Fog lies heavy over Halle. Three thousand horses snort into the autumn haze. After months of hard campaigning the Imperial cavalry wants only rest. The Thirty Years’ War grinds into its fifteenth year — the second annus horribilis running for the Catholic League. Barely a year before, in September 1631, Swedes and Saxons had broken the League at Breitenfeld; Tilly, who commanded it, lost his whole army on the field. Six months after that, in April 1632, he lost his life as well, dying of wounds taken at the Battle of Rain.
Sic transit gloria mundi. For years Tilly had ranked among the League’s most successful commanders; in a matter of months he threw it all away. The northern bishoprics had seemed all but back in Habsburg hands. The Imperial Estates had even begun to dread a hereditary monarchy, so vast had the Emperor’s power grown. The Empire — its eagle wore many feathers, each one a sovereign prince — seemed for a single historical moment about to harden into an absolutist state.
The Swedes put an end to it. At their head rode their charismatic king, Gustavus Adolphus.
Yet Swedish success unsettled even the Protestant Union. The wreckage the foreign army left behind weighed on the Lutheran estates. No one doubted the victories. But the question pressed all the same — and not only on the princes. The pamphlets pouring from Protestant presses asked it too: at what price? Vaterland, Vaterland: the word turns up on nearly every broadsheet of the day. The Saxon Elector now fights beside the Swedes against his own Emperor. Germany has become the battlefield of a foreign power. The Empire now lies wholly — nay, more than wholly — laid waste.1
The Emperor pulls the emergency brake. Albrecht von Wallenstein — the disgraced genius of the battlefield — is called back to command. The Swedes have marauded their way into Bavaria; now Wallenstein breaks their run of victories. In September he halts them at Zirndorf, and the aura of the invincible Swedish king shatters. Wallenstein is back, and emphatically so.
Then disease thins both armies. Soldiers desert by the score; horses die by the thousand. Enough, it seems, for this year. The Catholics pray that 1633 will prove kinder.
Gottfried von Pappenheim, too, is to take up winter quarters with his legendary cavalry — riders as famed as they are feared. At Halle they are to cut the Swedish supply lines.
For Pappenheim the wait is almost unbearable. Rest does not come naturally to this man of old Franconian stock. His wilfulness and recklessness had long been a thorn in the late Tilly’s side, and Pappenheim chafed at high command in his turn. Tilly and Wallenstein are too cautious for him, too slow to strike. War, he insists, must be waged to the hilt. “This war drags on for one reason only — stinginess, and the squandering of time!” he once flung at Wallenstein. Troops were raised too few, hired and paid off again, when the thing to do was to gather one overwhelming host and crush the enemy outright.
Pappenheim is no braggart; he lives this Machiavellian creed. Friend and foe alike know him for the ruthlessness with which his riders lay the country waste. The war demands it; victory over the Protestants justifies it. He is himself a convert, and he holds nothing but scorn for the old faith he left behind. When the League put Magdeburg to the torch, he read its ruin as a judgement: God had punished the city for its pride.
Twelve years in the field have hardened him. Pappenheim spares no one — least of all himself. He rides at the head of his men, straight into the thick of it. His scarred face tells you how he fights: visor up, always forward, always at the enemy. His comrades call him Schrammenheinrich — Scar-faced Heinrich.
As a young man Pappenheim had a surprisingly fine schooling in the classical tongues and in philosophy. Nothing marked him for a soldier. At the Defenestration of Prague in 1618 he is only twenty-three. Yet he swears an oath to himself: in hard times a man cannot waste his youth. Better to burn out than to rot in idleness. So he lays down the pen and takes up the sword — for the honour of his Emperor.
For if one man will fight for his Emperor to the last, it is Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim.
The chance comes sooner than he thinks. Pappenheim is still marching north when a courier gallops into camp and thrusts a dispatch into his hands. It is dated that same day, the 15th of November 1632. The message from the supreme commander of the Catholic League reads more like a telegram:
“The enemy is marching in! Let the Count drop everything where it stands and incaminate himself hither with all his men and guns, that he may be with us by tomorrow’s dawn.”
Followed, on the reverse, by an urgency call:
Cito, Cito, Citissime, Cito!
Pappenheim does not wait a second. The cuirassiers who had longed so badly for rest are called to the saddle.
Wallenstein is calling for help.
And Pappenheim will answer.
“There is no keeping an appointment with this Pappenheim.”2
It is the morning of the 16th of November 1632. Wallenstein surveys the fields of Lützen — and the cavalry he summoned has not come. The League’s commander has blundered. Two days earlier he sent Pappenheim’s horse from Weißenfels to Halle, and Gustavus Adolphus must have got wind of it. Out of nowhere the Swedish king has appeared from Naumburg. The Imperials are outnumbered, and the dangerous Schrammenheinrich is galloping somewhere far to the north with his cuirassiers.
But Wallenstein has not earned his name as the Emperor’s best man for nothing. He is no daredevil like Pappenheim; he prefers the cool arithmetic of war. His men have dug trenches through the night. Still, his left flank is thin — the very place where Pappenheim should be standing. His confidence holds. Pappenheim will come.
Pappenheim must come.
Wallenstein watches the Swedes form up. Some nineteen thousand men. The Imperials can muster only seventeen thousand. This morning their greatest ally is the fog. It lies so thick across the ground that no attack is possible; the musketeers cannot see what they are shooting at.
Gustavus Adolphus waits.
Only near midday does the fog lift. A Swedish hymn rises across the fields of Lützen, and the king himself leads the charge. He has found the Imperial weak spot — the left flank, where Pappenheim’s cavalry should be. Finnish horsemen pour across the open ground, scattering the Croat and Polish riders and tearing the line wide open. Terror spreads ahead of them. The Imperial musketeers give way, and panic laps at the centre of the Catholic army.
The battle is not an hour old, and already it looks decided — for the Protestants.
And then the thunder of Pappenheim’s horse drowns out the din of battle. Schrammenheinrich does not pause, does not stop to confer with his general; he attacks on sight. He throws his cavalry straight at the Swedes, and the Swedes give ground. The reeling Imperial centre steadies. He has sent other riders round behind the Swedish lines to fall on the baggage train and sow confusion. In minutes the whole fortune of the day turns over: what was shaping into Wallenstein’s defeat becomes a rout of Gustavus Adolphus.
It might have been the most dazzling victory of his life — the very thing he had always wanted: total battle, waged with every ounce of force and fury, heedless of loss, to smash the enemy once and for all.
Then a canister round turns fate once more. A length of iron wire tears open his side, and Pappenheim goes down from the saddle. Now it is his own riders who break — into panic, into disorder. Scarred and bleeding, the cuirassier tries one last time to call his men back to their ranks:
“Brothers, God have mercy! Is there no one left to keep faith and fight for the Emperor?”
His last recorded words are lost in the noise. No one can rally the riders now. The Swedes take back the upper hand, and what the Imperials had just won slips away again. Only when the fog rolls in once more can Wallenstein steady his line. And the fog proves the Swedes’ undoing. Gustavus Adolphus loses his bearings in it; a musket ball smashes his arm, his horse bolts, and Imperial riders cut him down with pistol and blade.
The fighting drags on for hours, until darkness closes over the field. The Imperials pull back. The Swedes take the fourteen Imperial guns. Each side loses between five and six thousand men that day. The Swedes hold the field — a tactical victory — but without their king they have lost the mastery they once held. Pappenheim dies of his wounds the next day. By Wallenstein’s order he is buried at the Strahov Monastery in Prague.
When his servants lift the wounded man, they find Wallenstein’s letter beneath his cuirass, soaked through with blood. He had carried it on him the whole time. In the end the Generalissimus knew: his Pappenheimer could be counted on.
Lützen is no decisive battle; by the measure of the Thirty Years’ War it is not even a large one. Yet it ends the men who had shaped the war from both sides. Tilly is dead. Pappenheim is dead. So is the Swedish king, face down in the mud. Less than two years on, Wallenstein is murdered. One by one the great commanders of Europe’s war meet their end. Only the war goes on.
After Andreas Gryphius, Thränen des Vaterlandes (1636). One of the most famous lines of German baroque poetry, written in the depths of the Thirty Years’ War.
Wallenstein’s exasperation at Pappenheim’s absence echoes a proverbial German expression: “Ich kenne meine Pappenheimer” (”I know my Pappenheimers”), made famous by Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy (1799). It means to see through someone completely — and carries, depending on context, both admiration and weary resignation.
