'Save his wine-pot.'
'True; but the Count is a German.'
I looked back to the mountains, where a silver haze was rising in the sunshine from the valley, where poor Quentin Home of Redden with so many of our comrades lay.
'Twenty of our brother soldiers have gone this morning to their last account,' said the Marquis of Gordon, with emotion. 'Alas! how this cursed soil of Alsace soaks up our Scottish blood!'
CHAPTER LXIV.
MADAME LA DUCHESSE.
Severe operations in Alsace, which luckily left me little time for reflection, followed this cavalry affair. Picardy was invaded by twenty thousand horse and ten thousand foot, all Spaniards, led by Piccolomini and Prince Thomas of Savoy. Hepburn's Scottish corps, now known as the Regiment de Douglas (their new colonel the Laird of Waughton was recently killed in Alsace), being commanded by Lord James, son of the first Marquis of Douglas, was withdrawn from the army to oppose them, and stopped their career on the banks of the Somme. I saw those gallant veterans no more; but the Scots of Ramsay and Leslie remained with us under the Duke of Weimar. The Austrians, led by Count Galias, broke into Franche Compte, but were driven back by the Vicomte de Turenne, with the loss of five thousand men; while De la Force defeated the troops of Colloredo on the Alsatian side of the Rhine, with the loss of twelve hundred slain and taken.
Moreover, to increase the general confusion and complete the ruin of Duke Charles of Lorraine, about the close of this year his friend and patron the Emperor Ferdinand II. died suddenly; and by an unexpected movement of the troops of Lavalette, the fine palace at Nanci was retaken, sacked, stripped, and destroyed; all the court of Duke Charles were dispersed or taken, and where Marie Louise found shelter, whether in a German convent near the Rhine, or at Vienna, I knew not; as in our camp we heard but little of the war in which we were engaged.
I feared at times that she might connect me with the death of Pappenheim, and conceive a repugnance for me in consequence. I shrunk from this idea, and longed to acquaint her that however great was my enmity to the Count, he did not—even on that honourable field—perish by my hand, but by the sword of a friend, who had at once avenged me, and averted a crowning act of treachery.
The Duke of Weimar turned all the energies of his combined force of French, Scots, and Swedes, to drive the Imperialists from his newly-gifted dukedom of Alsace, and with this view he invaded all the strong places. Thus, while serving with the Garde du Corps, I was at the siege of Colmar, a large town situated on the western bank of a rapid stream; there we stormed the breach into which my old acquaintance M. Schreckhorn and his petardiers fired thrice a cartouche from a mortar, which each time made a frightful slaughter among the stormers; as these cartouches are wooden cases, three inches thick, bound with marline, and hold ten iron balls of a pound each, with about four hundred musket-balls; but in spite of all opposition we took the town, which was afterwards ceded to France by the treaty of Munster in 1648, when its walls were demolished by Louis XIV.