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Page 24

GREAT BATTLES
OF THE WORLD

BY STEPHEN CRANE

AUTHOR. OF "THE RED
BADGE OF COURAGE," ETC.

ILLUSTRATED BY
JOHN SLOAN

PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT
COMPANY MDCCCCI

SEEN BY
PRESERVATION

J. B. LlPPINCOTT COMPANV

P

Electrotype* and Printed by
J. B. Litfincott Company, Philadelphia, U.S.A.

NOTE

THESE vigorous pictures were among
the very last work done by the la-
mented pen which gave us "The Red
Badge of Courage."

We were aroused by that startling drum-
beat to the advent of a new literary talent.
The commonplace was shattered by a fresh
and original force, and every one heard
and applauded. Then came the varied
fiction, always characteristic and con-
vincing, and then, at the end, this return
to the martial strain.

It was agreed that the battles should be
the choice of the author, and he chose
them for their picturesque and theatric
qualities, not alone for their decisiveness.
What he could best assimilate from his-
tory was its grandeur and passion and the
fire of action. These he loved, and hence
3

NOTE

the group of glorious battles which forms
this volume.

The talent of Stephen Crane was mel-
lowing under the tutelage of experience.
He lost none of his dash and audacity
even in the sedater avenues of history.
He was a strong and native growth of our
wonderful soil, and the fruits of him will
last while courage and genius are revered.

HARRISON S. MORRIS.

CONTENTS

PACK

THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL . . . .11

VITTORIA . . 31

THE SIEGE OP PLEVNA 63

THE STORMING OF BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS . 79

A SWEDE'S CAMPAIGN IN GERMANY . . .114
I. LEIPZIG
II. LUTZKN

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS .... 205
THE BRIEF CAMPAIGN AGAINST NEW ORLEANS . 223
THE BATTLE OF SOLFERINO . . . .241

ILLUSTRATIONS

PACK

AT THE FENCE — THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

Frontispiece

AFTER THE FRENCH DEFEAT — VITTORIA . . 58
OSMAN PASHA IN THE SORTIE FROM PLEVNA . 71
FREDERICK THE GREAT AT BURKERSDORF . .109
LEIPZIG — GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS GIVING THANKS

FOR VICTORY . . . . * . . 163
IN THE BREACH AT BADAJOS . . . . 220
THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS . . . .231
CARRYING THE CEMETERY GATE AT SOLFERINO . 273

THE BATTLE OF BUNKER
HILL

ON the 1 2th of June, 1775, Captain Har-
ris, afterwards Lord Harris, wrote
home from the town of Boston, then occu-
pied by British troops :

' ' I wish the Americans may be brought to a sense of
their duty. One good drubbing, which I long to give
them, by way of retaliation, might have a good effect
towards it. At present they are so elated by the petty
advantage they gained the ipth of April, that they de-
spise the powers of Britain. We shall soon take the
field on the other side of the Neck."

This very fairly expressed the irritation
in the British camp. The troops had been
sent to Massachusetts to subdue it, but
as yet nothing had been done in that
direction.

The ignominious flight of the British
regulars from Lexington and Concord was
still unavenged. More than that, they
had been kept close in Boston ever since

by the provincial militia,
ii

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

'•What!" cried General Burgoyne when
on his arrival in May he was told this
news. " What ! Ten thousand peasants
keep five thousand King's troops shut up ?
Let us get in, and we'll soon find elbow-
room !" " Elbow-room" was the army's
name for Burgoyne after that.

A little later General Gage remarked to
General Timothy Ruggles, "It is impos-
sible for the rebels to withstand our arms
a moment."

Ruggles replied : " Sir, you do not know
with whom you have to contend. These
are the very men who conquered Canada.
I fought with them side by side. I know
them well ; they will fight bravely. My
God, sir, your folly has ruined your cause !"

Besides Burgoyne, the Cerberus brought
over Generals Clinton and Howe and large
re-enforcements, so that the forces under
General Gage, the commander-in-chief,
were over ten thousand. By June I2th
the army in Boston was actually unable to
procure fresh provisions, and Gage pro-
claimed martial law, designating those who
were in arms as rebels and traitors.

The Essex Gazette of June 8th says :

12

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

"We have the pleasure to inform the
public that the Grand American Army is
nearly completed." This Grand American
Army was spread around Boston, its head-
quarters at Cambridge, under command of
General Artemas Ward, who had fought
under Abercrombie. The Grand American
Army was an army of allies. Ward, its sup-
posed chief, was authorized to command
only the Massachusetts and New Hamp-
shire forces, and when the Connecticut
and Rhode Island men obeyed him it was
purely through courtesy. Each colony
supplied its own troops with provisions
and ammunition ; each had its own officers,
appointed by the Committee of Safety.

To this committee, June i3th, came the
tidings that Gage proposed to occupy Bun-
ker Hill, in Charlestown, on the i8th, and
a council of war was held, which included
the savagely bluff, warm-hearted patriot,
General Israel Putnam, of the Connecticut
troops ; General Seth Pomeroy, Colonel
William Prescott, the hardy, independent
Stark, and Captain Gridley, the engineer —
all of whom were veterans of the French
and Indian War.

13

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

As a result of the meeting, a detach-
ment of nine hundred men of the Massa-
chusetts regiments, under Colonels Pres-
cott, Frye, and Bridge, with two hundred
men from Connecticut and Captain Grid-
ley's artillery company of forty-nine men
and two field-pieces, were ordered to pa-
rade at six o'clock P.M., the i6th, on Cam-
bridge Common. There they appeared
with weapons, packs, blankets, and in-
trenching tools. President Langdon, of
Harvard College, made an impressive
prayer, and by nine o'clock they had
marched, the entire force being under the
command of Colonel Prescott.

A uniform of blue turned back with red
was worn by some of the men, but for the
most part they wore their " Sunday suits"
of homespun. Their guns were of all sorts
and sizes, and many carried old-fashioned
powder-horns and pouches. Prescott
walked at their head, with two sergeants
carrying dark lanterns, until they reached
the Neck.

The Neck was the strip of land leading
to the peninsula opposite Boston, where
lay the small town of Charlestown. The
14

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

peninsula is only one mile in length, its
greatest breadth but half a mile. The
Charles River separates it from Boston on
the south, and to the north and east is the
Mystic River. Bunker Hill begins at the
isthmus and rises gradually to a height of
one hundred and ten feet, forming a smooth,
round hill.

At Cambridge Common, the night the
troops started for Bunker Hill, Israel
Putnam had made this eloquent address :
" Men, there are enough of you on the
Common this evening to fill hell so full
of the red-coats to-morrow that the devils
will break their shins over them."

At Bunker Hill the expedition halted,
and a long discussion ensued between
Prescott, Gridley, Major Brooks, and Put-
nam as to whether it would be better to
follow Ward's orders literally and fortify
Bunker Hill itself, or to go on to the lesser
elevation southeast of it, which is now
known as Breed's Hill, but had then no
special name. They agreed upon Breed's
Hill.

They began to intrench at midnight.

Prescott was consumed with anxiety lest
'5

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

his men should be attacked before some
screen could be raised to shelter them.
However enthusiastic they might be, he
did not think it possible for his raw troops
to meet to any advantage a disciplined sol-
diery in the open field.

So the pickaxe and the spade were busy
throughout the night. It was silent work,
for the foe was near. In Boston Harbor
lay the Lively, the Somerset, the Cerberus,
the Glasgow, the Falcon, and the Sym-
metry, besides the floating batteries. On
the Boston shore the sentinels were pacing
outside the British encampment. At inter-
vals through the night Prescott and Brooks
stole down to the shore of Charles River
and listened till the call of " All's well !"
rang over the water from the ships and
told them that their scheme was still undis-
covered.

At dawn the intrenchments were six feet
high, and there was a great burst of fire at
them from the Lively, which was joined
in a few moments by the other men-of-war
and the batteries on Copp's Hill, on the
Boston shore.

The strange thunder of the cannonade

16

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

brought forth every man, woman, and child
in Boston. Out of their prim houses they
rushed under trellises heavy with damask
roses and honeysuckle, and soon every
belfry and tower, house-top and hill-top,
was crowded with them. There the most
of them stayed till the thrilling play in
which they had so vital an interest was
enacted.

Meanwhile Prescott, to inspire his raw
men with confidence, mounted the parapet
'of the redoubt they had raised and delib-
erately sauntered around it, making jocular
speeches, until the men cheered each can-
non-ball as it came.

Gage, looking through his field-glasses
from the other shore, marked the tall figure
with the three-cornered hat and the banyan
— a linen blouse — buckled about the waist,
and asked-of Councillor Willard, who stood
near him, —

"Who is the person who appears to
command ?"

"That is my brother-in-law, Colonel
Prescott. "

"Will he fight?"

" Yes, sir ; he is an old soldier, and will
17

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

fight as long as a drop of blood remains in
his veins."

"The works must be carried," said Gage.

Gage was strongly advised by his gen-
erals to land a force at the Neck and attack
the Americans in the rear. It was also
suggested that they might be bombarded
by the fleet from the Mystic and the
Charles, and, indeed, might be starved out
without any fighting at all. But none of
this suited the warlike British temper ; the
whole army longed to fight — to chase the
impudent enemy out of those intrench-
ments he had so insole'ntly reared. The
challenge was a bold one ; it must be ac-
cepted. The British had the weight in all
ways, but they also had the preposterous
arrogance of the British army, which al-
ways deems itself invincible because it re-
members its traditions, and traditions are
dubious and improper weapons to fire at a
foe.

At noon the watchers on the house-tops
saw the lines of smart grenadiers and light
infantry embark in barges under command
of General Howe, who had with him Briga-
dier-General Pigot and some of the most

18

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

distinguished officers in Boston. They
landed at the southwestern point of the
peninsula.

When the intelligence that the British
troops had landed reached Cambridge it
caused great excitement. A letter of Cap-
tain Chester reads :

"Just after dinner on the ijih ult. I was walking out
from my lodgings, quite calm and composed, and all at
once the drums beat to arms, and bells rang, and a great
noise in Cambridge. Captain Putnam came by on full
gallop. ' What is the matter ?' says I. ' Have you not
heard ?' ' No. ' ' Why, the regulars are landing at
Charlestown,' says he, 'and father says you must all
meet and march immediately to Bunker Hill to oppose
the enemy.' I waited not, but ran and got my arms
and ammunition, and hastened to my company (who
were in the church for barracks), and found them nearly
ready to march. We soon marched, with our frocks and
trousers on over our other clothes (for our company is in
uniform wholly blue, turned up with red), for we were
loath to expose ourselves by our dress ; and down we
marched. ' '

After a reconnoissance, Howe sent back
to Gage for re-enforcements, and remained
passive until they came.

Meanwhile, there were bitter murmur-
ings among the troops on Breed's Hill.
They had watched the brilliant pageant, —
19

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the crossing over of their adversaries,
scarlet-clad, with glittering equipments,
with formidable guns in their train, — and
were conscious of being themselves ex-
hausted from the night's labor and the hot
morning sun. It was two o'clock, and
they had had practically nothing to eat
that day. Among themselves they accused
their officers of treachery. It seemed in-
credible that after doing all the hard work
they should be expected to do the fighting
as well. Loud huzzas arose from their
lips, however, — these cross and hungry
Yankees, — when Doctor — or General —
Joseph Warren appeared among them with
Seth Pomeroy.

Few men had risen to a higher degree
of universal love and confidence in the
hearts of the Massachusetts people than
Warren. He had been active in every
patriotic movement. The councils through
which the machinery of the Revolution was
put in motion owed much to him. He was
president of the Committee of Safety, and
probably had been one of the Indians of
the Boston Tea Party. But a few days
before he had been appointed major-gen-

20

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

eral. In recognition of this, Israel Putnam,
who was keeping a squad of men working
at intrenchments on Bunker Hill, had
offered to take orders from him. But
Warren refused, and asked where he might
go to be of the greatest service. " Where
will the onset be most furious ?" he asked,
and Putnam sent him to the redoubt.
There Prescott also offered him the chief
command, but Warren replied, " I came as
a volunteer with my musket to serve under
you, and shall be happy to learn from a
soldier of your experience."

At three o'clock the redoubt was in good
working order. About eight yards square,
its strongest side, the front, faced the set-
tled part of Charlestown and protected the
south side of the hill. The east side com-
manded a field ; the north side had an
open passage-way ; to the left extended a
breastwork for about two hundred yards.

By three o'clock some re-enforcements
for General Howe had arrived, so that he
now had over three thousand men. Just
before action he addressed the officers
around him as follows :

"Gentlemen, I am very happy in having

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the honor of commanding so fine a body
of men. I do not in the least doubt that
you will behave like Englishmen and as
becomes good soldiers. If the enemy will
not come out from their intrenchments, we
must drive them out at all events ; other-
wise the town of Boston will be set on fire
by them. I shall not desire one of you to
go a step farther than where I go myself
at your head. Remember, gentlemen, we
have no recourse to any resources if we
lose Boston but to go on board our ships,
which will be very disagreeable to us
all."

From the movements of the British, they
seemed intending to turn the American left
and surround the redoubt. To prevent
this, Prescott sent down the artillery with
two field-pieces — he had only four alto-
gether— and the Connecticut troops under
Captain Knowlton. Putnam met them as
they neared the Mystic, shouting, —

" Man the rail fence, for the enemy is
flanking of us fast !"

This rail fence — half of which was stone
— reached from the shore of the Mystic to
within two hundred yards of the breast-

22

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

works. It was not high, but Putnam had
said:

" If you can shield a Yankee's shins he's
not afraid of anything. His head he does
not think of."

Captain Knowlton, joined by Colonels
Stark and Reid and their regiments, made
another parallel fence a short distance in
front of this, filling in the space between
with new-mown hay from the fields.

A great cannonade was thundering from
ships and batteries to cover Howe's ad-
vance. His troops, now increased to three
thousand, came on in two divisions, the left
wing, under Pigot, towards the breastwork
and redoubt ; the right, led by Howe, to
storm the rail fence. The artillery moved
heavily through the miry, low ground, and
the embarrassing discovery was made that
there were only twelve-pound balls for six-
pounders. Howe decided to load them
with grape. The troops were hindered by
a number of fences, as well as the thick,
tall grass. Their knapsacks were extra-
ordinarily heavy, and they felt the power
of the scorching- sun.

o

Inside the redoubt the Americans waited
23

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

for them, Prescott assuring his men that
the red-coats would never reach the re-
doubt if they obeyed him and reserved
their fire until he gave the word. As the
assaulting force drew temptingly near, the
American officers only restrained their men
from firing by mounting the parapet and
kicking up their guns.

But at last the word was given — the
stream of fire broke out all along the line.
They were wonderful marksmen. The
magnificent regulars were staggered, but
they returned the fire. They could make
no headway against the murderous volleys
flashed in quick succession at them. The
dead and wounded fell thickly. General
Pigot ordered a retreat, while great shouts
of triumph arose from the Americans.

At the rail fence Putnam gave his last
directions when Howe was nearing him :

" Fire low : aim at the waistbands ! Wait
until you see the whites of their eyes !
Aim at the handsome coats ! Pick off the
commanders !"

The men rested their guns on the rail
fence to fire. The officers were used as

targets — many of the handsome coats were
24

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

laid low. So hot was the reception they
met that in a few moments Howe's men
were obliged to fall back. One of them
said afterwards, " It was the strongest post
that was ever occupied by any set of
men."

There was wild exultation within the
American lines, congratulation and praises,
for just fifteen minutes ; and then Pigot
and Howe led the attack again. But the
second repulse was so much fiercer than
the first that the British broke ranks and
ran down hill, some of them getting into
the boats.

"The dead," said Stark, "lay in front of
us as thick as sheep in a fold."

Meantime Charlestown had been set on
fire by Howe's orders, and the spectacle
was splendidly terrible to the watchers in
Boston. The wooden buildings made a
superb blaze, and through the smoke could
be seen the British officers striking and
pricking their men with their swords in the
vain hope of rallying them, while cannon,
musketry, crashes of falling houses, and
the yells of the victors filled up the measure
of excitement to the spectators.
25

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Twice, now, the Americans had met the
foe and proved that he was not invincible.
The women in Boston thought the last
defeat final — that their men-folk had gained
the day. But Prescott knew better ; he was
sure that they would come again, and sure
that he could not withstand a third attack.

If at this juncture strong re-enforcements
and supplies of ammunition had reached
him, he might well have held his own. But
such companies as had been sent on would
come no farther than Bunker Hill, in spite
if Israel Putnam's threats and entreaties.
There they straggled about under hay-cocks
and apple-trees, demoralized by the sights
and sounds of battle, with no authorized
leader who could force them to the front.

As for their commander-in-chief, Ward,
he would not stir from his house all day,
and kept the main body of his forces at
Cambridge.

When General Clinton saw the rout of
his countrymen from the Boston shore, he
rowed over in great haste. With his assist-
ance, and the fine discipline which prevailed,
the troops were re-formed within half an

hour. Clinton also proposed a new plan
26

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

of assault. Accordingly, instead of dif-
fusing their forces across the whole Amer-
ican front, the chief attack was directed on
the redoubt. The artillery bombarded the
breastwork, and only a small number
moved against the rail fence.

" Fight ! conquer or die !" was the watch-
word that passed from mouth to mouth as
the tall, commanding figure of Howe led
on the third assault. To his soldiers it
was a desperate venture — they felt that
they were going to certain death. But in-
side the redoubt few of the men had more
than one round of ammunition left, though
they shouted bravely, —

" We are ready for the red-coats again !"

Again their first fire was furious and de-
structive, but although many of the enemy
fell, the rest bounded forward without re-
turning it. In a few minutes the columns
of Pigot and Clinton had surrounded the
redoubt on three sides. The defenders of
the breastwork had been driven by the
artillery-fire into the redoubt, and balls
came whistling through the open passage.

The first rank of red-coats who climbed

the parapet was shot down. Major Pit-

27

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

cairn met his death at this time while cheer-
ing on his men. But the Americans had
come to the end of their ammunition, and
they had not fifty bayonets among them,
though these were made to do good ser-
vice as the enemy came swarming over
the walls.

Pigot got up by the aid of a tree, and
hundreds followed his lead. The Amer-
icans made stout resistance in the hand-to-
hand struggle that followed, but there could
be only one ending to it, and Prescott
ordered a retreat. He was almost the last
to leave, and only got away by skilfully
parrying with his sword the bayonet thrusts
of the foe. His banyan was pierced in
many places, but he escaped unhurt.

The men at the rail fence kept firm until
they saw the forces leaving the redoubt ;
they fell back then, but in good order.

A great volley was fired after the Amer-
icans. It was then that Warren fell, as he
lingered in the rear — a loss that was pas-
sionately mourned throughout New Eng-
land.

During their disordered flight over the
little peninsula the Americans lost more
28

BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL

men than at any other time of the day,
though their list of killed and wounded
only amounted to four hundred and forty-
nine. The heavy loss of the enemy — ten
hundred and fifty-four men — had the effect
of checking the eagerness of their pursuit ;
the Americans passed the Neck without
further molestation.

General Howe had maintained his repu-
tation for solid courage, and his long white-
silk stockings were soaked in blood.

The speech of Count Vergennes, that
"if it won two more such victories as
Bunker Hill, there would be no more
British Army in America/' echoed the gen-
eral sentiment in England land America as
well as in France. So impressed were the
British leaders with the indomitable resolu-
tion shown by the Provincials in fortifying
and defending so desperate a position as
Breed's Hill, that they made no attempt to
follow up their victory. General Gage ad-
mitted that the people of New England
were not the despicable rabble they had
sometimes been represented.

Among the Grand Army itself many

recriminations and courts-martial followed
29

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the contest. But Washington soon drilled
it into order.

The most important thing to be remem-
bered of Bunker Hill is its effect upon the
colonies. The troubles with the mother
country had been brewing a long time, but
this was the first decisive struggle for su-
premacy. There was no doubt of the
tough soldierly qualities displayed by the
Colonials ; the thrill of pride that went
through the country at the success of their
arms welded together the scattered colo-
nies and made a nation of them. The
Revolution was an accomplished fact.
"England," said Franklin, "has lost her
colonies forever."

VITTORIA

THE campaign of 1812, which included
the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo and
Badajos and the overwhelming victory of
Salamanca, had apparently done so much
towards destroying the Napoleonic sway
in the Peninsula that the defeat of the
Allies at Burgos, in October, 1812, came
as an embittering disappointment to Eng-
land ; and when Wellington, after his dis-
astrous retreat to Ciudad Rodrigo, re-
ported his losses as amounting to nine
thousand, the usual tempest of condemna-
tion against him was raised, and the mem-
bers of the Cabinet, who were always so
free with their oracular advice and so close
with the nation's money, wagged their
heads despairingly.

But as the whole aspect of affairs was
revealed, and as Wellington coolly stated
his plans for a new campaign, public opin-
ion changed.

It was a critical juncture : Napoleon had
arranged an armistice with Russia, Prussia,
3*

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

and Austria, which was to last until August
1 6, 1813, and it became known that this
armistice might end in peace. Peace on
the Continent would mean that Napoleon's
unemployed troops might be poured into
Spain in such enormous numbers as to
overwhelm the Allies. So, to insure Wel-
lington's striking a decisive blow before
this could happen, both the English Min-
istry and the Opposition united in sup-
porting him, and for the first time during
the war he felt sure of receiving the sup-
plies for which he had asked.

The winter and spring were spent by
Wellington in preparing for his campaign :
his troops needed severe discipline after
the disorder into which they had fallen
during the retreat from Burgos, and the
great chief entered into the matter of their
equipment with most painstaking attention
to detail, removing unnecessary weight
from them, and supplying each infantry
soldier with three extra pairs of shoes, be-
sides heels and soles for repairs. He drew
large re-enforcements from England, and
all were drilled to a high state of effi-
ciency.

32

VITTORIA

It is well to quote here from the letter
published by Wellington on the 28th of
December, 1812. It was addressed to the
commanders of divisions and brigades. It
created a very pretty storm, as one may
readily see. I quote at length, since surely
no document could be more illuminative of
Wellington's character, and it seems cer-
tain that this fearless letter saved the army
from the happy-go-lucky feeling, very com-
mon in British field forces, that a man is a
thorough soldier so long as he is willing at
all times to go into action and charge, if
ordered, at even the brass gates of Inferno.
But Wellington knew that this was not
enough. He wrote as follows :

'•GENTLEMEN i — I have ordered the army into canton-
ments, in which I hope that circumstances will enable
me to keep them for some time, during which the troops
will receive their clothing, necessaries, etc., which are
already in progress by different lines of communication
to the several divisions and brigades.

"But besides these objects, I must draw your atten-
tion in a very particular manner to the state of disci-
pline of the troops. The discipline of every army, after
a long and active campaign, becomes in some degree
relaxed, and requires the utmost attention on the part of
general and other officers to bring it back to the state in
which it ought to be for service ; but I am concerned to
3 33

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

have to observe that the army under my command has
fallen off in this respect in the late campaign to a greater
degree than any army with which I have ever served, or
of which I have ever read.

"It must be obvious, however, to every officer, that
from the moment the troops commenced their retreat
from the neighborhood of Burgos on the one hand, and
from Madrid on the other, the officers lost all command
over their men.

" I have no hesitation in attributing these evils to the
habitual inattention of the officers of the regiments to
their duty as prescribed by the standing regulations of
the service and by the orders of this army.

1 ' I am far from questioning the zeal, still less the gal-
lantry and spirit, of the officers of the army ; I am quite
certain that if their minds can be convinced of the neces-
sity of minute and constant attention to understand,
recollect, and carry into execution the orders which have
been issued for the performance of their duty, and that
the strict performance of this duty is necessary to enable
the army to serve the country as it ought to be served,
they will in future give their attention to these points.

"Unfortunately, the experience of the officers of the
army has induced many to consider that the period during
which an army is on service is one of relaxation from all
rule, instead of being, as it is, the period during which
of all others every rule for the regulation and control of
the conduct of the soldier, for the inspection and care of
his arms, ammunition, accoutrements, necessaries, and
field equipments, and his horse and horse appointments,
for the receipt and issue and care of his provisions and
the regulation of all that belongs to his food and the forage
34

VITTORIA

for his horse, must be most strictly attended to by the
officer of his company or troop, if it is intended that an
army — a British army in particular — shall be brought
into the field of battle in a state of efficiency to meet the
enemy on the day of trial.

"These are points, then, to which I most earnestly en-
treat you to turn your attention, and the attention of the
officers of the regiments under your command, Portu-
guese as well as English, during the period in which it
may be in my power to leave the troops in their can-
tonments.

' ' In regard to the food of the soldier, I have fre-
quently observed and lamented in the late campaign the
facility and celerity with which the French soldiers cooked
in comparison with those of our army.

11 The cause of this disadvantage is the same with that
of every other description, the want of attention of the
officers to the orders of the army and the conduct of
their men, and the consequent want of authority over
their conduct.

"But I repeat that the great object of the attention of
the general and field officers must be to get the captains
and subalternsof the regiments to understand and perform
the duties required from them, as the only mode by which
the discipline and efficiency of the army can be restored
and maintained during the next campaign."

The British general never refrained from
speaking his mind, even if his ideas were
certain to be contrary to the spirit of the
35

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

army. I will quote from " Victories of the
British Armies" as follows :

" Colborne marched with the infantry on
the right ; Head, with the Thirteenth Light
Dragoons and two squadrons of Portu-
guese, on the left, and the heavy cavalry
formed a reserve. Perceiving that their
battering train was endangered, the French
cavalry, as the ground over which they were
retiring was favorable for the movement,
charged the Thirteenth. But they were
vigorously repulsed ; and, failing in break-
ing the British, the whole, consisting of
four regiments, drew up in front, forming
an imposing line. The Thirteenth instantly
formed and galloped forward — and nothing
could have been more splendid than their
charge. They rode fairly through the
French, overtook and cut down many of
the gunners, and at last entirely headed
the line of march, keeping up a fierce and
straggling encounter with the broken horse-
men of the enemy, until some of the Eng-
lish dragoons actually reached the gates of
Badajoz."

And now I quote from Wellington's com-
ment to Colborne :

36

VITTORIA

" I wish you would call together the offi-
cers of the dragoons and point out to them
the mischiefs which must result from the
disorder of the troops in action. The undis-
ciplined ardor of the Thirteenth Dragoons
and First Regiment of Portuguese cavalry
is not of the description of the determined
bravery and steadiness of soldiers confi-
dent in their discipline and in their officers.
Their conduct was that of a rabble, gallop-
ing as fast as their horses could carry them
over a plain, after an enemy to whom they
could do no mischief when they were
broken and the pursuit had continued for
a limited distance, and sacrificing substan-
tial advantages and all the objects of your
operation by their want of discipline. To
this description of their conduct I add my
entire conviction, that if the enemy could
have thrown out of Badajoz only one hun-
dred men regularly formed, they would
have driven back these two regiments in
equal haste and disorder, and would prob-
ably have taken many whose horses would
have been knocked up. If the Thirteenth
Dragoons are again guilty of this conduct
I shall take their horses from them, and

37

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

send the officers and men to do duty at
Lisbon."

The incident of the dragoons' charge
happened early in 1811, but it shows how
Wellington dealt with the firebrands in the
army. However, imagine the feelings of
the Thirteenth Dragoons !

As for the Allies, they were for a long
time considered quite hopeless by British
officers ; the Portuguese were commonly
known in the ranks as the "Vamosses,"
from "vamos" "let us be off/' which they
shouted before they ran away. (The Amer-
ican slang "vamoose" may have had its
origin in the Mexican War.)

The Spanish and Portuguese hated each
other so cordially that it was with the
greatest difficulty that they could be in-
duced to cooperate : they were continually
plotting to betray each other, and, inci-
dentally, the English. Wellington had a
sufficiently hard task in keeping his Eng-
lish army in order and directing the civil
administration of Portugal, — which would
otherwise have tumbled to pieces from the
corruption of its government, — but hardest
of all was the military training of the
38

VITTORIA

Spanish and Portuguese. He was now in
supreme command of the Spanish army,
concerning which he had written :

"There is not in the whole Kingdom of
Spain a depot of provisions for the sup-
port of a single battalion in operation for
one day. Not a shilling of money in any
military chest. To move them forward at
any point now would be to insure their
certain destruction."

After that was written, however, he had
been able to equip them with some degree
of effectiveness, and had worked them up
to a certain standard of discipline : they
were brave and patient, and susceptible to
improvement under systematic training.
Beresford had also accomplished wonders
with the Portuguese, and Wellington's
army now numbered seventy thousand
men, of whom forty thousand were British.

Wellington, with his lean, sharp-featured
face, and dry, cold manner, was not the
typical Englishman at all. He was more
like the genuine Yankee of New England.
He made his successes by his resourceful-
ness, his inability to be overpowered by
circumstances. As he said : " The French

39

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

plan their campaigns just as you might
make a splendid set of harness. It an-
swers very well until it gets broken, and
then you are done for ! Now I made my
campaign of ropes ; if anything went wrong
I tied a knot and went on."

He was always ready, when anything
broke or failed him, to "tie a knot and go
on." That is the suppleness and adroit-
ness of a great chieftain, whereas the
typical English general was too magnifi-
cent for the little things ; he liked to hurl
his men boldly into the abyss — and then, if
they perished, it had been magnificently
done, at any rate. But Wellington was
always practical and ready to take ad-
vantage of any opportunity that offered.
He had no illusions about the grandeur of
getting men killed for nothing.

There were still two hundred and thirty
thousand French troops in Spain, but they
were scattered across the Peninsula from
Asturias to Valencia. To the extreme east
was Marshal Suchet with sixty-five thou-
sand men, and an expedition under General
Murray was sent against him which kept

him there. Clausel was prevented from
40

VITTORIA

leaving Biscay with his forty thousand men
by the great guerilla warfare with which
Wellington enveloped his forces. There
remained, then, for Wellington to deal with
the centre of the army under Joseph Bona-
parte, whose jealous suspicions had been
the means of driving from Spain Marshal
Soult, a really fine and capable commander.
The weak Joseph was now the head of an
immense and magnificently equipped army
of men and officers in the finest condition
for fighting, but who were to prove of how
little effect fine soldiers can be when they
lack the right chief.

The army of Joseph lay in a curve from
Toledo to Zamora, guarding the central
valley of the Douro, and covering the
great road from Madrid through Burgos
and Vittoria to France. Wellington's plan
was to move the left wing of his army
across the Douro within the Portuguese
frontier, to march it up the right bank of
the Douro as far as Zamora, and then,
crossing the Elsa, to unite it to the Galician
forces ; while the centre and right, ad-
vancing from Agueda by Salamanca, were
to force the passage of the Tormes and
41

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

drive the French entirely from the line of
the Douro towards the Carrion.

By constantly threatening them on the
flank with the left wing, which was to be
always kept in advance, he thus hoped
to drive the French back by Burgos into
Biscay. He himself expected to establish
there a new basis for the war among the
numerous and well-fortified seaports on
the coast. In this way, forcing the enemy
back to his frontier, he would at once
better his own position and intercept the
whole communication of the enemy. The
plan had the obvious objection that in
separating his army into two forces, with
great mountain ranges and impassable
rivers between them, each was exposed to
the risk of an attack by the whole force of
the enemy.

But Wellington had resolved to take this
risk. Sir Thomas Graham, in spite of his
sixty-eight years, had the vigor and clear-
headedness of youth, and the very genius
for the difficult command given him — that
of leading the left wing through virgin
forests, over rugged mountains, and across

deep rivers.

42

VITTORIA

The march of Wellington began May
22d, and an exalted spirit of enthusiasm
pervaded the entire army. Even Welling-
ton became expressive, and as he passed
the stream that marks the frontier of Spain
he arose in his stirrups, and, waving his
hand, exclaimed, " Farewell, Portugal !"

Meanwhile Graham, on May i6th, with
forty thousand men, had crossed the Douro
and pushed ahead, turning the French
right and striking at their communications.
Within ten days forty thousand men were
transported through two hundred miles of
the most broken and rugged country in
the Peninsula, with all their artillery and
baggage. Soon they were in possession
of the whole crest of mountains between
the Ebro and the sea. On the 3 1 st Graham
reached the Elsa. The French were as-
tounded when Graham appeared upon their
flank ; they abandoned their strong posi-
tion on the Douro ; then they abandoned
Madrid ; after that, they hurried out of
Burgos and Valladolid.

Wellington had crossed the Douro at
Miranda on May 25th, in advance of his
troops, by means of a basket slung on a

43

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

rope from precipice to precipice, at an im-
mense height above the foaming torrent.
The rivers were all swollen by floods.

Graham, with the left wing of the Allies,
kept up his eager march. Many men were
lost while fording the Elsa on May 3ist.
The water was almost chin-deep and the
bottom was covered with shifting stones.
Graham hastened with fierce speed to the
Ebro, eager to cross it before Joseph and
break his communications with France.
Joseph had wished to stop his retreat at
Burgos and give battle there, but he had
been told that incredible numbers of gueril-
las had joined the English forces, and so
he pushed on, leaving the castle at Burgos
heavily mined. It was calculated that the
explosion would take place just as the
English entered the town, but the fuses
were too quick — three thousand French
soldiers, the last to leave, were crushed by
the falling ruins. The allied troops marched
triumphantly through the scene of their
earlier struggle and defeat.

On abandoning Burgos Joseph took the
road to Vittoria and sent pressing orders
to Clausel to join him there, but this June-

VITTORIA

tion of forces was not effected — Clausel
was too late.

Wellington's strategy of turning the
French right has been called "the most
masterly movement made during the Pen-
insular War." Its chief merit was that it
gave Wellington the advantage of victory
with hardly any loss of life. It swept the
French back to the Spanish frontier. And
Joseph, whose train comprised an incred-
ible number of chariots, carriages, and
wagons, bearing a helpless multitude of
people of both sexes from Madrid (in-
cluding the civil functionaries and officers
of his court), as well as enormous stores
of spoil, began to perceive that this pre-
cipitate retreat was his ruin, and that he
must risk the chance of a great battle to
escape being driven in hopeless confusion
through the passes of the Pyrenees.

The sweep of the Allies under Graham
around the French right had taken them
through the wildest and most enchantingly
beautiful regions. At times a hundred
men had been needed to drag up one
piece of artillery. Again, the guns would
be lowered down a precipice by ropes,

45

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

or forced up the rugged goat-paths. At
length, to quote Napier, "the scarlet uni-
forms were to be seen in every valley, and
the stream of war, descending with impet-
uous force down all the clefts of the moun-
tains, burst in a hundred foaming torrents
into the basin of Vittoria."

So accurately had Graham done his
work in accordance with Wellington's
plans, that he reached the valley just as
Joseph's dejected troops were forming
themselves in front of Vittoria.

The basin or valley of Vittoria, with the
town in its eastern extremity, is a small
plain about eight miles by six miles in ex-
tent, situated in an elevated plateau among
the mountains and guarded on all sides by
rugged hills.

The great road from Madrid enters the
valley at the Puebla Pass, where too the
river Zadora flows through a narrow moun-
tain gorge. This road then runs up the
left bank of the Zadora to Vittoria, and
from there it goes on towards Bayonne and
the Pyrenees. This road was Joseph's
line of retreat.

King Joseph, burdened by his treasure,
46

VITTORIA

which included the plunder of five years
of French occupation in the Peninsula, and
consisted largely of priceless works of art,
selected with most excellent taste by him-
self and other French connoisseurs, had
dispatched to France two great convoys, a
small part of the whole treasure, along the
Bayonne road. As these had to be heavily
guarded against the Biscay guerillas, some
thousands of troops had gone with them.
Joseph's remaining forces were estimated
at from sixty thousand to sixty-five thou-
sand men.

The French were anxious above all
things to keep the road open — the road to
Bayonne : there are several rough moun-
tain roads intersecting each other at Vit-
toria, particularly those to Pampeluna,
Bilboa, and Galicia, but the great Bayonne
road was the only one capable of receiving
the huge train of lumbering carriages with-
out which the army was not to move.

On the afternoon of the 2Oth Welling-
ton, whose effective force was now sixty-
five thousand men, surveyed the place and
the enemy from the hill ranges and saw
that they were making a stand. He de-

47

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

cided then on his tactics. Instead of push-
ing on his combined forces to a frontal
attack, he made up his mind to divide his
troops ; he would send Graham with the
left wing, consisting of eighteen thousand
men and twenty guns, around by the
northern hills to the rear of the French
army, there to seize the road to Bayonne.
Sir Rowland Hill with twenty thousand
men, including General Murillo with his
Spaniards, was to move with the right
wing, break through the Puebla Pass, and
attack the French left.

The right centre under Wellington him-
self was to cross the ridges forming the
southern boundary of the basin and then
move straight forward to the Zadora River
and attack the bridges, while the left centre
was to move across the bridge of Mendoza
in the direction of the town.

The French right, which Graham was to
attack, occupied the heights in front of the
Zadora River above the village of Abechu-
cho, and covered Vittoria from approach
by the Bilboa road ; the centre extended
along the left bank of the Zadora, com-
manding the bridges in front of it, and
48

VITTORIA

blocking up the great road from Madrid.
The left occupied the space from Ariniz
to the ridges of Puebla de Arlauzon, and
guarded the pass of Puebla, by which Hill
was to enter the valley.

The early morning of June 2ist was,
according to one historian, " rainy and
heavy with vapor," while an observer
(Leith Hay) said : " The morning was ex-
tremely brilliant ; a clearer or more beauti-
ful atmosphere never favored the progress
of a gigantic conflict."

The valley was a superb spectacle oc-
cupied by the French army with the rich
uniforms of its officers. Marshal Jourdan,
the commander, could be seen riding slowly
along the line of his troops. The positions
they occupied rose in steps from the centre
of the valley, so that all could be seen by
the English from the crest of the Mo-
rillas as they stood ready for battle. In
his "Events of Military Life" Henry
says :

" The dark and formidable masses of
the French were prepared at all points to
repel the meditated attack — the infantry in
column with loaded arms, or ambushed

4 49

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

thickly in the low woods at the base of
their position, the cavalry in lines with
drawn swords, and the artillery frowning
from the eminences with lighted matches ;
while on our side all was yet quietness and
repose. The chiefs were making their ob-
servations and the men walking about in
groups amidst the piled arms, chatting and
laughing and gazing, and apparently not
caring a pin for the fierce hostile array in
their front."

At ten o'clock Hill reached the pass of
Puebla and forced his way through with
extraordinary swiftness. Murillo's Span-
iards went swarming up the steep ridges
to dislodge the French, but the enemy
made a furious resistance, and re-enforce-
ments kept coming to their aid. General
Murillo was wounded, but would not be
carried from the field. Hill then sent the
Seventy-first to help the Spaniards, who
were showing high courage, but being ter-
ribly mown down by the French musketry.
Colonel Cadogan, who led the Seventy-
first, had no sooner reached the summit of
the height than he fell, mortally wounded.
The French were driven from their posi-
50

VITTORIA

tion, but the loss of Cadogan was keenly
felt. The story of his strange state of
exaltation the night before the battle is
well known — his rapture at the prospect
of taking part in it. As he lay dying on
the summit he would not be moved, al-
though the dead lay thick about him, but
watched the progress of his Highlanders
until he could no longer see.

While this conflict was going on, Wel-
lington, with the right centre, had com-
menced his attack on the bridges over the
Zadora. A Spanish peasant brought word
that the bridge of Tres Puentes was neg-
ligently guarded, and offered to guide the
troops to it. Kempt' s Brigade soon reached
it ; the Fifteenth Hussars galloped over,
but a shot from a French battery killed the
brave peasant who had guided them.

The forces that crossed at Tres Puentes
now formed under the shelter of a hill.
One of the officers wrote of this position :
" Our post was most extraordinary, as we
were isolated from the rest of the army
and within one hundred yards of the
enemy's advance. As I looked over the
bank, I could see El Rey Joseph, sur-
51

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

rounded by at least five thousand men,
within five hundred yards of us."

It has always seemed an inconceivable
thing that the French should not have de-
stroyed the seven narrow bridges across
the Zadora before the 2 1 st had dawned.
Whether it was from over-confidence or
sheer mental confusion, it is impossible to
know.

The Third and Seventh Divisions were
now moving rapidly down to the bridge of
Mendoza, but the enemy's light troops and
guns had opened a vigorous fire upon them,
until the riflemen of the light division, who
had crossed at Tres Puentes, charged the
enemy's fire, and the bridge was carried.

Sir Thomas Picton was a picturesque
figure in this part of the operations.
Through some oversight he and his men,
the " Fighting Third," were neglected.
Orders came to other troops, bridges were
being carried, but no word was sent to

Picton. " D it !" he cried out to one

of his officers, "Lord Wellington must
have forgotten us !" He beat the mane
of his horse with his stick in his impatience
and anger. Finally, an aide-de-camp gal-
52

VITTORIA

loped up and inquired for Lord Dalhousie,
who commanded the Seventh Division. In
answer to Picton's inquiries he stated that
he brought orders for Dalhousie to carry
the bridge to the left, while the Fourth and
Sixth Divisions were to support the attack.
Picton rose in his stirrups, and shouted
angrily to the amazed aide-de-camp, —

" You may tell Lord Wellington from
me, sir, that the Third Division, under my
command, shall in less than ten minutes
attack the bridge and carry it, and the
Fourth and Sixth may support if they
choose." Then, addressing his men with
his customary blend of affection and pro-
fanity, he cried : " Come on, ye rascals !
Come on, ye fighting villains !"

They carried the bridge with such fire
and speed that the whole British line was
animated by the sight.

Maxwell says: "The passage of the
river, the movement of glittering masses
from right to left as far as the eye could
range, the deafening roar of cannon, the
sustained fusillade of the artillery, made
up a magnificent scene. The British cav-
alry, drawn up to support the columns,
53

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

seemed a glittering line of golden helmets
and sparkling swords in the keen sun-
shine which now shone upon the field of
battle."

L' Estrange, who was with the Thirty-
first, says that the men were marching
through standing corn (I suppose some
kind of grain that ripens early, certainly
not maize) yellow for the sickle and be-
tween four and five feet high, and the hiss-
ing cannon-balls, as they rent their way
through the sea of golden grain, made
long furrows in it.

The hill in front of Ariniz was the key
of the French line, and Wellington brought
up several batteries and hurled Picton's
division in a solid mass against it, while the
heavy cavalry of the British came up at a
gallop from the river to sustain the attack.

This hill had been the scene of a great
fight in the wars of the Black Prince, where
Sir William Felton, with two hundred
archers and swordsmen, had been sur-
rounded by six thousand Spaniards, and
all perished, resisting doggedly. It is still
called "the Englishmen's hill."

An obstinate fight now raged, for a brief

54

VITTORIA

space, on this spot. A long wall was held
by several battalions of French infantry,
whose fire was so deadly as to check the
British for a time. They reached the wall,
however, and for a few moments on either
side of it was a seething mass of furious
soldiers. " Any person," said Kincaid, who
was present, " who chose to put his head
over from either side, was sure of getting
a sword or bayonet up his nostrils."

As the British broke over the wall, the
French fell back, abandoning Ariniz for
the ridge in front of Gomecha, only to be
forced back again.

It was the noise of Graham's guns,
booming since mid-day at their rear, that
took the heart out of the French soldiery.

Graham had struck the great blow on
the left ; at eleven he had reached the
heights above the village and bridge of
Gamara Major, which were strongly occu-
pied by the French under Reille. General
Oswald commenced the attack and drove
the enemy from the heights ; then Major
General Robinson, at the head of a brigade
of the Fifth Division, formed his men and
led them forward on the run to carry the

55

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

bridge and village of Gamara. But the
French fire was so strong that he was com-
pelled to fall back. Again he rallied them
and crossed the bridge, but the French
drove them back once more. Fresh British
troops came up and the bridge was carried
again, — and then for the third time it was
lost under Reille's murderous fire.

But now the panic from the centre had
reached Reille. It was known that the
French centre was retreating : the French-
men had no longer the moral strength to
resist Robinson's attacks, and so the bridge
was won by the English and the Bayonne
road was lost to the French.

In the centre the battle had become a
sort of running fight for six miles ; the
French were at last all thrown back
into the little plain in front of Vittoria,
where from the crowded throng cries of
despair could be heard.

"At six o'clock," Maxwell says, "the
sun was setting, and his last rays fell upon
a dreadful spectacle : red masses of in-
fantry were advancing steadily across the
plain ; the horse artillery came at a gallop
to the front to open its fire upon the fugi-
56

VITTORIA

tives ; the Hussar Brigade was charging
by the Camino Real."

Of the helpless encumbrances of the
French army an eyewitness said : "Behind
them was the plain in which the city stood,
and beyond the city thousands of carnages
and animals and non-combatants, men,
women, and children, were crowding to-
gether in all the madness of terror, and as
the English shot went booming overhead
the vast crowd started and swerved with a
convulsive movement, while a dull and
horrid sound of distress arose."

Joseph now ordered the retreat to be
conducted by the only road left open, that
to Pampeluna, but it was impossible to take
away his train of carriages. He, the king,
only escaped capture by jumping out of
one door of his carriage as his pursuers
reached the other : he left his sword of
state in it and the beautiful Correggio
"Christ in the Garden/' now at Apsley
House, in England.

Eighty pieces of cannon, jammed close
together near Vittoria on the only remain-
ing defensible ridge near the town, had
kept up a desperate fire to the last, and

57

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Reille had held his ground near the Zadora
heroically, but it was useless. The great
road to Bayonne was lost, and finally that
to Pampeluna was choked with broken-
down carriages. The British dragoons
were pursuing hotly, and the frantic French
soldiers plunged into morasses, over fields
and hills, in the wildest rout, leaving their
artillery, ammunition-wagons, and the spoil
of a kingdom.

The outskirts of Vittoria were strewn
with the wreckage. Never before in
modern times had such a quantity of spoil
fallen into the hands of a victorious army.
There were objects of interest from mu-
seums, convents, and royal palaces ; there
were jewels of royal worth and master-
pieces of Titian, Raphael, and Correggio.

The marshal's baton belonging to Jour-
dan had been left, with one hundred and
fifty-one brass guns, four hundred and
fifteen caissons of ammunition, one million
three hundred thousand ball cartridges,
fourteen thousand rounds of artillery am-
munition, and forty thousand pounds of
gunpowder. Joseph's power was gone :
he was only a wretched fugitive. Six
58

VITTORIA

thousand of his men had been killed and
wounded and one thousand were prisoners.

It has not been possible to estimate the
value of the private plunder, but five and
one-half millions of dollars in the military
chest of the army were taken, and untold
quantities of private wealth were also lost
to their owners ; it was all scattered —
shining heaps of gold and silver — over the
road, and the British soldiers reaped it.
Wellington refused to make any effort to in-
duce his men to give up the enormous sums
they had absorbed : " They have earned it,"
he said. But he had reason to regret it.
They fell into frightful orgies of intemper-
ance that lasted for days. Wellington
wrote Lord Bathurst, June 2gth :

"We started with the army in the
highest order, and up to the day of the
battle nothing could get on better. But
that event has, as usual, totally annihilated
all order and discipline. The soldiers of
the army have got among them about a
million sterling in money, with the excep-
tion of about one hundred thousand dol-
lars which were got in the military chest. I
am convinced that we have now out of our

59

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ranks double the amount of our loss in the
battle, and have lost more men in the pur-
suit than the enemy have." It was calcu-
lated that seven thousand five hundred
men had straggled from the effects of the
plunder.

The convoys sent ahead by Joseph had
contained some of the choicest works of
art ; they reached France safely, and are
displayed in the museums of Paris. In jus-
tice to the Duke of Wellington it must be
said that he communicated with Ferdinand,
offering to restore the paintings which had
fallen into his hands, but Ferdinand desired
him to keep them. The wives of the
French officers were sent on to Pampeluna
the next day by Wellington, who had
treated them with great kindness.

As for the rest of the feminine army,
the nuns, the actresses, and the superbly
arrayed others, they made their escape with
greater difficulties and hardships. Alison
says : " Rich vestures of all sorts, velvet
and silk brocades, gold and silver plate,
noble pictures, jewels, laces, cases of claret
and champagne, poodles, parrots, monkeys,
and trinkets lay scattered about the fields
60

VITTORIA

in endless confusion, amidst weeping
mothers, wailing infants, and all the un-
utterable miseries of warlike overthrow."

Napoleon was filled with fury at his
brother for the result of Vittoria, but he
instructed his ministers to say that "a
somewhat brisk engagement with the Eng-
lish took place at Vittoria in which both
sides lost equally. The French armies,
however, carried out the movements in
which they were engaged, but the enemy
seized about one hundred guns which were
left without teams at Vittoria, and it is these
that the English are trying to pass off as
artillery captured on the battle-field !"

One of the most important captures of
the battle was a mass of documents from
the archives of Madrid, including a great
part of Napoleon's secret correspondence
— an invaluable addition to history.

Napier's summing up of the results of
the battle reads :

" Joseph's reign was over ; the crown
had fallen from his head. And, after years
of toils and combats, which had been
rather admired than understood, the Eng-
lish general, emerging from the chaos of

61

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the Peninsula struggle, stood on the sum-
mit of the Pyrenees a recognized con-
queror. From these lofty pinnacles the
clangor of his trumpets pealed clear and
loud, and the splendor of his genius ap-
peared as a flaming beacon to warring
nations."

However, Napier always was inclined to
be eloquent. Perhaps it was lucky for
Wellington that the worthless make-trouble,
Joseph Bonaparte, had been in the place
of his tremendous brother.

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

WHEN the Russian army swarmed
through the Shipka Pass of the
Balkans there was really nothing before
it but a man and an opportunity. Osman
Pasha suddenly and with great dexterity
took his force into Plevna, a small Bul-
garian town near the Russian line of
march.

The military importance of Plevna lay
in the fact that this mere village of seven-
teen hundred people was the junction of
the roads from Widin, Sophia, Biela, Zim-
nitza, Nikopolis, and the Shipka Pass.
Osman's move was almost entirely on his
own initiative. He had no great reputa-
tion, and, like Wellington in the early part
of the Peninsula campaign, he was obliged
to do everything with the strength of his
own shoulders. The stupidity of his su-
periors amounted almost to an oppression.

The Russians recognized the strategic
importance of Plevna a moment too late.

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

On July 1 8, 1877, General Krudener at
Nikopolis received orders to occupy Plevna
at once. He seems to have moved promptly,
but long before he could arrive Osman's
tired but dogged battalions were already
in the position.

The Turkish regular of that day must
have resembled very closely his fellow of
the present. Von Moltke, who knew the
Turks well and whose remarkable mind
clearly outlined and prophesied the result
of several more recent Balkan campaigns,
said, "An impetuous attack may be ex-
pected from the Turks, but not an obsti-
nate and lasting defence." Historically,
the opinion of the great German field-
marshal seems very curious. Even in the
late war between Greece and Turkey the
attacks of the Turkish troops were usually
anything but impetuous. They were fear-
less, but very leisurely. As to the last-
ing and obstinate defence, one has only
to regard the siege of Plevna to under-
stand that Von Moltke was for the moment
writing carelessly.

After Plevna, the word went forth that
the most valuable weapon of the Turk
64

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

was his shovel. When Osman arrived,
the defences of Plevna consisted of an
ordinary block-house, but he at once set
his troops at work digging intrenchments
and throwing up redoubts, which were
located with great skill. Soon the vicinity
of the town was one great fortress. Osman
coolly was attempting to stem the Russian
invasion with a force of these strange
Turkish troops, patient, enduring, sweet-
tempered, and ignorant, dressed in slovenly
overcoats and sheep-skin sandals, living on
a diet of black bread and cucumbers.

Receiving the order from the Grand
Duke Nicolas, General Krudener at Nikop-
olis despatched at dawn of the next day
six thousand five hundred men with about
seven batteries to Plevna. No effective
scouting had been done. The Russian
General, Schilder-Schuldner, riding com-
fortably in his carriage in the customary
way of Russian commanders of the time,
had absolutely no information that a strong
Turkish force had occupied the position.
His column had been allowed to distribute
itself over a distance of seventeen miles.
On the morning of the 2Oth an attack was
s 65

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

made with great confidence by the troops
which had come up. Two Russian regi-
ments even marched victoriously through
the streets of Plevna, throwing down their
heavy packs and singing for joy of the
easy capture. But suddenly a frightful
fusillade began from all sides. The elated
regiments melted in the streets. Infuriated
by religious ardor, despising the value of a
Christian's life, the Turks poured out from
their concealed places, and there occurred
a great butchery. The Russian Nine-
teenth Regiment of the line was cut down
to a few fragments. Much artillery am-
munition was captured. The Russians
lost two thousand seven hundred men.
The knives of the Circassians and Bashi-
Bazouks had been busy in the streets.

After this victory Osman might have
whipped Krudener, but the Russian leaders
had been suddenly aroused to the impor-
tance of taking Plevna, and Krudener was
almost immediately re-enforced with three
divisions. Within the circle of defence
the Turk was using his shovel. Osman
gave the garrison no rest. If a man was
not shooting, he was digging. The well-

66

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

known Grivitza Redoubt was greatly
strengthened, and some defences on the
east side of the town were completed.
Osman's situation was desperate, but his
duty to his country was vividly defined. If
he could hold this strong Turkish force on
the flank of the Russians, their advance on
Constantinople would hardly be possible.
The Russian leaders now thoroughly under-
stood this fact, and they tried to make the
army investing Plevna more than a con-
taining force.

The Grand Duke Nicolas had decided
to order an assault on the 3Oth of July.
Krudener telegraphed — the grand duke
was thirty miles from Plevna — that he hesi-
tated in his views of prospective success.
The grand duke replied sharply, ordering
that the assault be made. It seems that
Krudener went into the field in the full
expectation of being beaten.

Now appears in the history of the siege
a figure at once sinister and foolish. Sub-
ordinate in command to Krudener was
Lieutenant-General Prince Schahofskoy,
who had an acute sense of his own intel-
ligence, and in most cases dared to act in-
67

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

dependently of the orders of his chief. But
to offset him there suddenly galloped into
his camp a brilliant young Russian com-
mander, a man who has set his name upon
Plevna, even as the word underlies the
towering reputation of Osman Pasha.
General Skobeleff had come from the
Grand Duke Nicolas with an order directing
Prince Schahofskoy to place the young man
in command of a certain brigade of Cau-
casian Cossacks. The prince grew stormy
with outraged pride, and practically told
Skobeleff to take the Cossacks and go to
the devil with them.

The Russians began a heavy bombard-
ment, to which Osman' s guns replied with
spirit. The key of the position was the
Grivitza Redoubt. Krudener himself at-
tacked it with eighteen battalions of in-
fantry and ten batteries. And at the same
time Prince Schahofskoy thundered away
on his side. The latter at last became
furious at Krudener's lack of success, and
resolved to take matters into his own hands.
In the afternoon he advanced with three
brigades in the face of a devastating Turk-
ish fire, took a hill, and forced the Turks to

68

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

vacate their first line of intrenchments.
His men were completely spent with
weariness, and it is supposed that he
should have waited on the hill for support
from Krudener. But he urged on his tired
troops and carried a second position. The
Turkish batteries now concentrated their
fire upon his line, and, really, the Turkish
infantry whipped him soundly.

The Russians did not give up the dearly
bought gain of ground without desperate
fighting. Again and again they furiously
charged, but only to meet failure. When
night fell, the stealthy-footed irregular of
the Turkish forces crept through the dark-
ness to prey upon the route of the Russian
retreat. The utter annihilation of Prince
Schahofskoy's force was prevented by
Skobeleff and the brigade of Cossacks
with which the prince had sent him to the
devil. Skobeleff 's part in this assault was
really a matter of clever manoeuvring.

Krudener had failed with gallantry
and intelligence. Schahofskoy had failed
through pigheadedness and self-confidence.

After this attempt to carry Plevna, the

important Russian generals occupied them-
69

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

selves in mutual recriminations. Krudener
bitterly blamed Schahofskoy for not obey-
ing his orders, and Schahofskoy acidulously
begged to know why Krudener had not
supported him. At the same time they
both claimed that the Grand Duke Nicolas,
thirty miles away, should never have given
an order for an assault on a position of
which he had never had a view.

But even if Russian clothing and arms
and trinkets were being sold for a pittance
in the bazaars of Plevna, the mosques were
jammed with wounded Turks, and such
was the suffering that the dead in the
streets and in the fields were being gnawed
by the pervasive Turkish dog.

A few days later Osman Pasha received
the first proper recognition from Constan-
tinople. A small troop of cavalry had
wormed its way into Plevna. It was headed
by an aide-de-camp of the Sultan. In
gorgeous uniform the aide appeared to
Osman and presented him with the First
Order of the Osmanli, the highest Turkish
military decoration. And with this order
came a sword, the hilt of which flamed with

diamonds. Osman Pasha may have pre-
70

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

ferred a bushel of cucumbers, but at any
rate he knew that the Sultan and Turkey
at last understood the value of a good
soldier. To the speech of the aide Osman
replied with another little speech, and the
soldiers in their intrenchments cheered the
sultan.

On August 3ist the Turkish general
made his one offensive move. He threw,
part of his force against a Russian redoubt
and was obliged to retire with a loss of
nearly three thousand men. Afterwards
he devoted his troops mainly to the business
of improving the defences. He wasted no
more in attempts to break out of Plevna.

At this late day of the siege, Prince
Charles of Roumania was appointed to the
chief command of the whole Russo-Rou-
manian army. But naturally this office was
nominal. General Totoff had the real dis-
position of affairs, but he did not hold it
very long. General Levitsky, the assistant
chief of the Russian general staff, arrived
to advise General Totoff under direct
orders from the Grand Duke Nicolas. But
this siege was to be very well generalled.

The Grand Duke Nicolas himself came
71

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

to Plevna. One would think that the
grand duke would have ended this kalei-
doscopic row of superseding generals.
But the Great White Czar himself ap-
peared. Osman Pasha, shut up in Plevna,
certainly was honored with a great deal of
distinguished interest.

However, Alexander II. did his best to
give no orders. He had no illusions con-
cerning his military knowledge. With a
spirit profoundly kind and gentle, he simply
prayed that no more lives would be lost.
It is difficult to think what he had to say to
his multitudinous generals, each of whom
was the genius of the only true plan for
capturing Plevna.

At daylight on the 7th of September the
Turks saw that the entire army of the
enemy had closed in upon them. Amid
fields of ripening grain shone the smart
red jackets of the hussars. The Turks
saw the Bulgarians in sheepskin caps and
with their broad scarlet sashes stuck full
of knives and pistols. They saw the queer
round oilskin shakoes of the Cossacks and
the greatcoats of thick gray blanketing.

They saw the uniforms of the Russian in-

72

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

fantry, the green tunics striped with red.
For five days the smoke lay heavy over
Plevna.

The nth was the fete-day of the em-
peror, and the general assault on that day
was arranged as if it had been part of a
fete. The cannonade was to begin at day-
break along the whole line and stop at
eight o'clock in the morning. The artillery
was to play again from eleven o'clock
until one o'clock. Then it was to play
again from two-thirty to three.

Directly afterwards the Roumanian allies
of the Russians moved in three columns
against the Grivitza Redoubt. At first all
three were repulsed, but with the stimulus
of Russian re-enforcements they rallied,
and after a long time of almost hand-to-hand
fighting the evening closed with them in
possession of what was called the key of
the Plevna position. They had lost four
thousand men. The victory was fruitless, as
anticipating the attack on Grivitza, Osman
had caused the building of an inner re-
doubt. After all their ferocious charging, the
Russians were really no nearer to success.

At three o'clock of that afternoon Re-

73

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

doubt Number Ten had been assailed by
General Schmidnikoff. The firing had been
terrible, but the Russians had charged
to the very walls of the redoubt. The
Turks not only beat them off, but pursued
with great spirit. Two of the scampering
Russian battalions were then faced about
to beat off the chase. They lay down at
a distance of only two hundred yards of
the redoubt, and sent the Turks pell-mell
back into their fortifications.

At about the same time Skobeleff,
wearing a white coat and mounted on a
white charger, was leading his men over
the " green hills" towards the Krishin
Redoubt. There was a dense fog. Sko-
beleff's troops crossed two ridges and
waded a stream. They began the ascent
of a steep slope. Suddenly the fog cleared ;
the sun shone out brilliantly. The closely
massed Russian force was exposed at short
range to line after line of Turkish in-
trenchments. They retired once, but ral-
lied splendidly, and before five o'clock
Skobeleff found himself in possession of
Redoubt Number Eleven and Redoubt
Number Twelve.

74

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

His battalions were thrust like a wedge
into the Turkish lines, but the Turkish
commander appreciated the situation more
clearly than any Russian save Skobeleff.
The latter' s men suffered a frightful fire.
Re-enforcements were refused. All during
the night the faithful troops of the czar
fought in darkness and without hope.
They even built little ramparts of dead
men. But on the morning of September
1 2th Skobeleff was compelled to give up
all he had gained. The retreat over the
" green hills" was little more than a running
massacre.

After his return, Skobeleff was in a state
of excitement and fury. His uniform was
covered with blood and mud. His Cross
of St. George was twisted around over his
shoulder. His face was black with powder.
His eyes were blood-shot. He said, " My
regiments no longer exist/'

The Russian assaults had failed at all
points. They had begun this last battle
with thirty thousand infantry, twelve thou-
sand cavalry, and four hundred and forty
guns, and they lost over eighteen thousand
men. The multitude of generals again
75

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

took counsel. There were fervid animosi-
ties, and there might have been open rup-
ture if it were not for the presence of the
czar himself, whose gentleness and good-
nature prevented many scenes.

It was decided that the Turks must be
starved out. The Russians sent for more
troops as well as for heavy supplies of
clothing, ammunition, and food. The czar
sent for General Todleben, who had shown
great skill at Sebastopol, and the direction
of the siege was put in his hands.

The Turks had been accustomed to re-
provision Plevna by the skilful use of
devious trails. Todleben took swift steps
to put a stop to it, but he did not succeed
before a huge convoy had been sent into
the town through the adroit management
of Chefket Pasha. But the Russian horse
soon chased Chefket away and the trails
were all closed.

For the most part the September weather
was fine, but this plenitude of sun made
the Turkish positions about Plevna al-
most unbearable. Actual thousands of un-
buried dead lay scattered over the ridges.
At one time the Russian head-quarters
76

THE SIEGE OF PLEVNA

made a polite request to be allowed to send
some men to enter Grivitza and bury their
own dead. But this polite request met
with polite refusal.

On October igth the Roumanians, who
for weeks had been sapping their way up
to the Grivitza Redoubt, made a final and
desperate attack on it. They were re-
pulsed.

In order to complete the investment,
Todleben found it necessary to dislodge
the Turks from four villages near Plevna.

The weeks moved by slowly with a stolid
and stubborn Turk besieged by a stubborn
and stolid Russian. There was occasional
firing from the Russian batteries, to which
the Turks did not always take occasion to
reply. In Plevna there was nothing to eat
but meat, and the Turkish soldiers moved
about with the hoods of their dirty brown
cloaks pulled over their heads. Outside
Plevna there were plenty of furs and good
coats, but the diet had become so plain that
the sugar-loving Russian soldiers would
give gold for a pot of jam.

On the cold, cloudy morning of De-
cember 1 1 th, when snow lay thickly on all
77

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the country, a sudden great booming of
guns was heard, and the news flew swiftly
that Osman had come out of Plevna at
last and was trying to break through the
cordon his foes had spread about him.
During the night he had abandoned all his
defences, and by daybreak he had taken
the greater part of his army across the river
Vid. Advancing along the Sophia road, he
charged the Russian intrenchments with
such energy that the Siberian Regiment
stationed at that point was almost annihi-
lated. A desperate fight went on for four
hours, with the Russians coming up battal-
ion after battalion. Some time after noon
all firing ceased, and later the Turks sent
up a white flag. Cheer after cheer swelled
over the dreary plain. Osman had sur-
rendered.

The siege had lasted one hundred and
forty-two days. The Russians had lost
forty thousand men. The Turks had lost
thirty thousand men.

The advance on Constantinople had been
checked. Skobeleff said, " Osman the
Victorious he will remain, in spite of his
surrender."

78

THE STORMING OF BUR-
KERSDORF HEIGHTS

WHEN, in 1740, Wilhelm Friedrich
of Prussia died, the friends whom
his heir had gathered about him at his
pleasant country-house at Reinsberg were
doomed to see a blight fall on their ex-
pectations such as had not been known
since Poins and Falstaff congratulated
themselves on having an old friend for
their king.

When the young prince came to the
throne as Frederick II., thought these
trusting people, Prussia, instead of being
a mere barracks overrun with soldiers and
ruled by a miser, would become the refuge
of poets and artists. Its monarch would
be a man of peace, caring for nothing
beyond the joys of philosophy, poetry,
music, and merry feasts — this, of course,
providing for an indefinite extension of
the enchanted life he and his companions
led at Reinsberg.

79

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

They had the best of reasons for this
belief : the antagonism between the prince
and his father had begun almost as soon as
the rapture of having an heir had become
an old story to Friedrich Wilhelm. The
tiny " Fritz," with a cocked hat and tight
little soldier-clothes, drilling and being
drilled with a lot of other tiny boys, — and
frightfully bored with it all the time, — was
a standing grievance to his rough, boorish
father. " Awake him at six in the morning
and stand by to see that he does not turn
over, but immediately gets up. . . . While
his hair is being combed and made into a
queue, he is to have his breakfast of tea."
This was the beginning of his father's in-
structions to his tutors when, at seven, he
passed out of his governess's hands.

Notwithstanding the fine Spartan rigor
of this programme, the boy came up a
dainty, delicate little fellow, who turned up
his nose at boar-hunting and despised his
father's collection of giants, and loved to
play the flute and make French verses.
Friedrich Wilhelm was anything but a bad
monarch ; he was moral in a century
when nothing of the sort was expected of
80

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

monarchs ; he made the Prussian army
the best army in the world ; he even had
affections ; but for a man of these virtues
he was the most intolerable parent of
whom there is a record.

The brilliant Wilhelmina, Frederick's
dearly loved sister, whose young portraits
show her as very like her brother, has this
characteristic scene in her " Memoirs :"
Their sister, Princess Louisa, aged fifteen,
had just been betrothed to a margrave,
and the king asked her — they were at
table — how she would regulate her house-
keeping when she was married. Louisa,
a favorite, had got into the way of telling
her father home-truths, which he took very
well, as a rule, from her. On this occa-
sion she told him that she would have a
good table well served ; " better than
yours," said Louisa; "and if I have chil-
dren, I will not maltreat them like you,
nor force them to eat what they have an
aversion to." "What do you mean by
that ?" said the king. "What is there want-
ing at my table?" "There is this want-
ing," she replied: "that one cannot have
enough, and the little there is consists of

6 8l

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

coarse potherbs that nobody can eat."
The king, who was not used to such
candor, boiled with rage. " All his anger,"
says the Princess Wilhelmina, " fell on my
brother and me. He first threw a plate at
my brother's head, who ducked out of the
way, then let fly another at me." After
he had made the air blue with wrath, di-
rected at Frederick, " we had to pass him
in going out," and "he aimed a great blow
at me with his crutch, — which, if I had not
jerked away from it, would have ended
me. He chased me for a while in his wheel-
chair, but the people drawing it gave me
time to escape into the queen's chamber."
One always imagines this charming
young princess in the act of dodging some
sort of blow from Friedrich Wilhelm, who
was nicknamed " Stumpy," privately, by
his dutiful son and daughter. The habit
of hating his son became an insanity ; to
kick him and pull his hair, break his flute,
and take away his books and his brocaded
dressing-gown — that was ordinary usage ;
it came to the point where he nearly
strangled him, and later he condemned

him to death for trying to run away to his
82

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

uncle, George II., in England. When this
sentence had been changed to a term of
imprisonment, the poor young prince had
a much better time of it : his gaolers were
kinder than his father.

By the time he emerged from this cap-
tivity he had gained much wisdom — the
cold wisdom of selfishness and dissimu-
lation. In after years the father and son
became profoundly attached to each other,
but Frederick was always obliged to humor
and cajole his pig-headed sire, to lie more
or less, and generally adopt an insincere
tone, in order to avert wrath and suspicion
— a very hateful necessity to a natural
truth-teller, for Frederick was by nature
a great lover of facts. Although his train-
ing as a politician and a soldier included a
thorough education in guile, the tutors of
his childhood were simple, honest people,
who gave him a good, truthful start in life.

Friedrich Wilhelm, now that his heir
was twenty-one years old, thought it high
time to put an end to various vague matri-
monial projects, and get a wife for him
straightway. Frederick having found that
obedience was, on the whole, better than

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

captivity, was submissive and silent— to
his father ; but his letters to his friends
and his sister shrieked with protestations
against a marriage in which his tastes and
feelings were not so much as thought of.
Above all things he wished to be allowed
to travel and choose for himself, and he
had a morbid horror of a dull and awkward
woman. It did not much matter, he
thought, what else his wife was if she were
clever conversationally, with grace and
charm and fine manners. Beauty was de-
sirable, but he could get along without it,
if only he could feel proud of his consort's
wit and breeding. The bride of his father's
choosing was the Princess Elizabeth of
Brunswick-Bevern — a bashful and gawky
young person, with as little distinction as
a dairy-maid. But he subdued his rage
and married her, and, indeed, seems always
to have treated her with kindly deference,
although he made no pretence of affection.
Still carrying out his father's wishes, he
served in a brief campaign, and afterwards
regularly devoted a portion of his time to
military and political business. Friedrich
Wilhelm was now pleased with his son to

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

the extent of buying for him a delightful
residence — Reinsberg — and giving him a
tolerable income, and Frederick revelled in
his new freedom by building conservatories,
laying out pleasure-gardens, playing his
flute to his heart's content, writing poor
French verses, and solacing himself for
the " coarse potherbs" of his childhood by
exquisite dinners. They had the best
musicians for their concerts at Reinsberg —
the crown prince and his friends, with the
crown princess and her ladies. It was
here, in 1736, that Frederick began — by
letter — his famous friendship with Voltaire,
that survived so many phases of illusion
and disillusion.

It must be said of Frederick's friends —
who were mostly French — that they were
men of highly trained intelligence, but they
were not acute enough to know what sort
of king their prince would make.

When his father passed away, Frederick
felt as sincere a grief as if there had never
been anything but love between them ;
always afterwards he spoke of him with
reverence, and he learned to place a high
value on the stern discipline of his early
85

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

life — which is still to some extent a model
for the bringing up of young Hohenzol-
lerns.

It was a handsome young king who came
to the throne in 1 740. His face was round,
his nose a keen aquiline, his mouth small
and delicately curved, and all was domi-
nated by those wonderful blue-gray eyes,
that, as Mirabeau said, ." at the bidding of
his heroic soul fascinated you with seduc-
tion or with terror." Even in youth the
lines of the face showed a sardonic humor.
One can well imagine his replying to the
optimistic Sulzer, who thought severe
punishments a mistake : " Ach ! meine
lieber Sulzer, you don't know this — race !"
In the old-age portraits the face is sharp
and hatchet-like, the mouth is shrunken to
a mean line, but the great eyes still flash
out, commanding and clear.

The reign began with peace and philan-
thropy : Frederick II. started out by dis-
banding the giant grenadiers, the absurd
monstrosities that his father had begged
and bought and kidnapped from every-
where ; he started a " knitting-house" for
a thousand old women ; abolished torture

86

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

in criminal trials ; set up an Academy of
Sciences ; summoned Voltaire and Mau-
pertius ; made Germany open its eyes at
the speech, " In this country every man
must get to Heaven in his own way ;" and
proclaimed a practical freedom of the press
— all in his first week.

The fury of activity now took possession
of Frederick which lasted all his life. He
had the Hohenzollern passion for doing
everything himself: the three " secretaries
of state" were mere clerks, who spared
him only the mechanical part of secretarial
duties. His system of economy was rigid.
While looking over financial matters one
day he found that a certain convent ab-
sorbed a considerable fund from the forest-
dues, which had been bequeathed by dead
dukes " for masses to be said on their be-
half." He went to the place and asked
the monks, " What good does anybody get
out of those masses?" "Your majesty,
the dukes are to be delivered out of pur-
gatory by them." " Purgatory ? And they
are not out yet, poor souls, after so many
hundred years of praying ?" The answer
was, " Not yet." " When will they be out,
87

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

and the thing settled?" There was no
answer to this. " Send me a courier when-
ever they are out !" With this sneer the
king left the convent.

Stern business went on all day, and in
the evening, music, dancing, theatres, sup-
pers, till all hours ; but the king was up
again at four in the summer — five in winter.
In early youth Frederick had known a
period of gross living, from which he suf-
fered so severely that his reaction from it
was fiercely austere. After his accession,
a young man who had been associated
with this "mud-bath," as Carlyle has
named it, begged an audience. The king
received him, but rebuked him with such
withering speech that he straightway went
home and killed himself.

Only five months of his reign had passed
when the event occurred that put an end
to the ideal monarch of Frederick's sub-
jects. Charles VI., Emperor of Germany,
was dead. For years he had worked to
bind together his scattered and wabbling
empire, and by his " Pragmatic Sanction"
secure it to his daughter, Maria Theresa,
contrary to the rule that only male heirs

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

should succeed, and she was on the day
of his death (October 2oth) proclaimed
empress.

If the young Maria Theresa had been
married to the young Prince Frederick of
Prussia, as their reigning parents had at
one time decided, European history would
undoubtedly have been different, though
historians may be mistaken in thinking that
much trouble would have been saved the
world. In view of the fact that both these
young people were extravagantly well en-
dowed with the royal gifts of energy and
decision, one must be permitted to wonder
whether Frederick, as the spouse of the
admirable Maria Theresa, would have ever
become known as " the Great." But at all
events it would have prevented him from
rushing in on her domains and seizing
Silesia as soon as she was left with no one
but her husband — a man of the kindly
inert sort — to protect her ; and we should
have lost the good historical scene of
Maria Theresa appearing before her Hun-
garian Diet, with the crown on her beau-
tiful head, thrilling every heart as she lifted
her plump baby, Francis Joseph, and with
89

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

tears streaming down her face implored its
help against the Prussian robber.

We can still hear the thunderous roar
of the loyal reply, " We will die for our
sovereign, Maria Theresa !"

Nevertheless, by December the Prussian
robber was in Silesia with thirty thousand
men, engaged in finding out that he was
really made to be a warrior. By May
he held every fortified place in the prov-
ince ; by June Maria Theresa was forced
to cede it to him — since which time it
has always been a loyal part of Prussia.
11 How glorious is my king, the youngest
of the kings and the grandest !" chanted
Voltaire in a letter to Frederick — who, one
is pleased to know, found the praise rather
suffocating.

The genius of Frederick was next put to
a considerable test in the way of match-
making— a delicate art, particularly when
practised for the sake of providing the half-
barbarous Empire of Russia with mated
rulers.

The Czarina Elizabeth — Great Peter's
daughter — wished the king to find a Ger-
man bride for her nephew-heir, who was
90

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

afterwards Peter III. A true Hohenzollern,
Frederick felt himself quite equal to this task
— as to any other. From a bevy of young
princesses he selected the daughter of the
poverty-stricken Prince of Anhalt-Herbst,
because of the unmistakable cleverness the
girl had shown, though not fifteen. She
was handsome as well, and Elizabeth re-
named her " Catherine," changed her re-
ligion, and the marriage came off in 1745.
Frederick had displayed great acumen, but
it would puzzle a fiend to contrive a more
diabolical union than that of Peter and
Catherine !

Meanwhile, Maria Theresa had been
preparing to fight for Silesia again. With-
out waiting for her, Frederick pounced
upon Prague and captured it. After her
armies in Silesia and Saxony had been put
to flight by her adversary, at Hohenfried-
berg and Sorr and Hennersdorf and Kes-
selsdorf, the empress yielded. On Christ-
mas Day, 1 745, when the treaty was signed
that gave Silesia again to Prussia, — it was
known as the Peace of Dresden, — Berlin
went wild, and for the first time shouts
were heard among the revellers, " Vivat
91

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Friedrich der Grosse /" The Austrians
might call him " that ferocious, false, am-
bitious King of Prussia," but as a matter
of fact he was not more false and ferocious
than the other rulers, only infinitely more
able. Frederick had made for himself a
great name and raised his little kingdom —
of only two-and-a-half millions of people —
to a noble standing among nations. The
eyes of the world were fixed upon the
hero to see what he would do next. What
he did was to swear that he " would not
fight with a cat again," and to build him-
self a charming country home — his palaces,
and even Reinsberg, were too large. In
May, 1747, he had his housewarming at
little Sans Souci, where for the next forty
years most of his time was spent. There
were twenty boxes of German flutes in
the king's cabinet at Sans Souci, and infi-
nite boxes of Spanish snuff; and there
were three arm-chairs for three favorite
dogs, with low stools to make an easy step
for them. There was another favorite at
Sans Souci who was said to look like an
ape, although he was mostly called the

" skinny Apollo." How one would like to
92

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

have seen the king walking the terraces,
with "white shoes and stockings and red
breeches, with gown and waistcoat of blue
linen flowered and lined with yellow !"
while men with powdered wigs and highly
colored clothes, and women whose heads
bore high towers of hair unpleasantly
stuffed and decorated with inconsequent
dabs of finery followed him, all talking
epigrams and doing attitudes — polite
people had to hold themselves in curves in
the eighteenth century.

These were good years for Prussia : her
law courts were reformed ; her commerce
flourished, and so did agriculture ; potatoes
were introduced — they were at first con-
sidered poisonous ; a huge amount of
building was done, and the army was drilled
constantly under Frederick's eyes. Each
year saw it a better army ; its chief must
have known that he was preparing for the
great struggle of his life, although he took
as keen an interest in keeping up the
high standard of his new opera-house in
Berlin, both as to music and ballet, as he
did in the skilfullest manoeuvres of his
troops.

93

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Maria Theresa had never for a moment
given up Silesia in her heart. She was a
woman of austere virtues, but these did not
stand in the way of schemes which she
would have thought too despicable to be
used against anyone but the King of Prus-
sia. The Czarina of Russia had been made
to hate him by a series of carefully-devised
plots, — she looked on him as her arch-
enemy,— and within six months after the
Peace of Dresden she had signed, with
Maria Theresa, a treaty which actually pro-
posed the partitioning of Frederick's king-
dom, which was to be divided between
Russia, Austria, and Poland, while he was
to become a simple Margrave of Branden-
burg !

To get the signature of Louis XV. in-
volved harder work still for the virtuous
empress — but she did it. It was to ask it
of the Pompadour — in various affectionate
letters, beginning " My dear cousin," or
" Madame, my dearest sister." The Pom-
padour was also shown some stinging
verses of Frederick's with herself as sub-
ject, and she (representing France) be-
came the firm ally of Maria Theresa.

94

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

Through an Austrian clerk's treachery
Frederick became aware of this stupen-
dous conspiracy against him — but not till
1 755, when it was well matured. It seemed
incredible that he could think of keeping
these great countries from gobbling up his
little state. ,He could not have done it,
indeed, if it had not been for a certain
Englishman. It was an Englishman who
saved Frederick and Prussia — the " Great
Commoner," Pitt, who, having on hand a
French war of his own, raised a Hano-
verian army to help himself and Frederick,
and granted him a welcome subsidy of
six hundred and seventy thousand pounds
a year.

His ten years' drilling had given Fred-
erick a fine army of one hundred and thirty
thousand men. The infantry were said to
excel all others in quickness of manoeuvres
and skilled shooting, while the cavalry was
unsurpassed.

Frederick, without waiting for his foes
to declare war and mass their mighty forces,
began it by a stealthy, sudden move into
Saxony, September, 1756. October ist, at
Lowositz in Bohemia, he defeated von

95

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Browne, and, returning, captured the
Saxon force of seventeen thousand and
took them bodily — all but the officers — into
his own army.

England was delighted with this masterly
act of her ally. He was known there as
" the Protestant hero," which was not quite
true to facts ; certainly Frederick protested
against the old religion, but he was far
from being on with the new one. His
saying, " Everyone shall go to Heaven in
the way he chooses," had been applauded
in England, but they were not familiar with
his reply when a squabble as to whether
one or another set of hymn-books should
be used was referred to him : " Bah ! let
them sing what tomfoolery they like," said
the " Protestant hero." Had France and
Austria, however, succeeded in obliterating
Prussia, it is likely that Protestantism too
would have been done for in Germany.

Frederick having himself begun the
Seven Years' War, the confederated Ger-
man states, with Russia, France, and
Sweden, formally bound themselves to
" reduce the House of Brandenburg to its

former state of mediocrity," France —
96

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

very rich then — paying enormous subsidies
all around. England — with Hanover —
alone espoused Prussia's cause. During
1757, four hundred and thirty-seven thou-
sand men were put in the field against
Frederick. Only his cat-like swiftness
saved him from being overwhelmed again
and again. In April he made another
rush — like an avalanche — on Bohemia, and
won another great victory at Prague, but
he was terribly beaten by General Daun in
June at Kolin. Still he kept up courage,
and played the flute and wrote innumerable
French verses of the usual poor quality in
odd moments. In November, at Rossbach,
he met an army of French and Imperialists
over twice as large as his own, and by a
swift, unexpected movement broke them,
so that they were scattered all over the
country. Every German felt proud of this
French defeat, whether he were Prussian
or not. It was the first time the invincible
French had ever been beaten by a wholly
German army, with a leader of German
blood. The brilliant victory of Leuthen
followed Rossbach.

But although the world was ringing with

7 97

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Frederick's name, and he was acknowl-
edged to be one of the greatest generals
of history, the resources of his powerful
enemies were too many for him. At last
it seemed that a ruinous cloud of disaster
was closing around him and darkening the
memory of his glorious successes.

The defeat of Kunersdorf in 1759 would
have completely wiped out his army if the
over-cautious Austrian General Daun had
followed up his victory. "Is there no
cursed bullet that can reach me !" the Prus-
sian monarch was heard to murmur in a
stupor of despair after the battle. He
carried poison about him, after this, to use
when affairs became too bad. A severe
blow followed Kunersdorf, — George II.
died, October, 1760; George III. put an
end to Pitt's ministry — and this was the
end of England's support.

The winter of 1761 -'6 2 saw Frederick
at his lowest ebb. England's money had
stopped ; his own country, plundered, de-
vastated in every direction, afforded no
sufficient revenue. Fully half of the Prus-
sian dominions were occupied by the

enemy ; men, horses, supplies, and trans-
98

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

port could hardly be procured. The Prus-
sian army was reduced to sixty thousand
men, and its ranks were made up largely
of vagabonds and deserters — the old,
splendidly disciplined troops having been
practically obliterated.

He played no more on his flute — poor
Frederick ! At Leipzig an old friend sighed
to him, " Ach ! how lean your majesty has
grown!" "Lean, ja wohl," he replied;
"and what wonder, with three women
[Pompadour, Maria Theresa, and Czarina
Elizabeth] hanging to my throat all this
while !"

The Allies felt that it was only a matter
of a short time before they should see their
great enemy humbled to the position of
Elector of Brandenburg. From this abase-
ment Frederick was suddenly saved in
January, 1762. Life held another chance
for him. The implacable old czarina was
dead ; her heir, Peter III., was not merely
the friend, but the enthusiastic adorer of
Frederick of Prussia. Although thirty-
four years old and the husband of Cath-
erine (the young lady Frederick had taken
such pains to select for him so many years

99

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ago), Peter had been kept out of public
affairs as if he were a child. Neither he
nor Catherine was allowed to leave the
palace without permission of the czarina ;
they were surrounded with spies, and kept
in a gaudy and dirty semi-imprisonment —
the traditional style for heirs to the Russian
throne. Under this system they became
masters of deceit. Catherine, in her
cleverly unpleasant " Memoirs," tells how
they managed to escape and visit people
without being found out ; how she, when
ill and in bed, had a joyous company with
her, who huddled behind a screen when
prying ladies-in-waiting entered. But the
most painful part is the account of Peter,
who seems to have had more versatility in
hateful ways than any one outside of
Bedlam. Crazily vivacious over foolish
games, brutal when drunk, and silly when
sober, one wonders how for so many years
Catherine endured him.

There was a saving grace, though, in
him : he worshipped the King of Prussia.

Frederick adroitly rose to the occasion :
releasing all his Russian prisoners, he sent
them, well clad and provisioned, back to

100

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

their country. February 23d the czar re-
sponded by a public declaration of peace
with Prussia and a renunciation of all
conquests made during the war. His
general, Czernichef, was ordered to put
himself and his twenty thousand men at
the disposal of the Prussian hero, and on
May 5th a treaty of alliance between Prus-
sia and Russia was announced — to the
horror and disgust of France and Austria.
They had relied on Czernichef, but Czerni-
chef himself was a sincere admirer of his
new commander-in-chief and delighted in
the change. The Russian soldiers all
shared this feeling : they called Frederick
" Son of the lightning."

The French were being held by the
Hanoverian army ; Sweden had retired
from the war; with Russia on his side,
Frederick felt that he might hold out
against Austria till peace was declared by
the powers — peace with no provision made
for the partition of his kingdom.

In planning his next campaign — the last
of the war — it was evident to Frederick
that nothing could be done without recap-
turing the fortress of Schweidnitz, recently

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

captured by Loudon, the Austrian general.
The Austrians held all Silesia, and they
must be put out of it, but with Schweid-
nitz in their hands this was impossible.

Fortunately for Frederick, Daun was
appointed commander-in-chief of the Aus-
trians, the general who had been execrated
throughout the empire for his failure to
follow up Frederick after Kunersdorf. In
mid-May Daun took command of the
forces in Silesia, and with an army of
seventy thousand men made haste to place
himself in a strong position among rugged
hills to guard Schweidnitz. Schweidnitz,
with a garrison of twelve thousand picked
men and firm defences, it was impossible
to attack while Daun was there. Frederick
made repeated efforts to force Daun to
give up his hold on the fortress, threatening
his left wing, as his right wing seemed
impregnably situated ; but Daun, although
forced to change his position from time to
time, kept firmly massed about Schweidnitz.
Frederick at last, then, resolved to attempt
the impossible, and, his forces now aug-
mented by Czernichef 's to eighty-one thou-
sand, determined on storming the Heights

102

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

of Burkersdorf, where Daun's right wing
was firmly intrenched. The last of Fred-
erick's notable battles of the war, — a con-
flict upon which the destinies of Prussia
turned, — it was planned and executed by
him with a consummate brightness and
cleverness that more than justifies the
Hohenzollern worship of their great an-
cestor.

Burkersdorf Height, near the village
of the same name, which was also occu-
pied by Daun, lies parallel to Kunensdorf
Heights, where Frederick's army lay. It
is a high hill, very steep, and half covered
with rugged underbrush on the side next
to Frederick's position, and Prince de
Ligne and General O' Kelly — serving under
Daun — had made it bristle with guns.
Artillery was Daun's specialty ; his guns
were thick wherever the ground was not
impractically steep, and palisades — " the
pales strong as masts and room only for a
musket-barrel between" — protected the
soldiery ; they were even " furnished with
a lath or cross-strap all along for resting
the gun-barrel on and taking aim." In
fact, Burkersdorf Height was as good as
103

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

a fortress. East of it was a small val-
ley where strong intrenchments had been
made and batteries placed. Farther east,
two other heights had to be captured, —
they were also well defended, — Ludwigs-
dorf and Leuthmannsdorf.

By the iyth of July Frederick had all
his plans matured, and had made his very
first move — that is, he had sent Generals
Mollendorf an'd Wied on a march with
their men to put the enemy on a false
scent — when he received a call from Czerni-
chef at his head-quarters. It was par-
alyzing news that Czernichef brought :
Peter, the providential friend, had been
dethroned by the partisans of his clever
wife, Catherine.

After a reign of six months the young
czar had completely disgusted his subjects :
he had planned ambitious schemes of re-
form, and at the same time had made des-
potic enroachments. After delighting the
church with important concessions, he pro-
posed virtually to take away all its lands
and houses. He overdid everything, like
the madman he was. He offended his
army by dressing up his guards in Prussian
104

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

uniforms and teaching them the Prussian
drill, while he wore constantly the dress of
a Prussian colonel, and sang the praises of
our hero until his people were sick of the
name of " my friend, the King of Prussia."
Russian morals in the eighteenth cen-
tury were like snakes in Ireland — there
were none. In this respect Catherine was
not superior to her husband, but in mental
gifts she was an extraordinary young
woman. Her tact, her poise, her intel-
ligence, would have made a noble character
in a decent atmosphere. Peter had recog-
nized her powers and relied on them, and
she had endured him all these years,
thinking she would one day rule Russia as
his empress. But since his accession he
had been completely under the dominion
of the Countess Woronzow, a vicious crea-
ture, who meant to be Catherine's suc-
cessor. And Catherine, when Peter threat-
ened her and her son Paul with lifelong
imprisonment, had on her side finally begun
a plot, which resulted in her appealing to
the guards, much as Maria Theresa had
appealed to her Diet of Hungary. Every-
one was tired of Peter, and no voice was
105

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

raised against his deposition, whereupon
Catherine assumed the sovereignty of Rus-
sia, to the great relief and satisfaction of
all Russians. The brutal assassination of
poor Peter by Catherine's friends — not by
her orders — followed in a few days.

It was the intention of Catherine, on
beginning her reign, to restore Elizabeth's
policy in Russian matters and recommence
hostilities against Frederick ; but on look-
ing over Peter's papers she found that Fred-
erick had discouraged his wild schemes,
and that he had begged him to rely on his
wife and respect her counsels, and this pro-
duced a revulsion of feeling. She resolved
that she would not fight him ; nor, on the
other hand, would she be his ally ; the
secret message that had come to Czerni-
chef, and which he communicated to Fred-
erick, was that Catherine reigned, and
that he, her general, was ordered to return
immediately to St. Petersburg.

One can only guess at Frederick's emo-
tions at this news. Life must have seemed
a lurid melodrama, presenting one hideous
act after another. "This is not living,"
he said, "this is being killed a thousand

106

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

times a day !" On the eve of the attack
on Burkersdorf his ally had been taken
away from him ; his own forces were now
weaker than those of Daun, and he did not
see his way to a victory.

But the genius of Frederick could not
allow him to give in to the destinies. His
resourcefulness came to his rescue. He
simply begged Czernichef to stay with him
for three days. Three days must elapse
before his official commands came. Fred-
erick, with all the potency of his personal
fascination, implored the Russian during
that time to keep the matter secret, and,
without one hostile act against the enemy,
to seem to act with him as though their re-
lations were unchanged. Czernichef con-
sented ; it was one of the most devoted
acts that was ever done by a man for pure
friendship ; he well knew, and so did Fred-
erick, that he might lose his head or rot in
a dungeon for it, but — his own heroism
was great enough to make the sacrifice.

The drama accordingly went on. On the
evening of the 2Oth, with the forces of
Mollendorf and Wied, who had puzzled

the enemy and returned, with Ziethen and
107

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Czernichef, — this last, of course, only for
show, — Frederick silently marched into
Burkersdorf village and took by storm the
old Burkersdorf Castle, — an affair of a few
hours, — while Daun's forces fled in all di-
rections from the village. Then, through
the night, trenches were dug and batteries
built — forty guns well placed. At sunrise
the whole Prussian army could be seen to
be in motion by their opponents.

At four o'clock Frederick's famous can-
nonade began, concentrated upon the prin-
cipal height of Burkersdorf. General
O' Kelly's men were too high to be reached
by the cannon, but it was Frederick's ob-
ject to keep a furious, confusing noise
going on, to help draw attention from
Wied and Mollendorf, who were doing the
real fighting of the day. Mollendorf was
to storm O'Kelly's height, and Wied the
Ludwigsdorf height beyond, but Frederick
had arranged a spectacular drama by which
the foe was to be deceived as to these in-
tentions. It was not for nothing that Fred-
erick had personally overlooked his theatres
and operas all these years. His knowledge
of scenic displays and their effect on the

108

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

minds of an audience stood him in good
stead this day.

The Prussian guns continued a deafening
roar, hour after hour, with many blank
charges, and the bewildered commanders
of the allied Austrians watched from their
elevation the small man on his white horse
giving orders right and left. He wore a
three-cornered hat with a white feather,
a plain blue uniform with red facings, a
yellow waistcoat liberally powdered with
Spanish snuff, black velvet breeches, and
high soft boots. They were shabby old
clothes, but the figure had a majesty that
everyone recognized. The difficulty among
the officers on the heights was to find out
what were the orders Frederick was giving
so freely. His generals, who were much
smarter in their dress than he, dashed off
in all directions, and marched their troops
briskly about, keeping the whole line of
the enemy on the alert.

Daun, ignorant of the St. Petersburg
revolution and its consequences, and seeing
the Russian masses drawn up threaten-
ingly opposite his left wing, which he com-
manded, dared not concentrate his whole
109

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

force on Burkersdorf, but from time to time
sent bodies of men to support de Ligne
and O' Kelly. As no one could tell what
spot to support, no line of action could
be agreed upon. The commandant of
Schweidnitz, General Guasco, with twelve
thousand men, came out of the fortress to
attack the Prussian rear, but, fortunately
for Frederick, one of his astute superiors
sent him back.

Meantime, while this uproar and these
puzzling operations were going on, Wied
had taken his men out of view of the
Austrians by circuitous paths to the gradual
eastern ascent of Ludwigsdorf and moved
up in three detachments. Battery after
battery he dislodged, but when he came in
sight of the huge mass of guns and men
at the top, it seemed wild foolishness to
try to get there. It could never have been
done by a straight, headlong rush; they
crawled along through thickets and little
valleys, creeping spirally higher and higher,
dodging the fire from above, till at last a
movement through a dense wood brought
them to the rear and flank of the foe.
Then, with a magnificent charge of bayo-

IIO

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

nets, they sent them flying, and passed on
to the easy rout of the troops on Leuth-
mannsdorf.

On Burkersdorf Height O'Kelly's men
were looking for an attack on the steepest
side, where they were best fortified, but
Mollendorf 's troops had gone by a round-
about route to the western slope, where
after some searching they found a sheep-
track winding up the hillside. Following
this, they came to a slope so steep that
horses could not draw the guns. And then
the men pushed and pulled them along
and up, until the Austrians spied them
from above, and the cannon-balls came
crashing down into them. But under this
fire they planted their guns, and did such
gallant work with them that they were
soon at the top, dashing down the defences.
It was a tough struggle : the defences were
strong — there were line after line of them
— and the Austrians had no idea of yield-
ing. They fought like tigers until the fire
from the muskets set the dry branches of
their abatis ablaze, and Mollendorf quickly
closed in around them and forced them

to surrender. Frederick's orchestra still
in

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

boomed on, and the show of officers on
prancing steeds and parading troops kept
re-enforcements from coming to assist the
men on Burkersdorf.

It was noon when Mollendorf had
achieved his task, and Daun ordered the
army to fall back. But Frederick kept his
cannon going as if with a desperate inten-
tion till five, to make matters appear
more dangerous than they really were to
Daun. He was successful ; at nightfall
Daun led his entire army away, silently
and in order, and he never troubled Fred-
erick again.

He left fourteen guns behind him and
over one thousand prisoners, and quite
two thousand deserted to Frederick in the
next few days.

And Czernichef, who had stood by him
so nobly? He was full of warmest ad-
miration for Frederick's curious tactics and
their success, and the king must have been
eternally grateful to him. He marched for
home early next morning — and he was
neither beheaded nor imprisoned by Cathe-
rine when he got there : one is very glad
to know that.

112

BURKERSDORF HEIGHTS

Frederick was now enabled to besiege
Schweidnitz ; its re-conquest gave him back
Silesia and left him to long years of peace
at Sans Souci. It is fair to conclude that
these were happy years, since his happiness
lay in incessant work ; it needed the most
arduous toil to get his country into shape
again, but Prussia deserved it — "To have
achieved a Frederick the Second for King
over it was Prussia's great merit," says
Carlyle.

A SWEDE'S CAMPAIGN IN
GERMANY

I
LEIPZIG

AT the opening of the seventeenth cen-
./\. tury the prospects of Sweden must
have seemed to offer less hope than those
of any nation of Europe.

Only a scanty population clung to the
land, whose long winters paralyzed its in-
dustrial activities for many months of the
year ; and the deadly proximity of the in-
solent conqueror, Denmark, cut her off
almost entirely from European commerce
and made her complete subjugation seem
but a question of time.

Then it was that the powerful Gustavus
Vasa took charge of Sweden's destinies,
delivering the country from Danish tyranny
and establishing his new monarchy with the
Lutheran Church for its foundation.

He was the first of a great race of kings.
114

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

From the beginning of his reign, 1527, to
the death of Charles XII., 1718, every
monarch displayed some signal ability.
But the finest flower of the line, the most
original genius and hero, and one of the
world's greatest conquerors, was Gustavus
Adolphus, the " Northern Lion/'

He was the grandson of the liberator,
Gustavus Vasa, the first Protestant prince
ever crowned, and the son of Charles IX.,
who came to the throne in his son's tenth
year.

Gustavus Adolphus was born in 1594,
his advent bringing great joy to the
Swedes, as it shut out the possible acces-
sion of the Polish house of Vasa, who
were Roman Catholics. From early child-
hood it was apparent that he had unusual
qualities of mind, great steadfastness, and
high ideals of duty, while his perceptions
were swift and wonderfully luminous.

From the first he was inured to hardships
— early rising, simple fare, indifference to
heat and cold ; much the same sort of dis-
cipline, I suppose, to which the boys of
the house of Hohenzollern are now habitu-
ated. His father felt the necessity of

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

securing the most distinguished men that
were to be found for his son's education,
both from Sweden and foreign lands.
Count de la Gardie had charge of his mili-
tary education ; Helmer von Morner, of
Brandenburg, was his teacher in science
and languages, and John Skythe, a man of
great learning, had general charge. So
much severe military drill, combined with
constant lessons perseveringly adminis-
tered by intellectual martinets, has had the
effect of crushing the spontaneity, the
power of taking the initiative, out of many
a callow princeling ; but Gustavus was not
of any ordinary princely metal. He took
kindly to handling a musket and playing
soldier, while at the same time he displayed
a wonderful facility for learning anything
that was presented to him.

Besides his mother tongue, he under-
stood Greek, Latin, German, Dutch, Ital-
ian, Polish, and Russian, using Latin in
daily speech with special fluency. His
vigorous memory and brilliantly keen un-
derstanding were at the service of his
natural desire to know, and all combined
to make the work of teaching him a delight.

116

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

His father was proud of the promise he
showed, and from his tenth year onward
allowed him to take part in his councils
and audiences, and sometimes even to give
his answers in council. Records of re-
ports of foreign ambassadors contain many
praises of his intelligence and keen dis-
cernment in abstruse questions. When he
visited Heidelberg in 1620 the Duke of
Zweibrlicken gave an extremely admiring
account of him.

Mathematics came to him easily. His
favorite subjects were the various branches
of military science, and fortifications,
their plans and erection, exercised his
mind almost unceasingly. Grotius's treat-
ise on the "Right of War and Peace"
and Xenophon's "Anabasis" were among
his favorite readings.

The family of Adolphus owed their posi-
tion as the reigning power of the country
to their espousal of Protestant principles,
and it was therefore considered essential
that the youth should be brought up to
consider himself as the champion and de-
fender of the Protestant faith.

But it seemed a part of his very being
117

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

to feel sympathy with this belief only. He
indeed seemed to have been born an
ardent Protestant. The fine austerity of
his temperament, the elevation and purity
of his mind, made it impossible for him
ever to relax his views. Protestantism, or
Lutheranism, as the latest form of religion
of which he was aware, excited his sincere
devotion, which throughout his career only
grew to greater heights of self-effacing
enthusiasm.

Gustavus is described as being tall and
slim in his early youth, with a long, thin,
pale face, light hair, and pointed beard.
But in after years he grew to great height
and bulk, and is said to have been ex-
tremely slow and clumsy in his movements,
and so heavy that no Swedish horse could
carry him in armor.

It is a curious physical fact in connection
with this indisputable one that his mind
formed its lucid conclusions like lightning,
and that much of his success as a soldier
was due to the marvellous speed of his
operations.

His portrait, taken at this later period
by Van Dyke, shows the long face well

nS

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

rounded ; the nose is of the prominent
Roman type, while the pointed beard is
still worn, also a mustache curved up at
the ends. The eyes are large and beauti-
fully shaped ; they were steel-gray, and
capable of fearful flashes of anger when
the quick and often-repented temper of the
monarch was aroused ; but the brows are
finely arched, and the whole face expresses
justice and benevolence. Sternness is in
it, but it is the face pre-eminently of a
good man. One can read in it the courage
of high principles and a great mind ; it is
absolutely unlike the portraits of the fero-
cious and dissolute warriors of the time.

His first campaign was undertaken when
he was only in his seventeenth year. He
stormed the city of Christianople, which
then belonged to Denmark, and trium-
phantly entered the town, but afterwards,
when attacking one of the Danish islands,
the young leader came to grief; his horse
broke through the thin ice over a morass,
where he floundered for some time, sur-
rounded by his enemies. He was finally
rescued by young Baner.

In the same year Charles IX. died, and
119

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the queen-dowager, the step-mother of
Gustavus, having made a full resignation
of her claims to the regency, which under
Swedish law she might have claimed until
Gustavus had reached his twenty-fourth
year, he succeeded to his father's title of
" King Elect of the Swedes, Goths, and
Vandals."

For a young man of eighteen it was a
formidable undertaking to ascend the
throne of Sweden, and he behaved with
modesty and dignity at a session of the
States Assembly convened to discuss the
rights of succession. He spoke of his
youth and inexperience, but added man-
fully, " Nevertheless, if the States persist
in making me king, I will endeavor to
acquit myself with honor and fidelity."

He was formally proclaimed king on
December 31, 1611.

All the force of his character was now
called into play. Among the nobility there
was a great deal of jealousy ; people of a
certain rank felt that there was no reason
why he should occupy the throne — each of
them had quite as good a claim to it as
this grandson of a former subject.

120

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

But here Gustavus's great personal force
made itself apparent. The malcontents
found it impossible to treat him otherwise
than with the respect due to a sovereign.
He was able to control his natural impetu-
osity in all matters of court usage ; his
nobles were first made to feel that they
were kept at a distance and under the
dominion of a powerful will, and then they
seemed glad to serve him as he wished.
His appointments of men to fill public
posts, civil and military, showed remark-
able acumen. For his principal counsellor
he chose the famous Oxenstiern, distin-
guished at twenty-eight as the coldest,
most practical of diplomats, and who has
left a reputation as an unequalled states-
man.

Two sets of questions now presented
themselves to the king and the Senate ;
one related to the development of agri-
culture and mining in the country, the other
to the critical condition of the kingdom,
between Danes, Polanders, and Musco-
vites.

The king decided to continue the war
with Denmark, but as King Christian got

121

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the better of him, he astutely receded, and
signed a treaty of peace in 1613. He
then proceeded against the Czar of Mus-
covy, and thereby augmented the Swedish
kingdom by several provinces of impor-
tance, one of which included the ground on
which St. Petersburg now stands.

In 1617 peace was concluded with Russia
through the mediation of James I. of Eng-
land, who was always offering himself as
a peace-maker.

Gustavus now went through the cere-
monies of a coronation at Upsal. It is
said that this brief time of festivity was the
only rest he ever enjoyed from the end of
his childhood to the abrupt close of his
life. At this time of so-called rest, indeed,
he was concentrating all his mind on inter-
national affairs, studying the laws of com-
merce, and trying to lift the burden of tax-
ation from his people as far as was possible.

He looked over his ships, which were in
a wretched condition as a whole, and sent
for the best mariners he could obtain from
Holland and the Hanse Towns, with the
idea of building up a good and sufficient
navy.

122

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

His army also profited by his inventions
in arms and artillery ; indeed, he had at
all times a watchful eye upon his soldiers,
providing for their comfort and well-being.
They had fur-lined coats for cold weather
and comfortable tents, and they could take
the field in the bitterest winter as well as
in summer.

Sweden was continually exporting steel
for armor to Spain and Italy, so it occurred
to Gustavus to establish home manufacto-
ries of fire-arms and swords that should
equal those of any other country. Among
his many useful improvements and inven-
tions the leather cannon was the most curi-
ous. These pieces, being very light, were
easily shifted on the battle-field and rapidly
hauled over rugged country. They were
made of thick layers of the hardest
leather girt around with iron or brass
hoops. After a dozen discharges they
would fall to pieces, but they were made
in camp in quantities, and could be re-
placed at once. Gustavus attributed many
of his most brilliant victories to them and
used them till the day of his death.

At this time the king and Oxenstiern were
123

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

staying for a time at a castle which he had
inherited from a cousin, when a fire broke
out in the night and raged up all the stair-
cases. They could only save themselves
by jumping out of the windows and wading
up to their shoulders through a filthy moat,
but both escaped with nothing worse than
bruises.

Schiller speaks admiringly of Gustavus
for "a glorious triumph over himself by
which he began a reign which was but one
continued series of triumphs, and which
was terminated by a victory/1

This triumph of duty over inclination
was Gustavus' s yielding to the entreaties
of his step-mother and other counsellors
and giving up the beautiful Emma, Count-
ess of Brahe. He was deeply in love
with her, — the chroniclers assure us that
his intentions were honorable, — and she
had promised to be his wife, but it was
represented to him that although the
Countess of Brahe had all the necessary
merits and virtues, marriage with a subject
would seriously impair the power of his
throne. So, to quote Schiller again, he

" regained an absolute ascendancy over a
124

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

heart which the tranquillity of a domestic
life was far from being able to satisfy/'

His marriage, however, although it was
dictated by considerations of policy, seems
to have been a successful one.

In the summer of 1620 Gustavus made
a tour, incognito, of the principal towns
of Germany, with the object of seeing for
himself, in Berlin, the sister of the elector.
His suit prospered, and it is said that in
defiance of the elector's wishes the Prin-
cess Maria Eleonora, who was then in her
twentieth year, accepted Gustavus and
eloped with him to Sweden. They were
married in Stockholm with great pomp.
She was graceful and majestic, and we are
assured that she made Gustavus a worthy
and Christian queen.

The relations of Sweden with Poland
were perpetually unsatisfactory. Sigis-
mund, its Catholic king, disputed the throne
with his cousin Gustavus, and a tedious
eight years' war resulted.

But instead of exhausting Sweden, it
had the effect of developing the consum-
mate military genius of her king ; of bring-
ing his army, by its constant exercise, to an
125

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

extraordinary degree of skill, and of mak-
ing ready for the coming great struggle in
Germany the new principles of military art
introduced by Gustavus.

Not only was he a brilliant strategist,
but the king looked after his army with
paternal care ; it was well fed, well clad,
and promptly and well paid. Every de-
tail was attended to by him. Religious
services were held, morning and evening,
by every regiment. No plunder, cruelty,
intemperance, no low and slanderous talk
or immorality, were allowed — his officers
and soldiers alike were obliged to follow
his example.

It is not to be wondered at that this
army was led from one victory to another,
or that the fame of its discipline and its
successes should be noised all over Europe.
The great Thirty Years' War, that stu-
pendous struggle of Roman Catholicism
to blot out the work of the Reformation in
Germany, was now raging, and in the
various Protestant countries, notably Eng-
land and Holland, as well as the anti-Papist
states of Germany, people were beginning

to look towards Gustavus as the most
126

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

likely champion to give them victory.
There were no such generals on the Prot-
estant side in Europe, and it was known
that Gustavus was deeply and sincerely
religious, leading an upright life — a man
of honor, who might be relied upon to
keep his word.

Ferdinand, the Catholic Emperor of
Germany, laughed at the idea of the Swe-
dish champion ; the "Snow King," he said
(this being one of the favorite names for
Gustavus), would melt if he tried coming
south.

As for Gustavus, he had longed for
years to try conclusions with Tilly and the
other Imperial generals, but more particu-
larly since Ferdinand in 1629 had promul-
gated the Edict of Restitution, whereby at
one stroke the Archbishoprics of Madge-
burg and Bremen, the Bishoprics of Min-
den, Verden, Halberstadt, Lubeck, Ratze-
burg, Misnia, Merseburg, Naumburg,
Brandenburg, Havelberg, Lebus, and
Cammin, with one hundred and twenty
smaller foundations, were taken away from
the Protestant Church and restored to the
Roman Catholic Church.
127

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

To restore these lands and dignities,
which had been from fifty to eighty years
in the possession of the Protestants, was
of course impossible without the use of
brute force. By using the armies of Tilly
and Wallenstein to compel it, the Emperor
Ferdinand proclaimed himself the author
of a political and religious revolution, the
success of which must depend entirely
upon military despotism, and which was
without any moral basis whatever.

There were many different motives
prompting Gustavus to enter the lists
against Ferdinand's forces. It was not
only that there was great flattery in the
appeal to help the oppressed — not only that
war was his native element, wherein he
felt sure of success ; besides all this, he
had bitter grievances to redress. In 1629
Ferdinand sent sixteen thousand Imperi-
alist troops to take part against him in the
war with Poland. To Gustavus's remon-
strance Wallenstein had replied, "The
Emperor has too many soldiers ; he must
assist his good friends with them." The
envoys sent to represent Gustavus at the

Congress of Lubeck were insolently turned
128

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

away. Ferdinand also continued to sup-
port the claims of the Polish king, Sigis-
mund, to the Swedish throne, refused the
title of king to Gustavus Adolphus, insulted
the Swedish flag, and intercepted the king's
despatches.

However, Gustavus would enter the war
only at his own time and on his own terms.
He was far too prudent and wise, far too
dutiful, to impoverish his own country or
leave her exposed to the attacks of ene-
mies. In 1624 England had approached
him, wishing to know his terms for invading
Germany, but England would not accede
to his rather high stipulations.

The King of Denmark then underbid
Gustavus, made terms with England, and
rushed into the German conflict with great
confidence, but he was ignominiously de-
feated, while Wallenstein (at that time
Ferdinand's best general) established him-
self on the Baltic coast. This was getting
dangerously near, as Gustavus felt.

In 1628 Gustavus Adolphus made an
alliance with Christian of Denmark, his
old enemy, but as a Protestant and a foe
to Catholic rule in Germany his loyal friend

9 129

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

— for the time. It was agreed between
them that all foreign ships except the ships
of the Dutch should be excluded from the
Baltic. In the summer of the same year
he sent two thousand men to defend Stral-
sund against Wallenstein.

In 1629, through the secret intervention
of Cardinal Richelieu, a treaty of peace
was signed with Poland at Stuhmsdorf.
Again, in 1630, Cardinal Richelieu, the
wily diplomatist who governed France for
Louis XIII. and had a hand in all the
affairs of Europe, sent Baron de Charnace
to Gustavus at Stockholm and made the
same proposals in the name of France
that England had made in 1624. But the
flippant manner of de Charnace disgusted
the king, and the terms did not please
him : he did not care to assume the role
of a mercenary general paid by France
and bound for a limited number of years,
and so de Charnace returned home without
having accomplished anything.

Richelieu, as the minister of a Catholic

king and a prince himself of the Roman

Catholic Church, of course did not dare

to openly ally himself with Gustavus in the

130

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

latter' s character of defender of the Pro-
testant faith. But in his desire to frustrate
the ambitions of the House of Austria,
against which he had schemed for years,
he was quite willing to support any power
that would directly or indirectly advance
the supremacy of France.

Gustavus now felt comparatively free to
leave Sweden and invade Germany. By
his treaty with Denmark he was free to
retreat through her territory.

After the unsuccessful attempt made by
Christian of Denmark to oppose the em-
peror by leading the forces of the Pro-
testant Union, Gustavus remained the only
prince in Europe to whom the Germans felt
they could appeal — the only one strong
enough to protect them, and upright
enough to insure them religious liberty.

Pressing appeals came from all sides now
to add to his own personal motives for
embarking in the German war. He raised
an army of forty-three thousand men in
Sweden, but set out on his expedition with
only thirteen thousand. On the occasion
of taking his leave, Gustavus appeared
before the Estates with his little daughter

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

of four in his arms. This princess was
born so "dark and ugly," with such a
"rough, loud voice," that the attendants
had rushed to Gustavus with the news that
a son was born to him. When this was
found to be a mistake they were reluctant
to tell him, as his joy at having an heir to
his military greatness was so openly ex-
pressed. But finally his sister, the Princess
Catherine, took the child to him and ex-
plained that it was a daughter. If he felt
any disappointment he did not show it ;
tenderly kissing the child, he said, " Let us
thank God, sister ; I hope this girl will be
as good as a boy ; I am content, and pray
God to preserve the child." Then, laugh-
ing, he added, " She is an arch wench, to
put a trick upon us so soon."

In this manner did the celebrated Chris-
tina of Sweden enter the world. Her
father was deeply fond of her, and enjoyed
taking her to his reviews ; there she showed
great pleasure in hearing the salutes fired,
clapping her little hands, so that the king
would order the firing to be repeated for
her, saying "She is a soldier's daughter."

There is a famous letter of Gustavus's
132

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

still preserved in which he wrote to Oxen-
stiern : " I exhort and entreat you, for the
love of Christ, that if all does not go on
well, you will not lose courage. I conjure
you to remember me and the welfare of
my family, and to act towards me and mine
as you would have God act towards you
and yours, and as I will act to you and
yours if it please God that I survive
you, and that your family have need of

me."

It is said that when Gustavus presented
the little girl to the Estates as his heir,
tears came to the eyes of those northern
men, who had the name of being cold and
stern, as they repeated their oath of alle-
giance to the young princess.

"I know," the king said to them, "the
perils, the fatigues, the difficulties of the
undertaking, yet neither the wealth of the
House of Austria dismays me nor her
veteran forces. I hold my retreat secure
under the worst alternative. And if it is
the will of the Supreme Being that Gus-
tavus should die in the defence of the faith,
he pays the tribute with thankful acquies-
cence ; for it is a king's duty and his re-

'33

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ligion to obey the great Sovereign of Kings
without a murmur. For the prosperity of
all my subjects I offer my warmest prayers
to Heaven. I bid you all a sincere — it may
be an eternal — farewell."

At this time he could hardly speak for
emotion. He clasped his wife to him and
said " God bless you !" and then, rushing
forth, he mounted his horse and galloped
down to the ship that was to take him away
from Sweden.

Sweden was anything but rich, yet so
inspired had the people become by the ex-
alted spirit of their monarch, that they
were eager to contribute whatever they
could to the campaign.

On June 24, 1630, Gustavus was the
first man of his expedition to land on the
Island of Usedom, where he immediately
seized a pickaxe and broke the soil for the
first of his intrenchments. Then, retiring
a little way from his officers, he fell upon
his knees and prayed.

Observing a sneering expression upon

the faces of some of his officers at this, he

said to them: "A good Christian will

never make a bad soldier. A man that

134

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

has finished his prayers has at least com-
pleted one-half of his daily work."

A painting commemorating this event
is said still to be in existence in a Swedish
country-house belonging to the family of
de la Gardie.

Hardly a month after the landing of
Gustavus Ferdinand deprived himself of
his most able general ; he removed Wal-
lenstein, — the Duke of Friedland, — dis-
banding a large part of his army, and
putting the rest under the command of
Tilly, who now being over seventy, was
slow in getting his army ready for the field.

When Ferdinand heard of the Swedish
king's arrival on German soil, he had said
lightly, " I have got another little enemy !"
But by Christmas time Gustavus was
established firmly on the banks of the
Rhine, while ambassadors and princes sur-
rounded him.

On reaching Stettin, in Pomerania, the
king found his course opposed by Boguslas,
the aged and infirm Duke of Pomerania,
who feared to espouse the cause of the
Protestant prince. But Gustavus insisted
upon entering Stettin and seeing the duke.
135

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

When the latter came to meet him,
borne along the street on a sedan chair, he
responded to Gustavus's hearty greetings
by saying lugubriously, "I must neces-
sarily submit to superior power and the
will of Providence." At which Gustavus
said with gracious pleasantry, that was no
doubt trying to the timid old man : " Yon-
der fair defendants of your garrison" (the
windows were crowded with ladies) "would
not hold out three minutes against one com-
pany of Dalicarnian infantry; you should
behave yourself with greater prowess in
the married state" (the duke was over
seventy and had no children) " or else per-
mit me to request you to adopt me for
your son and successor." This was a jest
in earnest, for on the death of the duke
the Swedes held possession of Pomerania,
which was confirmed to them by subse-
quent treaty.

Germany was astounded at the orderly
and moral behavior of the Swedish sol-
diers; nothing save "vinegar and salt"
were they allowed to make any demand
for outside the camp. In January a nota-
ble event occurred. Richelieu, having in
136

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

view the effect that so favorable a diversion
would have on the war then going on in
Italy between France and the House of
Austria, had at last arranged conditions
that Gustavus could accept.

Richelieu, as Wakeman says, "had long
fixed his eyes on Gustavus as one of the
most formidable weapons capable of being
used against the House of Austria, and he
desired to put it in the armory of France."

In January, 1631, Gustavus signed the
treaty of Barwalde, by which he undertook
to maintain an army of thirty-six thousand
men, to respect the Imperial Constitution,
observe neutrality towards Bavaria and the
Catholic League as they observed it towards
him, and to leave the Catholic religion un-
touched in those districts where it was es-
tablished. France was to supply the king
with two hundred thousand dollars yearly
for six years.

In March a great gathering of Protes-
tants was held in Leipsic ; they agreed to
raise troops if they themselves were at-
tacked, but they were willing to submit to
the emperor if he would but repeal the
Edict of Restitution. There seemed to
137

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

have been some distrust of Gustavus
among them ; no doubt they began to fear
already that he would prove too much of a
conqueror.

There had been great sympathy in Eng-
land with Gustavus in his character as a
Protestant champion. Charles I. himself
was quite indifferent, but his subjects, par-
ticularly his Scotch subjects, were anxious
to be of service in the campaign.

In July of 1631 the Marquis of Hamil-
ton had landed on the shores of the Baltic
with six thousand troops, generously raised
at his own expense. The marquis was a
magnificent fellow, who lived in the field
like a prince, with gorgeous liveries, equip-
ages, and table. The king received him
affectionately, but although he commanded
his own troops he never achieved the rank
of general in the Swedish army.

It is said that the English soldiers were
not of great service in the war, and that
they were fearfully affected by the strange
food. The German bread gave them ter-
rible pangs (it must have been Pumper-
nickel) ; they over-fed themselves dread-
fully with new honey, and the German
138

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

beer played havoc with them. In this way
the British contingent was soon reduced to
but two regiments, finally to only one, and
the Marquis of Hamilton was content to
follow Gustavus as a simple volunteer.

An expostulating letter from Charles I.
to Gustavus in relation to Hamilton is said
to be almost unintelligible except for a
postscript, which reads, —

"I hope shortly you will be in a possi-
bility to perform your promise concerning
pictures and statues, therefore now in earn-
est do not forget it."

Gustavus Adolphus sent back to Scot-
land many well-trained commanders who
had occasion afterwards to use their skill
acquired under him. Some of these had
a European reputation : Spence, of War-
minster, created by Gustavus Count Or-
cholm ; Alexander Leslie, afterwards Earl
of Leven ; Drummond, Governor of Pom-
erania ; Lindsay, Earl of Crawford ; Ram-
say ; Hepburn ; Munro, and, most de-
voted and beloved of all the king's Scottish
officers, Sir Patrick Ruthven.

Various squabbles have been recorded
as taking place between the Scotchmen
139

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

and the king. One relates to Colonel
Seton, who was mortally offended at re-
ceiving a slap in the face from the king.
He demanded instant dismissal from the
Swedish service and it was given him.
He was riding off towards Denmark when
the king overtook him.

" Seton," he said, " I see you are greatly
offended with me, and I am sorry for what
I did in haste. I have a high regard for
you, and have followed you expressly to
offer you all the satisfaction due to a
brother officer. Here are two swords and
two pistols ; choose which weapon you
please, and you shall avenge yourself
against me."

This was too great an appeal to Seton's
magnanimity ; he broke out with renewed
expressions of the utmost devotion to the
king and his cause, and they rode back to
camp together.

At one time Hepburn declared with fury
to Gustavus that "he would never more
unsheath his sword in the Swedish quar-
rel," but, nevertheless, he did do so, and
was made Governor of Munich. The

truth was that Gustavus had a domineering
140

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

spirit and a fiery temper, but meanness or
injustice had no part in him, and his noble
candor won the true and everlasting at-
tachment of those who were near him.

At one time Douglas, a Scotchman who
had enrolled himself in the Swedish army
in 1623, behaved in so unpardonable a
fashion in Munich as to cause his arrest.
Sir Henry Vane, the British ambassador
to Sweden, who was greatly disliked there
for his insolence and pig-headedness, ap-
proached Gustavus and demanded the
release of Douglas.

" By Heaven1!" replied the king, " if you
speak another syllable on the subject of
that man, I will order him to be hanged."
Presently, however, he said: "I now release
him on your parole, but will not be af-
fronted a second time. By Heaven ! the
fellow is a rascal, and I do not choose to
be served by such sort of animals."

" May it please your majesty, I have
always understood that the subjects of the
king my master have rendered you the
most excellent and faithful services."

" Yes, I acknowledge the people of your

nation have served me well, and far better
141

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

than any others, but this dog concerning
whom we are talking has affronted me, and
I am resolved to chastise him." Within a
few moments he had grown calmer, and
said : " Sir, I request you not to take ex-
ception at what has dropped from me ; it
was the effect of a warm and hasty temper.
I am now cool again, and beseech you to
pardon me."

He once spoke of this temper to his
generals, saying, " You must bear with
my infirmities, as I have to bear with
yours."

That Gustavus had so open a way before
him this far in Germany, that he had been
able to walk through Pomerania and Bran-
denburg without encountering any opposi-
tion that he could not easily overcome, was
owing to Wallenstein's Imperial command
having been taken from him.

One of the cleverest strokes Richelieu
had ever made was the securing the dis-
missal of Wallenstein from the Imperial
army. It seems a miraculous piece of
craft, at the very moment when Wallen-
stein's arms had brought glorious victory

to the emperor, and when Gustavus, abso-
142

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

lute master of his military operations, was
advancing on German soil, to deprive the
Imperial armies of the only leader whose
authority could stand against the great
talents of Gustavus.

To be sure, there was great dissatisfac-
tion with Wallenstein among the Catho-
lic League on account of his personal pre-
tensions, but this of itself would not have
brought about his downfall. The only
effectual voice to influence Ferdinand was
the voice of a priest. His own confessor
wrote of Ferdinand :

" Nothing upon earth was more sacred
to him than a sacerdotal head. < If it should
happen, he often said, that he were to
meet, at the same time and place, an angel
and a priest, the priest would obtain the
first and the angel the second act of obei-

sance."

So Richelieu introduced in his court a
gentle Capuchin monk, Father Joseph, who
lived but to scheme for his master the
cardinal. He told the emperor, among
other arguments, that " It would be prudent
at this time to yield to the desire of the
princes the more easily to gain their suf-
143

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

frages for his son in the election of the
King of the Romans. The storm once
passed by, Wallenstein might quickly
enough resume his former station."

Ferdinand piously gave in to the gentle
monk, although he afterwards discovered
the trickery ; Wallenstein was removed
and Tilly was made commander-in-chief.

Johann Tzerklas, Count von Tilly, was
born in South Brabant in 1559, of an an-
cient and illustrious Belgian family. It
is thought that he was educated for the
Jesuit priesthood, and in this way became
fanatically attached to Rome. At twenty-
one he gave up the priesthood to enter the
army of the Duke of Alva. Adopting the
Imperial service, he followed the Duke of
Lorraine into Hungary, where in some
campaigns against the Turks he rose
rapidly from one step to another.

At the conclusion of this war Maximilian
of Bavaria made him commander-in-chief
of his army with an unlimited power.
When the unfortunate Elector Palatine
Frederick accepted the crown of Bohemia
and defied the emperor and his Catholic

League, Maximilian took part with the
144

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

emperor against him, and was rewarded,
at the successful termination of the war,
by having the Palatine countries given to
him. The defeat of Frederick's forces in
1620 was no doubt due to Tilly's general-
ship. Poor Frederick, who fled from Tilly
in terror and abdicated his electorate when
he had two armies ready to support him,
explained his poltroonery by saying philo-
sophically: "I know now where I am;
there are virtues which only misfortune can
teach us ; and it is in adversity alone that
princes learn to know themselves."

Tilly, like Wallenstein, paid his troops
on "the simple plan, that they shall get
who have the power, and they shall keep
who can."

But Tilly was undoubtedly more disin-
terested in his character than Wallenstein,
who worked for his own aggrandizement,
and only pretended to be at one time
Protestant, at another Catholic.

Tilly was a sincere bigot, of the sort of
stuff that the infamous Duke of Alva,
whom he was said to resemble personally,
was made. "A strange and terrific as-
pect," says Schiller in describing Tilly,
i45

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

" corresponded with this disposition : of
low stature, meagre, with hollow cheeks, a
long nose, a wrinkled forehead, large whis-
kers, and a sharp chin. He generally ap-
peared dressed in a Spanish doublet of
light green satin with open sleeves, and a
small but high-crowned hat upon his head,
which was ornamented with an ostrich-
feather that reached down to his back."

This horrible fanatic, with his ferocious
thirst for the blood of Protestants, never-
theless appreciated his adversary's powers :
"The King of Sweden," he said in the
assembly of the electors at Ratisbon, "is
an enemy as prudent as brave; he is
inured to war and in the prime of life ; his
measures are excellent, his resources ex-
tensive, and the states of his kingdom have
shown him the greatest devotion. His
army, composed of Swedes, Germans, Li-
vonians, Finlanders, Scotch, and English,
seems to be animated by but one senti-
ment, that of blind obedience to his com-
mands. He is a gamester from whom
much is won even when nothing is lost."

Tilly had no fondness for parade, and

appeared among his troops mounted on a
146

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

wretched little palfrey. By a curious con-
tradiction, this man, who allowed his men to
perform unspeakable acts of cruelty and
lust, was himself by nature both temperate
and chaste.

Field Marshal Tilly was now an old man,
but he could boast that he had never lost a
battle. Yet he who had vanquished Mans-
field, Christian of Brunswick, the Mar-
grave of Baden, and the King of Denmark
was now to find the King of Sweden too
much for him.

The progress of the " Snow King" in
Pomerania and Brandenburg made the
new commander-in-chief put forth all his
powers to collect the military forces scat-
tered through Germany, but it was mid-
winter before he appeared with twenty
thousand men before Frankfort on the
Oder. Here he had news that Demmin
and Colberg had both surrendered to the
King of Sweden, and giving up his offen-
sive plan of attack, he retired towards the
Elbe River to besiege Magdeburg.

On his way, however, he turned aside to
New Brandenburg, which Gustavus had
garrisoned with two thousand Swedes,
147

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Germans, and British, and, angered by
their obstinate resistance, put every man
of them to the sword. When Gustavus
heard of this massacre he vowed that he
would make Tilly behave more like a per-
son of humanity than a savage Croatian.

Breaking up his camp at Schwedt, he
marched against Frankfort on the Oder,
which was defended by eight thousand men
— the same ferocious bands that had been
devastating Pomerania and Brandenburg.
The town was taken by storm after a three
days' siege. Gustavus himself, helped by
Hepburn and Lumsden, whom he asked
to assist him with their " valiant Scots, and
remember Brandenburg," placed a petard
on a gate which sent it flying. The Swedish
troops rushed through, and when the Im-
perial soldiers asked to be spared, they
cried " Brandenburg quarter !" and cut
them down. Thousands were killed or
drowned in the river. The remainder, ex-
cepting a number of officers who were
taken prisoners, fled to Silesia. All the
artillery fell into the hands of the Swedes.
For the first time the king was unable

wholly to restrain his men — all the stores
148

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

of ill-gotten Imperialist wealth in Frankfort
were grabbed by his army.

Giving Leslie charge of Frankfort, and
having sent one detachment into Silesia
and another to assist Magdeburg, he
then — turning aside, incidentally, to carry
Landsberg on the Warth — proceeded to-
wards Berlin with troops and artillery,
sending couriers in advance to explain his
mission, which was to demand help from
his brother-in-law, the elector.

The elector invited the king to dine and
sleep at. Berlin under the protection of his
own guard, and consented to the tempo-
rary occupation of the fortresses of Span-
dau and Kustrin by the king's men, a per-
mission which was withdrawn within a few
weeks. When remonstrated with for these
concessions the next .day by one of his
advisers, the elector said : " Mais que faire ?
Us ont des canons." It is a remark which
seems to explain the lazy, inconsequent
character of the elector, who, however, was
always ready to admit the logic of superior
force.

Magdeburg, one of the richest towns

of Germany, enjoyed a republican liberty
i49

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

under its wise magistrates. The rich arch-
bishopric of which it was the capital had
belonged for a long period to the Prot-
estant princes of the House of Branden-
burg, who had introduced their religion
there. The Emperor Ferdinand had re-
moved the Protestant administration and
given the archbishopric to his own son,
Leopold, but, nevertheless, the city of
Magdeburg had found it possible to con-
clude an alliance with the King of Sweden,
by which he promised to protect with all
his powers its religious and civil liberties,
while he obtained permission to recruit in
its territory and was granted free passage
through its gates.

He sent there Dietrich, of Falkenberg,
an experienced soldier, to direct their mili-
tary operations, and the magistrates made
him governor of the city during the war.

While Gustavus was hindered from com-
ing to its relief, Magdeburg was invested
by the forces of Tilly, with those of Count
Pappenheim, who served under him.
Having ordered the Elector of Saxony to
comply with the Edict of Restitution and
to order Magdeburg to surrender, and
150

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

having received a firm refusal, Tilly pro-
ceeded, March 30, 1631, to conduct the
siege personally with great vigor, and
finally, after a long, heroic defence, his men
carried it by storm May 20. Falkenberg
was one of the first to fall. Then began
the storied horrors of Magdeburg, the
slaughter of the soldiers, the citizens, the
children, the outrages and murder of the
women, many of whom killed themselves
to escape the demons let loose by Tilly.

Many Germans felt pity for the wretched
women delivered into their hands, but the
Walloons of Pappenheim's army were
monsters of brutal fury. The scenes of
crime in Magdeburg were unsurpassed in
animal insanity by anything that has been
recorded. When some officers of the
League, sickened with these sights, ap-
pealed to Tilly to stop them, he said,
"The soldier must have some reward for
his danger and his labors."

The inhabitants themselves, it is said, set
fire to the city in twelve different places,
preferring to be buried under the walls to
yielding, but some authorities say it was
fired by Pappenheim. Only the Cathedral

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

and fifty houses were left from the con-
flagration ; the rest had gone to ruin, soot,
and ashes.

At last, on May 23d, Tilly walked through
the ruined streets of the city. More than
six thousand bodies had been thrown into
the Elbe ; a much greater number of living
and dead had been consumed in the flames
— altogether thirty thousand were killed.

On the 24th a Te Deum was chanted in
the Cathedral by Tilly's orders, and he
wrote to his emperor that since the taking
of Troy and the destruction of Jerusalem
no such victory had been seen. He then
marched his men away through the Hartz
Mountains, avoiding a meeting with Gus-
tavus.

Great and bitter complaints arose in all
quarters now against Gustavus for not suc-
coring the city that depended upon him,
and he was obliged to publish a justifica-
tion of himself. The facts had been that
the two Protestant Electors of Saxony and
Brandenburg insisted, in the most cowardly
spirit, upon preserving their neutrality, and
would not allow the king's army to cross
their territory. Had he done so in despite
152

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

of them, his retreat might have been cut
off. While the siege was in progress,
however, Gustavus finally came to Berlin,
and said to the pusillanimous elector :

"I march towards Magdeburg not for
my own advantage, but for that of the
Protestants. If no person will assist me
I will immediately retreat, offer an accom-
modation to the emperor, and return to
Stockholm. I am certain that Ferdinand
will grant me whatever peace I desire ; but
let Magdeburg fall, and the emperor will
have nothing more to fear from me ; then
behold the fate that awaits you !" The
elector was frightened, but would not yield
a free passage for the Swedes through
his dominions, and insisted upon having
Spandau given back to him, and while Gus-
tavus was arguing the question with him
the news came that Magdeburg had fallen.

The horrible fate of the city sent a
shudder throughout Germany. On the
strength of it Ferdinand began to make
fresh exactions, clearing out more Prot-
estant bishoprics and demanding more
men and funds from the electors ; but all
this had the effect of opening the eyes of
'S3

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the members of the Protestant Union to
their own foolishness in not supporting
Gustavus, " and the liberties of Germany
arose out of the ashes of Magdeburg,"
says Schiller.

It was now realized that within eight
months the "Snow King" had made him-
self master of four cities, forts, and castles,
and had cleared the whole country behind
him to the shores of the Baltic — a territory
one hundred and forty miles wide. But
while other princes were changing their
attitude, the Elector of Brandenburg re-
mained obstinately, stupidly resolved on
his own idea, — he must have Spandau
back ; at last Gustavus ordered his com-
mander to evacuate the fortress, but he
declared that from that day his brother-in-
law should be treated as his enemy. To
emphasize this, he brought his whole army
before Berlin, and when the elector sent
ambassadors to his camp he said to them :

" I will not be worse treated than the
emperor's generals. Your master has re-
ceived them in his states, has furnished
them with all necessaries, surrendered every
place which they desired, and, notwith-
154

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

standing so much complaisance, he has not
been able to prevail upon them to treat his
people with more humanity. All that I
require from him is security, a moderate
sum of money, and bread for my troops ;
in return for which I promise to protect his
states and to keep the war at a distance
from him. I must, however, insist upon
these points, and my brother the elector
must quickly decide whether he will accept
me for his friend or his capital plunderer."

A report of this speech, together with
pointing the cannon against the town, had
the effect of clearing away the elector's
doubts and sweetening his fraternal rela-
tions with Gustavus. Most amiably he
concluded a treaty, in which he consented
to pay thirty thousand dollars monthly to
the king, to allow the fortress of Spandau
to remain in his hands, and engaged to
open Kustrin at all times to his troops.

This decisive union of the Elector of
Brandenburg with the Swedes was soon
followed by others. The Elector of Saxony,
who had had two hundred of his villages
burned by Tilly, now joined Gustavus
eagerly. When Gustavus, in order to test

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the Saxon ruler, who had heretofore been
so shifty, sent word that he would make no
alliance with him unless he would deliver
up the fortress of Wittenberg, surrender
as a hostage his eldest son, give the Swe-
dish troops three months' pay, and sur-
render up all traitors in his ministry, the
elector replied :

" Not only Wittenberg, but Torgau, all
Saxony, shall be open to him ; I will sur-
render the whole of my family to him as
hostages ; and if that be insufficient, I will
even yield up myself to him. Hasten back,
and tell him that I am ready to deliver up
all the traitors he will name, to pay his
army the money he desires, and to venture
my life and property for the good cause."

The king, convinced of his sincerity,
withdrew his severe conditions. " The mis-
trust," said he, " which they showed me
when I wished to go to the aid of Magde-
burg awakened mine ; the present confi-
dence of the elector merits an equal return
from me. I am content if he will furnish
my army with a month's whole pay, and I
even hope to be able to indemnify him for

this advance." The Landgrave of Hesse-
156

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

Cassel also joined him. The Dukes of
Mecklenburg and Pomerania were already
his firm friends.

Shortly after these events the king sum-
moned his allies to meet him a't Torgau at
a council of war, for Tilly had invested
Leipzig with a large army, and was threat-
ening it with the fate of Magdeburg. The
council decided upon pursuing Tilly at
once, the Saxon elector saying this vehe-
mently. Gustavus had had a short respite
from warlike labors ; he had visited Pom-
erania in June, where great rejoicings had
been held on his behalf, and where he was
joined by his queen, Maria Eleonora (just
a year after he had landed), who had come
from Sweden with re-enforcements of six
thousand Swedes.

But, after all, war was the dominating
thought always with Gustavus ; soon he was
at head-quarters making active prepara-
tions for the next battle. Cust, in his
" Lives of the Warriors of the Thirty
Years' War," says: -The bridge of Wit-
tenberg being in his hands, he had already
issued orders to Horn and Baner to meet
him at this place of rendezvous, about six-
is?

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

teen miles from thence ; Colonel Hay had
been directed to occupy Havelberg ; while
Banditzen was now directed to remain in
charge of the camp at Werben. The king,
however, with the delicacy of a man of
honor and station, kept all his troops on
the western bank of the Elbe, that he
might leave the Saxon army encamped on
the right bank until he obtained from the
elector his authority in writing to cross the
bridge."

The united Saxon and Swedish armies
joined their forces on September 7, 1631,
and came within sight of Tilly's forces near
Breitenfeld, a small town four miles from
Leipzig. The king's governor of Leipzig
had surrendered to Tilly two days before,
but the "old corporal," as Gustavus called
him, had inflicted no outrages upon the
town.

Gustavus pushed his men forward
rapidly, leaving tents and baggage behind
him in his camp, thinking his men might
well sleep in the fields at this season of the
year. On the evening before the action
Gustavus called his generals to him, ex-
plained the plan of battle to them, and told
158

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

them that "they were about to fight to-
morrow troops of a different stamp from
Polanders or Cossacks, to whom they had
hitherto been opposed.

"Fellow-soldiers," he said, "I will not
dissemble the danger of the crisis. You
will have a day's work that will be worthy
of you. It is not my temper to diminish
the merit of veteran troops like the Impe-
rialists, but I know my own officers well,
and scorn the thought of deceiving them.
Our numbers are perhaps inferior, but God
is just ; and remember Magdeburg."

After riding about through the ranks
with the sanguine, light-hearted manner
that always inspired courage in his men,
he retired for a few hours' sleep in his
coach. And here, the chroniclers say, he
dreamed that he had a pugilistic encounter
with Tilly and floored him.

Tilly was waiting for them next morning
on the slope of a hill, with large woods
behind him, and his artillery on an emi-
nence. His men wore white ribbons in
their hats and helmets, and the allies, or
confederates, as they were called, sprigs
of holly or oak. The Imperial army was
159

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

stretched in a single line, having neither a
second line nor a reserve.

Gustavus kept his own men well sepa-
rated from his Saxon troops. The Saxons
were upon and behind a hill with their
guns while his own men were in separate
bodies, each under its own commander,
but capable of being shifted or massed ac-
cording to the will of Gustavus in an in-
credibly short space of time. This manner
of making his battle-field a chess-board, on
which only his hand controlled the moves,
was at that time unknown. It has been
said by experts that Gustavus's tactics on
the day of Leipzig added more to the art
of war than any that had been invented
since the days of Julius Caesar.

A strong wind raged, blowing thick dust
in the faces of the Swedes, and, as the
battle proceeded, the smoke of the powder.
As Gustavus moved his men to the attack
in compact columns, in order to pass the
Loderbach, Pappenheim, at the head of
two thousand cuirassiers, plunged at them
with violence. The king, clad in gray,
with a green plume in his gray beaver hat,
and mounted on his horse — of the sort called

160

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

" flea-bitten," — made a dash forward at the
head of his cavalry, anxious to get the wind
in his favor and to get his left flank out of
range of a battery. Pappenheim, whose
advance had been made without orders,
received a volley from the musketeers that
made him reel, and Baner at the head of
the reserve cavalry, and Gustavus himself
with the right wing, came on him with such
impetus as to drive him fairly from the
field.

Meanwhile on Tilly's extreme right
Furstenberg threw himself on the Saxons ;
they had no such training as the king's old
forces, and flew in a wild rout. The Elec-
tor of Saxony, who was in the rear, joining
their flight with his body-guard, never
stopped until he reached Eilenburg, where
he consoled himself with deep draughts of
beer, quite content to be out of the fray.

Gustavus witnessed the panic and flight
of the Saxons, — from whom he had not
expected too much, — and an officer he had
summoned being shot dead in the saddle,
the king took his place and cheered his
men forward, crying " Vivat ! vivat !"

The enemy fell back before the vigor of

« 161

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

this attack. At the same time the king
discovered from the thick clouds of dust
about him that some large body of troops
was near ; he was told they were Swedes,
but they were not there in accordance with
his plan of battle, so he galloped up close
to them, and coming back quickly organ-
ized his troops to receive an attack. " They
are Imperialists," he said. " I see the
Burgundian cross on their ensigns." It
was here that the two Scottish regiments
under Hepburn and Munro first practised
firing by platoons. This was so amazing
to the veteran Cronenberg and his fine
Walloon infantry that they retired with all
speed.

At four o'clock the king took charge of
his right wing, wheeled it suddenly to the
left, dashed up to the heights where the
Imperial artillery was placed, and, captur-
ing it, turned the fire of their own guns on
the enemy. Gustavus now swooped down
upon Tilly's rear.

Caught between this cavalry attack at

the rear and Horn's infantry in front, the

Imperialists made a tough struggle. When

the sun went down only six hundred men

162

BATTLE OF LEIPZIG

were left to close around Tilly and carry
him from the field. With that exception
the army had been destroyed. Seven
thousand lay dead in the field ; five thou-
sand prisoners remained to take service
with the victors, as the custom was at that
time.

The king threw himself on his knees
among the dead and wounded to offer up
thanksgivings. He had the alarm-bells
set ringing in all the villages round about
to apprise the country of his -victory. He
encamped with his army in the deserted
camp of the enemy. Almost all the bag-
gage of the Imperialists fell into the hands
of the conquerors. Hardly a soldier
among the killed and wounded had less
than ten ducats in his pocket or concealed
within his girdle or saddle. Now that the
battle was over the Elector of Saxony
joined Gustavus in his camp at night.
The king, who could be astutely diplomatic,
gave him all the credit for having advised
the battle and kept silent as to the Saxon
troops. The elector, transported with joy
at the issue of the day, promised to Gus-
tavus the Roman crown. Gustavus lost
163

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

no time in dallying with the Roman crown
but made new plans for action. He left
Leipzig to the elector and set forward for
Merseburg, which, with Halle, at once
surrendered.

Here he gave his army a rest of ten
days, and many Protestant princes joined
him in council.

II.
LUTZEN

FROM the day of Leipzig, Tilly's for-
tunes left him ; his past victories
were forgotten and execrations were heaped
upon him. Though he was wounded, he
went to work with all his old energy to form
a new army, but the emperor expressly
commanded that he should never again risk

o

any decisive battle.

The glorious victory at Leipzig is said
to have changed not only the world's
opinion of Gustavus, but his own opinion

of himself. He was now more confident ;
164

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

he took a bolder tone with his allies, a more
imperious one with his enemies, and even
more decision and greater speed marked
his military movements, though nothing
tyrannical or illiberal was seen in him.

The emperor and the Catholic League
were dumfounded at the annihilation of
Tilly. Richelieu was beginning to think his
auxiliary too powerful ; Louis XIII. even
was heard to mutter, "It is time to put a
limit to the progress of this Goth."

"Alone, without a rival," Schiller says,
" he found himself now in the midst of
Germany ; nothing could arrest his course.
His adversaries, the princes of the Cath-
olic League, divided among themselves,
led by different and contrary interests,
acted without concert, and consequently
without energy. Both statesman and gen-
eral were united in the person of Gustavus.
He was the only source from which all au-
thority flowed : he alone was the soul of his
party, the creator and executor of his mili-
tary plans. Aided by all these advantages,
at the head of such an army, endowed with
a genius to profit by all these resources, con-
ducted besides by principles of the wisest
165

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

policy, it is not surprising that Gustavus
Adolphus was irresistible. In not much
more time than it would have taken another
to make a tour of pleasure, with the sword
in one hand and pardon in the other he
was seen traversing Germany from one
end to the other, as a conqueror, lawgiver,
and judge. As if he had been the legiti-
mate sovereign, they brought him from all
parts the keys of the towns and fortresses.
No castle resisted him, no river stopped
his victorious progress, and he often tri-
umphed by the mere dread of his name."

Many of his advisers pressed Gustavus
to attack Vienna, but after careful con-
sideration he thought he would serve his
cause best by marching straight into the
heart of Germany on the Main and the
Rhine.

Ten days after Leipzig the king reached
Erfurt and ordered Duke William of Saxe-
Weimar to take possession of the city.
Proceeding through the Thuringian Forest,
he reached Konigshofen Schweinfurt, which
yielded to him, as did Wurzburg. Marien-
berg he was obliged to take by storm ; a

great store of treasure was here, as well as
1 66

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

the money which the Elector of Bavaria
had sent to Tilly for the purpose of re-
placing his shattered army.

Great quantities of provisions, corn, and
wine fell into Swedish hands. A coffin
filled with ducats was found, and as it was
lifted the bottom gave way, and the soldiers
began to help themselves to the coin in
the presence of the king. " Oh, I see how
it is," said he ; " it is plain they must have
it ; let the rogues convert it to their own

uses."

In truth, the character of the Swedish
army was no longer beyond suspicion ;
the soldiers had become to some extent
demoralized with their conquests ; the
cruelties and barbarities that they had suf-
fered had forced upon them terrible re-
prisals, and the usage of looting was so
universal that they could not be held back
from it.

Tilly had by this time collected a new
army out of the Palatinate and come back
to Fulda, and here he tried to get the con-
sent of Maximilian of Bavaria to engage
Gustavus in battle again, but the duke was
fearful of having another army wiped out,
167

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

now the only one the Catholic League
possessed, and refused him.

The Swedish king now advanced rapidly
towards the Rhine by way of the Main,
reducing Aschaffenburg, Seligenstadt, and
the whole territory on both sides of the
river. The Count of Hanau made but
slight resistance when his citadel was cap-
tured, and gladly agreed to pay two thou-
sand five hundred pounds a month for the
support of the army and to recall his re-
tainers from the Imperial service.

Nothing now kept Gustavus from march-
ing on Frankfort-on-the-Main. The magis-
trates of the city begged the ambassador
that he sent to entreat him to consider
their legitimate oaths to the emperor, and
to leave them neutral, on account of their
annual fairs, which were their chief com-
mercial enterprise. The king was not
moved by these touching business con-
siderations ; he was surprised, he replied,
that while the liberties of Germany were
at stake and the Protestant religion in
jeopardy, they should convey to his ear
such an odious sentiment as neutrality, and
that the citizens of Frankfort should talk

168

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

of annual fairs, as if they regarded all
things merely as tradesmen and merchants,
rather than as men of the world with a
Christian conscience. More sternly he
went on to say that he had found the keys
to many a town and fortress from the Isle
of Rugen on the Baltic to the banks of
the Main, and knew well where to find a
key for Frankfort.

The magistrates were filled with alarm
at this, and asked for time to consult the
Elector of Mayence, their ecclesiastic sov-
ereign, but the king replied that he was
master of Aschaffenburg ; he was Elector
of Mayence ; he would give them plenary
absolution.

"The inhabitants," he said, "might de-
sire to stretch out only their little finger to
him, but he would be content with nothing
but the whole hand, that he might have
sufficient to grasp."

He then moved his army on Saxen-
hausen, a beautiful suburb of the city, and
here the magistrates met him, and after
taking the oath of fidelity opened the gates
of the city to him. The king made a
solemn public entrance into the city, lead-
169

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ing his troops with uncovered head, as a
mark of respect, and bringing in fifty-six
pieces of artillery. He was welcomed by
the magistracy to a great banquet in the
coronation hall of the imperial palace of
Braunfels. Maria Eleonora, his queen,
now joined him in Frankfort, and when
she met him was so overcome with joy
that, throwing her arms around him, she
cried, " Now is Gustavus the Great become
my prisoner !"

The next event of importance in this
victorious progress was the carrying of
Mayence, which after a short siege capitu-
lated on December i3th. On the I4th
the king celebrated his thirty-seventh birth-
day by entering Mayence with great pomp,
and took up his residence in the palace of
the elector, ordering a service of thanks-
giving for his success to be held in the
Roman Catholic Cathedral. Provisions,
artillery, and money fell into the hands of
the army. The king seized as his personal
share the library of the elector, and gave
it to Oxenstiern for one of the Swedish
universities, but, alas ! it was lost in the

Baltic.

170

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

The exhausted Swedish soldiers were
now allowed a space of rest to recuperate
their energies. On January loth the queen
arrived in Mayence and shared with Gus-
tavus for a short time the ceremonial splen-
dors of a regal court, where five German
princes and many foreign ambassadors had
come to confer with the king and transact
important negotiations with him. Among
these was the Marquis de Breze, an am-
bassador from the French court ; by his
conversation Gustavus detected something
of the truth, that Richelieu now feared him
and was trying to undermine his power.

Accordingly, he sent word to Louis XIII.
that he wished to speak with him person-
ally. The French ambassador tried to
persuade Gustavus that an interview with
Richelieu would do as well, but he replied
haughtily :

" All kings are equal. My predecessors
have never given place to the Kings of
France. If your master thinks fit to de-
spatch the cardinal half way, I will send
some of my people to treat with him, but
I will admit of no superiority."

When the king and queen left Mayence,
171

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

in mid-February, Gustavus had had a new
citadel built at the confluence of the Rhine
and Main, which was called at first " Gus-
tavusburg," but in after days lapsed into
" Pfaffenraube" (Priest-plunder). A lion
of marble on a high marble pillar is near
Mayence, holding a naked sword in his
paw and wearing a helmet on his head, to
mark the spot where the " Lion of the
North" crossed the great river of Germany.

During February Kreutznach in the
Palatinate, one of the strongest castles in
Germany, and the town of Ulm surren-
dered to the king.

Leaving Oxenstiern, his minister and
friend, to protect his conquests on the
Rhine and Main, Gustavus began his ad-
vance against the enemy March 4, 1632,
with an army — including his allies' forces
— of one hundred thousand infantry and
forty thousand cavalry under arms. The
Catholic League had been extremely active
during the months since the defeat of Tilly
at Breitenfeld and Leipzig, and had raised
even larger forces.

By the capture of Donauworth it was
evident to Tilly that Gustavus' s next move
172

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

was to be towards Bavaria, for he was now
master of the right bank of the Danube.
Accordingly, after destroying all the
bridges in the vicinity, Tilly intrenched
himself in a strong position on the other
side of the River Lech. Numerous garri-
sons defended the river as far as Augs-
burg. The Bavarian elector shut himself
up in Tilly* s camp, feeling that the issue
of the coming battle must decide everything
for him.

The Lech, in the month of March, is
swollen to a great torrent by the melting
snows from the Tyrol, and dashes furiously
between high, steep banks. The officers
of Gustavus considered it impossible to
effect a crossing and urged him not to try
it. But he exclaimed to Horn, —

"What! Have we crossed the Baltic
and so many great rivers of Germany, and
shall we now for this Lech, this rivulet,
abandon our enterprise !"

He had made the discovery that his side
of the river was higher by eleven feet than
the opposite bank, which would greatly
favor his cannon. He immediately took
advantage of this by having three batteries
173

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

erected on the spot where the left bank of
the Lech forms an angle opposite its right.
Here seventy-two pieces kept up a con-
stant cannonade on the enemy.

He had now to invent a bridge that
would cross the torrent, and also think of
means to distract the enemy from noticing
its construction. He made a strong set
of trestles of various heights and with un-
equal feet, so that they would stand up-
right on the uneven bed of the river ; these
were secured in their places by strong
piles driven into the river-bed. Planks
were then nailed to the trestles. While
this went on, the cannonade drowned the
noise of the hammers and hatchets ; one
thousand musketeers lined the Swedish
bank and kept the Imperialist soldiers from
coming near enough to discover the work,
while a thick smoke, made by burning
wood and wet straw, hid the workmen for
the most part.

Before daybreak the bridge was finished
and an army of engineers and soldiers
selected by the king soon crossed it and
threw up a substantial breastwork.

Tilly saw his Toes intrenched on his own
174

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

side of the river and, under the tremendous
firing of the guns from the higher bank,
was utterly powerless to keep them from
coming. For thirty-six hours the cannon-
ade went on, the king standing most of
the time at the foot of the bridge and
sometimes acting as gunner himself to
encourage his men. The Imperialists
made a desperate effort to seize the bridge,
but a large number were cut down in the
attempt.

Finally, Tilly, whose courage was heroic
throughout the day, fell with a shattered
thigh, and had to be borne away. Maxi-
milian, the Bavarian duke, now precipi-
tately abandoned his impregnable position
and moved the army quietly away to
Ingolstadt.

When Gustavus next day found the
camp vacant his astonishment was great :

" Had I been the sovereign of Bavaria,"
he cried, " never, though a cannon-ball had
taken away my beard and chin, — never
would I have quitted a post like this and
laid my states open to the enemy."

Bavaria, indeed, lay open to the con-
queror ; before occupying it, however, he

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

rescued the Protestant town of Augsburg
from the Bavarian yoke, Augsburg being
in his eyes a special object of veneration
on account of the famous " Confession" —
the place "from whence the law first pro-
ceeded from Sion." Augsburg, indeed, at
first resisted him, but when he saw the
dread devastation that his guns began to
make on its beautiful buildings he stopped
them and insisted on an interview with the
governor, who, seeing the hopelessness of
resistance, yielded.

Tilly died in Ingolstadt, the Elector of
Bavaria sitting by his bedside. He ad-
jured Maximilian to keep Ingolstadt with
all his powers against Gustavus and to
seize Ratisbon at once, begged him never
to break his alliance with the emperor,
and besought him to appoint General Gratz
in his place. " He will conduct your troops
with reputation, and, as he knows Wallen-
stein, will traverse the designs of that in-
solent man. Oh," he sighed, "would that
I had expired at Leipzig and not survived
my fame !"

So died Tilly, bigoted, merciless, cruel,
but nevertheless faithful and zealous to his
176

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

last breath in defence of his religion and
the League.

Ingolstadt was a fortress considered
impregnable ; it had never been conquered.
Gustavus had determined to take it, and
made a partial investment only, for on one
side of it was the whole Bavarian army
under Maximilian.

While riding about the walls one day and
going very near to take observations, on
account of his short sight, a twenty-four
pounder killed his horse — the favorite " flea-
bitten" steed — under him ; he rose tran-
quilly and, mounting another horse, con-
tinued his reconnoitring. In camp in the
evening his generals in a body protested
against his risking so valuable a life in this
way ; but he replied that he had a foolish
sort of a fancy which always tempted him
to imagine that he could see better for
himself than others could, and that his
sense of God's providence gave him the
firm assurance that he had other assistance
in store for so just a cause than the preca-
rious existence of one Gustavus Adolphus.

Within a few days news came that the
Bavarian troops had taken the Imperial

» 177

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

town of Ratisbon, and this caused a change
in the king's plans ; he had spent eight days
on Ingolstadt, but he now suddenly aban-
doned it, because it would have been of no
special advantage to him without Ratisbon
in his scheme of cutting off Maximilian
from Bohemia.

Munich was his next objective point, and
he now proceeded into the interior of
Bavaria, where Mosburg, Landshut, all the
Bishopric of Freysingen, surrendered to
him. But the Bavarians looked upon Prot-
estants as children of hell. Soldiers who
did not believe in the Pope were to them
accursed monsters. When they succeeded
in capturing a Swedish straggler they put
him to death with tortures the most re-
fined and prolonged. When the Swedish
army came upon mutilated bodies of their
comrades they took vengeance into their
own hands, but never by consent of
Gustavus.

His approach to Munich threw the capital
into an agony of terror. It had no de-
fenders, and they feared that the treatment
his soldiers had met at the hands of the

country-people might lead him to use his
178

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

power cruelly. Some Germans in his army
begged to be allowed to repeat here the
sacking of Magdeburg, but such a low
revenge was impossible to the king. When
the magistracy sent to implore his clemency,
he answered that if they submitted readily
and with good grace, care should be taken
that no man should suffer with respect to
life, liberty, or religion. Only one act of
questionable taste accompanied his public
entry, and that was the presence of a
monkey in the procession — a monkey with
a shaven crown and in a Capuchin's dress,
with a rosary in his paw. One hopes that
the king was not responsible for this.

He found an abandoned palace : the
elector's treasures had been removed.
There were left, though, many fine can-
vases by Flemish and Italian masters.
His officers urged the king to plunder or
destroy these, but he said : " Let us not
imitate our ancestors, the Goths and Van-
dals, who destroyed everything belonging
to the fine arts, which has left our nation
a proverb and a byword of contempt with
posterity for acts of this wanton barbarity."

He had evidently forgotten the earnest
179

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

request of Charles I. for " pictures and
statues."

The construction of the palace — a mag-
nificent building — caused the king to ex-
press great admiration: he asked the
steward the name of the architect. " He
is no other than the^elector himself," was the
reply. " I should like to have this archi-
tect," replied the king, "to send him to
Stockholm." "That," said the steward,
"he will take care to avoid."

The guns in the arsenal had been buried
so carefully, that they would not have been
discovered if it had not been for a treach-
erous insider, who told the secret. " Arise
from the dead," cried the king, "and come
to judgment !" and one hundred and forty
pieces of artillery were dug up, a large
sum of gold being found in one of them.

Appointing the Scotchman Hepburn to
the post of Governor of Munich, Gustavus
soon started forth with his army.

Meanwhile Maximilian, although be-
sought by his Bavarians to come and de-
liver them from the Swedes, could not
resolve to risk a battle. The wonderful
victories of Gustavus had indeed a para-

180

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

lyzing effect upon the country. As yet no
one had been found capable of resisting
him. Richelieu himself was horror-stricken
at the power he had helped to raise. It
was expected in France that an invasion
of Swedes would be the natural continua-
tion of the Rhine conquests ; it was said
that Gustavus would not rest until he had
made Protestantism compulsory through-
out Europe. Nothing less than the com-
mand of the German Empire was supposed
to be his ultimate aim.

There is no doubt that his ambitions
steadily enlarged themselves, but there is
nothing to prove that he contemplated
supplanting Ferdinand. His enemies were
disheartened. Ferdinand was now brought
to the pass of abjectly begging Wallen-
stein to resume his command, and Wallen-
stein was assuming airs of indifference and
allowing himself to be persuaded only with
great pressure.

This extraordinary man was the son of
a Moravian baron of the ancient race of
Waldstein. As a youth he was notably
proud and stubborn, ambitious, and con-
ceited, often saying, " If I am not a prince,

181

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

I may become one.'' He fell from a very
high window whilst at the University of
Goldben and was quite unhurt, which is
said to have been the beginning of his
certainty of future greatness. He was
grossly superstitious always and entirely
an egotist. At twenty- three he married a
wealthy widow, who in a fit of jealousy
gave him a " love philter" in his wine, from
which he narrowly escaped death. Dying
in 1614, she left him a large property, and
later he married a Countess Isabelle von
Haggard, of immense fortune and of much
" beauty, piety, and virtue."

Wallenstein now began to invest his
great wealth in the purchase of confiscated
properties, and it was said that through
his knowledge of metallurgy he adulterated
the coin which he paid. At all events, his
wealth assumed fabulous dimensions, and
through his wife's relations he mingled with
the highest nobles of the empire. He
always spoke with affection of his wife, but
did not live with her nor write to her for
years at a time.

In person Wallenstein was very tall and

thin, with a yellow complexion, short red

182

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

hair, and small, twinkling eyes. His cold,
malignant gaze frightened his great troop
of servants, who nevertheless staid with
him because they were unusually well paid.
His military career had begun in his youth,
when he served in Hungary. Afterwards
he raised a body of horse at his own ex-
pense for a war against the Venetians.
On the breaking out of the war in Bohe-
mia, in 1618, he was offered the post of
general to the Bohemian forces, but adopted
the side of the sovereign in whose family
he had been brought up.

After putting down the Bohemian re-
bellion, in which Tilly had served Maxi-
milian, the emperor decided that it was
necessary for him to have a powerful army
under his own orders. Wallenstein offered
to raise an army, clothe, feed, and arm it
at his own expense, if he should be made a
field-general, an offer which the emperor
accepted and which Wallenstein carried
out.

His military activities from' this time on

are historical, as well as the details of his

cold, pompous nature. He lived like a

king, with great state, had no principles

183

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

whatever about the way he acquired wealth,
and spent it with magnificent lavishness.

At the time Ferdinand deprived him of
his command, just as Gustavus was entering
Germany, Wallenstein had become Duke
of Friedland, Sagan, Glogau, and Mecklen-
burg, and was more insolent than if he had
had royal blood in his veins. He spent an
income of three million of florins yearly, for
his armies had plundered the land for years
with great effect. He was able to control
his rage at his sudden downfall because
his Italian astrologer, Seni, who ruled him
completely, assured him that the stars
showed that a brilliant future awaited him,
exalted beyond anything he had yet known.
And so he was led on to close his career
by plots against his emperor and to meet
death by the hand of assassins.

All of Gustavus's successes were the
source of deep satisfaction to Wallenstein ;
they brought nearer his inevitable recall.

Now when Tilly was dead, and the em-
peror was beseeching him again to take
command of the Imperial troops, Wallen-
stein sent an envoy to convey the congratu-
lations of the Duke of Friedland to the
184

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

King of Sweden, and to invite his majesty
to a close alliance with him. He under-
took, in concert with Gustavus, to conquer
Bohemia and Moravia and drive the em-
peror out of Germany.

Gustavus felt that help would be very
welcome, and he seriously considered the
offer, but he could not bring himself to
believe in a success promised by such an
unscrupulous adventurer, who so willingly
offered to become a traitor. He courte-
ously refused, and Wallenstein accepted
the emperor's offer of chief command with
a salary amounting to the value of one
hundred and eight thousand pounds per
annum. He demanded that he should
have uncontrolled command of the German
armies of Austria and Spain, with unlimi-
ted power to reward and punish. Neither
the King of Hungary (to whom the em-
peror had wished to give the highest com-
mand) nor the emperor himself was ever
to appear in his army or exercise the
slightest authority in it. No commission
or pension was to be granted without
Wallenstein' s approval. An Imperial

hereditary estate in Austria was to be
185

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

assigned to him. As the reward of suc-
cess in the field he should be made lord
paramount over the conquered countries,
and all conquests and confiscations should
be placed entirely at his disposal. All
means and moneys for carrying on the war
must be solely at his command.

The ambassador to whom he made these
terms suggested that the emperor must
have some control over his armies, and
that the young King of Hungary should
at least be allowed to study the art of war
with Wallenstein, but the reply was :
" Never will I submit to any colleague in
my office ; no, not even if it were God
Himself with whom I should have to share
my command." In his extremity the empe-
ror accepted these conditions, April 15, 1632.

Although an avowed Jesuit, Wallenstein
had no religious scruples whatever, and
the Catholics feared and hated him as
much as the Protestants. The gorgeous
luxury of his surroundings was apparently
only designed to impress the world ; he
was not a sensualist, but seems to have
been actuated only by an insane love of
power. Soldiers flocked to his standard

1 86

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

and worshipped the mighty warrior who
rewarded them with ceaseless plunder, but
the princes, nobles, and peasantry of the
countries through which he passed were
left with a blight upon them. He seemed
to be unable to see in a country any
reasons for industrial prosperity or for
conserving wholesome conditions of any
sort; he was a brave, fearless leader —
after that, a robber, and nothing else.

He distributed enormous sums among
his favorites, and the amount he spent in
corrupting the members of the Imperial
Court was still greater. The height to
which he raised the Imperial authority
astonished even the emperor ; but his de-
sign unquestionably was, that his sovereign
should stand in fear of no one in all Ger-
many besides himself, the source and en-
gine of his despotic power. He cared
nothing, however, himself, for popularity
from his equals, and less for the detestation
of the people or the complaints of the
sovereigns, but was ready to bid a general
defiance to all consequences.

Wallenstein raised his army. From
Italy, Scotland, Ireland, as well as from
187

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

every part of Germany, men flocked to
him in thousands who cared little for
country or religion, but were attracted by
the prospects of plunder and of distinction
under the renowned soldier who had made
himself a dictator.

In May, 1632, his organization was com-
plete. He began by driving Gustavus's
Saxon allies out of Bohemia, while Pap-
penheim scourged the Rhine country.
Then he directed his forces upon rich
Protestant Nuremberg.

Gustavus, before he could get there,
threw himself into Nuremberg and forti-
fied it, and then, gathering his army to-
gether, prepared to give battle to Wallen-
stein. But the latter had made up his
mind to starve out Gustavus. With his
own light cavalry, superior in number to
that of the Swedes, he could more readily
obtain supplies than they.

Forming a huge camp on an eminence
overlooking Nuremberg, he prepared stol-
idly to wait until the king should be forced
to go. At the end of June the camp was
finished, and Gustavus held out until Sep-
tember.

1 88

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

His men were starving and dying, disci-
pline had become relaxed, even his gen-
erals becoming cruel and rapacious. On
September 3d he had led his men against
Wallenstein's intrenchments, but was
forced to retire. A few days later he
left Nuremberg, providing it with a garri-
son, although he had lost through battle,
disease, and starvation nearly twenty thou-
sand men. Wallenstein's loss in the same
time was thirty-six thousand. No attempt
at pursuit was made by Wallenstein.
Turning north into Saxony, he proceeded
to choose a position between the Elbe and
the Saale, where he might intrench him-
self for the winter and carry on what to
him was one of the most necessary features
of a campaign — the sending of bands of
marauders and requisitioners through the
country

He also had in mind detaching the Saxon
elector from his alliance with Gustavus, this
vacillating prince having shown symptoms
of yielding to the great furore caused by
Wallenstein's resumption of power.

Gustavus determined that he should not

lose Saxony by want of decision. Sum-
189

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

moning Oxenstiern and Bernhard of Saxe-
Weimar to his aid, he forced his army with
all speed through Thuringia, and before
Wallenstein could recover from his aston-
ishment he seized both Erfurt arid Naum-
burg. At Erfurt he said farewell to his
queen, who never saw his face again until
he was in his coffin at Weissenfels.

The weather had become so bitterly cold
that Wallenstein had expected no further
advances from Gustavus during the win-
ter. He was preparing to intrench him-
self between Merseburg and Torgau.
He had sent Pappenheim again to the
Rhineland. Gustavus took advantage of
this division and resolved to fight before
Pappenheim could return to re-enforce his
adversary. Wallenstein sent messenger
after messenger to bring back Pappen-
heim, and hastily throwing up intrench-
ments, he awaited the onslaught of the
Swedish king at the village of Lutzen,
November 6th.

On the Southern side of the large high-
way leading from Lutzen to Leipzig lay the
Swedes ; to the north, the Imperialists.

Two ditches ran by the sides of this road,
190

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

and some old willow-trees bordered it.
The deep, rich mould of the soil is heavy
for horse and foot. On Wallenstein's
right was a hill where a group of wind-
mills waved their arms.

On the evening of the 5th the Duke of
Friedland had ordered his men to deepen
and widen the ditches, and he planted two
large batteries on the windmill hill. Gus-
tavus had passed the night in his coach
with the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, for he
owned neither tent nor field equipage.
He had ordered his army to be ready two
hours before daylight, but there was so
solid a fog that the darkness was intense,
and not a step could be taken. Gustavus
had his chaplain perform divine service
while waiting. He never forgot, it was said,
either the time to pray or the time to pay
— never leaving his men's wages in arrears.
He would take no breakfast and declined
to put on his steel breastplate, as a wound
he had received made it uncomfortable.
He was clad in a new plain cloth doublet
and an elk-skin surtout.

Riding along the ranks, he encouraged

each regiment, addressing Swedes and
191

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Germans in their respective tongues, and
urging all to valor and steadfastness.
"God with us!" was the rallying-cry of
the Swedes. " Jesu Maria !" was the shout
of the Imperialists.

The morning wore on, as the soldiers
waited still in impenetrable darkness. At
one time Gustavus threw himself on his
knees and began a hymn, the military band
accompanying him. His terrible weeks at
Nuremberg and the hardships of the late
toilsome march had seemed to bring out
more strongly than ever the fervent piety
of his nature. When, on his arrival a few
days before at Naumburg, the people had
rushed from all the country round to see
him, and had prayed on their knees for the
favor of touching the hem of his garment
or his sword in its scabbard, he was
touched by this innocent worship, but he
was moved to say to those with him :
" Does it not seem as if this people would
deify me ? Our affairs go on well without
doubt, but I much fear that Divine ven-
geance will punish me for this rash mock-
ery, and soon convince the foolish multi-
tude of my weak mortality."
192

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

Towards eleven o'clock the fog began
to lighten and the enemies could see each
other, while the Swedes beheld the flames
of Lutzen, set on fire by Wallenstein that
he might not be flanked on that side.

Gustavus now mounted his horse and
drew his sword for action, placing himself
at the head of the right wing. Wallen-
stein opened the attack with a tremendous
fire of musketry and artillery, with which
Gustavus's leather guns found it hard to
cope. The ditches of the road made a
formidable obstacle to the Swedish cavalry,
being lined with musketeers. But at
length the Swedish musketeers cleared
the others away. The horsemen, how-
ever, under the heavy firing, now seemed
to find the ditches impassable ; they hesi-
tated before them, whereupon Gustavus
dashed forward to lead them across.

"If," said he sternly, "after having
passed so many rivers, scaled so many
walls, and fought so many battles, your
old courage fails you, stand still but for a
moment and see your master die in the
manner we all ought to be ready to do."

He leaped the ditch, and they were after
13 193

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

him like the wind, urging him to spare his
invaluable life and promising to do every-
thing. On the other side of the road and
ditches he observed three dark masses of
Imperial cuirassiers clad in iron, and turn-
ing to a colonel said :

" Charge me those black fellows, for
they are men that will undo us — as for the
Croats, I mind them not."

The royal order was at once executed,
but the Croats suddenly swept down upon
the Swedish baggage and actually reached
the king's coach, which, however, they
failed to capture.

Both sides fought desperately ; it had
to be decided whether it was Gustavus's
genius that had won at the battle of the
Lech and at Leipzig, or if Tilly's want of
skill had been the only cause. On this
day Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland, had
to justify the emperor's confidence and the
enormous demands he had made upon it.
Each soldier of each side seemed to feel
that the honor and success of his chieftain
depended solely on his individual efforts.

The Swedes advanced with such velocity

and force that the first, second, and third
194

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

Imperial brigades were forced to fly ; but
Wallenstein stopped the fugitives. Sup-
ported by three ranks of cavalry, the
beaten brigades formed a new front to the
Swedes and struck furiously into their
ranks. A murderous series of combats
then began ; there was no space for even
loading muskets — they fought wildly with
sword and pike. At last the Swedes, ex-
hausted, withdrew to the other side of the
ditches, abandoning a battery they had
gained.

In the meantime the king, at the head
of his right wing, had attacked the enemy's
left. His splendidly powerful cuirassiers
of Finland had easily routed all the Croats
and Poles covering this wing, and their
flight spread confusion among the rest of
the cavalry. But he then received the
news that his infantry had retired, and that
his left wing, under the heavy fire of the
windmill hill, was about to yield.

Ordering Horn to pursue the wing which
he had just defeated, he turned to fly to
the assistance of his own men. His horse
carried him so swiftly that no one kept up
with him but the Duke of Lauenburg.
195

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

He galloped straight to the place where
his men were being assailed with the great-
est fury, and his nearsightedness led him
too near. An Imperialist corporal noticed
that all gave way before him with great
respect, and shouted to a musketeer :

" Fire at him ! That must be a man of
distinction !" and the king's left arm was
shattered.

He begged Lauenburg to help him to a
place of safety, but the next moment he
was shot in the back. Turning to Lauen-
burg he said :

" Brother, I have enough ; seek only to
save your own life."

As he spoke he fell to the ground, where
a volley of other shots pierced him.

A desperate struggle still took place
over him. A German page, refusing to
tell the royal rank of his master, was mor-
tally shot. But Gustavus still had life
enough to say :

"I am the King of Sweden, and seal
with my blood the Protestant religion and
the liberties of Germany." Then he mur-
mured : "My God! Alas! my poor

queen !"

196

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

For a long time the Duke of Lauenburg
was accused of assassinating the king, and
there is a great deal to be said in support
of such a charge. Among the Spanish
archives were found papers showing that
there was a plot in progress to kill Gus-
tavus. Still, it is conceivable that his
death was caused by the ordinary chances
of war.

It was the king's charger, galloping into
the Swedish lines covered with blood, that
brought the news of the king's death.
The Swedish cavalry came with furious
speed to the place to rescue the precious
remains of their king. A great conflict
raged around his dead body until it was
heaped with the slain. The dreadful news,
spreading through the Swedish army,
inflamed their courage to desperation ;
neither life nor death mattered to them
now ; the Yellow Guard of the king was
nearly cut to pieces.

Bernhard, Duke of Weimar, a warrior
of great skill and courage, took command
of the army. The Swedish regiments
under General Horn completely defeated
the enemy's left wing, took possession of
197-

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the windmill hill, and turned Wallenstein's
cannon against him. The Swedish centre
advanced and carried the battery again,
and while the enemy's resistance grew
more feeble, their powder-wagons blew up
with fearful roars. Their courage seemed
to give way, and victory was assured to
the Swedes.

Then Pappenheim arrived at the head of
his cuirassiers and dragoons, and there was
a new battle to fight. This unexpected
re-enforcement renewed and fired the
courage of the Imperialists. Wallenstein
seized the favorable moment to form his
lines again. Again he drove the Swedes
back and recaptured his battery. Every
man of the Yellow Regiment, which had
most distinguished itself on the side of the
Swedish infantry, lay dead in the order in
which he had fought.

The Blue Regiment also had been blotted
out by a terrific charge of the Austrian
horse under Count Piccolomini, who had,
during the charge, seven horses shot under
him, and was hit in six places.

While the worst of the conflict was
going on, Wallenstein rode through it with
198

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

cold intrepidity ; men and horses fell thick
around him and his mantle was full of
bullet-holes, but he escaped unhurt.

Pappenheim was wounded in the thigh,
and the next moment a musket-ball tore
his chest. He felt that he had got his
death-blow, but was able to speak cheer-
fully to his men, who carried him away in
his coach to Leipzig. He was replaced
by Hoik.

Duke Bernhard re-formed his men and
the fight went on with a stubborn fury that
nothing could assuage. Neither side would
be beaten. Again and again the Swedes
were forced back ; again and again they
rallied and drove back their antagonists.

Ten leaders on each side had fallen.
The Imperial side finally weakened with
the loss of its generals. At nightfall the
Swedes formed all their broken regiments
into one dense mass, made their final move-
ment across the ditches, captured the
battery, and turned its guns on the enemy.

Confused as the Imperialists had become,
they still fought. The bloody struggle
went on until it was too dark to see any-
thing ; both armies then left the field, each
199

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

claiming the victory. Pappenheim's army
left their guns, being without a general
and having no orders. It was said that
after Pappenheim was borne away Wallen-
stein betook himself to a sedan chair and
did not again expose himself to the enemy.
He was reproached for this afterwards by
his army, who also said that he retired from
the field before it was necessary. Pro-
ceeding to Leipzig, he witnessed the death
of Pappenheim. Piccolomini was the last
of his side in the field.

The Duke of Friedland insisted on hav-
Lig the Te Deum sung in honor of a
victory in the churches, but this deceived
no one. It was no victory, but a defeat
from which he never recovered. While
at Leipzig he accused his officers of coward-
ice, and after a court-martial had several
of the bravest of them disgraced or shot.
But neither this nor a few inconsequent
successes were sufficient to restore the pres-
tige that Wallenstein had lost at Lutzen.

Nearly one hundred thousand corpses
remained unburied on the field, and the
plain all around was covered with wounded
and dying.

200

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

It was not until the next day that the
Swedes were able to find the body of their
king ; it was almost unrecognizable with
blood and wounds, trampled by horses'
hoofs, and naked. A huge stone was rolled
by the soldiers as near as they could to the
place where the royal corpse was found ;
it still rests where they left it, and is known
as "The Stone of the Swede."

The Imperialists had stripped the body
in their eagerness to preserve relics of the
great Gustavus. Piccolomini sent his buff
waistcoat to the emperor. His rings,
spurs, and gold chain are still in possession
of various families. A famous turquoise
is supposed to have passed into the hands
of a Roman Catholic bishop who desired a
trophy of "Anti-Christ," as Gustavus was
called by the Catholics.

The body was carried from the field in
solemn state amid a procession of the
whole army. It was taken to Weissenfels,
and from thence to Sweden. There the
whole nation mourned, knowing well that
they should not have another monarch like
Gustavus Adolphus.

Nothing has ever transpired to change

201

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the world's opinion of him as one of the
world's greatest and best. Although the
Thirty Years' War was not concluded for
several years after his death, yet he was,
nevertheless, the cause of its cessation.
Through his agency alone the cause of the
Protestant belief triumphed, and the effects
of the great upheaval of the Reformation
were not allowed to be obliterated in Ger-
many.

Professor Smyth said of him : " It is
fortunate when the high courage and ac-
tivity of which the human character is capa-
ble are tempered with a sense of justice,
wisdom, and benevolence ; when he who
leads thousands to the field has sensibility
enough to feel the responsibility of his
awful trust, and wisdom enough to take
care that he directs against its proper ob-
jects alone the afflicting storm of human
devastation. It is not always that the
great and high endowments of courage
and sagacity are so united with other high
qualities as to present to the historian at
once a Christian, a soldier, and a statesman.
Yet such was Gustavus Adolphus, a hero
deserving of the name, perfectly distin-

BATTLE OF LUTZEN

guishable from those who have assumed
the honors that belong to it — the mere mili-
tary executioners with whom every age has
been infested."

Cust says : " Gustavus Adolphus is
thought to have been the first sovereign
who set the example of a standing army.
The feudal association of barons with their
retainers had given way in the previous
century to a set of military adventurers,
who made war a profession to gratify their
license and their acquisitiveness, and who
were commissioned by kings and leaders
to collect together the assassins of Europe.

" These constituted at the very time of
the Thirty Years' War the unprincipled
and insatiate legions who harried Germany,
who, without much discipline, were con-
tinually dissipated by the first disaster and
collected together again, as it were from
the four winds of heaven, to cover the face
of the land again and again with terror,
devastation, and confusion.

" Gustavus, who had witnessed this from
afar, or experienced it in his Polish wars,
had in him that spirit of organization and

order which signally distinguished him
203

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

above every great leader who preceded
him. He saw that a well-disciplined force
of men to be commanded by a superior
class of officers of high honor and intel-
ligence, and who should constitute an
armed body that might obtain the dignity
of a profession of arms, would be more
efficient and a cheaper defence of nations
than the hap-hazard assembling of mere
bloodhounds, and he first executed the
project of having a force of eighty thou-
sand men, part in activity and part in re-
serve, who should be constantly maintained
well-armed, well-clothed, well-fed, and well-
disciplined."

204

THE STORMING OF
BADAJOS.

IN studying the campaign in the Penin-
sula, one must remember first of all
that the man who was made Earl of Wel-
lington for the victory at Ciudad Rodrigues
was not the great potentiality who, as the
Duke of Wellington, influenced England
after Waterloo. During the Peninsula
campaign Wellington was afflicted at all
times by a bitter and suspicious Parliament
at home. They had no faith in him, and
they strenuously objected to furnishing
him with money and supplies. Welling-
ton worked with his hands tied behind him
against the eager and confident armies of
France. We ourselves can read in our
more frank annals how a disgruntled part
of Congress was forever wishing to turn
Washington out of his position as head of
the colonial forces. Parliament doled sup-
plies to Wellington with so niggardly a

hand that again and again he was forced
205

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

to stop operations for the want of pro-
visions and arms. At one time he actually
had been told to send home the transports
in order to save the expense of keeping
them at Lisbon. The warfare in Parlia-
ment was not deadly, but it was more
acrimonious than the warfare in the Penin-
sula. Moreover, the assistance to his arms
from Portugal was so wavering, uncertain,
and dubious that he could place no faith
in it. The French marshals, Soult and
Marmont, had a force of nearly one hun-
dred thousand men.

Wellington held Lisbon, but if he wished
to move in Portugal there always frowned
upon him the fortified city of Badajos.
But finally there came his chance to take
it, if it could be taken in a rush, while
Soult and Marmont were widely separated
and Badajos was left in a very confident
isolation.

Badajos lies in Spain, five miles from the
Portuguese frontier. It was the key of a
situation. Wellington's chance was to
strike at Badajos before the two French
marshals could combine and crush him.

His task was both in front of him and be-
206

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

hind him. He lacked transport ; he lacked
food for the men ; the soldiers were eating
cassava root instead of bread ; the bullocks
were weak and emaciated. All this was
the doings of the Parliament at home.
But Wellington knew that the moment to
strike had come, and he seems to have
hesitated very little. Placing no faith in
the tongues of the Portuguese, he made
his plans with all possible secrecy. The
guns for the siege were loaded on board
the transports at Lisbon and consigned to
a fictitious address. But in the river Sadao
they were placed upon smaller vessels, and
finally they were again landed and drawn
by bullocks to Eloas, a post in the posses-
sion of the allies. Having stationed two-
thirds of his force under General Graham
and General Hill to prevent a most prob-
able interference by Soult and Marmont,
Wellington advanced, reaching Eloas on
the nth of March, 1812. He had made
the most incredible exertions. The stu-
pidity of the Portuguese had vied with the
stupidity of the government at home.
Wellington had been carrying the prepara-
tion for the campaign upon his own shoul-
207

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ders. If he was to win Badajos, he was
to win it with no help save that from gal-
lant and trustworthy subordinates. He
was ill with it. Even his strangely steel-
like nature had bent beneath the trouble
of preparation amid such indifference.
But on March i6th Beresford with three
divisions crossed the Guadiana on pon-
toons and flying bridges, drove in the ene-
my's outposts, and invested Badajos.

At the time of the investment the garri-
son was composed of five thousand French,
Hessians, and Spaniards. Spain had al-
ways considered this city a most important
barrier against any attack through Portu-
gal. A Moorish castle stood three hun-
dred feet above the level of the plain.
Bastions and fortresses enwrapped the
town. Even the Cathedral was bomb-
proof. The Guadiana was crossed by a
magnificent bridge, and on the farther
shore the head of this bridge was strongly
fortified.

Wellington's troops encamped to the
east of the town. It was finally decided
first to attack the bastion of Trinidad.

The French commander had strengthened
208

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

all his defences, and by damming a stream
had seriously obstructed Wellington's op-
erations. Parts of his force were con-
fronted by an artificial lake two hundred
yards in width.

The red coats of the English soldiers
were now faded to the yellow brown of
fox fur. All the military finery of the be-
ginning of the century was tarnished and
torn. But it was an exceedingly hard-
bitten army, certain of its leaders, de-
spising the enemy, full of ferocious desire
for battle.

Perhaps the bastion of Trinidad was
chosen because it was the nearest to the
intrenchments of the allies. In those days
the frontal attack was possible of success.
On the night of the i;th of March the
British broke ground within one hundred
and sixty yards of Fort Picerina. The
sound of the digging was muffled by the
roar of a great equinoctial storm. The
French were only made wise by the day-
light, but in the meantime the allies had
completed a trench six hundred yards long
and three feet deep, and with a communi-
cation four thousand feet in length. The
14 209

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

French announced their discovery by a
rattle of musketry, but the allies kept on
with their digging, while general officers
wrapped in their long cloaks paced to and
fro directing the work.

The situation did not please the French
general at all. He knew that something
must be done to counteract the activity of
the besiegers. He was in command of a
very spirited garrison. On the night of
the i Qth a sortie was made from the Tala-
vera Gate by both cavalry and infantry.
The infantry began to demolish the trench
of the allies. The cavalry divided itself
into two parts and went through a form of
sham fight which in the darkness was de-
ceptive. When challenged by the pickets,
they answered in Portuguese, and thus
succeeded in galloping a long way behind
the trenches, where they cut down a num-
ber of men before their identity was discov-
ered and they were beaten back. General
Phillipon, the French commander, had
offered a reward for every captured in-
trenching tool. Thus the French infantry
of the sortie devoted itself largely to mak-
ing a collection of picks and spades.

210

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

Men must have risked themselves with
great audacity for this reward, since they
left three hundred dead on the field, but
succeeded in carrying off a great number
of the intrenching tools.

Great- rain-storms now began to com-
plicate the work of the besiegers. The
trenches became mere ditches half-full of
discolored water. This condition was
partly improved by throwing in bags of
sand. On the French side a curious de-
vice had been employed as a means of
communication between the gate of the
Trinidad bastion and Fort San Roque.
The French soldiers had begun to dig, but
had grown tired, so they finished by hang-
ing up a brown cloth. This to the be-
siegers' eyes was precisely like the fresh
earth of a parallel, and behind it the
French soldiers passed in safety.

Storm followed storm. The Guadiana,
swollen past all tradition by these furious
downpours, swept away the flying bridges,
sinking twelve pontoons. For several days
the army of the allies was entirely without
food, but they stuck doggedly to their
trenches, and when communication was at

211

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

last restored it was never again broken.
The weather cleared, and the army turned
grimly with renewed resolution to the
business of taking Badajos. This was in
the days of the folorn hope. There was
no question of anything but a desperate
and deadly frontal attack. The command
of the assault of Fort Picerina was given to
General Kempt. He had five hundred
men, including engineers, sappers, and
miners, and fifty men who carried axes.
At nine o'clock they marched. The night
was very dark. The fort remained silent
until the assailants were close. Then a
great fire blazed out at them. For a time
it was impossible for the men to make any
progress. The palisades seemed insur-
mountable, and the determined soldiers of
England were falling on all sides. In the
meantime there suddenly sounded the
loud, wild notes of the alarm-bells in the
besieged city, and the guns of Badajos
awakened and gave back thunder for
thunder to the batteries of the allies. The
confusion was worse than in the mad nights
on the heath in " King Lear," but amid the
thundering and the death, Kempt's fifty

212

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

men with axes walked deliberately around
Fort Picerina until they found the entrance
gate. They beat it down and rushed in.
The infantry with their bayonets followed
closely. Lieutenant Nixon of the Fifty-
second Foot (now the Second Battalion of
the Oxfordshire Light Infantry, fell almost
on the threshold, but his men ran on. The
interior of the fort became the scene of a
terrible hand-to-hand fight. All of the
English did not come in through the gate.
Some of Kempt's men now succeeded in
establishing ladders against the rampart,
and swarmed over to the help of their com-
rades. The struggle did not cease until
more than half of the little garrison were
killed. Then the commandant, Gasper
Thiery, surrendered a little remnant of
eighty-six men. Others who had not been
killed by the British had rushed out and
been drowned in the waters of that inun-
dation which had so troubled Wellington
and so pleased the French general. Phil-
lipon had estimated that the Picerina would
endure for five days, but it had been taken
in an hour, albeit one of the bloodiest hours
in the annals of a modern army.
213

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Wellington was greatly pleased. He
was now able to advance his earthworks
close to the eastern part of the town, while
his batteries played continually on the
front of Fort San Roque and the two
northern bastions, Trinidad and Santa
Maria.

But at the last of the month Wellington
was confronted by his chief fear. News
came to him that Marshal Soult was ad-
vancing rapidly from Cordova. It was now
a simple question of pushing the siege
with every ounce of energy contained in
his army. Forty-eight guns were made to
fire incessantly, and although the French
reply was destructive, the English guns
were gradually wearing away the three
great defences. By the 2d of April Trini-
dad was seriously damaged, and one flank
of Santa Maria was so far gone that Phil-
lipon set his men at work on an inner de-
fence to cut the last-named bastion off from
the city. On the night of the 2d an attack
was made on the dam of the inundation.
Two British officers and some sappers suc-
ceeded in gagging and binding the sentinel
guarding the dam, and having piled barrels
214

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

of gunpowder against it, they lighted a
slow-match and made off. But before the
spark could reach the powder the French
arrived under the shelter of the comic
brown cloth communication. The explo-
sion did not occur, and the inundation still
remained to hinder Wellington's progress.
On the 6th it was thought that three
breaches were practicable for assault, and
the resolute English general ordered the
attack to be made at once. To Picton,
destined to attach his name to the imper-
ishable fame of Waterloo, was given an
arduous task. He was to attack on the
right and scale the walls of the castle of
Badajos, which were from eighteen to
twenty-four feet high. On the left General
Walker, marching to the south, was to
make a false attack on Port Pardaleras,
but a real one on San Vincente, a bastion
on the extreme west of the town. In the
centre the Fourth Division and Welling-
ton's favorite Light Division were to march
against the breaches. The Fourth was to
move against Trinidad, and the Light Di-
vision against Santa Maria. The columns

were divided into storming and firing par-
215

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ties. The former were to enter the ditch
while the latter fired over them at the
enemy. Just before the assault was to be
sounded a French deserter brought the
intelligence that there was but one com-
munication from the castle to the town,
and Wellington decided to send against
it an entire division. Brigadier-General
Power with his semi-useless Portuguese
brigade was directed to attack the head of
the bridge and the other works on the
right of the Guadiana.

The army had now waited only for the
night. When it had come, thick mists
from the river increased the darkness. At
10 o'clock Major Wilson, of the Forty-
eighth Foot (now the First Battalion of the
Northamptonshire regiment), led a party
against Fort San Roque so suddenly and
so tempestuously that the work capitulated
almost immediately. At the castle, Gen-
eral Picton's men had placed their ladders
and swarmed up them in the face of
showers of heavy stones, logs of wood,
and crashing bullets, while at the same
time they were under a heavy fire from the
left flank. The foremost were bayoneted
216

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

when they reached the top, and the be-
sieged Frenchmen grasped the ladders
and tumbled them over with their load of
men. The air was full of wild screams as
the English fell towards the stones below.
Presently every ladder was thrown back,
and for the moment the assailants had to
run for shelter against a rain of flying mis-
siles.

In this moment of uncertainty one man,
Lieutenant Ridge, rushed out, rallying his
company. Seizing one of the abandoned
ladders, he planted it where the wall was
lower. His ladder was followed by other
ladders, and the troops scrambled with re-
vived courage after this new and intrepid
leader. The British gained a strong foot-
hold on the ramparts of the castle, and
every moment added to their strength as
Picton's men came swarming. They drove
the French through the castle and out of
the gates. They met a heavy re-enforce-
ment of the French, but after a severe
engagement they were finally and trium-
phantly in possession of the castle. Lieu-
tenant Ridge had been killed.

But at about the same time the men of the
217

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Fourth Division and of the Light Division
had played a great and tragic part in the
storming of Badajos. They moved against
the great breach in stealthy silence. All
was dark and quiet as they reached the
glacis. They hurled bags full of hay in
the ditch, placed their ladders, and the
storming parties of the Light Division, five
hundred men in all, hurried to this des-
perate attack.

But the French general had perfectly
understood that the main attacks would be
made at his three breaches, and he had
made the great breach the most impreg-
nable part of his line. The English troops,
certain that they had surprised the enemy,
were suddenly exposed by dozens of bril-
liant lights. Above them they could see
the ramparts crowded with the French.
These fire-balls made such a vivid picture
that the besieged and besiegers could gaze
upon one another's faces at distances which
amounted to nothing. There was a mo-
ment of this brilliance, and then a terrific
explosion shattered the air. Hundreds of
shells and powder-barrels went off together,

and the English already in the ditch were
218

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

literally blown to pieces. Still their com-
rades crowded after them with no definite
hesitation. The French commander had
taken the precaution to fill part of the ditch
with water from the inundation, and in it
one hundred fusiliers, men of Albuera,
were drowned.

The Fourth Division and the Light Di-
vision continued the attack upon the breach.
Across the top of it was a row of sword-
blades fitted into ponderous planks, and
these planks, chained together, were let
deep into the ground. In front of them
the slope was covered with loose planks
studded with sharp iron points. The Eng-
lish, stepping on them, rolled howling
backward, and the French yelled and fired
unceasingly.

It was too late for the English to become
aware of the hopelessness of their under-
taking. Column after column hurled them-
selves forward. Young Colonel Macleod,
of the Forty-third Foot (now the First Bat-
talion of the Oxfordshire Light Infantry),
a mere delicate boy, gathered his men
again and again and led them at the breach.

A falling soldier behind him plunged a
219

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

bayonet in his back, but still he kept on
till he was shot dead within a yard of the
line of sword-blades.

For two hours the besiegers were tire-
lessly striving to achieve the impossible,
while the French taunted them from the
ramparts.

"Why do you not come into Badajos?"

Meanwhile, Captain Nicholas of the En-
gineers, with Lieutenant Shaw and about
one hundred men of the Forty-third Foot,
actually had passed through the breach of
the Santa Maria bastion, but once inside
they were met with such a fire that nearly
every man dropped dead. Shaw returned
almost alone.

Wellington, who had listened to these
desperate assaults and watched them as
well as he was able from a position on a
small knoll, gave orders at midnight for
the troops to retire and re-form. Two
thousand men had been slain. Dead and
mangled bodies were piled in heaps at the
entrance to the great breach, and the stench
of burning flesh and hair was said to be
insupportable.

And still, in the meantime, General

220

THE STORMING OF BADAJOS

Walker's brigade had made a feint against
Pardaleras and passed on to the bastion of
San Vincente. Here for a time everything
went wrong. The fire of the French was
frightfully accurate and concentrated.
General Walker himself simply dripped
blood ; he was a mass of wounds. His
ladders were all found to be too short.
The walls of the fortress were thirty feet
in height. However, through some lack
of staying power in the French, success at
last crowned the attack. One man clam-
bered somehow to the top of a wall and
pulled up others, until about half of the
Fourth Foot (now the King's Own Royal
Lancaster Regiment) were fairly into the
town. Walker's men took three bastions.
General Picton, severely wounded, had not
dared to risk losing the Castle, but now,
hearing the tumult of Walker's success,
he sent his men forth and thousands went
swarming through the town. Phillipon
saw that all was lost, and retreated with a
few hundred men to San Christoval. He
surrendered next morning to Lord Fitzroy
Somerset.

The English now occupied the town.

221

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

With their comrades lying stark, or per-
haps in frightful torment, in the fields
beyond the walls of Badajos, these soldiers,
who had so heroically won this immortal
victory, became the most abandoned,
drunken wretches and maniacs. Crazed
privates stood at the corners of streets and
shot everyone in sight. Everywhere were
soldiers dressed in the garb of monks, of
gentlemen at court, or mayhap wound
about with gorgeous ribbons and laces.
Jewels and plate, silks and satins, all suf-
fered a wanton destruction. Napier writes
of " shameless rapacity, brutal intemper-
ance, savage lust, cruelty and murder,
shrieks and piteous lamentations."

He further says that the horrible tumult
was never quelled. It subsided through
the weariness of the soldiers. One wishes
to inquire why the man who was ultimately
called the Iron Duke did not try to stop
this shocking business. But one remem-
bers that Wellington was a wise man, and
he did not try to stop this shocking busi-
ness because he knew that his soldiers were
out of control and that if he tried he would
fail.

222

THE BRIEF CAMPAIGN
AGAINST NEW ORLEANS

{December 14, 1824— January 8, 1815.}

THE Mississippi, broad, rapid, and sin-
ister, ceaselessly flogging its en-
wearied banks, was the last great legend of
the dreaming times when the Old World's
information of the arisen continents was
roseate but inaccurate. England, at war
with the United States, heard stories of
golden sands, bejewelled temples, fabulous
silks, the splendor of a majestic barbarian
civilization, and even if these tales were
fantastic they stood well enough as symbols
of the spinal importance of the grim Father
of Waters.

The English put together a great expe-
dition. It was the most formidable that
ever had been directed against the Ameri-
cans. It assembled in a Jamaican harbor
and at Pensacola, then a Spanish port

and technically neutral. The troops num-
223

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

bered about fourteen thousand men and
included some of the best regiments in the
British army, fresh from service in the
Peninsula under Wellington. They were
certainly not men who had formed a habit
of being beaten. Included in the expedi-
tion was a full set of civilian officials for
the government of New Orleans after its
capture.

A hundred and ten miles from the mouth
of the Mississippi, New Orleans lay trem-
bling. She had no forts or intrenchments ;
she would be at the mercy of the powerful
British force. The people believed that
the city would be sacked and burned.
They were not altogether a race full of
vigor. The peril of the situation be-
wildered them ; it did not stir them to
action.

But the spirit of energy itself arrived in
the person of Andrew Jackson. Since the
Creek War, the nation had had much
confidence in Jackson, and New Orleans
welcomed him with a great sigh of relief.
The sallow, gnarled, crusty man came ill to
his great work ; he should have been in

bed. But the amount of vim he worked
224

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

into a rather flabby community in a short
time looked like a miracle. The militia of
Louisiana were called out ; the free negroes
were armed and drilled ; convicts whose
terms had nearly expired were enlisted ;
and down from Tennessee tramped the
type of man that one always pictures as
winning the battle — the long, lank woods-
man, brown as leather, hard as nails, in-
separable from his rifle, in his head the eye
of a hawk.

The Lafitte brothers, famous pirates,
whose stronghold was not a thousand miles
from the city, threw in their lot with the
Americans. The British bid for their ser-
vices, but either the British committed the
indiscretion of not bidding enough or the
buccaneers were men of sentiment. At
any rate they accepted the American
pledge of immunity and came with their
men to the American side, where they ren-
dered great service Afterwards the Eng-
lish, their offer of treasure repulsed, some-
what severely reproved us for allowing
these men to serve in our ranks.

Martial law was proclaimed, and Jackson

kept up an exciting quarrel with the city
is 225

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

authorities at the same time that he was
working his strange army night and day in
the trenches. Captain John Coffee with
two thousand men joined from Mobile.

The British war-ships first attempted to
cross the sand-bars at the mouth of the
river and ascend the stream, but the swift
Mississippi came to meet them, and it was
as if this monster, immeasurable in power,
knew that he must defend himself. The
well-handled war-ships could not dodge
this simple strength ; even the wind refused
its help. The river won the first action.

But if the British could not ascend the
stream, they could destroy the small Ameri-
can gun-boats on the lakes below the city,
and this they did on December 1 4th with a
rather painful thoroughness. The British
were then free to land their troops on the
shores of these lakes and attempt to ap-
proach the city through miles of dismal
and sweating swamps. The decisive word
seems to have rested with Major-General
Keane. Sir George Pakenham, the com-
mander-in-chief, had not yet arrived. One
of Wellington's proud veterans was not
likely to endure any nonsensical delay
226

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

over such a business as this campaign
against a simple people who had not had
the art of war hammered into their heads
by a Napoleon. Moreover, the army was
impatient. Some of the troops had been
with Lord Ross in the taking of Wash-
ington, and they predicted something easier
than that very easy campaign. Everybody
was completely cock-sure.

On the afternoon of December 23d,
Major-General Gabrielle Villere, one of
the gaudy Creole soldiers, came to see
Jackson at head-quarters, and announced
that about two thousand British had landed
on the Villere plantation, nine miles below
the city. Jackson was still feeble, but this
news warmed the old passion in him. He
pounded the table with his fist. " By the
Eternal!" he cried, "they shall not sleep
on our soil !" All well-regulated authori-
ties make Jackson use this phrase — " By the
Eternal !" — and any reference to him hardly
would be intelligible unless one quoted the
familiar line. I suppose we should not
haggle over the matter ; historically one
oath is as good as another.

Marching orders were issued to the
227

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

troops, and the armed schooner Carolina
was ordered to drop down the river and
open fire upon the British at 7.50 in the
evening. In the meantime, Jackson re-
viewed his troops as they took the road.
He was not a good-natured man ; indeed,
he is one of the most irascible figures in his-
tory. But he knew how to speak straight
as a stick to the common man. Each corps
received some special word of advice and
encouragement.

This review was quaint. Some of the
Creole officers were very gorgeous, but
perhaps they only served to emphasize the
wildly unmilitary aspect of the procession
generally. But the woodsmen were there
with their rifles, and if the British had
beaten Napoleon's marshals, the woodsmen
had conquered the forests and the moun-
tains, and they too did not understand that
they could be whipped.

The first detachment of British troops
had come by boat through Lake Borgne
and then made a wretched march through
the swamps. Both officers and men were
in sorry plight. They had been exposed

for days to the fury of tropical rains, and
228

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

for nights to bitter frosts, without gaining
even an opportunity to dry their clothes.
But December 23d was a clear day lit by
a mildly warm sun. Arriving at Villere's
plantation on the river bank, the troops
built huge fires and then raided the country
as far as they dared, gathering a great
treasure of " fowls and hams and wine."
The feast was merry. The veteran soldier
of that day had a grand stomach, and he
made a deep inroad into Louisiana's store
of " fowls and hams and wine."

As they lay comfortably about their fires
in the evening some sharp eye detected by
the faint light of the moon a moving,
shadowy vessel on the river. She was
approaching. An officer mounted the levee
and hailed her. There was no answer.
He hailed again. The silent vessel calmly
furled her sails and swung her broadside
parallel. Then a voice shouted and a
whistling shower of grape-shot tore the
air. It was the little Carolina.

The British forces flattened themselves in
the shelter of the levee and listened to the
grape-shot go ploughing over their heads.

But they had not been long in this awk-
229

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ward position when there was a yell and a
blare of flame in the darkness. Some of
Jackson's troops had come.

Then ensued a strange conflict. The
moon, tender lady of the night, hid while
around the dying fires two forces of in-
furiated men shot, stabbed, and cut. One
remembers grimly Jackson's sentence —
" They shall not sleep on our soil." No ;
they were kept awake this night at least.

There was no concerted action on either
side. An officer gathered a handful of
men and by his voice led them through the
darkness at the enemy. If such valor and
ferocity had been introduced into the
insipid campaigns of the North, the intro-
duction would have made overwhelming
victory for one people or the other. Dawn
displayed the terrors of the fighting in the
night. In some cases an American and
an English soldier lay dead, each with his
bayonet sheathed in the other's body.
Bayonets were rare in the American ranks,
but many men carried long hunting knives.

As a matter of fact, the two forces had
been locked in a blind and desperate em-
brace. The British reported a loss of
230

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

forty-six killed, one hundred and sixty-
seven wounded, and sixty-four missing.
In this engagement the Americans suffered
more severely than in any other action of
the short campaign.

On the morning of December 24th, Sir
George Pakenham arrived with a strong
re-enforcement of men and guns. Paken-
ham was a brother-in-law of Wellington.
He had served in the Peninsula and was
accounted a fine leader. The American
schooners Carolina and Louisiana lay at
anchor in the river firing continually upon
the British camp. Pakenham caused a
battery to be planted which quickly made
short work of these vessels.

During the days following the two
armies met in several encounters which
were fiery but indecisive. One of these
meetings is called the Battle of the Bales
and Hogsheads.

Jackson employed cotton-bales in
strengthening a position, and one night
the British advanced and built a redoubt
chiefly of hogsheads containing sugar and
molasses. The cotton suffered consider-
ably from the British artillery, often igniting
231

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

and capable of being easily rolled out of
place, but the sugar and molasses behaved
very badly. The hogsheads were easily
penetrated, and they soon began to dis-
tribute sugar and molasses over the luck-
less warriors in the redoubt, so that British
soldiers died while mingling their blood
with molasses and with sugar sprinkling
down upon their wounds.

Although neither side had gained a par-
ticular advantage, the British were obliged
to retire. They had been the first disci-
plined troops to engage molasses, and they
were glad to emerge from the redoubt,
this bedraggled, sticky, and astonished
body of men.

On the opposite bank of the river a
battery to rake the British encampment
had been placed by Commander Patterson.
This battery caused Pakenham much an-
noyance and he engaged it severely with
his guns, but at the end of an hour he had
to cease firing with a loss of seventy men
and his emplacements almost in ruins.
The damage to the American works was
slight, but they had lost thirty-six in killed

and disabled.

232

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

Both sides now came to a period of
fateful thought. In the beginning the
British had spoken of a feeble people who
at first would offer a resistance of pretence
but soon subside before the victorious
colors of the British regiments. Now they
knew that they were face to face with de-
termined and skilful fighters who would
dauntlessly front any British regiment
whose colors had ever hung in glory in a
cathedral of old England. The Ameri-
cans had thought to sweep the British into
the Gulf of Mexico. But now they knew
that although their foes floundered and
blundered, although they displayed that
curious stern-lipped stupidity which is the
puzzle of many nations, they were still the
veterans of the Peninsula, the stout, un-
dismayed troops of Wellington.

Jackson moved his line fifty yards back
from his cotton bale position. Here he
built a defensive work on the northern
brink of an old saw-mill race known as the
Rodriguez Canal. The line of defence
was a mile in length. It began on the
river bank and ended in a swamp where
during the battle the Americans stood knee-
233

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

deep in mud or on floating planks and logs
moored to the trees. The main defences
of the position were built of earth, logs,
and fence-rails in some places twenty feet
thick. It barred the way to New Or-
leans.

The Americans were prepared for the
critical engagement some days before
Pakenham had completed his arrange-
ments. The Americans spent the interval
in making grape-shot out of bar-lead and
in mending whatever points in their line
needed care and work.

Pakenham' s final plan was surprisingly
simple and perhaps it was surprisingly bad.
He decided to send a heavy force across
the river to attack Patterson's annoying
battery simultaneously with the deliverance
of the main attack against Jackson's posi-
tion along the line of the Rodriguez Canal.
Why Pakenham decided to make the two
attacks simultaneously is not quite clear
at this day. Patterson's force, divided by
the brutally swift river from the main body
of the Americans, might have been con-
sidered with much reason a detached body
of troops, and Pakenham might have eaten
234

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

them at his leisure while at the same time
keeping up a great show in front of Jackson,
so that the latter would consider that some-
thing serious was imminent at the main
position.

However, Pakenham elected to make the
two attacks at the same hour, and posterity
does not perform a graceful office when it
re-generals the battles of the past.

Boats were brought from the fleet, and
with immense labor a canal was dug from
Lake Borgne to the Mississippi. For use
in fording the ditch in front of Jackson,
the troops made fascines by binding to-
gether sheaves of sugar-cane, and for the
breastwork on the far-side of the ditch
they made scaling ladders.

On January 7, 1815, Jackson stood on
the top of the tallest building within his
lines and watched the British at work. At
the same time Pakenham was in the top
of a pine-tree regarding the American
trenches. For the moment, and indefi-
nitely, it was a question of eyesight.
Jackson studied much of the force that was
to assail him ; Pakenham studied the posi-
tion which he had decided to attack. Pak-
235

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

enham's eyesight may not have been very
good.

Colonel Thornton was in command of
the troops which were to attack Patterson's
battery across the river, and a rocket was
to be sent up to tell him when to begin his
part of the general onslaught.

Pakenham advanced serenely against
the Rodriguez Canal, the breastwork, and
the American troops. One wishes to use
here a phrase inimical to military phrase-
ology. One wishes to make a distinction
between disinterested troops and troops
who are interested. The Americans were
interested troops. They faced the enemy
at the main gate of the United States.
Behind them crouched frightened thou-
sands. In reality they were defending a
continent.

As the British advanced to the attack
they made a gallant martial picture. The
motley army of American planters, woods-
men, free negroes, ex-convicts, and pirates
watched them in silence. Here tossed the
bonnets of a fierce battalion of High-
landers ; here marched a bottle-green regi-
ment, the officers wearing furred cloaks
236

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

and crimson sashes ; here was a steady line
of blazing red coats. Everywhere rode
the general officers in their cocked hats,
their short red coats with golden epaulettes
and embroideries, their skin-tight white
breeches, their high black boots. The
ranks were kept locked in the manner of
that day. It was like a grand review.

But the grandeur was extremely brief.
The force was well within range of the
American guns when Pakenham made the
terrible discovery that his orders had been
neglected : there was neither fascine nor
ladder on the field. In a storm of rage
and grief the British general turned to the
guilty officer and bade him take his men
back and fetch them. When, however, the
ladders and fascines had been brought into
the field, a hot infantry engagement had
already begun and the bearers, becom-
ing wildly rattled, scattered them on the
ground.

It was now that Sir George Pakenham
displayed that quality of his nation which
in another place I have called stern-lipped
stupidity. It was an absolute certainty
that Jackson's position could not be carried
237

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

without the help of fascines and ladders ;
it was doubtful if it could be carried in any
case.

But Sir George Pakenham ordered a
general charge. His troops responded
desperately. They flung themselves for-
ward in the face of a storm of bullets
aimed usually with deadly precision. Back
of their rampart, the Americans, at once
furious and cool, shot with the quickness
of aim and yet with the finished accuracy
of life-long hunters. The British army
was being mauled and mangled out of all
resemblance to the force that had landed
in December.

Sir George Pakenham, proud, heart-
broken, frenzied man, rode full tilt at the
head of rush after rush. And his men
followed him to their death. On the right,
a major and a lieutenant succeeded in
crossing the ditch. The two officers
mounted the breastwork but the major
fell immediately. The lieutenant imperi-
ously demanded the swords of the Ameri-
can officers present. But they said: "Look
behind you." He looked behind him and

saw that the men whom he had supposed
238

THE NEW ORLEANS CAMPAIGN

were at his back had all vanished as if the
earth had yawned for them.

The lieutenant was taken prisoner and
so he does not count, but the dead body of
the major as it fell and rolled within the
American breastwork established the high-
water mark of the British advance upon
New Orleans.

Sir George Pakenham seemed to be
asking for death, and presently it came to
him. His body was carried from the field.
General Gibbs was mortally wounded.
General Keane was seriously wounded.
Left without leaders, the British troops
began a retreat. This retreat was soon a
mad runaway, but General Lambert with a
strong reserve stepped between the beaten
battalions and their foes. The battle had
lasted twenty-five minutes.

Jackson's force, armed and unarmed,
was four thousand two hundred and sixty-
four. During the whole campaign he lost
three hundred and thirty-three. In the
final action he lost four killed, thirteen
wounded. The British force in action was
about eight thousand men. The British
lost some nine hundred killed, fourteen
239

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

hundred wounded, and five hundred pris-
oners.

Thornton finally succeeded in reaching
and capturing the battery on the other side
of the river, but he was too late. Some
of the British war-ships finally succeeded
in crossing the bars, but they were too late.
General Lambert, now in command, de-
cided to withdraw, and the expedition sailed
away.

Peace had been signed at Ghent on De-
cember 24, 1814. The real Battle of New
Orleans was fought on January 8, 1815.

240

THE BATTLE OF
SOLFERINO

"TTALY," said Prince Metternich, "is
A merely a geographical expression. "
The sneer was justified ; the storied pen-
insula was cut up into little principalities
for little princes of the houses of Hapsburg
and Bourbon. The millions who spoke a
common tongue and cherished common
traditions of a glorious past were ruled as
cynically as if they were so many cattle.
The map of Italy for 1859 is a crazy-quilt
of many patches. How has it come about,
then, that the map of Italy for 1863 is of
one uniform color from the Alps to the
"toe of the boot," including Sardinia and
Sicily ? We must except the Papal States,
of course, still separate till 1870, and Vene-
tia, Austrian till 1866, when the " Bride of
the Sea" became finally one with the rest
of Italy.

This was the last miracle that Europe
had looked for. Unity in Italy ! " Since

16 241

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the fall of the Roman Empire (if ever be-
fore it)," said an Englishman, " there has
never been a time when Italy could be
called a nation any more than a stack of
timber can be called a ship." This was
true even in the days of the mediaeval
magnificence of the city-states, Venice,
Genoa, Milan and Florence, Pisa and
Rome. But in modern times Italy had be-
come only a field for intriguing dynasties
and the wars of jealous nations.

During the latter half of the eighteenth
century Italy was strangely tranquil ; was
she content at last with her slavery ? Never
that ; the people had simply grown apa-
thetic. Their spasmodic insurrections had
always ended in a worse bondage than
ever : their very religion was used to fasten
their chains. Perhaps nothing could have
served so well to wake them from this
torpor of despair as the iron tread of the
first Napoleon. The " Corsican tyrant"
proved a beneficent counter-irritant — a
wholesome, cleansing force throughout
the land. It was good for Italy to be rid,
if only for a little while, of Hapsburgs and

Bourbons ; to have the political divisions
242

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

of the country reduced to three ; to be
amazed at the sight of justice administered
fairly and taxation made equitable. But
the most significant effect of the Na-
poleonic occupation was this, that the
hearts of the Italians were stirred with a
new consciousness : they had been shown
the possibility of becoming a united race —
of owning a nation which should not be a
" mere geographical expression."

And although 1815 brought the bad
days of the Restoration, and the stupid,
corrupt, or cruel princes climbed back
again on their little thrones, and the map
was made into pretty much the same old
crazy-quilt, still it was not the same old
Italy : all the diplomats at Vienna could
not make things as they had been before.
The new spirit of freedom came to life in
the north, in the Kingdom of Sardinia,
that had made itself the most independent
section of the country. In the beginning
it was only Savoy, and the Dukes of Savoy,
"owing," as the Prince de Ligne said, "to
their geographical position, which did not
permit them to behave like honest men,"
had swallowed, first, Piedmont ; then, Sar-
243

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

dinia ; and then as many of the towns of
Lombardy as they could. The restoration
enriched the kingdom by the gift of Genoa
— where, in 1806, Joseph Mazzini was
born.

Mazzini, Garibaldi, Cavour — those
names will be always thought of as one
with the liberation of Italy.

Though frequently in open antagonism,
yet the work of each of the three was
necessary to the cause, and to each it was
a holy cause, for which he was ready to
make any sacrifice :

' « Italia ! when thy name was but a name,
When to desire thee was a vain desire,
When to achieve thee was impossible,
When to love thee was madness, when to live
For thee was the extravagance of fools,
When to die for thee was to fling away
Life for a shadow — in those darkest days
Were some who never swerved, who lived, and

strove,
And suffered for thee, and attained their end."

Of these devoted ones Mazzini was the
prophet ; his idealism undoubtedly made
too great demands upon the human beings
he worked for, but let us bear in mind
that it needed a conception of absolute
244

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

good to rouse the sluggish Italian mind
from its materialism and Machiavellism."
Mazzini wore black when a youth as
"mourning for his country," and when his
university course was at an end he took
up the profession of political agitator and
joined the Carbonari.

But the greatest service he ever did his
cause was the organization of a new society
— on a much higher plane than the Car-
bonari and its like. The movement was
called " Young Italy," famous for the spirit
it raised from end to end of the peninsula.
Among those attracted by Mazzini' s ex-
alted utterance was the young Garibaldi,
who, taking part in Mazzini' s rising of 1 834,
was condemned to death, and made his
escape to South America. In constant
service in the wars between the quarrel-
some states he gained his masterly skill in
guerilla warfare which was afterwards to
play so great a part in the liberation of his
country. He did not return until it seemed
as though the hour of Italy's deliverance
was at hand, in 1 848, which only proved to
be the "quite undress rehearsal" for the
great events of 1859.
245

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

Garibaldi has been called " not a soldier
but a saint." Most great heroes, alas !
have outlived their heroism, and their
worshippers have outlived their worship,
but Garibaldi has never been anything but
the unselfish patriot who wanted everything
for his country but nothing for himself.
He has been described, on his return to
Italy from South America, as " beautiful as
a statue and riding like a centaur." " He
was quite a show," said the sculptor Gib-
son, " everyone stopping to look at him."
" Probably," said another Englishman, "a
human face so like a lion, and still retaining
the humanity nearest the image of its
Maker, was never seen."

The third of the immortal Italian trio,
Count Camillo de Cavour, was, like Maz-
zini and Garibaldi, a subject of the Sar-
dinian kingdom. There was no prouder
aristocracy in Europe than that of Pied-
mont, but Camillo seems to have drawn
his social theories from the all-pervading
unrest that the great Revolution and Bona-
parte had left in the air, rather than the
assumed sources of heredity. In his tenth
year he entered the military academy at
246

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

Turin, and at the same time was appointed
page to the Prince of Carignan, afterwards
Charles Albert, father of Victor Emmanuel.
This was esteemed a high honor, but it did
not appeal to him in this light. When
asked what was the costume of the pages,
he replied, in a tone of disgust : " Parbleu !
how would you have us dressed, except as
lackeys, which we were ? It made me
blush with shame."

His attitude of contempt for the place
occasioned a prompt dismissal. At the
academy he was so successful with mathe-
matics that he left it at sixteen, having be-
come sub-lieutenant in the engineers, al-
though twenty years was the earliest age
for this grade. He then joined the gar-
rison at Genoa, but the military career had
no allurements for him. Taking kindly to
liberal ideas, he expressed himself so freely
that the authorities transferred him to the
little fortress of Bard, till, in 1831, he re-
signed his commission.

Having by nature a " diabolical activity"
that demanded the widest scope for itself,
he now took charge of a family estate at

Leri, and went in for scientific farming.
247

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

"At the first blush," he wrote, " agri-
culture has little attraction. The habitue
of the salon feels a certain repugnance for
works which begin by the analysis of
dunghills and end in the middle of cattle-
sheds. However, he will soon discover a
growing interest, and that which most re-
pelled him will not be long in having for
him a charm which he never so much as
expected."

Although he began by not knowing a
turnip from a potato, his invincible energy
soon made him a capital farmer ; his experi-
ments were so daring that "the simple
neighbors who came trembling to ask his
advice stood aghast ; he, always smiling,
gay, affable, having for each a clear, con-
cise counsel, an encouragement enveloped
in a pleasantry."

Besides agriculture, his interests ex-
tended to banks, railway companies, a
manufactory for chemical fertilizers, steam
mills for grinding corn, and a line of
packets on the Lago Maggiore. During
this time he visited England, and was to be
seen night after night in the Strangers'
Gallery of the House of Commons, making
248

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

himself master of the methods of Parlia-
mentary tactics, that were to be of such
value to Italy in later years.

In 1847 Cavour started the Risorgimento,
a journal whose programme was simply
this : " Independence of Italy, union be-
tween the princes and peoples, progress
in the path of reform, and a league be-
tween the Italian states. " As for Italian
unity, "Let us," Cavour would say, "do
one thing at a time ; let us get rid of the
Austrians, and then — we shall see/' After
returning from England in 1 843 he wrote :
" You may well talk to me of hell, for since
I left you I live in a kind of intellectual
hell, where intelligence and science are re-
puted infernal by him who has the good-
ness to govern us."

The king, Charles Albert, had called him
the most dangerous man in the kingdom,
and he certainly was the most dangerous to
the old systems of religious and political
bigotry ; but his work was educational ;
gradually he was enlightening the minds of
the masses, and preventing a possible reign
of terror. In 1848 he wrote : " What is it
which has always wrecked the finest and
249

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

justest of revolutions ? The mania for
revolutionary means ; the men who have
attempted to emancipate themselves from
ordinary laws. Revolutionary means, pro-
ducing the directory, the consulate, and
the empire ; Napoleon, bending all to his
caprice, imagining that one can with a like
facility conquer at the Bridge of Lodi and
wipe out a law of nature. Wait but a
little longer, and you will see the last con-
sequence of your revolutionary means —
Louis Napoleon on the throne !"

Charles Albert, the king, who, as Prince
Carignan, had been one of the Carbonari,
and secretly hated Austria, has been ac-
cused of treachery and double dealing
(he explained that he was " always between
the dagger of the Carbonari and the
chocolate of the Jesuits") ; but the time
came when he nobly redeemed his past.
In 1845 he assured d'Azeglio that when
Sardinia was ready to free herself from
Austria, his life, his sons' lives, his arms,
his treasure, should all be freely spent in
the Italian cause.

In February, 1848, he granted his
people a constitution ; a parliament was
250

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

formed, Cavour becoming member for
Turin.

In this month the revolution broke out
in Paris and penetrated to the heart of
Vienna. Metternich was forced to fly
his country ; the Austrians left Milan ;
Venice threw off the yoke — all Italy re-
volted. The Pope, it is said, behaved
badly, and left Rome free for Garibaldi
to enter, with Mazzini enrolled as a volun-
teer.

Even the abominable Ferdinand of Sicily
and the Grand Duke of Tuscany had been
obliged to grant constitutions ; all the
northern states had hastened to unite
themselves to Sardinia by universal plebi-
scite. At the very beginning, Charles
Albert fulfilled his pledge ; he placed him-
self at the head of his army and defied
Austria.

But it was too soon : Austria was too
strong. On the 23d of March, 1849, Charles
Albert was crushingly defeated by Ra-
detsky at Novara. There, when night fell,
he called his generals to him and in their
presence abdicated in favor of his son,

Victor Emmanuel, who knelt weeping be-
251

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

fore him. The pathos of despair was in
his words : " Since I have not succeeded in
finding death," he said, " I must accomplish
one last sacrifice for my country."

He left the battle-field and his country
without even visiting his home ; six months
later he was dead. "The magnanimous
king," his people called him.

The young Victor Emmanuel began his
reign in a kingly fashion ; pointing his
sword towards the Austrian camp, he ex-
claimed: "Per Dio! d'ltalia sara." It
seemed at the time a mere empty boast —
his little country was brought so close to
the verge of ruin. The terms of peace
imposed an Austrian occupation until the
war indemnity of eighty million francs
should be paid. Yet Cavour was heard
to say that all their sacrifices were not too
dear a price for the Italian tricolor in ex-
change for the flag of Savoy. It was not
until July that Rome fell — Rome, where
Garibaldi had established a republic and
Mazzini was a Triumvir !

At the invitation of the Pope, Louis
Napoleon, then president of the French
republic, seeing the opportunity for con-
252

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

ciliating the religious powers, poured his
troops into Rome, and Garibaldi fled, with
Anita at his side. The brave wife with her
unborn child would not leave her hero, but
death took her from him. In a peasant's
hut, a few days later, she died, his arms
around her. As for Mazzini, the fall of
Rome nearly broke his heart. For days
he wandered dazed about the Eternal City,
miraculously escaping capture, till his
friends got him away.

It was not until April of 1850 that Pius
IX. dared to come back to Rome, where a
body of French troops long remained, to
show how really religious a nation was
France. From his accession there had
been a Papal party in Italy, who, because
of the good manners of the gentle eccle-
siastic, had wrought themselves up to be-
lieve that Italy could be united under him.
But as early as 1847 d'Azeglio wrote from
Rome : "The magic of Pio Nono will not
last ; he is an angel, but he is surrounded
by demons."

After the events of the 1848 rising, and
his appeal (twenty-five pontiffs had made
the same appeal before him !) to the for-
253

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

eigner against his own people, the dream
of a patriotic pope melted into thin air.

And so Austria came back into Italy,
and seemed again complete master there.
It would be interesting to be able to analyze
the sensibilities of these prince-puppets
who were jerked back to their thrones by
their master at Vienna. Plenty of Austrian
troops came to take care of them. As for
the bitter reprisals Italians had to bear, it
is almost impossible to read of them. In
certain provinces everyone found with a
weapon was put to death. A man found
with a rusty nail was promptly shot. At
Brescia a little hunchback was slowly burnt
alive. Women, stripped half- naked, were
flogged in the market-place, with Austrian
officers looking on. It was after his visit
to Naples in the winter of 1850 that Glad-
stone wrote, "This is the negation of God
erected into a system of government."

But Italy had now a new champion.
When Victor Emmanuel signed his name to
the first census in his reign, he jestingly
gave his occupation as " Re Galantuomo,"
and this name stuck to him forever after.
A brave monarch Victor Emmanuel proved,
254

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

whose courage and honesty were tried in
many fires.

When arranging negotiations with Ra-
detsky after Novara, he was given to un-
derstand that the conditions of peace
would be much more favorable if he would
abandon the constitution granted by
Charles Albert.

"Marshal," he said, "sooner than sub-
scribe to such conditions, I would lose a
hundred crowns. What my father has
sworn I will maintain. If you wish a war
to the death, be it so ! My house knows
the road of exile, but not of dishonor."

The Princes of Piedmont had been
always renowned for physical courage and
dominating minds. Effeminacy and men-
dacity are not their foibles. It is hinted
by the Countess of Cesaresco, in her "Liber-
ation of Italy," that sainthood was esteemed
the privilege strictly of the women of the
family, but then sainthood is not absolutely
necessary to a monarch. The Piedmont
line had always understood the business
of kings, — but none so thoroughly as
Victor Emmanuel.

He was unpopular at first ; the Mazzin-
255

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

ists cried, " Better Italy enslaved than
handed over to the son of the traitor,
Carlo Alberto!" On the wall of his
palace at Turin was written : " It is all up
with us ; we have a German king and
queen" — alluding to the Austrian origin
of his mother and of his young queen,
Marie Adelaide.

These two — wife and mother — were
ruled by clerics and made his life melan-
choly when he began a course of ecclesi-
astical reform. One person in every two
hundred and fourteen in Sardinia was an ec-
clesiastic, and the church had control of all
ecclesiastical jurisdiction and could shelter
criminals, among other mediaeval privileges.
To reform these abuses, the king in 1849
approached the pope with deferential re-
quests, but the pope absolutely refused to
make any changes.

However, the work of reform was firmly
pushed on, and a law was passed by which
the priestly privileges were sensibly cut
down, although the king's wife and mother
wrung their hands, and the religious press
shrieked denunciation. At this time Santa

Rosa, the Minister of Commerce and Agri-
256

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

culture, died, and the church refused him
the last sacrament, though he was a blame-
less and devout member of the Roman
Church. This hateful act of intolerance
reacted on the clergy, as a matter of course,
and gave an impetus to church reform.

When, in 1855, Victor Emmanuel was so
unfortunate as to lose his wife, his mother,
and his brother within a month, and the
nation as a whole mourned with him, his
clerical friends embittered his affliction by
insisting with venomous frankness that it
was the judgment of Heaven that he had
brought upon himself for his religious per-
secutions.

Strength was Victor Emmanuel's genius :
he was not intellectual in any marked de-
gree, but his ministers could work with him
and rely upon him. A union between him
and Cavour, the two great men of the
kingdom, was inevitable. Up to this time
Cavour had no general fame except as a
journalist, but the king had the insight to
recognize his extraordinary powers, and
when Santa Rosa died (unshriven) Cavour
in his place became Minister of Agricul-
ture and Commerce. " Look out!" said
<7 257

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the king to his prime minister, d'Azeglio,
when this had come to pass, " Cavour will
soon be taking all your portfolios. He
will never rest till he is prime minister
himself."

Under the regime of Cavour, railways
and telegraph wires lined the kingdom in
all directions ; he took off foolish tariffs
and concluded commercial treaties with
England, France, Belgium, and other
powers. " Milord Cavour" was a nick-
name showing the dislike aroused by his
English predilections, but through him
Piedmont repaired the damage of the war
of 1848, and grew steadily in prosperity.

Cavour' s brilliant intellectual powers
seem to have been so limitless that it is
rather a relief to think of him personally
as only a dumpy little man with an over-
big head. Although a born aristocrat, and
living in the manner becoming one, he was
capable of quite demonstrative behavior.
The occasion for this was a dinner given by
d'Azeglio. Cavour, seated at table, joked
the premier about his jealousy of Ratazzi ;
the premier replied angrily ; whereupon

the greatest of diplomats arose, seized his
258

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

plate, lifting it as high as he could, and
dashed it to the floor, where it broke into
fragments. Then he rushed out of the
house, crying :

" He is a beast ! He is a beast !"

This quarrel, which sounds like an act
from a nursery drama, led to a change in
the cabinet, with Cavour left out. But a
little later on d'Azeglio resigned and Ca-
vour was prime minister.

A marvellous stroke of statesmanship
on behalf of his country was Cavour's in-
tervention in the Crimean War in 1855, —
three years after Louis Napoleon's coup-
d'etat. It seemed an act of folly to send
fifteen thousand troops from the little Italian
state — which had no standing among
European powers — to help England and
France. The undertaking seemed to Sar-
dinians an act of insanity ; Cavour's col-
leagues were violently against him. But
the king stood by him ; so the troops were
sent and the ministers resigned.

Never was an action more fully justified.
At the close of the Crimean War Sardinia
had two powerful allies — France and Eng-
land ; and for the first time she was ad-
259

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

mitted on terms of equality among the
" powers." A significant thing had been
said, too, in 1855: "What can I do for
Italy?" asked the Emperor Napoleon of
Cavour. Cavour was not slow to tell him
what could be done ; he was convinced
that he must look for aid to the vanity and
ambition of Napoleon III.

No diplomatic pressure of his, however,
availed. During the next two years the
attitude of Austria became constantly more
unendurable, but still Napoleon would
make no move.

It proved to be the most unlikely of
events that brought about a consummation
of the wishes of Cavour.

On the evening of January 14, 1858, a
carriage drove through the Paris streets on
its way to the opera. With the appear-
ance of its two occupants all the world is
familiar ; the wonderful Spanish eyes of
the lady, the exquisite lines of her figure —
who has not seen them pictured ? The
smallish man with her had been described
by the Crown Prince of Prussia as having
" strangely immobile features and almost

extinguished eyes." His huge mustache
260

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

had exaggeratedly long waxed ends, and
his chin was covered with an "imperial."

The terrible crash of Orsini's bombs,
thrown underneath their carriage, failed to
carry out the conspirators' purpose. The
emperor had a slight wound on the nose
and the empress felt a blow on the eye.
That was all, except that her silks and
laces were spattered with blood from the
wounded outside the carriage. They con-
tinued their drive and saw the opera to its
finish before they were told of the tragedy
that had befallen. Eight people had
been killed and one hundred and fifty-six
wounded by the explosion.

The Empress Eugenie, it is said, showed
the greatest composure over the event, but
this was not true of her husband. Prob-
ably no man of modern times had had so
many attempts made on his life as Louis
Napoleon, and always, before, he made
light of them, but this last one, resulting
in such cruel slaughter, completely un-
nerved him. He now lived in a tremor,
dreading the vengeance of still others of the
revolutionary ex-friends of his youth, but

he dared not relax the despotic grip with
261

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

which he ruled his land. How could he
placate them ? He wore a cuirass under
his coat; he had wires netted over the
chimneys of the Tuileries, so that bombs
should not burst on his hearth ; a swarm
of detectives were around him wherever
he went, and always the question asked
itself in his mind : What should he do to
take off the curse of fear from his life ?

Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, the whole of
Italy, were filled with rage and disgust at
the news of Orsini's attempt. Orsini —
an Italian ! That must be the end of all
their hopes of help from France ! But in
the summer of 1 848 Cavour was summoned
to the Emperor at Plombieres, and during
two days there the agreement was formu-
lated by which France and Italy united
against Austria. This was Louis Napo-
leon's solution of his problem — to help
Italy at least sufficiently to annul the hate
of every assassin on the peninsula. Ac-
cording to the Prince Regent of Prussia,
he chose "la guerre" instead of "le poig-
nard."

No written record was made of the

bargain between Napoleon and Cavour ;
262

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

but we know that it gave Savoy and
Nice to France, and made one innocent
royal victim, the young Princess Clotilde,
Victor Emmanuel's daughter, who was
there betrothed by proxy to Prince Jerome
Napoleon.

It was at Plombieres that Napoleon with
some naivete said to Cavour : " Do you
know, there are but three men in all Eu-
rope ; one is myself, the second is you, and
the third is one whose name I will not men-
tion." Napoleon was not alone in his high
estimate of Cavour. In Turin they said :
"We have a ministry, a parliament, a con-
stitution ; all that spells Cavour."

At his reception on New Year's Day,
1859, Napoleon astounded everyone by
greeting the Austrian ambassador with
these words : "I regret that our relations
with your government are not so good as
they have been hitherto." This ostenta-
tious expression was equal to publication
in a journal. Immediate war was looked
for by everyone. Piedmont, France, and
Austria openly made bellicose prepara-
tions.

Although on the i8th of January, 1859, a
263

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

formal treaty was made, by which France
was bound to support Piedmont if attacked
by Austria, Napoleon hesitated and tried
to back out of his agreement. It will never
be known by what tortuous system of di-
plomacy Cavour compelled Austria herself
to declare war, but it was done, April 27th.
Cavour' s intrigues during these days
were dazzlingly complicated ; he had to
deal on one hand with his imperial ally,
and on the other with shady revolutionary
elements — and to keep his right hand in
ignorance of what his left hand did. He
summoned Garibaldi to Turin ; Garibaldi,
in his loose red shirt and sombrero with its
plume, with his tumultuous hair and beard,
struck dismay to the heart of the servant
who opened the door. He refused to admit
him, but finally agreed to consult his master.
"Let him come in/' said Cavour. "It is
probably some poor devil who has a peti-
tion to make to me." This was the first
meeting of the statesman and the warrior.
When told of the French alliance, Gari-
baldi exclaimed : " Mind what you are
about ! Never forget that the aid of for-
eign armies must be, in some way or other,
264

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

dearly paid for !" But his adherence was
whole-heartedly given to Victor Emmanuel,
and at the end of the short campaign Italy
rang with his name.

For months past Austria had been
pouring troops into Italy — there seemed
no limit to them. Garibaldi, by the end
of April, was in command of a band of
Cacciatori delli Alpi, a small force, but made
up of the iron men of North Italy, worthy
of their leader.

On May 26. Victor Emmanuel took the
command of his army ; it comprised fifty-
six thousand infantry in five divisions, one
division of cavalry in sixteen squadrons,
with twelve field-guns and two batteries
of horse artillery. May I2th the French
emperor rode through the streets of Genoa
amid loud acclamations ; the city was hung
with draperies and garlands in his honor.
At Alessandria he rode under an arch on
which was inscribed, " To the descendant
of the Conqueror of Marengo !" In all he
had one hundred and twenty-eight thou-
sand men, including ten thousand cav-
alry.

It was a short campaign, but the weeks
265

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

were thick with battles, and the battle-fields
with the slain.

The first engagement was at Genestrello,
May 2oth. The Austrians, driven out,
made a stand at Montebello, where, though
twenty thousand strong, they were routed
by six thousand Sardinians. The armies of
the emperor and king forced the Austrians
to cross the Po, and there retire behind the
Sesia. On the 3oth the allies crossed the
Sesia and drove the foe from the fortified
positions of Palestro, Venzaglio, and Casa-
lino.

Next came Magenta — a splendid triumph
for MacMahon ; the Austrian loss was
ten thousand men ; that of the French
between four thousand and five thousand.
Meantime, Garibaldi had led his Cacciatori
to the Lombard shores of Lake Maggiore,
had beaten the Austrians at Varese, en-
tered Como, routed the enemy again at
San Fermo, and was now proceeding to
Bergamo and Brescia with the purpose of
cutting off the enemy's retreat through the
Alps of the Trentino.

On the 8th of June Victor Emmanuel

and Napoleon III. made their triumphal

266

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

entry into Milan, from whence every
Austrian had fled. Everyone remembers
how MacMahon, now Duke of Magenta,
caught up to his saddle-bow a child who
was in danger of being crushed by the
crowd.

The emperor and the king soon moved
on from Milan. By the 23d their head-
quarters were fixed at Montechiaro, close
to the site of the coming battle of Sol-
ferino.

On the day before the battle, the lines
of the allies lay near the Austrian lines,
from the shore of the Lake of Garda at
San Martino to Cavriana on the extreme
right. On the evening of the 23d there
was issued a general order regulating the
movements of the allied forces : Victor
Emmanuel's army was sent to the extreme
left, near Lake Garda ; Baraguay d'Hilliers
was given the centre in front of Solferino,
which was the Austrian centre ; to his
right was MacMahon, next Marshal Niel,
and then Canrobert at the extreme right,
while the emperor's guard were ordered
here and there in the changes of the battle.

The enemy, under Field-Marshal Sta-
267

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

dion, held the entire line of battle strongly,
with one hundred and forty thousand men.

Solferino has been the scene of many
combats ; it is a natural fighting-ground,
and the Austrian s had barricaded them-
selves at all the strong points of vantage.

At five in the morning of the 24th, Louis
Napoleon sat in his shirt-sleeves, after his
early coffee, smoking a cigar, when tidings
came to him that the fighting had begun.
In a few minutes he was driving at full
speed to Castiglione, and on the way he
said to an aide : " The fate of Italy is per-
haps to be decided to-day." It was he in-
deed who decided it ; whatever else is said
of him, it was he who struck a great blow
for Italy at Solferino.

It was the great day of Napoleon III. ;
he has never been considered a notable
soldier, but throughout this day, in every
command issued, he displayed consummate
military ability.

The sun glared in the intense blue above
with tropical heat, when, at Castiglione,
Napoleon climbed the steeple of St. Peter's

Church and beheld the expanse of Lake

268

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

Garda, growing dim towards the Tyrolean
Alps. There was the remnant of an an-
cient castle — a sturdy tower — guarding the
village of Solferino, called the " Spy of
Italy/' Already a deadly fire from its loop-
holes poured on Baraguay d'Hilliers's men,
who faced it bravely, but were falling in
terrible numbers.

He could see the Austrian masses swarm-
ing along the heights uniting Cavriana with
Solferino. The Piedmontese cannon boom-
ing from the left told that Victor Emmanuel
was fighting hard, but his forces were hid-
den by hills. It was at once plain to him,
from his church steeple, that the object of
the Austrians was to divert the attack on
Solferino — the key of their position — by
outflanking the French right, filling up the
gap between the Second and Fourth Corps,
and thus cutting the emperor's army in
two. Coming down from his height, Na-
poleon at once sent orders to the cavalry
of the Imperial Guard to join MacMahon,
to prevent his forces from being divided.
Altogether the emperor's plan seems to
have been clear and definite ; his design
was to carry Solferino at any cost, and
269

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

then, by a flank movement, to beat the
enemy out of his positions at Cavriana.
Galloping to the top of Monte Fenil, the
emperor beheld a thick phalanx of bayonets
thrust its way suddenly through the trees
of the valley ; it was a huge body of Aus-
trians sent to cut off the line of the French.
There was not a minute to be lost ; he
sent orders to General Maneque, of the
Guard, to advance at once against the Aus-
trian columns. With magnificent rapidity
the order was executed, and the Austrian s
— a great number — were beaten back far
from the line of battle.

The Austrian batteries placed on the
Mount of Cypresses and on the Cemetery
Hill of Solferino were keeping up a deadly
fire on the French.

Baraguay d'Hilliers brought Bazaine's
brigade into action against the one, and
the First Regiment of zouaves rushed up
the other, only to be hurled back by the
enemy as they reached the steep slope.
A horrible confusion followed these two
repulses, the zouaves and General Ne-
grier's division being fatally mixed and

fighting with each other like furies. But
270

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

General Negrier kept his head and cok
lected his troops, scattered all over the
hillocks and valleys. Then, with the Sixty-
first Regiment of the line and a battalion of
the One Hundredth Regiment, he started
resolutely to mount the Cemetery Hill.
It was a deadly march ; the enemy, holding
the advantage, disputed every turn and
twist of the ascent. Twice Negrier's
troops rushed up along the ridge-like path,
but the circular wall of the cemetery,
bored with thousands of holes, through
which rifles sent a scathing hail, was strong
as a fortress to resist them. It was sheer
murder to take his men up again ; Ne-
grier abandoned the attack.

The enemy's cannon-balls from the three
defended heights fell thick and fast on
Monte Fenil, where Napoleon and his
aides breathlessly watched the progress of
the drama.

Many of the Cent-Gardes who formed
the imperial escort were shot down ; the
emperor was in the midst of death. The
Austrians had been strongly re-enforced
and held to the defence of Solferino more

obstinately than ever.
271

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

But, notwithstanding this, the French
were gaining ground ; the left flank of
the Austrians was at last broken by
the artillery of the French reserve, and
the whole army felt a thrill of encourage-
ment.

A number of French battalions were
now massing themselves about the spur
of the Tower Hill of Solferino, but it was
impossible to proceed to the attack while
solid Austrian masses stood ready to
pounce upon their flank.

A few fiery charges scattered the enemy
in all directions, and a tempest of shouts
rang out when Forey gave the order to
storm the Tower Hill. The drum beat,
the trumpets sounded. "Vive 1'Empe-
reur !" echoed from the encircling hills.
" Quick" is too slow a word for French
soldiers. The Imperial Guard, chasseurs,
and battalions of the line rushed up with
such fierce velocity that it was no time at
all before the heights of Solferino were
covered with Napoleon's men. Nothing
could stand against such an electric shock —
the Tower Hill was carried, and General

Lebceuf turned the artillery on the de-
272

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

feated masses of Austrians choking up the
road that led to Cavriana.

The convent and adjoining church,
strongly barricaded, yielded after repeated
attacks, and then Baraguay d'Hilliers and
Negrier made a last attempt on the Ceme-
tery Hill. The narrow path that led up to
it was strewn with bloody corpses, but
neither the dead resting in their graves
nor these new dead could be held sacred.
A strong artillery fire on the gate and
walls stopped the rifles from firing through
the holes, and in this pause Colonel Laf-
faile led the Seventy-eighth Regiment up.
They burst in the gate of the cemetery, —
there were not many there to kill ! — they
were soon on their way towards the village.

Their way lay through a checker-board
of tiny farms and fields, separated by stone
walls wreathed with ivy. Little chapels,
dedicated to favorite saints, stood in every
enclosure. Houses, walls, and chapels had
all been turned into barricades by the Aus-
trians. Douay's and Negrier's men had
to fight their way to the village through a
rain of bullets from unseen enemies. Now
they took the narrow path winding up by

18 273

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

the Tower Hill into the streets of the vil-
lage ; when nearly at the top the clanking
of heavy artillery-wheels told them that
the enemy were retreating and carrying
off the very guns that had played such
havoc on their ranks from the top of Tower
Hill. It took but a short time to capture
them, and then they were fairly in the vil-
lage, chasing the last straggling Austrians
through the streets.

Solferino was in the hands of the French ;
but the fate of the battle was not yet de-
cided, for Cavriana was a strong position,
and Stadion and his generals had made a
careful study of its possibilities.

At two o'clock MacMahon's left wing
was completely surrounded by the enemy,
but moving forward on the right he boldly
turned the Austrian front, and swept every-
thing before him to the village of San
Cassiano, adjoining Cavriana. The village
was attacked on both sides and carried by
Laure's Algerian sharpshooters, but the
Austrians still held Monte Fontana, which
unites San Cassiano to Cavriana, — and re-
pulsed Laure's men with deadly skill.

Re-enforced, they made a splendid dash
274

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

and took Monte Fontana, but the Prince
of Hesse brought up reserves and won it
back for the Austrians. Napoleon now
ordered MacMahon to push forward his
whole corps to support the attack, and as
Maneque's brigade and Mellinet's grena-
diers had succeeded in routing the enemy
from Monte Sacro, they were ordered to
advance on Cavriana.

Lebceuf placed the artillery of the Guard
at the opening of the valley facing Cavri-
ana, and Laure's Algerian sharpshooters
after a prolonged hand-to-hand conflict
with the Prince of Hesse's men carried
Cavriana at four o'clock. Two hours later
Napoleon was resting in the Casa Pastore,
where the Austrian emperor had slept the
night before. The sultry glare of the day
had culminated in a wild, black storm ; the
wind was a hurricane, and it was under
torrents of rain that the Austrians made
their retreat, while the thunder drowned
the noise of Marshal Niel's cannon driving
them from every stand they made.

Such overwhelming numbers had been
brought to bear on the French that day
that their defeat would have been almost
275

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

certain if it had not been for Napoleon's
generalship and his modern rifled guns.
These were new to the Austrians, who be-
came panic-stricken at their effect.

The Piedmontese troops, under their
" Re Galantuomo," fought as nobly as their
brilliant allies that day. The young Em-
peror Francis Joseph commanded in person
at San Martino, but it was Benedek that
Victor Emmanuel had to reckon with, —
the best general of all the Austrian staff.
He beat him out of San Martino, and to
the Italians the combat of June 24th is
known as the Battle of San Martino to this
day.

The scorching sun of next morning shone
upon twenty-two thousand ghastly dead.
It has been believed that the horrible sights
and scents of this battle-field sickened the
emperor and cut short the campaign, but
who can tell ? Was it perhaps Eugenie's
influence — always used in favor of the
pope ? Or was it that he realized that the
movement could now only end in the com-
plete liberation of Italy — a consummation

that he regarded with horror ? All that is
276

BATTLE OF SOLFERINO

known is this : three days after the Aus-
trians had been driven back to their own
country, and while all Italy went mad with
joy at the victory, while Mrs. Browning
was writing her "Emperor Evermore" —
a cruel satire on later events — it became
known that Napoleon had sent a message
to the Austrian kaiser asking him to sus-
pend hostilities.

The two emperors met at Villafranca,
a small place near Solferino. At the close
of their interview Francis Joseph looked
humiliated and sombre — Louis Napoleon
was smilingly at ease. He, the parvenu,
had made terms with a legitimate emperor,
and was pleased with himself. He had
arranged that Lombardy was to be united
to Piedmont, while Venetia remained Aus-
trian. When Victor Emmanuel was told
of these terms he could only say coldly
that he must ever remain grateful for what
Napoleon had done, but he murmured
" Poor Italy !"

And Cavour ? Cavour was struck to the
heart. Had he arranged such a finale as
this with the upstart emperor — that he

should leave the game when it suited his

277

GREAT BATTLES OF THE WORLD

pleasure, and make terms with the Aus-
trian emperor all by himself — insolently
disregarding Victor Emmanuel ? He wept
with grief and anger. He left at once for
the camp, and there he told the emperor
his opinion of him in stinging words. He
begged his king to repudiate the treaty
and reject Lombardy, but Victor Em-
manuel, although as bitterly disappointed
as Cavour, felt that he must be prudent
for his people's sake.

Angered at the king's refusal, Cavour
resigned his office and retired to his farms
at Leri, but after a few months he was
back in his old place in the cabinet. All
his hopes and ambitions came back —
although physically the shock had broken
him — and he labored for Italy till his death
in June of 1 86 1 . The whole Italian people,
from king to peasant, knew that they had
lost their best friend. But Cavour's life
work was nearly finished. Garibaldi had
taken up the work of emancipation where
Napoleon had abandoned it, and before he
left him forever, to Cavour was given the
triumph of hearing his beloved master pro-
claimed King of Italy.
278

D Crane, Stephen

25 Great battles of the

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