In such a camp it was that the wild soldiery dwelt in unbridled licence, insupportable to the neighbourhood even in a friendly country. The provinces, cities, and villages were obliged to supply wood, straw, fodder, and provisions, the waggons rolled along every road, and droves of fat cattle were collected. The neighbouring villages quickly disappeared; as all the wood-work and thatching was torn away by the soldiers and employed in building their huts, only the shattered clay walls remained. The soldiers and their boys roved about the neighbourhood, plundering and stealing, and the cantineers drove about with their carts. In the camp the soldiers congregated in front of their huts; meanwhile the women cooked, washed, mended the clothes and squabbled together; there was constant tumult and uproar and bloody crimes, fighting with bare weapons, and combats between the different services or nations. Every morning the crier and the trumpet called to prayer, even among the Imperialists; early on the Sunday the regimental chaplain performed service in the camp, then the soldiers and their households seated themselves devoutly on the ground, and it was forbidden for any one during service to loiter and drink in the canteens. It is known how much Gustavus Adolphus inculcated pious habits and prayers; after his arrival in Pomerania he caused prayers to be read twice a day in his camp, but even in his army, it was necessary in the articles of war to admonish the chaplains against drunkenness.

In the open space in front of the main guard was the gambling ground, covered with cloaks and set with tables, round which all the gamesters crowded. There the card-playing of the old Landsknechte gave place to the quicker games of the dice. The use of dice was frequently forbidden in the camp, and stopped by the captain of the guard and the provost; then the gamblers assembled privately behind the fence, and played away their ammunition, bread, horses, weapons, and clothes, so that it was found necessary to place them under the supervision of the main-guard. Three square dice were rolled on each cloak or table, called in camp language "Schelmbeine;" each set had its croupier; to him belonged the cloak, table, and dice; he had the office of judge in cases of dispute, and his share of the winnings, but also frequently of blows. There was much cheating and cogging; many dice had two fives or sixes, many, two aces or deuces, others were filled with quicksilver and lead, split hair, sponge, chaff, and charcoal; there were dice made of stags-horn, heavy below and light above, "Niederländer,"[[11]] which must be slid along, and "Oberländer,"[[12]] which must be thrown "from Bavarian Heights" for them to fall right; often the noiseless work was interrupted by curses, quarrels, and flashing rapiers. Lurking tradespeople, frequently Jews, slipped in, ready to value and buy up the rings, chains, and booty staked.

Behind the tents of the upper officers and the regimental provost, separated from them by a wide street, stood the shops of the cantineers in parallel cross rows. Cantineers, butchers, and common victuallers formed an important community. The price of their goods was decided by the provost, who received a perquisite in money or in kind; for example, he received a tongue for every beast that was killed. On every cask which was to be tapped, he wrote the retail price with chalk. By these compacts, and the favour of the powerful, which was to be bought by time-serving, the purveyors of the army maintained a proportionably secure position, and insured themselves the payment, though irregular, of their long tallies, which were scored equally for the officers and soldiers. In good times traders came from afar to the camp with expensive stuffs, jewels, gold and silver workmanship, and delicacies. In the beginning of the war especially, the officers set a bad example to the army by their extreme luxury; every captain would have a French cook, and consumed the dearest wine in great quantities.

The military signals of the camp were, for the infantry the beat of the drum, for the cavalry the trumpet: the drum was very large, the drummer often a half-grown boy, sometimes the fool of the company. In the beginning of the war, the German army had in many cases a uniform beat. Every command from the General to the camp, had to be proclaimed by a herald riding through it with a trumpeter. On such occasions the herald wore over his dress a "tabard" of coloured silk, embroidered before and behind with the arms of the sovereign. This proclamation, which announced to the camp in the evening the work of the following day, was very destructive to secret and rapid operations; it was also very injurious to discipline, for it announced to the loiterers and robbers of the camp, the night when they might steal out for booty.

When times were prosperous, a battle won, a rich city plundered, or an opulent district laid under contribution, everything was plentiful, food and drink cheap; and it once happened, in the last year of the war, that in the Bavarian camp a cow was bought for a pipe of tobacco. The Croats of the Imperial army in Pomerania, in the winter of 1630 and 1631, had their girdles overlaid with gold, and whole plates of gold and silver on the breast. Paul Stockmann, a pastor at Lützen, relates, that in the Imperial army, before the battle of Lützen, one horseman had his horse decorated with a quantity of golden stars, and another with three hundred silver moons; and the soldiers' women wore the most beautiful church dresses and mass vestments, and that some Stradiots rode in plundered priests' dresses, to the great mirth of their comrades. In these times also carousers drank to one another in costly wine from the chalices, and caused long chains to be made of the plundered gold, from which, according to the old knightly custom, they severed links to pay for a carousal. But the longer the war lasted the more rare were these golden times. The devastation of the country revenged itself fearfully on the army itself; the pale spectre of hunger, the forerunner of pestilence, glided through the lines of the camp, and raised its bony hand against every straw hut. Then supplies from the surrounding districts ceased, the price of provisions was raised so as to be almost unattainable; a loaf of bread, for example, in the Swedish army in 1640, at Gotha, cost a ducat. Hollow-eyed pale faces, sick and dying men, were to be seen in every row of huts; the vicinity of the camp was pestilential from the decaying bodies of dead animals. All around was a wilderness of uncultivated fields, blackened with the ruins of villages, and the camp itself a dismal city of death.

A broad stream of superstition had flowed through the souls of the people from ancient times up to the present day, and the soldier's life of the Thirty years' war revived an abundance of peculiar superstitions, of which a portion continues even now; it is worth while to dwell a little upon these characteristic phenomena.

The belief that it is possible to make the body proof by magic against the weapons of the enemy, and on the other hand to make your own arms fatal to them, is older than the historical life of the German people. In the earliest times, however, something gloomy was attached to this art; it might easily become pregnant with fatality, even to its votaries. The invulnerability was not unconditional, and succumbed to the stronger counter-magic of the offensive weapon: Achilles had a heel which was not invulnerable; no weapon could wound the Norse god Baldur, but the waving of a branch of misletoe by a blind man killed him; Siegfried had a weak spot between the shoulders, the same which the soldiers of the Thirty years' war considered also as vulnerable. Among the numerous Norse traditions are many accounts of charmed weapons: the sword, the noblest weapon of heroes, was considered as a living being, also as a slaying serpent or a destroying fire; when it was shattered, it was spoken of by the Norse poets as dying. It was unnecessary to charm swords forged by dwarfs, as there was a destroying magic concealed in them; thus the sword of Hagens, the father of Hilda, was death to any man when it was drawn from the sheath, magic Runic character being scratched on the hilt and blade of it.

The introduction of fire-arms gave a new aspect and a wider scope to this superstition; the flash and report of the weapon, and the distant striking of the ball, imposed the more on the fancy, the less the imperfect weapon was certain of hitting: the course of the deadly shot was considered malicious and incalculable. Undoubtedly the literature of the Reformation seldom touched upon this kind of magic; it first made itself heard in the middle of the century, when it served to portray the condition of the people. But in armies, the belief in magic was general and widely spread, travelling scholars and gipsies were the most zealous vendors of its secrets, one generation of Landsknechte imparted it to the next: in Italy and in the armies of Charles V., Italian and German superstitions were mixed, and in the time of Fronsperg and Schärtlin almost every detail of the art of rendering invulnerable is to be found. Luther, in 1527, inveighs against the superstition of the soldiery: "One commits himself to St. George, another to St. Christopher, some to one saint, some to another; some can charm iron and gun-flints, others can bless the horse and his rider, and some carry the gospel of St. John,[[13]] or somewhat else with them, in which they confide." He himself had known a Landsknecht, who, though made invulnerable by the devil, was killed, and announced beforehand the day and place of his death. Bernhard von Milo, Seneschal at Wittenberg, sent to Luther for his opinion on a written charm for wounds; it was a long roll of paper written in wonderful characters.

When the Augsburg gunner, Samuel Zimmermann the elder, wrote the experiences of his life up to 1591, in a folio volume, under the title of 'Charms against all Stabs, Strokes, and Shots, full of great secrets,' he mentions only the defensive incantations, which he did not consider as the works of Belial; but it is apparent from his manuscript that many devilish arts were known to him, which he intended to conceal. Another well-known Zimmermann, who was hardened, received a fearful blow from a dagger; there was no wound to be seen, but he died shortly after from the internal effect of the blow. In 1558 there was an invulnerable soldier in the regiment of Count Lichtenstein, who, after every skirmish, shook the enemy's balls off his dress and his bare body; he often showed them, and the holes burnt through his clothes; he was at last slain by some foreign peasants.

When the Italians and Spaniards entered the Netherlands in 1568, they carried along with them, with little success, whole packets and books full of magic formulas of conjurations and charms. The French found talismans and magic cards fastened round the necks of the prisoners and the dead, of the Brandenburg troops who had been led by Burgrave Fabian von Dohna, in 1587, as auxiliaries to the Huguenots. When the Jesuit George Scheerer preached at the Court Chapel at Vienna in 1594, before the Archduke Matthias and his Generals, he found it necessary to exhort them earnestly against the use of superstitious charms for cuts, stabs, shots, and burns.