My Lady Rotha: A Romance

by Stanley John Weyman

This was the Swedish Lager. It lay principally to the south of the city proper, though on all sides it encircled it more or less. They told me that there lay in it about forty thousand soldiers and twenty thousand horses, and twenty thousand camp followers; but the number was constantly increasing, death and disease notwithstanding, so that it presently stood as high as sixty thousand fighting men and half as many followers, to say nothing of the garrison that lay in the city, or the troops posted to guard the approaches. It seemed to me, gazing over that mighty multitude from the top of the hill, that nothing could resist such a force; and I looked abroad with curiosity for the enemy.

I expected to view his army cheek by jowl with us; and I was disappointed when I saw beyond our camp to southward, where I was told he lay, only a clear plain with the little river Rednitz flowing through it. This plain was a league and more in width, and it was empty of men. Beyond it rose a black wooded ridge, very steep and hairy.

My lady explained that Wallenstein's army lay along this ridge--seventy thousand men, and forty thousand horses, and Wallenstein himself. His camp we heard was eight miles round, the front guarded by a line of cannon, and taking in whole villages and castles. And now I looked again I saw the smoke hang among the trees. They whispered in Nuremberg that no man in that army took pay; that all served for booty; and that the troopers that sacked Magdeburg and followed Tilly were, beside these, gentle and kindly men.

'God help us!' my lady cried fervently. 'God help this great city! God help the North! Never was such a battle fought as must be fought here!'

We went down very much sobered, filled with awe and wonder and great thoughts, the dullest of us feeling the air heavy with portents, the more clerkly considering of Armageddon and the Last Fight. Briefly--for thirteen years the Emperor and the Papists had hustled and harried the Protestants; had dragooned Donauwörth, and held down Bohemia, and plundered the Palatinate, and crushed the King of Denmark, and wherever there was a weak Protestant state had pressed sorely on it. Then one short year before I stood on the Burg above the Pegnitz, the Protestant king had come out of the North like a thunderbolt, had shattered in a month the Papist armies, had run like a devouring fire down the Priests' Lane, rushed over Bohemia, shaken the Emperor on his throne!

But could he maintain himself? That was now to be seen. To the Emperor's help had come all who loved the old system, and would have it that the south was Germany; all who wished to chain men's minds and saw their profit in the shadow of the imperial throne; all who lived by license and plunder, and reckoned a mass to-day against a murder to-morrow. All these had come, from the great Duke of Friedland grasping at empire, to the meanest freebooter with peasant's blood on his hands and in his veins; and there they lay opposite us, impregnably placed on the Burgstall, waiting patiently until famine and the sword should weaken the fair city, and enable them to plunge their vulture's talons into its vitals.

No wonder that in Nuremberg the citizens could be distinguished from the soldiers by their careworn faces; or that many a man stood morning and evening to gaze at the carved and lofty front of his house--by St. Sebald's or behind the new Cathedral--and wondered how long the fire would spare it. The magistrates who had staked all--their own and the city's--on this cast, went about with stern, grave faces and feared almost to meet the public eye. With a doubled population, with a huge army to feed, with order to keep, with houses and wives and daughters of their own to protect, with sack and storm looming luridly in the future, who had cares like theirs?

One man only, and him I saw as we went home from the Burg. It was near the foot of the Burg hill, where the strasse meets three other ways. At that time Count Tilly's crooked, dwarfish figure and pale horse's face, and the great hat and boots which seemed to swallow him up, were fresh in my mind; and sometimes I had wondered whether this other great commander were like him. Well, I was to know; for through the crowd at the junction of these four roads, while we stood waiting to pass, there came a man on a white horse, followed by half a score of others on horseback; and in a moment I knew from the shouting and the way women thrust papers into his hands that we saw the King of Sweden.

He wore a plain buff coat and a grey flapped hat with a feather; a tall man and rather bulky, his face massive and fleshy, with a close moustache trimmed to a point and a small tuft on his chin. His aspect was grave; he looked about him with a calm eye, and the shouting did not seem to move him. They told me that it was Baner, the Swedish General, who rode with him, and our Bernard of Weimar who followed. But my eye fell more quickly on Count Leuchtenstein, who rode after, with the great Chancellor Oxenstierna; in him, in his steady gaze and serene brow and wholesome strength, I traced the nearest likeness to the king.

And so I first saw the great Gustavus Adolphus. It was said that he would at times fall into fits of Berserk rage, and that in the field he was another man, keen as his sword, swift as fire, pitiless to those who flinched, among the foremost in the charge, a very thunderbolt of war. But as I saw him taking papers from women's hands at the end of the Burg Strasse, he had rather the air of a quiet, worthy prince--of Coburg or Darmstadt, it might be,--no dresser and no brawler; nor would any one, to see him then, have thought that this was the lion of the north who had dashed the pride of Pappenheim and flung aside the firebrands of the south. Or that even now he had on his shoulders the burden of two great nations and the fate of a million of men.