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Updated: June 26, 2025
The tortures Torstenson suffered found an outlet in giving orders for a general assault on the works of the city, especially on the Peter Gate. The firing of the double and single arquebuses began again, the mortars joined in with their short, sharp roar, and soon the earth shook and the air vibrated with the frightful din. Conrad had taken refuge in a corner of the hospital wall.
In Germany, Marshal Guebriant and the Swedish general Torstenson, so paralyzed that he had himself carried in a litter to the head of his army, had just won back from the empire Silesia, Moravia, and nearly all Saxony; the chances of war were everywhere favorable to France, a just recompense for the indomitable perseverance of Cardinal Richelieu through good and evil fortune.
In the olden times men were laid on the torture-bench that they might be forced to confess their evil deeds; and God Himself sometimes uses pain to bring a sinner to repentance, when he has turned a deaf ear to all the voices of conscience and religion. Torstenson, a man scarcely forty years of age, was seated in an arm-chair.
He had, he said, paraded his army and fired a salute in his honour; should any further resistance be offered, he would the next day attack the town more vigorously, and destroy it. The commandant sent a polite but firm refusal, and on the following day Torstenson fulfilled the first part of his threat by opening a terrible fire against the town.
When all the inhabitants capable of bearing arms had been thus told off to their several duties, the old men, women, and children were requested to observe the appointed hours for prayer, and ask help from the Almighty in the city's time of need. Marshal Torstenson appeared before Freiberg on December 29.
And I can tell you another thing, noble sir, and that is that you will never conquer the town no, not if you and all your soldiers were to stand on your heads! 'Silence, boy! cried an officer angrily. 'Let the lad chatter, said Torstenson. 'His talk helps to pass away the time. And pray, he continued, turning to Conrad, 'who is to blame for your trouble but yourselves?
These Swedes now are pressing the siege of our town so hard that we cannot possibly hold out for long. They say that even if Torstenson offers us fair terms, the commandant means to refuse them without even asking your worship anything about it, and so to give the town up to be stormed and pillaged.
Wasn't that what Abimelech did when he couldn't get round the people of Sichem any other way? 'Ah, but when he tried it again at another place, laughed Wahle, 'a woman dropped a stone on his head from the top of the tower, and that finished him. 'May the same fate soon overtake Torstenson! said a third. 'Oh, he'll never venture up here, said Wahle.
This place, my Dryasdust informs me, had many accidents by floodage and by fire; was seized and re-seized in the Thirty-Years War especially, at a great rate: Saxon Arnheim, Austrian Holk, Swedish Torstenson; no end to the battering and burning poor Neisse had, to the big ransoms "in new Reichs-thalers and 300 casks of wine." But it always rebuilt itself, and began business again.
Field-Marshal Torstenson, a martyr to gout, could only sit at the window of his quarters in the hospital, directing the attack, and chafing inwardly at its continued want of success.
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