To retaliate, the peasants would watch for stragglers, for the sick and wounded who had dropped behind, putting them to death with every device of insult and cruelty known. Much of the cruelty is too hideous to mention. In many districts the desolation was so great that persons were found dead with grass in their mouths. Men climbed up the scaffolds and tore down the bodies of those hanged and devoured them. The supply was large. Newly buried corpses were dug up for food. Children were enticed away that they might be slain and eaten. The population, when plundered, would become plunderers in turn, forming into bands, and inflict on others the horrors that they themselves had suffered. Men became wholly indifferent to the sufferings of others. Whole countries were destroyed, towns and villages reduced to ashes, and civilization was pushed back into barbarism for half a century. The Thirty Years' War is said to have been so unspeakably cruel and calamitous that the like has never been known in Europe.
CAUSES OF THE LENGTH OF THE WAR.
Gustavus Adolphus writes in a letter that the war would be long drawn out and stop from exhaustion. The original purpose of the war was the suppression of the Protestant faith, but the victories of Gustavus Adolphus made the Catholics hopeless. Also other interests of a political nature rose up, the war passed from a German to a European question. Though there were times when peace might have been made, the side who had the best of it for the moment deemed it folly to stop when victory was in reach. The other side thought it base and cowardly not to continue, as some turn of fortune might repair the losses. Many a war has dragged on after the purpose for which it began had become unattainable, because those who began it were too vain to admit that the objects of the war were impossible from its outset.
In a long war also individuals rise up to whom fighting becomes a second nature, who know nothing else but violence and murder. Thus many soldiers were indignant when the Westphalian peace was signed, for they felt they had a vested right to plunder and murder, looking upon a wretched, helpless population as their just prey.
A further reason for the long continuation of the war was the very exhaustion of both sides; there was not enough strength on either side to strike a decisive blow, nor sufficient energy left to make a vigorous effort for peace, making it seem useless to try. In the earlier and middle period of the war there were many cries for peace, but in the last eight years there was a terrible silence of death and such utter desperation that no one dared to speak of peace, so great was the exhaustion. The soldiers decreased as it became more and more difficult to recruit and feed them; the military operations grew feebler and more desultory, the fighting more inconclusive, though the misery did not diminish. But while the people and soldiers had become tired of the interminable struggle and wanted peace, many of the diplomats did not appear to desire it.
CAUSES OF THE WAR.
The great length of the war gradually revealed its very hopelessness and uselessness, creating a general desire for rest and peace, transforming and weakening the religious movements out of which the war had arisen. The principle of private judgment, coming from the Reformation, had had time to develop and undermine the ideas of temporal rights and duties common to both parties, while many ideas first conceived by the Reformation but suppressed at the time, had at last commenced to grow through the long-continued tribulations.
Another cause of the war was the inherent incompatibility of religious views among the people. Religious discord exists to-day, but it is not decided by bloody contests, because of breadth of religious insight, general indifference, and increasing skepticism. The convictions of the people of the seventeenth century, as to the truth of their own opinions and the errors of their opponents, were of such an absolute character as can not be found nowadays even among people with the most rigid beliefs. They did not know then that it was possible to live together and yet have the most varied and contradictory religious convictions. To suppose that these people were stupid is an error. The chances are that they were less stupid than the people are to-day. How many, at the present time, can look at their country, its ideals, ideas, and customs justly and without prejudice? Naturally very few. But to place ourselves outside of not only our country but our generation is much more difficult. How could we then expect the people of the seventeenth century to do this?
IGNORANCE THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE OF THE WAR.
The fundamental cause that brought the Thirty Years' War to a close was mental insight into the uselessness and hopelessness of further struggle, caused by the feeling of exhaustion due to the long continuance of the war. The reason why this war put an end to all religious wars was, that this intellectual insight became general in Europe, inculcating more liberal religious views. This psychological attitude, with increasing indifference to religion and resultant skepticism, caused religious questions to be regarded less seriously, making further wars for such purposes impossible. The basal reason, therefore, was the intellectual realization of the foolishness of bloodshed on account of difference of religious convictions; that is, lack of knowledge of this fact in the past—in short, ignorance—was at the bottom of it all, as of most evils in the world.