Seems like I ought to do something religious today, so I picked a battle from the the ultimate military expression of religious devotion: The Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe’s way of debating the Catholic vs. Protestant thing by counting corpses.
And since I’ve had a few requests to sing the glories of the Swedish Empire, such as it was, I picked the first great Swedish victory: Breitenfeld, September 17, 1631.
Breitenfeld apparently isn’t much now, a suburb of Leipzig in what used to be East Germany. They’ve even run an autobahn across the battle site, thought I guess in a cramped country like what’s left of Germany, you can’t exempt battle sites or you couldn’t build a driveway without zigzags. But for a few hours, about four centuries back, Breitenfeld was the center of the world.
First we have to set the scene a little, which is where religion comes in. Comes in with cannons blazing and civilians massacred, as usual. If you’re looking for a testimonial to the power of faith for your next sermon, preacher, stop right here. Those primitive bucketheads, using nothing more advanced than cannon that were like big rock-throwers, managed to do a job on Germany it took centuries to overcome (at which time the Germans did it to themselves all over again, for free). Faith can move mountains, we all know that, but did you know that faith also managed to exterminate three-fourths of the population in some German provinces, like Baden-Wurttemberg?
You can’t get a death rate like that without divine help.
The Thirty Years War disembowelled Germany, which covered most of Central Europe in the 17th century. I came across some German poem, surprisingly good for a poem, about the war, something like, “For three years running the river has been dammed with corpses.” (Anybody know that poem? I’d like to quote it properly but I can’t find it.)
30 Years War: Strange Fruit, Euro-Style
Most of the dead weren’t killed in battle. They died when the army their local princeling had put his bets down on lost. The soldiers on the losing side could flee—and they did, usually, with no delay at all, since they were mostly foreigners. But the villagers couldn’t flee or they’d starve—no Oxfam for those peasant refugees. They had to stay while mercenary scum, just utter scum, sadistic at a level that would make Liberia look like a Quaker Teachers’ College, poured into the farmlands and had themselves a good time in the name of whichever god and/or king they were paid by. Rape went without saying. Murder, standard practice. Famine, plague—guaranteed, once these filthy bastards swarmed through.
After a while the soldiers got bored with ordinary killing and started using their imaginations. Sometimes just to pass the time, sometimes to get the peasants to tell where they’d buried their grain or bacon. One of the new tortures that was a favorite of the scum who followed the Swedish army around during its victory march through southern Germany from 1630-35 gave a new word to the German language: “Schwedentrunk,” “Swedish drink,” the direct ancestor of the American-made “waterboarding.” Except waterboarding isn’t torture, at least not til Christopher Hitchens tries it, but if it was torture, it’d be the same torture as the Swedish Drink.
When the Swedish camp followers would catch a German peasant and suspect that he was holding out on them—or if they were just bored—they’d tie the poor misfortunate bastard to a table and mix up a cocktail of ditch water, shit and piss. Then they’d put a funnel in his mouth and pour the stinking mess down him til his belly swole up and he passed out. Then they’d hit his gut with sticks or just kick him while he rolled around trying to scream. You just don’t get Lutherans like that these days. Or Catholics like the ones who took the German Protestant city of Magdeburg on May 20, 1631, killing 25,000 out of 30,000 citizens in one day—again, not bad for the level of technology they had at the time.
The Catholic commander that day, Papenheim, was so proud he just had to boast:
“I consider it cost the city more than 20,000 souls, and most certainly no greater horrors and divine justice have been seen since the Destruction of Jerusalem. All our soldiers have become rich men.”
See? Stuff like this is why I have to laugh when Dixie whiners complain about Sherman. If only they knew what the real rough stuff is like, they’d have his picture in a little shrine as Kwan-Yin Sherman, God of Mercy.
To see what real harsh treatment of civilians means, check Papenheim’s cold-blooded segue to that last sentence, “All our soldiers have become rich men.” All part of God’s plan, and in case you didn’t know, God is a Cat’lic and goes to Mass, not Church.
Gustavus praying after Breitenfeld: Looka them killers on their knees!
In fact (here’s a smooth little segue of my own; Papenheim’ s not the only smooth writer type around here), it was the total horror of Magdeburg that helped the Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus win at the battle of Breitenfeld. Relieving the siege of Magdeburg was the official reason Gustavus Adolphus had landed his army in Germany, but they arrived too late. It may have worked out better that way for the Swedes, though not for the poor ol’ Magdeburg-ites, because when the surviving German Protestants heard what had happened when the Catholic soldiers-of-God slaughtered and raped their way into Magdeburg, they finally realized they’d have to fight back. And when those same Imperial armies—meaning a hard core of mercenaries followed by all the two-legged plague-bearing rats in Europe—swarmed over Saxony, one of the few parts of Germany that hadn’t been destroyed yet, the Elector of Saxony, John George I, put his 10,000 men together with Gustavus’s 25,000 Swedes and 7000-odd assorted Germans.
The Imperial Army under Tilly (Wallenstein had been thanked and shoved offstage because he was getting too popular for the Emperor’s liking) had about 35,000, so the difference wasn’t much. Especially because the Saxon troops turned out to be totally worthless, breaking and running as soon as the battle started.
The Swedes were something else, something weird. Well, Swedes are weird anyway, but Swedish weirdness hit a glorious peak in the 17th century, when the Swedish “zombie” troops marched across Germany and the Baltics. That’s how opposing troops thought of them, “zombies,” because they didn’t flinch under musket fire, didn’t show any expression at all. Like I said: Typical Swedes. Until they appeared, the class of European armies was the Spanish infantry. Most European armies would just drop their weapons and flee when they heard Spanish infantry was the opposition. The Spanish fought in a sort of modern phalanx, the Tercio (“Thirds”), with a mix of three types of arms to deal with any combination of cavalry or infantry attack: Swordsmen to hack through massed pike formations, pikemen to fend off cavalry, and musketmen to deliver shock volleys to charging cavalry and opposing infantry.
At the time of the Battle of Breitenfeld, the tercio was still considered the last word in infantry formations. It was a big, slow, but unstoppable hunk of steel that was sometimes called “The Spanish Square,” meant to have 3000 men but usually advancing with about half that. European armies before the French Revolution were so loose about recruiting and desertion that every formation, including the tercio, had to have noncoms forming a line across the rear to whack deserters back into the line. Not the Swedes, though. They just scowled their way forward, just as happy to get it over with. Maybe they knew their descendants would have to watch Ingmar Bergman movies like the one they made us watch in Social Studies, which—and I swear to God I’m not making this up—consisted of about three hours of this woman dying of cancer and screaming every now and then, and in between the screaming fits just lying there in bed with this clock tick-tocking at about 200 decibels. Maybe Gustav’s pikemen could see that coming and were hoping for a musket ball in the forehead. At any rate, they freaked other European soldiers right out. The Spanish would charge you too, but they’d do it sweating and calling you a heretic hijo de puta, showing a little team spirit. Not the Swedes; mope, hack, sulk, hack, frown, hack, that was them. Creeped people right out.
They had a couple of other things going for them in this battle, things the Imperial forces weren’t expecting. First, the Swedes had been fighting on the Eastern Front against Polish/Lithuanian cavalry, some of the best around, and they’d perfected combined-arms tactics on the Polish plains. Second, they were organized in battalions of about 600 men instead of Tercios three times or four times that size. And they were more heavily armed than the infantry in the Imperial tercios, because one of the combined-arms lessons learned Gustav brought back from Poland was that if you used these new, light (relatively light) artillery pieces, you could wheel them along right with the infantry in the battalions, and when you stacked your musketeers four or five deep and added the firepower of cannon firing homemade grapeshot, you could stop any cavalry charge or infantry advance dead in its tracks. And the small size of the battalion, compared to the Tercio, made for a thinner, longer line, with more guns sprouting from it. Dangerous when edged weapons and cavalry ruled the battlefield but a good idea as firepower improved for the infantry.
17th-c. field piece: Long-barrelled Claymore
Gustavus was a true pioneer in the use of field artillery, mobile artillery. The guns he used look ridiculous; some were so crude they used leather to hold a copper barrel together, and let me tell you, if somebody was going to fire one of those anywhere near me I’d want to be sure he measured out the powder charge with a teaspoon. But they could be carried by a couple of horses, or a half-dozen Swedes if horses were scarce, so the Swedish had a lot more tubes, operating a lot closer to the front line, than their opponents. These pieces had no range or accuracy, but loaded with forks and spoons, they were Hell up close; think of them as early Claymore mines, more than artillery. (You can see some of those pieces at this recreation site.)
The Imperial officer corps still thought of artillery as fixed: Incredibly heavy, thick barrels (because metallurgy wasn’t up to much yet) that you planted on a good spot overlooking the battlefield and hoped to turn toward the action, wherever it went. They had it all figured out, they thought: You use your cavalry to attack, your infantry to defend, and your artillery to make a lot of noise. Gustavus had other ideas.
The battle didn’t go that well for the Swedes and their Saxon friends at first. The Imperial cavalry, under the same Papenheim who sang a joyful tune at the Sack of Magedburg, crushed the Swedes’ Saxon allies. They ran like cheap mascara.
That should’ve been the end of the battle. The horse hacks down the Swedish infantry flank, the Swedes run…it’s all over. Not this time. The smaller, more mobile battalion structure made it easier for the Swedes to refuse their line in the classic right-angle defense against a collapsed flank. By the time the Saxons had said, “Auf weidersein!” the Swedes were in a new line, holding off the cavalry. That was NOT supposed to happen, and it freaked the troopers out.
Then Gustavus led his own cavalry, toughened on the Eastern Front, against the Imperial flanks. They swarmed the huge artillery tubes and turned them on the Imperial Tercios, which were now advancing against the Swedish line. God, what a target that must have been: 2000 heavily armed men marching in close order, a huge mass of crunchy flesh, bone and metal.
Artillery in the early 17th century didn’t fire exploding shells, of course, and didn’t have the muzzle velocity that was possible later, when stronger metals went into the tubes. In fact, artillery generally aimed to hit infantry on the bounce, because a huge metal ball bouncing through massed soldiery killed far more than a single fly-by. When one of those asteroids hit a Tercio, everything turned into shrapnel: meat, bones, metal. In fact, late in the battle Tilly was wounded when a piece of one of his own men’s smashed pike, crunched by a cannonball, slammed into his face.
So all the Swedish cavalry had to do, once they overran the enemy tubes, was turn them a few degrees and start firing. Those huge metal marbles rolled right through the tercios, demonstrating the formation’s fatal flaw in a few bad seconds. Bowling fer Catholics!
The Tercios were now caught in a classic crossfire, with the Swedish line, thinned out to give firing room to as many men as possible, pouring musket balls and grape at them, and the Imperial artillery sending slow-lob metal maiming balls right through their ranks.
17th-c. view of Breitenfeld: If you can see it, you’ve got better eyes than me.
They broke and surrendered, or died. Four out of five were killed or captured and for a while, the Imperial forces had no army at all. And that’s how the glory days of the Schwedentrunk came to southern Germany in a epic battle betwixt two defunct religions. But you have to admit, the leather cannon were pretty cool.
Hey Nerdoids and Nerdettes! Note Gary Brecher’s functioning email: gary dot brecher at gmail dot com
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