As it neither suited our service, nor the policy of the time, to be absent from church, we were marched to the great cathedral, where we saw mass celebrated with great pomp and ceremony. Many of our reformed Scots shrugged their shoulders, and knitted their brows; but the Marquis de Gordon, who came of a Catholic house, whispered to me,—
'Is it not a sad thing, M. Blane—sad to me, at least—to see a hundred gentlemen of the Scottish Guard mere idle spectators here—strangers before that altar, for which so many of their fathers bent the knee in peace, and laid down their lives in war?'
'My mother's house were Lollards of Kyle,' said I.
Vic, with its old ruined castle of the twelfth century; the marshy plain of Marsal; the little town of Dieuse, and the sedgy banks of the Sielle, were all rapidly passed, without a shot being exchanged; and now we approached the land of strong castles and barrier-towns, as we entered Alsace, a German circle of the Upper Rhine, which was not ceded to France until 1648, prior to which year it belonged to the house of Swabia, who were styled Dukes of Alsace. Here, at a village in which we were quartered, I first tasted that vintage, peculiar to the province, named the stroh, or straw wine; and here we found, that which proved much less pleasant, the bravest of Duke Charles's troops, combined with some of the chosen and hardy lanzknechts of the Empire, garrisoning all the fortresses that lay between us and the far-famed Rhine.
Cardinal de Lavalette, who commanded us, was a son of the famous Duc d'Epernon, and was particularly an adherent and friend of Cardinal Richelieu. With Sir John Hepburn, he had under his baton, another Camp-Marechal, the Viscount de Turenne, whose military genius and brilliant valour rendered him almost the equal of that great cavalier whom a cannon-shot at the siege of Zaberne was to send prematurely to his grave.
The general of the Imperialists was Mathias Count Gallas, a native of Trent, whose reputation and long career of severe and successful service, rendered him a formidable antagonist to the young Cardinal, whose army was to act in conjunction with the Swedes under the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and to add Alsace to the new conquests of France, whose frontier Richelieu had sworn should be the Rhine.
Though Count Gallas had been guilty of great cruelty in Saxony, the brilliance of his achievements in Bohemia, the skill with which he invested Lauff, and pushed the siege of Mantua, and the greatness of mind he displayed in releasing old Count Thurn, because he would not see a brave enemy perish on the scaffold, together with his fine order of battle at Nordlingen, had gained him such a reputation, that the veteran General Leganez, exclaimed,
'The best officer in the world might learn something from Gallas!'
His head-quarters were now at Worms, from whence he sent out strong detachments to ravage all the country and capture the places still held by the Swedes, before they could be joined by their new allies the French. He stormed Keizar-Loutar; invested Deux-Ponts; and after forcing Count Mansfeldt's lines before Mentz, threw supplies into the city, and thus stood matters when our army halted on the frontier of Alsace.
Having heard from our spies that a thousand of Gallas' cavalry horses were at grass in a verdant hollow near Ingwieler, a little town on the Motter, a tributary of the Rhine, I conceived the idea of decoying, and bringing them all to Lavalette's head-quarters. Full of ardour and enthusiasm, I burned for an opportunity to distinguish myself; and accustomed as I had been to border picqueering and foraging, it seemed an expedition adapted to my skill and capacity. Sir Quentin Home and Lord Dundrennan (they were a pair of inseparables), Raynold Cheyne of Dundargle, the Chevalier, Tushielaw, and another spirit equally reckless, insisted on accompanying me; and on obtaining permission from the Marquis our captain, and from Camp-Marechal Hepburn, we prepared at once to put our scheme in force—quietly and deliberately as we would have done in other days to cross the English frontier, and drive home the fatted beeves of the western wardenrie.