THE RINGSTETTEN SAGA VII: LÜTZEN

Previously on The Ringstetten Saga:
By All Hallows (31-10/1-11), Leipzig, Halle, and the villages in the surrounding area have been taken back by the Imperialists. Eleanor is especially worried about the fate of her spouse, having seen his death on the battlefield in a prophetic dream. Gustavus has received and replied to a letter from his little daughter Christina at Stegeborg. Count Pappenheim, now Wallenstein's Man Friday, is commanding the garrison of Halle an der Saale and quelling an uprising in the local marketplace. Gerhard and Alois, especially our young lieutenant, are worried about the outcome of the upcoming confrontation. Liselotte and Hedwig are also worried, but about the ones they love. And Albrecht von Wallenstein, together with his son and heir Berthold, leaves Schloss Lützen, where the Wallensteins are quartered, for a cold and foggy battlefield... on the eve of battle, the evening before the sixth of November 1632.
From sunrise until about 11:30, a thick and cool morning fog covers the battlefield. On one side, a pale, lean, raven-haired overlord reviews his ranks from a scarlet velvet sedan chair, without saying a word, but casting heart-freezing glares at officers and privates.
Across the swampy plains, his strawberry blond and well-spoken opponent reviews the Protestant army on a nutbrown steed, while singing a song he has written himself in an incredible baritone voice, in Swedish and German. After which the Swedish army repeats the song in chorus (here is the English translation!):

"Do not despair, my little band,

though enemies throughout the land

are seeking to destroy you!

They rejoice, hoping you'll fall soon,

but they will sing another tune,

so keep on brave and coy, you!"

Right before midday, the fog clears like a curtain opening up before a play. And this one will prove one bloody, gory tragedy.

With thunder and lightning, two armies have clashed

at daybreak, one autumn morrow.

Through thick gray fog, gunfire has violently flashed,

stifling the wounded’s cries of sorrow.

On winning, on winning, on daring to dare

is hell-bent the mind of each rider,

though he lose the grip on the reins of his mare,

and rashly dismount, in a stride, her.

As the heavy cuirassier falls to the ground,

the pikeman, who would stand defeated,

sees his chance and thrusts his blade, turning around:

thus, rider and steed are mistreated.

The common soldier rushes into the fray:

his duty reads “dying or slaying”.

The commander watches his men the game play,

and soon heavy cards he’s seen playing.

While Wallenstein stays overlooking the fight in his sedan chair on top of a hill at the edge of the fields (due to his fear of gunshots), Gustavus rides forth into the frontline to encourage his men and keep them from yielding, as bravely as any subaltern officer. Call that foolhardiness or daring-do, whatever you will!

There he rides, his blue plume flutters! Lovely lad!

Cool eyes, every muscle in tension!

The tall, dashing figure in bright doublet clad

draws friends’ and enemies’ attention!

Thus he takes command of his faltering wing,

exposed like a leader of twenty.

Like a young lieutenant, risks takes the blond king:

his sword’s drawn, his scabbard is empty.

He’s shuttled by thunderstorm wings through the ranks,

into the fog, into the fire.

Like hail, many a bullet on a breastplate clanks

where enemy units conspire.

In the early afternoon, the fog returns, blurring the distinction between friend and foe, as gunshots stifle the officers' words of command and screams of pain from the wounded ones.

Gustavus gets lost and finds himself caught in the crossfire, as his men react to his disappearance and the fact that he is already wounded: an Austrian bullet has already pierced and broken His Majesty's left arm, though he does not react to the pain and has already bandaged the wound, using his blue sash as a sling (clever as always!)...

“Onward, my brave Swedish cavalry!

Onward, comrades of German breeding!”

In vain… they can’t catch up… their leader don’t see...

then, suddenly, hear: “The King’s bleeding!”

Into the dark bosom of Wallenstein’s troop

no one the wounded rider followed.

The yellow doublet was, at one fell swoop,

by the clanking iron wave swallowed.

The enemy leader closest to him recognizes such a high-ranking officer, and he doesn't waste any hot lead on such an important target...

A Croatian officer, who follows the King closely on horseback: Long time have I sought you! (He shoots Gustavus in the back. The bullet shatters his right shoulder blade, and then punctures his lung. Gustavus falls unconscious off his steed, to be stabbed thrice by Croatians in the chest and back, and receive three shots to the same region. The first wound in his back brings searing chest pain. The Croatians take his clothes, weapons, and accessories as spoils of war, leaving the Swedish ruler in a bloodstained shirt.)

The Croatian officer: Now he's suffered enough. Let me give him the mercy shot! (He shoots Gustavus in the nape of the neck).

The news of the King's death spreads across the battlefield like wildfire, amidst gunshots and clanking of steel. Enter Count Pappenheim, the leader of the Catholic cavalry, who wanted to challenge Gustavus to a duel (since he knows of a prophecy in which a scar-faced Count of Pappenheim will someday defeat and slay a great Nordic ruler in single combat, and he was born on the same day the same year as Gustavus!). He learns what has happened to Gustavus from a Swedish officer, who shoots him in the chest as he receives a gunshot in the same spot (the left breast) from one of Pappenheim's own riders. This officer is none other than Lieutenant Gerhard von Ringstetten himself. Both the Prussian youth and the Bavarian count are left each with a punctured lung: Gottfried zu Pappenheim "drowns painfully and slowly in his own blood", carried by his orderly Jakob towards Wallenstein's encampment (he will die in the same Leipzig morgue where he coaxed Tilly)... while the young Prussian, seized with searing pain and staggering from blood loss, makes it to the edge of the front near the Swedish garrison, before collapsing, coughing up blood and closing his veiled green eyes, in one of the trenches of the battlefield.

The Swedish army, through the fog and the fire, thirsts for revenge and lunges relentlessy upon Wallenstein's ranks, driving them to flight:

Then, a rising clamour sears flesh and bone:

“Gustavus! Our father! Our leader!”

Thus, his brigades combine: he won’t die alone.

They roar, rushing forward, dear reader.

Croatians retreat and Walloons take to flight,

and, buried in heaps of slain sinners,

the Friedlander’s cannons are hidden from sight:

the martyr’s men shall be the winners.

The last word was missing in his epic song:

the word that crowns every achievement.

The mourners have done their duty, right or wrong:

they wrote it in blood and bereavement.

They’ve won. On the fields, with a lovely parade,

they honour their beloved leader,

but most of them have fallen within the glade:

the living are few, my dear reader.

At the end of the day, the sun sets over a swampy plain littered with lifeless bodies: casualties like Gustavus, Pappenheim, and Berthold von Wallenstein (the Generalissimo's only son) as well as countless unsung officers and privates on both sides of the conflict. "It is cold for the fallen, cold is the fog, but coldest are the hearts of the few survivors. The Protestants have finally won the battle, but they have lost much more than their liege." 
The slain lay, some of them, embracing one another like friends or like brothers, just like at Breitenfeld: Swede and Croat, Saxon and Austrian, reconciled in the afterlife.

The late king's lifeless body is discovered, bloodstained and riddled with gunshot and stab wounds, amidst a heap of slain Croatians. And Sweden's legendary Blue Brigade has dwindled to a dark sergeant (imprisoned and presumed dead) and a fatally injured lieutenant: Liselotte finds an unconscious and freezing Gerhard, whom she gives a drink of brandy from her canteen, takes to the surgeon, and tends to herself. Another nice draught of brandy (both to quench his thirst and ease his pain) down the lieutenant's throat almost brings him back from a state of near-death, but he will have to rest in bed at Breitenfeld all winter long, speaking and moving as little as possible, if he wants to survive: the bullet is lodged so deeply in his chest that it can't be taken out. The Leipzig Christmas wedding which Liselotte and he had dreamt of will have to be cancelled: they will marry in spring in the Swedish camp, if the wounded lieutenant survives.

Alois, however, has not been found, dead or alive. For one good reason: he strayed in the fog as well, was struck in the nape of his neck with a sword and suffers from amnesia, and thus he has joined Wallenstein's army as he was swept in the Friedlander's pell-mell retreat. After a brief stay in Leipzig before its fall, the amnesiac sergeant has followed the Wallenstein entourage eastward, into Friedland (the Wallensteins' shire, located in between Saxony and Bohemia). He has learned to know Isabella and Thekla von Wallenstein, His Lordship's wife and child (promoted to heiress after her brother's death), the former a blond and elegant Viennese noblewoman, the latter a raven-haired and reserved damsel who has lived in the shade of her father and brother... and is nowadays disturbed by her many suitors. Once in the province of Friedland, Wallenstein has had the local gallows prepared for executing four colonels and nine subaltern officers for cowardice, as scapegoats for the Lützen-Leipzig debacle. Alois, now raised to the rank of generalissimo's orderly's orderly's orderly (pretty high, isn't it?), has become aware that disobedient peasants and servants, officers, privates, and vassals, are bound to wear a hemp necklace at the pettiest offence (even stealing fruit, or not wearing the Wallensteinian colours, which are scarlet and black).
The Schloss Friedland chapel and those closest to it have got no bells, whose knell provokes His Lordship, but eunuchs calling from the church towers... Though very few people there are deeply religious. To start with, the Wallensteins and their associates are freethinkers.
 However, Friedland is a peaceful shire with public schools in the smallest villages, manufactures (early modern industries), steelworks, and medical care for the meanest subjects. The currency is a golden coin made in Friedland itself with Wallenstein's profile on one side and his crest on the other. Everything seems to betray that Wallenstein will take all this to imperial scale once he has dethroned the Kaiser: he is convinced that his reign will be remembered for its goodness and emphasis on welfare. Think of that, of an Enlightened despot born a century ahead of his times!

In a glass case in a parish church (in Weissenfels, Saxony), the hero of freedom is mourned for by officers, privates, and a heartbroken Queen Eleanor (perchance the saddest of them all).
Eleanor (Desperate): Oh, Gustavus! Darling! Without you, I'm so alone! I wither, helpless, on my own!

With the enbalmed form of her late spouse, his unusually large enbalmed heart in a golden baroque reliquary, and his wounded steed, she invites Hedwig and Liselotte to follow the funeral procession to the royal palace in Nyköping. The blond girl, trying in vain to comfort her queen, declines such a tempting offer: she will follow the Swedish ranks, sure that her beloved Alois is still alive somewhere and that they are destined to meet each other again. Liselotte declines as well, worried about Gerhard's state of health and having already decided to tend to his wounds. And also because she feels at home on the war front, not being that fond of courtly life.