Jacob A. Riis

“ Emperor Ferdinand was better than his day; he wept at the sight of the King’s blood-stained jacket. The Protestant world trembled; its hope and strength were gone. But the Swedish people, wiping away their tears, resolved stoutly to carry on Gustav Adolf’s work. The men he had trained led his armies to victory on yet many a stricken field. Peace came at length to Europe; the last religious war had been fought and won. Freedom of worship, liberty of conscience, were bought at the cost of the kingliest head that ever wore a crown. ”

“ From distant lands and peaceful homes have we come to battle for freedom, truth and thy gospel. Give us victory for thy holy name’s sake, Amen!”
Tilly had expected the King to attack, but the fiery Pappenheim upset his plans. The smoke of the guns drifted in the faces of the Swedes and the King swung his army to the south to get the wind right. In making the turn they had to cross a brook and this moment Pappenheim chose for his charge. Like a thunderbolt his Walloons fell upon them. The Swedish fire mowed them down like ripened grain and checked their impetuous rush. ”

“ On the heath Dalgas was prophet, prince, and friend of the people. In the crowds that flocked about his bier homespun elbowed gold lace in the grief of a common loss. Boughs of the fragrant spruce decked his coffin, the gift of the heath to the memory of him who set it free.
To Dalgas apply the words of the seer with which he himself characterized the Society that was the child of his heart and brain: “The good men are those who plant and water,” for they add to the happiness of mankind. ”

“ Almost at the first thrust he ran the Admiral through. The seconds held his servant while Stahl jumped on his horse and galloped away. Tordenskjold breathed out his dauntless soul in the arms of his faithful servant and friend.
His body lies in a black marble sarcophagus in the “Navy Church” at Copenhagen. The Danish and Norwegian peoples have never ceased to mourn their idol. He was a sailor with a sailor’s faults. But he loved truth, honor, and courage in foe and friend alike. Like many seafaring men, he was deeply religious, with the unquestioning faith of a child. ”

“ But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil. The heath had known such in the dim past. It had not always been a desert. The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients, which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages stood, bear witness to it. Great battles account for their share, and some of them were fought in historic times. On Grathe Heath the young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend. ”

“ CARL LINNÉ, KING OF THE FLOWERS
Years ago there grew on the Jonsboda farm in Smaland, Sweden, a linden tree that was known far and wide for its great age and size. So beautiful and majestic was the tree, and so wide the reach of its spreading branches, that all the countryside called it sacred. Misfortune was sure to come if any one did it injury. So thought the people. It was not strange, then, that the farmer’s boys, when they grew to be learned men and chose a name, should call themselves after the linden. The peasant folk had no family names in those days. ”

“ At what peril I am here with you, you know who see me hounded as a wild beast day by day, hour by hour. But our beloved country is more to me than life. How long must we be thralls, we who were born to freedom? Those of you who are old remember what persecution Swedish men and women have suffered from the Danish kings. The young have heard the story of it and have learned from they were little children to hate and resist such rule. These tyrants have laid waste our land and sucked its marrow, until nothing remains for us but empty houses and lean fields. ”

“ Tilly fled, wounded, and narrowly escaped capture. A captain in the Swedish army, who was called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol. A staff officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief. Twilight fell upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead, two-thirds of them the flower of the Emperor’s army. Blood-stained and smoke-begrimed, Gustav Adolf and his men knelt on the field and thanked God for the victory. ”

“ Behind prison walls, comforted only by Dagmar’s son, sat the King, growing old and gray with anger and grief. Denmark lay prostrate under the sudden blow, while her enemies rose on every side. Day by day word came of outbreaks in the conquered provinces. The people did not know which way to turn; the strong hand that held the helm was gone, and the ship drifted, the prey of every ill wind. ”

“ He had come to make an end of Denmark.
Copenhagen was almost without defences. The old earth walls mounted only six guns, with breastworks scarce knee-high. In places King Karl could have driven his sleigh into the heart of the city at the head of his army. But for the second time he hesitated when a swift blow would have won all—and lost. Overnight the Danish nation awoke to a fight for its life. King and people, till then strangers, in that hour became one. ”

“ Peaceful husbandmen were murdered, the young women dragged away to worse than slavery, and helpless children spitted upon the lances of the wild landsknechts and tossed with a laugh into the blazing ruins of their homes. But no such foul blot cleaves to the memory of Gustav Adolf. While he lived his men were soldiers, not demons. In his tent the work of Hugo Grotius on the rights of the nations in war and peace lay beside the Bible and he knew them both by heart. When he was gone, the fame of some of his greatest generals was smirched by as vile orgies as Tilly’s worst days had witnessed. ”

“ Gustav’s pen was as sharp as his tongue. When Hans Brask, the oldest prelate in the land, who had stood stoutly by the old régime, left the country and refused to come back, he wrote to him: “As long as you might milk and shear your sheep, you staid by them. When God spake and said you were to feed them, not to shear and slaughter them, you ran away. Every honest man can judge if you have done well.” Hard words to a good old man; but there were plenty of others who deserved them. That was the end of the hierarchy in Sweden.
But not of the unruly peasants who had tasted the joys of king-making. ”

“ The ignorant Bavarian peasants had been told that the King was the very anti-Christ, come to harass the world for its sins, and carried on a cruel guerilla warfare upon his army. They waylaid the Swedes by night on their foraging trips and maimed and murdered those they caught with fiendish tortures. The bitterest anger filled Gustav Adolf’s soul when upon his entry into Landshut the burgomaster knelt at his stirrup asking mercy for his city. ”

“ It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew the Thirty Years’ War, the most terrible that ever scourged the civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and hamlets. ”

“ Three times Karl Gustav hurled his columns against them; as often they were driven back, broken and beaten. A few gained a foothold on the walls only to be dashed down to death. The burghers fought for their lives and their homes. Their women carried boiling pitch and poured it over the breastworks, and when they had no more, dragged great beams and rolled them down upon the ladders, sweeping them clear of the enemy. In the hottest fight Gunde Rosenkrantz, one of the king’s councillors, trod on a fallen soldier and, looking into his face, saw that it was his own son breathing his last. ”

“ To-day there are more than six thousand in a town with handsome buildings, gas, electric lighting, and paved streets. The heath is half a dozen miles away. And this is not the result of any special or forced industry, but the natural, healthy growth of a centre for an army of industrious men and women winning back the land of their fathers by patient toil. All through the landscape one sees from the train the black giving way to the green. ”

“ King Valdemar gave Denmark her first written laws that judged between man and man, in at least one of her provinces clear down into our day. “With law shall land be built” begins his code. “The law,” it says, “must be honest, just, reasonable, and according to the ways of the people. It must meet their needs, and speak plainly so that all men may know and understand what the law is. It is not to be made in any man’s favor, but for the needs of all them who live in the land.” ”

“ In Göteborg they knew the strength of his fleet and laughed at his threat. But it was never safe to laugh at Tordenskjold. The first dark night he stole in with ten armed boats, seized the shore batteries of the old fort, and spiked their guns before a shot was fired. The rising moon saw his men in possession of the ships lying at anchor. With their blue-lined coats turned inside out so that they might pass for Swedish uniforms, they surprised the watch in the guard-house and made them all prisoners. ”

“ Dagmar meant daybreak in their ancient tongue, and it really seemed as if a new and beautiful day dawned upon the land in her coming. The dry pages of history have little enough to tell of her beyond the simple fact of her marriage and untimely death, though they are filled with her famous husband’s deeds; but not all of his glorious campaigns that earned for him the name of “The Victor” have sunk so deep into the people’s memory, or have taken such hold of their hearts, as the lovely queen who
Came without burden, she came with peace ”

“ It proved the longest and hardest winter any one then living could remember. Easter was at hand before the ice broke up, and let a fishing smack slip over to Ystad, on the mainland. It came back with news that set the whole island wondering. Peace had been made, and Denmark had ceded all its ancient provinces east of the Öresund to Karl Gustav. Ystad itself and Skaane, the province in which Jens Kofoed had been campaigning, were Swedish now, and so was Bornholm. All unknown to its people, the island had changed hands in the game of war overnight, as it were. ”

“ The King’s, on the contrary, moved in smaller bodies, quickly thrown upon the point of danger, and his artillery was so distributed among them as to make every shot tell on the compact body of the enemy. Whichever way Pappenheim turned he found a firm front, bristling with guns, opposing him. Seven times he threw himself upon the living wall; each time his horsemen were flung back, their lines thinned and broken. The field was strewn with their dead. Tilly, anxiously watching, threw up his hands in despair. “This man will lose me honor and fame, and the Emperor his lands,” he cried. ”

“ In the first year of the war the Swedish budget was thirteen millions of dollars, of which nine and a half went for armaments. The whole army which Gustav Adolf led into Germany numbered only 14,000 soldiers, but it was made up of Swedish veterans led by men whose names were to become famous for all time, and welded together by an unshakable belief in their commander, a rigid discipline and a religious enthusiasm that swayed master and men with a common impulse. Such a combination has in all days proven irresistible. ”

“ Denmark was helplessly impoverished. Her trade was ruined; the nobles were sucking the marrow of the country. Of the freehold farms that had been its strength scarce five thousand were left in the land. It could hardly pay its way in days of peace. Its strongholds lay in ruins; it had neither arms, ammunition, nor officers. On its roster of thirty thousand men for the national defence were carried the dead and the yet unborn, while the Swedish army of tried veterans had gone from victory to victory under a warlike king. ”

“ Sailors from the useless ships took out their guns and mounted them in the redoubts. Peasants flocked in and were armed with battle-axes, clubs, and boat-hooks when the supply of muskets gave out. When Karl Gustav drew his lines tight he faced six thousand determined men behind strong walls. The city stood in a ring of blazing fires. Its defenders were burning down the houses and woods beyond the moats to clear the way for their gunners. The King watched the sight from his horse in silence. ”

“ All day they fought, and victory seemed to lean toward the Danes, when the base Holsteiners, the Danish rear-guard whom the enemy had bought to betray their king, turned their spears upon his army, and decided the day. The battle ended in utter rout of Valdemar’s forces. Four thousand Danish men were slain. The King himself fell wounded on the field, his eye pierced by an arrow, and would have fallen into the hands of the enemy once more but for an unknown German knight, who took him upon his horse and bore him in the night over unfrequented paths to Kiel, where he was safe. ”

“ Tordenskjold saw that if he could capture or destroy this fleet Norway was saved; the siege must perforce be abandoned. And Norway was his native land, which he loved with his whole fervid soul. But no time was to be lost. He could not go back to ask for permission, and one may shrewdly guess that he did not want to, for it would certainly have been refused. He heard that the Swedish officers, secure in their stronghold, were to attend a wedding on shore the next day. His instructions from the Admiralty were: in an emergency always to hold a council of war, and to abide by its decision. ”