COUNTDOWN TO LÜTZEN VII: DAYS OF VICTORIES V

DAYS OF VICTORIES

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

V. The raid on the Old Holdfast

The Catholics saw with dread how the invincible Protestant army was gradually closing in on the Kaiser's own capital. Tilly lay in his grave, and the other, even more redoubtable warlord, Wallenstein, who had been banished on account of his hubris, sat, ominous and offended, at his distant palace of Friedland. Before him lay a chart on which zodiac signs had been drawn. He didn't want to hear about religion, but the dark loner did believe in the stars. They were his gods. By the position of the stars and the planets, he believed he could read the events of his life in the future, and he read of a great, dizzying destiny. Yet the Kaiser had to beg for a long time, and to promise him unfathomable glory and power, and even carte blanche, before he rose once more from obscurity, to support him with freshly-recruited troops. Until then, Gustavus Adolphus had led the events of the war, but Wallenstein decided to quietly and secretly force him to return up north again, step by step, not by uncertain battle, but by attacking his allies, and through war of attrition and want, like by means of a mysterious enchantment.

A half mile away from Nuremberg, Wallenstein had built, on three hills, a mammoth camp, that everyone spoke of as if it had been a fairytale. It was so vast that its triple palisade of deforestated woodland even encircled streams and hamlets. It took many hours to ride around its perimetre, and breastplates and cannons were glimmering everywhere.

"As long as I breathe", Gustavus Adolphus said, "Wallenstein will never succeed".

And he wrote to Oxenstierna, who was making haste thither with reinforcements: "This opponent is an evil spirit, that only can be exorcized through fasting". Wallenstein's fortified hills loomed like a world of wraiths, whose residents never showed themselves at the light of day, but still spread dread and misery. The water in the springs and fountains was poisoned. Famished stray horses staggered on the roads, and some of them, stung by gadflies, had become mad and threw themselves headlong from the steep cliffs. On the streets, ailing people lay starving and dying of fever. In Wallenstein's camp, the filth reached such levels that the soldiers couldn't sleep at night, for the tents were completely full of grasshoppers.

Then, one dark autumn night, Wallenstein awoke to the sound of gunshots and to the shouts of wide-awake women and youngsters. Mothers used to scare their children with threats of the Swedes to make them behave themselves, and now, the bullets of the dreaded ones were already rattling through the tents. Gustavus Adolphus could no longer bear to see his men suffer. With muskets in their right hands and the left ones free, his soldiers were climbing up the deforestated and steep slopes of the highest hill.

On the top of the hill, there was an old holdfast. There stood Wallenstein, against the rays of the rising sun, which, for instants, managed to pierce the thick gunsmoke. A dark armour covered his slender torso, and his face, the sun caught red in his raven hair, remained inexpressive, like that of a dead man. None of his warriors had ever seen him laugh or received a word of kindness from his lips. Sternly and coldly, he gave his commands in a sharp voice, keeping silence every now and then. From total obscurity, he had risen to the power which he had created himself, and only his presence was enough for his soldiers to fight with all their fury.

Time after time, the Swedes were put to rout, and the living slipped on the blood of the slain. Ablaze with impatience, the King commanded the army in the midst of the carnage and gunfire, and the sole of one of his boots was shot away. Lennart Torstensson was taken prisoner and, afterwards, imprisoned in such a moist and cold dungeon in Ingolstadt (where Tilly had died) that he would later suffer from painful gout for a lifetime. 
With a flashing, slashing blade in his hand, Stålhandske stormed forth, surrounded by his Finnish riders, but they were driven backwards down the slope. When night finally fell with splashing rain, which would render gunpowder useless, the attackers were forced to turn back.

However, it didn't last long before they attempted to storm the Old Holdfast one more time. One day, the Swedish army was placed in battle array before Wallenstein's camp, waiting for four hours to give battle. But, as mysteriously silently as he used to sit himself in a reunion, his cannons and muskets kept silence. Even the sentinels went back into the encampment. Only when the Swedes had marched away did Wallenstein finally leave the place. And, behind him, the whole great holdfast burned to the ground, for he had given orders that that should be done.

Soon, news and more news would come from Saxony that Wallenstein had begun to devastate their land. To support their allies, the Swedes marched even further up north, travelling on the same roads they had already taken before in the victorious days of Breitenfeld. Oxenstierna rode by the King's side, and, like the year before, the march went, at night, through wooded valleys, by the light of blazing torches. Slowly and quietly, for no one to hear their words, both riders conversed about their dearest dreams, of a Northern Baltic Empire and an alliance of Scandinavian and Germanic Protestants with Sweden for a leading land. Serious and pensive, they finally took their leave of each other, weighed down by a silent intuition that this farewell was perchance their last one.

When the King rode into Erfurt, where Mary Eleanor was waiting for him, she had, full of desire, already hastened to the market square in the company of her court ladies. He followed her up to their apartments in the local castle, but both were so distracted and in such low spirits that everyone realized it. Hustle and bustle reigned in every corner, and, the very next morning, he had to lead his army against Wallenstein, who was not far away from his present quarters. He entrusted the Queen to his council, called war a scourge, and reminded everyone that he, himself, could every moment fall prey to misfortune or death.

"We shall see each other", he whispered to her. "If not in this finite life, it will be in the joys of Eternity".

With tears in both their eyes, they embraced clinging to each other, he gave her the most passionate of his kisses, and then he rode away into the sunset.

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