes wavered, were driven back across the road, and a battery of seven cannon, immediately east of the Schwedenstein, taken by the Imperialists. Gustavus now placed himself at the head of Stenbock's Smaland regiment of cuirassiers—its commander had just fallen—which was stationed in the right wing, nearest to the infantry. He called out to his favourite, Colonel Stahlhantsch, a soldier of fortune, who had risen from the condition of a serving-man, "Charge those black fellows (Piccolomini's cuirassiers), else they will do us a mischief;" crossed the road, galloped on before his men, and threw himself on the flank of another cuirassier regiment. The spirit of the religious champion, the Gideon of Protestantism, had, in this his last hour, sole possession of his fiery nature: he exclaimed, "Now, in God's name, let us at them! Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, let us fight for the honour of Thy holy name!" and dashed at the enemy. At this moment, four comrades are noticed as having been at his side, besides one or two grooms: these were, Hof-Marschal Kreilsheim, Chamberlain Truchsess, a young Nuremberger named Löbelfing, of whom we shall hear more presently, and Duke Francis Albert, of Saxe Lauenburg. This last, of sinister name, was a cadet of one of the oldest and poorest sovereign houses of North Germany, connected rather nearly with the royal blood of Sweden. He had taken arms, a mere adventurer, under Tilly; but, on the arrival of his royal kinsman in Germany, changed sides, went over to the Swedes, and obtained a pension from Gustavus, with whom he lived on terms of intimacy. They were at once enveloped in the hostile ranks. The Swedish cuirassiers, staggered for a moment by the fire from the ditches, followed in hot haste; but too late: a pistol-shot broke the King's arm. He continued, for a moment, to encourage his comrades; but, his strength failing him, he turned his horse's head, and muttered to the Duke, "Mon cousin, tirez moi d'ici, car je suis fort blessé." As he turned, an Austrian page 265 trooper marked the action, cried out, "Art thou here? I have long sought for thee!" and discharged his carbine into the King's shoulder. The King fell from his horse, with the last words,. "My God!" The doer of the deed was instantly "beaten down with a storm of arquebusades" by the Swedes; but it was reported that he was a Lieutenant von Falkenberg, who had become acquainted with the King's person while a prisoner. A desperate struggle now took place around the body. Those next to the King were killed or mortally wounded, except Lauenburg alone, who contrived to ride unhurt out of the mélée. The actual spot of the death is fixed by Philippi, conjecturally, just within the angle formed by the divergence of the new and old roads to Leipzig. The body, stripped and mangled, was found at last by his victorious countrymen. It was brought in the night into the village church of Meuehen; the troopers who escorted it did not dismount, but rode by torchlight round the altar, before which it was deposited. Thence it was finally carried to rest with the remains of his ancestors in his own land.

Such, or nearly such, seem to be the circumstances of the royal soldier's death. But the belief that he perished by treachery became in after years so general, that it is impossible to avoid referring to them, even in the most cursory narrative. More is unnecessary; since Schiller, in his well-known history, has said nearly all that need be said respecting this once favourite historical puzzle. There is no affirmative evidence whatever in favour of the supposition that the deed was perpetrated by Francis Albert of Saxe Lauenburg, or any other traitor. The negative evidence against it consists mainly in the fact that no eyewitness of the battle, and no immediately contemporary writer, refers to it. The suspicion arises afterwards, and makes way to the light from various and distant quarters—first as a vague report, afterwards as a definite charge—until at last it becomes universally received, if not absolutely believed, among the Swedes, and has great currency even among the Germans.

"He who ate my bread," so ran the mystic verse in the mouth of the people, "hath lift up his heel against me: thus did it befall Gustavus from the fourth man, who entered the enemy's lines along with him."¹ No doubt the ill fame of Francis Albert himself, and his repeated desertions of both causes, make him a not unnatural object of such suspicion; but one circumstance, which Gftörer has acutely pointed out, must be taken into account on the other side: he was arrested by the Imperial Government as an accomplice in Wallenstein's treason, long imprisoned, and ultimately discharged—a course of conduct which they would have hardly adopted towards a hired assassin of their own, such as the story makes him. The verdict, in short, on such evidence as we have before us, must be, not simply not proven, but not guilty; and all that remains is that impalpable cloud of doubt of which, when once raised, it is so difficult to disembarrass the mind.

It was not until 1790, after Schiller's history had appeared, that a document was published by Murr, in his "Contributions to the History of the Thirty Years' War," which has at least a negative bearing of some importance on this problem. It is a narrative of the King's death, obtained by Colonel von Löbelfing, father of the youth who has been mentioned as one of Gustavus's comrades in his last charge, from the lips of his son; but at second hand only. This gallant lad was not a page of the King's, as he is commonly represented, but a volunteer, who followed his person in a hearty boyish passion of admiration for the hero. The father tells his story touchingly enough, in the language of a soldier-saint of those times. The youth, he says, saw the King surrounded by enemies; saw him fall from his horse; dismounted, and offered his own. "Then the King raised both his hands towards him; but my son was not able alone to lift him on horseback, and his Ma-

¹ "Wer mein Brod isst, der mit Füssen mich tritt;

So geschah es Gustavo von dem Vierten,

Der mit ihm ins Lager eintritt."

page 266 jesty could not help himself. There-upon¹ came up some of the enemy's cuirassiers, and wanted to know who it was; but neither the King nor my son would say: one of them, on this, fired a pistol through the King's head, who then said, 'I am myself the King of Sweden,' and so fell asleep. . . . They gave my son two shots and three stabs, stripped him to his shirt, and left him for dead." The poor fellow was brought to Naumburg, where he died some days after. "And thus," adds the father, "did this young cavalier, whose whole age was only eighteen years, seven months, and twenty-three days, truly wait upon his late Majesty in that bloody fight, although he was not in his royal service; stayed by him until his blessed end, and was the last of all at his side. ... In his sickness he never complained of pain, was very patient, and often said it was for his King's sake he had received those wounds, and would willingly suffer all over again on his account; and, if he might live for a hundred years longer, he would not wish to do so." And he prayed his attendants "to write to his heart's loved father and his relations, and beg us not to sorrow for him, for that he had lost his life in his calling on a Christian and honourable occasion, and had fought gallantly by the side of his Majesty of Sweden for God's word and glory." This account, whatever its value as to minute particulars, is at all events important on the question of the murder. It purports to have been given by the young man to his attendants at Naumburg, who conveyed it to his father, who wrote it down a few weeks after the battle. Had the story of murder been then current, it must have figured somehow in the recital.

Such a suspicion was hardly needed to embitter the universal feeling of inconsolible grief. "The sorrow," says Philippi, "which the death of the King occasioned throughout Protestant Germany and in Sweden is depicted by contemporaries in the liveliest colours. Country and town, citizen, peasant, and soldier, all united to mourn the irreparable loss. They wandered about like a flock without a shepherd, loudly bewailing the death of their prince, their liberator; for such was Gustavus Adolphus to them all. Never was a sovereign more revered, more loved, or more wept for. Every one would have his portrait, and there was not a cottage in Germany where it was not to be found." And that popular impression was as deep and enduring as it was general. As late as 1796, when Christian Fischer travelled that way, the Saxon postilion would take off his hat as he passed the Schwedenstein. And if traditional reverence has since grown fainter, that which arises from wider education and an increased love of religious and political freedom has taken its place, and the memory of Gustavus Adolphus abides as life-like as ever.

And most deservedly. History has grown cold and critical: the Clio of our times seems to have an old-maidish pleasure in decrying the subjects of our early enthusiasm, in lowering by a few pegs the special heroes of our imaginations. She has not ventured even to attempt this operation on Gustavus Adolphus. A halo of something like superhuman dignity surrounds him. So it was even with his contemporaries. Those who saw him every day seem still to have regarded him rather as an agent of Providence—the embodiment of a great purpose—than an ordinary man. He was thus marked by destiny from the beginning: when his father, Charles the Ninth, exhorted in council to designs to which he felt unequal, would lay his hand on the fair hair of his boy, and say, "Ille faciet; " when he relinquished the love of his youth and all the temptations of a throne, married for reasons of state, and set himself doggedly to the task of taming, one by one, his hard-mouthed neighbours of the North, as a preparation for the mightier destinies which he alone foresaw. Such

¹ The devil's advocate might have a word to put in here. If the cuirassiers only came up "thereupon," it was not a cuirassier who fired the fata shot.

page 267 he appeared to the Germans among whom he came as a deliverer; on whom his noble features, his bright blue eyes, his floating golden hair—il ré d'oro, the Italians called him—produced the effect of an angelic messenger. Not that he was affectedly superior to other men, or had anything of the prophet in his demeanour; on the contrary, every account represents him as simple, affable, free spoken among his associates, even to a fault. The Jesuits of Munich recounted with pride how he had disputed with them for an hour or so "concerning transubstantiation and communion sub utrâque," ending, as they were pleased to assert, with high compliments to their order. The peasants of Bavaria would long tell the tale, how, as he forced them to drag his artillery, he would come among them with kind words and instructions how to place the lever, accompanied with occasional florins. But, in truth, he was an example, such as most of us may have witnessed in common life, of that class of men whose exceptional superiority of character is such that, no familiarity seems to diminish the distance between them and others. Much of this was, no doubt, owing to that deep religious conviction which, when openly avowed and consistently acted on, always awes minds conscious of their own falling short. Cromwell could not have been more convinced of his own divine vocation, or more fearless in his expression of reliance on it; but there is something of the earth, earthy, in the zeal of Cromwell even when taken at its best, which contrasts unfavourably with the earnest, manly, single-minded piety of Gustavus. And the consequence is, that, while Cromwell's enemies made him out a hypocrite, and have left great part of the world persuaded that he was one, no detractor has ever endeavoured to fasten the like imputation on the Swede. With him, as with Cromwell, the constant sense of religion led to a familiarity of utterance respecting it which, to the ears of our reserved generation, seems almost startling. "Pray constantly: praying hard is fighting hard," was his favourite appeal to his soldiers. "You may win salvation under my command, but hardly riches," was his encouragement to his officers. He "preached," in short, so much—though without the shadow of affectation—that a Michelet might perhaps say of him, as of our Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, "le plus dur pour les prisonniers, c'était d'entendre les sermons de ce roi des prêtres, d'endurer ses moralités, ses humilités."

But he was not content with preaching: his conduct was throughout a noble exemplification of the religion which he professed. To take one trait only: his strict maintenance of discipline. The Thirty Years' War was a hideous time, in which the military were not only permitted to indulge in every excess, but encouraged in it as a matter of policy;—it being the received principle of noted leaders to employ their armies as a scourge, not only to intimidate the enemy, but to keep in order doubtful allies or personal foes, through the system of "free quarters." Of the unhappy agent of this system—the soldier—it might be said, in the language of the Norfolk Island convict, that when he entered the service "the heart of a man was taken from him, and there was given to him the heart of a beast." From the beginning of his wars Gustavus set himself determinedly to the task of extirpating an evil which had become unendurable, while every campaign seemed to root it more firmly in the land. And he succeeded to an extent which seems almost miraculous. No army under his command was ever disgraced by unpunished enormity; and it was not until long after his death, when his example had ceased to act, that the Swedish forces became equally a terror to the country with the Imperialist.

Had so noble a character the alloy of earthly ambition? Was it his purpose to extend the Swedish dominion, or to become the first Protestant Emperor of Germany, or to achieve supremacy in Western Europe? It may be so. He was a conqueror by profession—an ab- page 268 solute monarch by divine right. "The devil," (he told his chaplain, who found .him one day reading the Bible,) "is very near at hand to those who are accountable to none but God for their actions." But of this much we may be certain: with some men, a great purpose serves as the cover of personal ambition; by others, personal aggrandisement is sought merely as auxiliary to a great purpose—and so it was with Gustavus. If he ever had dreams of empire, it was for the greater glory of what he deemed the truth.

If, in fact, religious zeal had a rival in his temperament, it was not ambition, but warlike ardour. He was passionately devoted, if such a phrase may be used, to military science. In his short life (he died at eight-and-thirty) he had leisure almost to reconstruct the art of war. And the art of war, as understood and practised by him, comprehended everything, from the conception of a campaign to the construction of artillery-harness or camp-kettles. That minute attention to detail which seems to us pedantic was then almost unavoidable; for he lived in an age when the art of carrying on war on a grand scale had been long forgotten; when, consequently, the division of labour in the soldier's profession was comparatively unknown; and no one would have passed in the eye of world as a great commander who was not also an accomplished corporal. And hence some of his critics have thought that his chief superiority lay in the lower part of his vocation; that he was "a greater tactician than strategist." But the highest authority is against them. Napoleon placed Gustavus among the eight great captains of the world; that list of colossal celebrities which begins with Alexander and ends with himself.

Nevertheless, one thing we have against him; and that was a fatal imperfection, venial as we may deem it. His ungovernable impetuosity of temper manifested itself in various ways; he could not command himself, when he had righteous cause of anger, or when he had danger to encounter. He confessed himself guilty of the first charge. All commanders, he said, had their weaknesses; such a one his drunkenness; such a one his avarice; his own was choler: and he prayed men to forgive him. He was sometimes terrible to behold in one of these fits; the old fury of the sea-kings seemed to come over him: eye-witnesses so described him in a scene at Nuremberg, when, in wrath against plunderers, he dragged forth a delinquent corporal by the hair of his head, exclaiming, "It is better that I should punish thee, than that God should punish thee and me and all of us on thy account;" and ordered him off to instant execution. But his intemperance of courage, in exposing his person in action, was a greater sin than his intemperance in anger. No prayers, no representations, could wean him from his constant habit of taking the foremost place in time of danger. And he was singularly unlucky into the bargain. While Wallenstein, the favourite of fortune, who, however inferior in other respects to Gustavus, did not lack personal courage, seems never to have received a wound, the King, like the Napiers, scarcely ever went into serious action without being hit. His fate at Lützen was but in accordance with this habitual disregard of sterner duty. He perished in a blaze of glory, which by its very excess of light dazzles the historical inquirer, and converts into a martyrdom that which was in truth both an error and a crime. There have been generals as prudent as brave, who have nevertheless risked their lives by daring exposure, deliberately, because the rallying of a broken army, or the necessity of personal presence at a menaced spot, seemed to require it. Gustavus had no such excuse. His Smalanders needed no such prodigality of life to encourage them in the charge. His place was not at their head, but at that of his whole army. He ran on almost certain death, in the mere animal spirit of valiant intoxication, like the Berserkar of old, or the savage Malay. "Died Abner as a fool dieth?" The traveller who stands by the Swedes' Stone may not without page 269 reason put this question, and feel his enthusiasm damped by the reflection that Gustavus, a victor at Lützen, might probably have brought the war at once to a successful termination. The sixteen years of misery which followed, ending, indeed, in the rescue of Protestantism and liberty at last, but as by fire only, and under trials the most unfavourable to their healthy development; the decline of Sweden from her high estate; the deterioration of the political and social spirit of Germany—consequences which Europe feels to this day, and our children are likely to experience for generations yet unborn—all these followed from that momentary yielding to the furious impulse of a noble but uncontrolled nature.

To be continued.