CHAPTER XL.
THE KIRK-BELL OF GOMETRA—THE SORTIE.
The siege continued for several months, with various successes and repulses—with advances on one hand, and sorties on the other. The slaughter was great in the city, but greater in the trenches, where the dead lay in thousands, buried in shallow holes, and where the wild-dogs scraped away the earth by night, and the decaying masses tainted the humid summer air. From the walls we could easily distinguish where those hideous catacombs lay, and where the bodies, half decayed, were sweltering among the reeds and slime of the Frankenlake; for by day a dark cloud of flies swarmed over them, and by night the malaria that overhung the spot assumed an almost luminous tint. There, too, came the birds of prey; and there they remained hovering and gorging, until a musket-shot at daybreak put all to flight, save those whom the malaria, and their hideous repast, had rendered somewhat indisposed to fly.
Death had thinned the number of the citizens, whose aspect of misery increased daily; for the loss of friends, the loss of business, the destruction of their dwellings and property, the scarcity of money and of provisions, the prices of which were enormous, as all that our Fourriers could collect were seized and retained for the use of the troops; the aspect of each deserted holfe and bourse, where the merchants were wont to meet daily for the transaction of their lucrative and peaceful business—where vast sums once passed from pocket to pocket, and mighty deeds of transfer were executed—was also sorely changed. Torn down by the passing shot, columns, arcades, and balconies were strewn in fragments among the grass and moss that grew between the stones: here the trees, that whilome had shaded a pleasant boulevarde, had been cut down to form an abattis; there the pavement had been torn up to face a bastion, and vast gaps had been beaten in the solid walls.
The scarcity of food increased, until the soldiers, at last, were brought as low as the citizens, and we had little else to subsist on than a few handfuls of Hamburg meal per man. This we boiled into porridge and ate with a little butter, for we were destitute of milk; every cow, sheep, and goat having been shot and eaten, even to the hides and entrails, long ago. Succour and provision from Rügen and the sea had now been cut off by various gunboats and armed crayers sent by Wallenstein into the Sound, from whence a storm had blown the dismantled Danish fleet. Thus we had nothing before us but starvation or death; and Sir Donald frequently urged that we should all sally forth, sword in hand, and cut a passage to some seaport on the Saxon shore. But the stout Laird of Balgonie vowed that he would never thus desert a city entrusted to his care by the princes of the north; and that to leave the Stralsunders to their fate would be alike unworthy of ourselves and of the ancient military fame of the Scottish people.
This argument was conclusive, and we all resolved to make our graves on the shore of Pomerania, if Gustavus Adolphus could not march to our assistance. Of that we saw not the least probability, for at that time he had his hands full of work in Poland, where, with thirty thousand men (ten thousand of whom were Scottish infantry), he was besieging Dantzig, storming Newbürg, Strazbürg, Dribentz, Sweitz, and Massovia. As for the unfortunate King of Denmark, who was then hovering near Count Tilly, off the Holstein shore, we never expected the least relief from him. Pay we had none, and very little provisions, but we had plenty of powder and shot of every description. The garrison was now reduced to four thousand Scots, and one thousand Germans, Danes, and Frenchmen, all worn by incessant toil, and scarcity of food, for they had a strong city to defend against a hundred thousand men, in whose rear lay all the vast resources of Germany and Flanders; for Wallenstein could command every thing between the Baltic and the gates of Vienna.
Pressing on their works, his pioneers laid down their sap rollers, and dug trenches in new places, facing them internally with gabions and fascines, over which they flung the loose earth, and thus got rapidly under cover. Some of these pioneers were so bold in one place as to push their sap rollers to the foot of the outer glacis.
My daily visits to Ernestine threw a bright gleam of happiness athwart the murky cloud of war and desolation that surrounded us; and when seated by her side, in her pretty little boudoir, I forgot the miseries endured by us at the Frankendör, the desolation of the city, the desperate state—the starvation and death—to which we were hurrying, and which I strove to conceal from her for a time, but in vain.
Once, when I led her to the Frankendör during a brief cessation of hostilities, that she might see the white tents of her father's brigade, the wan visage, the anxious eyes, the tattered attire and fallen paunch of more than one once rotund and jovial city councillor, attracted her attention, and displayed, in language too powerful to be misunderstood, the undeserved miseries endured by the honest and industrious people of Stralsund.
Scottish porridge is certainly very good in its way; but as the best of food will pall the appetite by repetition, we soon tired of having nothing but porridge for breakfast, porridge for dinner, and porridge for supper. The tables of the Field-marshal commanding, of the burgomaster, and all the great men of the city, were limited to the same poor fare; and in some instances the aged, the sickly, and the mendicant, who were unable to raise the enormous sum for which an ounce of meal or of salted fish were sold in the market-place, were found dead in their litters of straw, or at the threshold of their doors, and reduced to mere skeletons.