Other ladies, the wives of fugitive German nobles, were placed in the same house. Thus, in the hope that they would form a pleasant little community, whose safety depended upon our valour, we marched, with drums beating and colours flying, to the Frankendör, the post assigned us; and the scene—as the event proved—of the most hazardous and desperate service in that beleaguered city.
It was the weakest point, too; otherwise the old Scottish Invincibles had not got it to defend.
The aspect of the citizens—men who until this time had given their whole souls to peaceful occupations, and to the quiet acquisition of wealth—men whose ledgers had long since superseded their Bibles—whose God was a mere golden idol; whose whole thoughts were of pounds, dollars, and stivers—hides, tallow, corn and cheese, ships and storehouses; whose passion was wealth, and whose arid hearts had been ossified to mere ink-horns, was pitiable in the extreme. In neglected attire, with wan and dejected countenances, they moved stealthily about, their eyes at times aghast with terror, and always expressive of anxiety and alarm; while surveying ruefully their deserted mole, their places of business thronged by soldiers and encumbered by the munition of war; their best houses and public buildings turned into barracks, or battered, dinted, and defaced by cannon-shot; their trees cut down to form abbatis; their pavements torn up, and thoroughfares trenched, to make parapets, breastworks, and traverses; their market-places ringing incessantly to the tramp of armed troopers, the clank of artillery-wheels, the rattle of drums, and the wild yell of the Scottish war-pipe, as the various duties of defending their beautiful city—now transformed into one vast garrison—were vigorously executed under the orders of Sir Alexander Leslie.
With all the recklessness of foreign soldiers defending a town, about the actual protection of which they cared not the value of a rush, our Danes and Germans destroyed and defaced whatever they could not defile. The churches were turned into hospitals, where the wounded and dying lay side by side upon beds or pallets of straw, presenting a hideous combination of suffering and misery. Chapels were converted into cooking places, where the messmen lighted fires on the pavement; and where the soldiers laughed and sang, as their camp-kettles simmered upon fires that were composed of carved oak-work, altar-screens, pews, pulpits, and whatever came first to hand and bill-hook; and where the flames, thus recklessly lit, blazed above the ashes of the dead, encircling the gothic pillars, licking their foliaged capitals, filling the vaulted roofs with smoke, and blackening the fretted stone-work, which they failed to ignite.
In other churches, the Baron Karl's pistoliers and the cavalry were cantoned; and there the long legends and brasses on the pavement, expressive of piety and faith, of human vanity or earthly mortality, as they enumerated the life, the death, and rank of those who slept below, were defaced by horses hoofs, or hidden by the litter and mire that defiled those stately temples, which had been founded and consecrated in the earlier ages of Christianity by some of those northern missionaries, the relation of whose labours were the theme and the glory of our old friend, Father Ignatius d'Eydel.
We marched to the Frankendör, a ravelin that lay immediately without the walls, and was an indifferent breastwork, before which lay a dry ditch, having in its front the lake of Franken; on the opposite bank, the brigade of Count Carlstein (old Rupert-with-the-Red-plume) was securely ensconced, though within less than the distance of a cannon-shot, by trenches and embankments, basketed up for their culverins. These, for the present, were silent; but we could perceive that the Imperialists were busy erecting two camarade batteries of ten guns each, to which we could only oppose a species of tambour work, which we foresaw would afford us very little shelter unless strengthened.
Wallenstein's line of circumvallation reached the count's left flank; Arnheim's line reached his right: thus the unhappy city had been completely enclosed on the landward side, and cut off from all the supplies it usually received from Mechlenburg, Saxony, and Pomerania.
Major-general Johan Gorge Arnheim, a gentleman of Brandenburg, and director to the elector of Saxony, had the third command in the army of Wallenstein, and was one of the bravest, and most accomplished soldiers in the Imperial army; but to military talents of the highest class, he unfortunately united all the craft and dissimulation of a statesman. Hence his treachery to the Poles and to the Swedes on many occasions; till even Wallenstein suspected him of sinister designs against himself, and despatched him from Stralsund, with 10,000 men, to the assistance of Sigismund, King of Poland, who was then at war with Gustavus, dismissing him with this brief and vain-glorious order:—
"Arnheim—March! drive Gustavus out of Poland; and, in case you fail, send to tell him that I—Wallenstein—will come and effect it."