Lectures and Essays. Smith GoldwinЧитать онлайн книгу.
weakness, then withdrew to that palace at Prague, so like its mysterious lord, so regal and so fantastic in its splendour, yet so gloomy, so jealously guarded, so full of the spirit of dark ambition, so haunted by the shadow of the dagger. There he lay, watching the storm that gathered in the North, scanning the stars and waiting for his hour.
When the Swedes and Saxons, under Gustavus and the Elector of Saxony, drew near to the Imperial army under Tilly, in the neighbourhood of Leipsic, there was a crisis, a thrill of worldwide expectation, as when the Armada approached the shores of England; as when the allies met the forces of Louis XIV. at Blenheim, as when, on those same plains of Leipsic, the uprisen nations advanced to battle against Napoleon. Count Tilly's military genius fell short only of the highest. His figure was one which showed that war had become a science, and that the days of the Paladins were past. He was a little old man, with a broad wrinkled forehead, hollow cheeks, a long nose and projecting chin, grotesquely attired in a slashed doublet of green satin, with a peaked hat and a long red feather hanging down behind. His charger was a grey pony, his only weapon a pistol, which it was his delight to say he had never fired in the thirty pitched fields which he had fought and won. He was a Walloon by birth, a pupil of the Jesuits, a sincere devotee, and could boast that he had never yielded to the allurements of wine or women, as well as that he had never lost a battle. His name was now one of horror, for he was the captor of Magdeburg, and if he had not commanded the massacre, or, as it was said, jested at it, he could not be acquitted of cruel connivance. That it was the death of his honour to survive the butchery which he ought to have died, if necessary, in resisting sword in hand, is a soldier's judgment on his case. At his side was Pappenheim, another pupil of the Jesuits, the Dundee of the thirty years' war, with all the devotion, all the loyalty, all the ferocity of the Cavalier, the most fiery and brilliant of cavalry officers, the leader of the storming column at Magdeburg.
In those armies the heavy cavalry was the principal arm. The musket was an unwieldy matchlock fired from a rest, and without a bayonet, so that in the infantry regiments it was necessary to combine pikemen with the musketeers. Cannon there were of all calibres and with a whole vocabulary of fantastic names, but none capable of advancing and manoeuvring with troops in battle. The Imperial troops were formed in heavy masses. Gustavus, taking his lesson from the Roman legion, had introduced a more open order—he had lightened the musket, dispensed with the rest, given the musketeer a cartridge box instead of the flapping bandoleer. He had trained his cavalry, instead of firing their carbines and wheeling, to charge home with the sword. He had created a real field artillery of imperfect structure, but which told on the Imperial masses.
The harvest had been reaped, and a strong wind blew clouds of dust over the bare autumn fields, when Count Tilly formed the victorious veterans of the Empire, in what was called Spanish order—infantry in the centre, cavalry on the flanks—upon a rising ground overlooking the broad plain of Breitenfeldt. On him marched the allies in two columns—Gustavus with the Swedes upon the right, the Elector with his Saxons on the left. As they passed a brook in front of the Imperial position, Pappenheim dashed upon them with his cavalry, but was driven back, and the two columns deployed upon the plain. The night before the battle Gustavus had dreamt that he was wrestling with Tilly, and that Tilly bit him in the left arm, but that he overpowered Tilly with his right arm. That dream came through the Gate of Horn, for the Saxons who formed the left wing were raw troops, but victory was sure to the Swede. Soldiers of the old school proudly compare the shock of charging armies at Leipsic with modern battles, which they call battles of skirmishers with armies in reserve. However this may be, all that day the plain of Breitenfeldt was filled with the fierce eddies of a hand-to-hand struggle between mail- clad masses, their cuirasses and helmets gleaming fitfully amidst the clouds of smoke and dust, the mortal shock of the charge and the deadly ring of steel striking the ear with a distinctness impossible in modern battle. Tilly with his right soon shattered the Saxons, but his centre and left were shattered by the unconquerable Swede. The day was won by the genius of the Swedish king, by the steadiness with which his troops manoeuvred, and the promptness with which they formed a new front when the defeat of the Saxons exposed their left, by the rapidity of their fire and by the vigour with which their cavalry charged. The victory was complete. At sunset four veteran Walloon regiments made a last stand for the honour of the Empire, and with difficulty bore off their redoubtable commander from his first lost field. Through all Protestant Europe flew the tidings of a great deliverance and the name of a great deliverer.
On to Vienna cried hope and daring then. On to Vienna; history still regretfully repeats the cry. Gustavus judged otherwise—and whatever his reason was we may be sure it was not weak. Not to the Danube therefore but to the Main and Rhine the tide of conquest rolled. The Thuringian forest gleams with fires that guide the night march of the Swede. Frankfort the city of empire opens her gates to him who will soon come as the hearts of all men divine not as a conqueror in the iron garb of war but as the elect of Germany to put on the imperial crown. In the cellars of the Prince Bishop of Bamberg and Wurtzburg the rich wine is broached for heretic lips. Protestantism everywhere uplifts its head, the Archbishop of Mainz, chief of the Catholic persecutors becomes a fugitive in his turn. Jesuit and Capuchin must cower or fly. All fortresses are opened by the arms of Gustavus, all hearts are opened by his gracious manner, his winning words, his sunny smile. To the people accustomed to a war of massacre and persecution he came as from a better world a spirit of humanity and toleration. His toleration was politic no doubt but it was also sincere. So novel was it that a monk finding himself not butchered or tortured thought the king's faith must be weak and attempted his conversion. His zeal was repaid with a gracious smile. Once more on the Lech Tilly crossed the path of the thunderbolt. Dishonoured at Magdeburg, defeated at Leipsic, the old man seems to have been weary of life, his leg shattered by a cannon hall he was borne dying from the field and left the Imperial cause headless as well as beaten. Gustavus is in Augsburgh, the queen of German commerce, the city of the Fuggers with their splendid and romantic money kingdom, the city of the Confession. He is in Munich, the capital of Maximilian and the Catholic League. His allies the Saxons are in Prague. A few marches more and he will dictate peace at Vienna with all Germany at his back. A few marches more the Germans will be a Protestant nation under a Protestant chief and many a dark page will be torn from the book of fate.
Ferdinand and Maximilian had sought counsel of the dying Tilly. Tilly had given them counsel bitter but inevitable. Dissembling their hate and fear they called like trembling necromancers when they invoke the fiend upon the name of power. The name of Wallenstein gave new life to the Imperial cause under the very ribs of death. At once he stood between the Empire and destruction with an army of 50,000 men, conjured, as it were, out of the earth by the spell of his influence alone. All whose trade was war came at the call of the grand master of their trade. The secret of Wallenstein's ambition is buried in his grave, but the man himself was the prince of adventurers, the ideal chief of mercenary bands, the arch contractor for the hireling's blood. His character was formed in a vast political gambling house, a world given up to pillage and the strong hand, an Eldorado of confiscations. Of the lofty dreamer portrayed in the noble dramatic poem of Schiller, there is little trace in the intensely practical character of the man. A scion of a good Bohemian house, poor himself, but married to a rich wife, whose wealth was the first step in the ladder of his marvellous fortunes, Wallenstein had amassed immense domains by the purchase of confiscated estates, a traffic redeemed from meanness only by the vastness of the scale on which he practised it, and the loftiness of the aim which he had in view. Then he took to raising and commanding mercenary troops, improving on his predecessors in that trade by doubling the size of his army, on the theory, coolly avowed by him, that a large army would subsist by its command of the country, where a small army would starve. But all was subservient to his towering ambition, and to a pride which has been called theatrical, and which often wore an eccentric garb, but which his death scene proves to have been the native grand infirmity of the man. He walked in dark ways and was unscrupulous and ruthless when on the path of his ambition; but none can doubt the self sustaining force of his lonely intellect, his power of command, the spell which his character cast over the fierce and restless spirits of his age. Prince- Duke of Friedland, Mecklenburgh, and Sagan, Generalissimo of the armies of the House of Austria—to this height had the landless and obscure adventurer risen, in envy's despite, as his motto proudly said, not by the arts of a courtier or a demagogue, but by strength of brain and heart, in a contest with rivals whose brains