But this is only a beginning. Turning to the second, we see at the centre of the plate a noble oak tree, from whose boughs twenty-one corpses are already limply dangling. On a ladder a twenty-second victim is about to be turned off by the hangman, while, three or four rungs below, a friar holds up the crucifix before his eyes. A second friar gives his benediction to a twenty-third at the foot of the ladder; a twenty-fourth is playing dice on a drum-head against a group of halberdiers, and in the foreground yet another friar is busy with the twenty-fifth. Far off, one can see the tents of the encampment, and in the middle distance the pikes of two regiments of infantry stand up like long bristles against the sky.
In the next etching, two musketeers, with bunches of ribbons hanging from the knees of their baggy knickerbockers, are taking aim at a malefactor tied to a post. Three or four corpses litter the ground behind the post, and a friar, whom we recognize by his pointed hood as a Capuchin, is talking to another prisoner who will soon be lying with them. Several officers and a large emaciated sporting dog are looking on. More friars appear in the next plate, preparing more prisoners to rejoin a companion who, this time, is being burnt alive. Their crime is sacrilege; for it is they who have fired the churches which we see blazing in the background. Callot concludes his rhymed caption with two lines that might find their place in one of the Cautionary Stories of Jane and Ann Taylor.
“Mais pour punition de les avoir brulez, ils sont eux-mesmes enfin aux flammes immolez.23” After which we pass on to the most elaborate and the most impassively frightful of all the executions-that of a voleur inhumain, who, on a high scaffold, is being broken on the wheel. The executioner stands over him, his crowbar raised above his head, ready to shatter one of the victim’s shins; and at the other end of the wheel’s diameter an ecclesiastic in a biretta bends over the naked man, holding a little crucifix close to the upturned face and praying inaudibly through the reiterated screams. At one corner of the scaffold, in a neat little heap, as though left there by a man who has gone for a swim and will be back in a moment, lie the victim’s clothes and broadbrimmed hat.
From executions Callot passes to the workings of a providential and poetic justice. In the first of the three plates devoted to this subject, we see a number of mutilated veterans dragging themselves over the ground on the stumps of limbs. The second shows a pleasant suburban walk during a time of truce. The local army has been disbanded and civil law and order temporarily restored. Unemployed and lacking the means to steal their living, the soldiers are reduced to begging for alms. But their mendicite faict rire le passant, and some of them have already lain down to die upon the dunghills at the side of the road. More dramatically frightful is the bad end to which the soldiers come in the next etching. Here the enraged peasants have turned against their despoilers, of whom an isolated company has been ambushed by the country-people and is in process of being massacred.
At the centre of the plate lies the body of an infantryman, half naked ; for he has been already stripped of his shirt and doublet. Over him stand two peasants, one of whom is pulling off his boots, while the other, with a great flail, threshes the corpse -again and again in a frenzy of accumulated hatred for all soldiers, in an insane and senseless effort to be revenged, if only symbolically and on dead flesh, for all the outrages suffered through the long years of warfare. That evening, no doubt, the thresher returned in triumph to his family and his pillaged hovel.
The burden of loot was heavy on his back twenty pounds of flour, two or three shirts, ragged, it was true, and much stained with blood, but still very wearable, a whole ham, a pair of boots, two pistols and a flask of distilled liquor. There was a feast after sunset, and everyone was happy and full of hope. Peace, they were all convinced, would come now at almost any moment; the soldiers would vanish and the nightmare be at an end. But the thresher and his neighbours were poor ignorant boors; they knew nothing of those two men, hundreds of miles to the West, in Paris, one dressed in scarlet, the other in tattered grey, and both of them working, working all day long and far into the night, to make quite sure that there should be no peace, that the soldiers should go on marching and the nightmare be prolonged. In 1633, when Callot drew that dry and unimpassinoned portrait of the Man with the Flail, the Thirty Years’ War had run exactly half its course. There were still fifteen years of miseres et malheurs to go.
It is necessary now to turn again to the political and military events which were the immediate cause of those miseries and misfortunes of the early sixteen-thirties. In the first weeks of 1631, Gustavus Adolphus finally accepted the golden bait, which Richelieu had extorted from the despairing peasants of France, and, along with the bait, accepted the Cardinal’s conditions. By the Treaty of Barwalde the King of Sweden was hired to act, not as the espada of the European bull-fight, but rather as banderillero and picador. Richelieu and Father Joseph had no desire to see the Hapsburg monster killed, above all by a Protestant matador; Gustavus’s function was to wound and exhaust, not only the bull, but himself and all the Protestants as well.
After which the French were to step in and occupy the entire bull-ring. This policy of playing both ends against the middle had been employed in the previous century by the Papacy, which had encouraged Charles V against those enemies of Catholic unity, the Protestants, and the Protestants against that menace to papal sovereignty, Charles V. It was an ingenious policy, but not of the sort best calculated to make an appeal to French taxpayers or the German victims of military atrocities.
Primed with French money, Gustavus was ready to go into action; but the Protestants, and especially John George, the powerful Elector of Saxony, were still reluctant to join him. With the opening of the campaigning season of 1631, Tilly marched into north-eastern Germany and, in the latter part of March, annihilated a Swedish garrison at New Brandenburg. A fortnight later Gustavus captured Frankfort-on-the-Oder and, by way of retaliation, killed exactly as many Catholic prisoners as Tilly had slaughtered Swedes. Meanwhile, Tilly’s lieutenant, Pappenheim, was besieging Magdeburg. The city was stormed on May 10, set on fire and the greater number of its thirty-odd thousand inhabitants massacred. Catholic Germany rang bells, said Te Deums and got drunk in honour of its conquering heroes.
The Protestants nursed a hatred which their fear of the Emperor and their scepticism in regard to Gustavus’s military ability did not allow them to express. Flushed with triumph, Ferdinand now made the mistake of peremptorily refusing Saxony’s appeal that he should withdraw the Edict of Restitution, and proceeded to invade the Elector’s territories. Thereupon, John George finally made up his mind to join the Swedes. Tilly fought two indecisive engagements with Gustavus, then marched away to fall upon Leipzig. Gustavus followed him and compelled him to give battle at Breitenfeld, where on September 17th he utterly defeated him. From Leipzig, the Swedes marched south-west to the Rhineland, and there, in a part of the country that had for some years been spared the horrors of war and military occupation, they wintered in luxury, while their leader organized the now triumphant Protestants into an evangelical league under Swedish control.
Meanwhile, from his palaces at Prague and Gitschin, Wallenstein kept sending mysterious emissaries to the conqueror, offering to join with Gustavus in building up a new and greater German empire free from French, Spanish and Hapsburg influences and united by the sword under the dictatorship of the two greatest commanders of the age. That wild, enormous dream of which he had talked a year before with Father Joseph -perhaps the auspicious, star-predicted moment had arrived when it could be made to come true. But Gustavus was not inclined to ally himself with a man to whom the betrayal of old friends and an indulgent master meant so little, and the offers from Bohemia were politely declined. Against his will, Wallenstein was compelled to retain the dubious semblance of loyalty to the Emperor.
In March 1632, Gustavus moved against Bavaria. The imperial armies were once more defeated on the River Lech, and Tilly received wounds, of which he soon after died. Augsburg and Munich were now occupied by the Swedes, and the peasants who, a few years before, had been driven to ineffectual revolt by the domestic tyranny of their own government, now found themselves at the mercy of a conquering army.
In despair,
