United States or Australia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
The caution with which he avoided a battle was imputed to fear; but the well-established reputation of Wallenstein enabled him to despise this suspicion. The vanity of the allies allowed them not to see that he purposely saved them a defeat, because a victory at that time would not have served his own ends.
Yet this was but the prelude to greater sufferings, with which Wallenstein himself, at the head of the main army, threatened Saxony. After having left behind him fearful monuments of his fury, in his march through Franconia and Thuringia, he arrived with his whole army in the Circle of Leipzig, and compelled the city, after a short resistance, to surrender.
Nothing shows the weakness of the imperial power, with all its apparent strength, and the barbarous notions and customs of the country, more than this grant to Wallenstein. And, with all his heroism and success, he cannot now be viewed in any other light than as a licensed robber.
Invention loses its childish or juvenile character in becoming virile; there are no other changes. Compare Schiller's Robbers, written in his teens, with his Wallenstein, dating from his fortieth year; or the vague sketches of the adolescent James Watt with his inventions as a man. Another case is the metamorphosis or deviation of creative power.
All the resources which had been obtained by the violent and oppressive extortions of Tilly and Wallenstein were exhausted; all these depots, magazines, and rallying-points, were now lost to the Emperor; and the war could no longer be carried on as before at the cost of others.
And when the Emperor laid upon him his commands to move towards the Danube, and prevent the Duke of Weimar from establishing himself in so dangerous a position on the frontiers of Austria, Wallenstein thought proper to conclude the campaign a second time, and quartered his troops for the winter in this exhausted kingdom.
But the rapidity with which Gustavus Adolphus had taken possession of Naumburg, disappointed this plan, and it was now Wallenstein himself who awaited the attack.
Wallenstein was in power, Wallenstein the mysterious, the ambitious, the victorious; soldier of fortune and arbiter of empires; reader of the stars and ally of the powers of darkness; poor by birth and rich by marriage and imperial favor; an extraordinary man, surrounded by mystery and silence, victorious through ability and audacity, rising from obscurity to be master of the emperor, and falling at length by the hand of assassination.
Colonels Illo and Goetz were ordered by Wallenstein to the Warta, to push forwards into Pomerania, and to the coasts of the Baltic, and actually obtained possession of Landsberg, the key of Pomerania.
History says nothing of prisoners; a further proof of the animosity of the combatants, who neither gave nor took quarter. Pappenheim died the next day of his wounds at Leipzig; an irreparable loss to the imperial army, which this brave warrior had so often led on to victory. The battle of Prague, where, together with Wallenstein, he was present as colonel, was the beginning of his heroic career.
Word Of The Day