COUNTDOWN TO LÜTZEN III: DAYS OF VICTORIES I

Here are the Gustavus Adolphus Cakes we made last year.
They're decorated with yellow marzipan, blue fondant, whipped cream (for the fog)
and filled with raspberry jam (for the blood)

DAYS OF VICTORIES

A historical tale by Werner von Heidenstam
translated from the Swedish and adapted by Sandra Dermark

I. The Protestants take to arms

Deep within the Hofburg, his vast Viennese palace, sat an aged and ailing Kaiser Matthias, rosary on his knees, and he spoke of tolerance. But, when he closed his weary eyes, his nephew Ferdinand was crowned kaiser by the allied Electors of the Realm. Before the altar of the Virgin, he had sworn to reinstate the great power of the Catholic Church. Clever and strong, surrounded by prelates and priests, he was a man who kept his word. It was his dream, that all the power in Christendom should be shared by him and the Pope alone. A storm was encroaching on his vast realm, because many of the electors and their subjects had become Protestant since long ago. In the olden days, the Pope had been the one in charge of spiritual matters, but that could no longer satisfy the faith of the people, and that threatened their right to research and think free. The earthly world began, more and more, to rise up against the old Church.

In the North, the din of war thundered as well. The young king of the Swedes, Gustavus Adolphus, was burning with desire for great deeds. He was already starting to devise a new form of warfare, and, at the same time, to rejuvenate and complete the internal state of Sweden. The world is always young, and always new, for brave young people. He had already conquered Karelia, and Latvia would soon follow as well, so that the waves of the Baltic, from as far south as Riga up to the Gulf of Bothnia, would reach the Swedish coastline.
But the Kaiser shrugged his shoulders at this young man's feats in faraway lands. To him, the Polish Catholic Sigismund was still the rightful heir to the throne of Sweden, and Gustavus Adolphus was but a usurper, on whom he didn't even dare to bestow the royal name. The Kaiser was determined to exterminate all those who could be called heretics, without any mercy, and he had such people near. With the crown of twelve stars around her head, the Mother of God was still looking after his armies, over men who, their hands on their crucifixes, swore to give their blood for her sake. The inevitable conflict had come. The Protestants fled their razed churches and their scoured homes, as they restlessly looked around for a leader. Who was strong enough of will to be the man of the new age? Who would gather all of them and lead them to victory, for their young creed not to become a poor flickering candle-light, that the storm would quench for ever?

The evil spirits of warfare, all of them, flew over the heart of Europe, to scour and devastate the region for thirty long years. Ploughshares were left to their fate, to rust. Horses were harnessed to cannons. Poor farmers had to pick acorns, nuts, and berries in the woods to feed. Like redoubtable Titans, the Kaiser's warlords rushed forth, scattering fire and blood over the lands. Filled with dread and awe, the rank and file looked up to them and followed them blindly through hailstorms of bullets. What happened to a soldier who couldn't get his pay? The light of burning haystacks and already scoured farmhouses lit up their way, as they waded across rivers and marshes at night, towards the next place (even a petty holdfast would count) where there were full cellars ripe for the looting.

Before a grand palace, sometimes a long row of baroque coach-and-sixes stopped at the gates. The horses harnessed to the carriages were led to feed from marble mangers, while blue-blooded guards and pageboys stood at the staircases. Every evening, countless guests gathered in the brilliantly lighted great halls, but the host himself often remained unseen. If he ever appeared before the set table, he sat wrapped up in his own sinister thoughts, as he kept silence. He was lilywhite and slender, with raven hair and blazing black eyes. If he ever said a few short words, the whole company at the table listened to him entranced, as if he were a soothsayer, as if they were listening to some mysterious voice from beyond. Silence was to be kept in his presence as well. The servants were walking about in soft slippers, and the lords wrapped their spurs in satin ribbons, so that they did not clink. This was the most redoubtable and the most dreaded of all the Titans, and his name was Albrecht von Wallenstein.

In his youth, Wallenstein had been but a middling landowner, but he had married a dreadfully wealthy and elderly dowager, without any children of her own, who died shortly after the wedding and left him the whole of her vast property. By subsequently purchasing the castles and lands of defeated Protestants from the Crown, he had expanded his estate to unfathomable proportions.
A freethinker himself, he cared little for the conflicts between believers of different faiths. With his reputation as a warrior and his endless fortune, he summoned a vast army for the Kaiser, and he let those soldiers feed themselves by taking all that there was to be found. All the way from faraway lands, adventurers came to enlist under his flags to win both glory and wealth. His wildest cavalry came all the way from Croatia. And, when the Croatians' silvery reins glittered through the gunsmoke, both Catholics and Protestants knew that no quarter would be given at all. The German electors could no longer tolerate such a scourge. And thus, they persuaded the Kaiser to take the highest command of the Army from Wallenstein and bestow it upon another of the Titans: the septuagenarian, undefeated Count of Tilly.

High atop the walls of Magdeburg, which nearly resembled steep cliffs, the Protestants soon saw that Tilly was closing in at the head of his ranks, veteran soldiers grown old under the flag of the Catholic League. But what was this new, hitherto unknown battle-cry, that reached the crowds on the ramparts?

"Down with the Kaiser's men! Long live the King of Sweden!"

Strange things, indeed, had happened on the Baltic coast: there, a great royal fleet with Swedish flags had suddenly landed. It's rather petty just to sit at home by the fireside and sigh and complain about living in hard times. Young Gustavus Adolphus was a Great Swede, and Great Swedishness has never meant to be left behind and let others win their victories. For him, Great Swedishness was to let the whole people rejuvenate and arise, and then, with the help of said people, to gallantly reach the hand towards the flagpole, in the heart of the greatest power of its times. The grandson of Gustavus Vasa, the father of the nation, hadn't forgotten what the real legacy of House Vasa was, and thus, he had come to support the Germans of the same religion. Fortresses and holdfasts fell into his hands, and forth went the march across grass and snow: rather snow, with which his Swedes and Finns were obviously familiar. But could he be able to save his Protestant allies in Magdeburg? The Elector of Saxony sat aside, quaffing his ale, and he didn't know yet what he should think about those unwelcome guests, so he denied the Swedes passage through his lands.

Then, in the meantime, Tilly thought of employing a ruse de guerre. Day and night had his huge cannons thundered at the walls of Magdeburg, where the people had already started to lose hope, but now he had his artillery silenced. At nightfall, the weary sentinels were still watching on their posts... but not a sound could be heard from Tilly's camp.

"He knows the Swedes are coming", the townsfolk thought. "Against his custom, the old man is preparing to retreat". Confidently, most of them returned to their homes at the end of the night and got to bed, to finally have a rest. But the next morning, ere the bells in the church towers struck seven o'clock, a high ladder arose and leaned against the silent ramparts. Followed by a band of dark-skinned Walloons, up climbed a man who never had shivered or shaken. It was Colonel Pappenheim. Every time that battle frenzy or rage brought the hot blood to his brows, two crossed scars that resembled crossed swords flushed red atop his bushy eyebrows. The higher he climbed, the redder the scars blazed.

"Victory! Victory!", he cried, and finally he nailed the Imperial flag to the bastion, where the last sleeping guards were hastily stabbed dead.

The pealing of the church bells and the rising smoke soon proclaimed to the whole region that Magdeburg was being conquered and destroyed. Wounds, famine, toil and trouble: Tilly's soldiers had held through all the odds to get to live in such times as those. Here, the meanest private could get the wealth of a lifetime, as long as he made a good catch. There were no longer rules or order. They just had to break some locks and fill their knapsacks to the brim. But who could carry fine tables or chairs, or glass from windowpanes? "Break the furniture, and let that rubbish burn!" That was the wild robber band's solution to the problem.

Women tried to hide in their cellars and in garrets, or on the heaps of slain out on the blood-stained streets. On the floor of one only church there lay, at the end of the day, the bodies of more than fifty beheaded women. Little children ran around, calling for mum and dad, only to receive no answer. Laughing, the drunken Croatians caught them by their feet, split the poor orphans in twain with their sabres, and threw their bodies into the flames. Rooftops fell down with thunder, and the whole of Magdeburg was plunged into such an inferno, that the heat forced the conquerors to retreat and continue their looting elsewhere, another day.

Tilly looked, with tears in his eyes, at the heaps of ashes, when he made a gloomy entrance in the ruins. The spoils that his men carried with them, when they finally marched on towards Leipzig, were of no interest to him.


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