The first imperial cavalry charge shattered against Horn’s defense. The Catholic horsemen had been astonished at the speed with which the Swedes took new positions. They had been expecting the sluggish maneuvers of Continental armies.
Others could have warned them. The Danes and Poles and Russians had been bloodied enough, over the past twenty years, by Gustav’s small army. The Danes could have told them of Borgholm, Christianopel, Kalmar and Waxholm—all places where a teenage Swedish king had bested them. The Russians could have told them of Angdov and Pleskov, and the Poles could have recited a very litany of woe: Riga, Kockenhusen, Mittau, Bauske, Walhof, Braunsberg, Frauenburg, Tolkemit, Elbing, Marienburg, Dirschau, Mewe, Putzig, Wörmditt, Danzig, Gurzno and the Nogat.
The haughty cuirassiers in Tilly’s army never thought to ask. They were south Germans, in the main, taking the coin of Maximillian of Bavaria. The peculiar-sounding names of Baltic and Slavic battlefields and sieges meant nothing to them.
In all those years Gustav II Adolf had suffered defeats as well. The Danes had beaten him at Helsingborg, and the Poles at Honigfeld. But the Danes and the Poles could have warned the forces under the Habsburg banner of the incredible elasticity of the Swedish king. He rebounded from reverses with renewed energy, using defeat as his school.
Tilly’s men would study in that school themselves—study long and hard, before this day was over. They were not, alas, apt pupils. Arrogant Pappenheim, now trying—and failing—to rally his cavalrymen somewhere on the Halle road, had learned one lesson. Pathetic the Swedish nags might be, but there was nothing pitiful about the men astride them. Neither they, nor the infantrymen who formed their shield. Seven times his Black Cuirassiers had charged the Swedish line. Seven times they had been beaten back—and then routed by a countercharge.
Not apt pupils, no. Now, on the opposite flank, the imperial cavalry failed the lesson for the eighth time. The first charge, headlong, exuberant, certain of victory—no caracole here!—broke like a wave against a rock. They had been expecting a confused and shaken enemy, disorganized by the sudden rout of the Saxons. Instead, the Catholic cuirassiers found themselves piling into a solid and well-positioned defense. Horn had even managed to seize and prepare the ditches alongside the Düben road.
The Swedish arquebus roared; the Swedish pike held firm. The imperial cavalry fell back.
Back, but not dismayed. Tilly and his men had won the first great Catholic victory in the Thirty Years War, the Battle of the White Mountain. Eleven years had since passed, and with them came many more triumphs. That army had been accused—and rightly—of many crimes over those years. Of cowardice, not once.
Again, they charged; again, with sabering fury. And, again, were driven back.
The infantry tercios lumbered nearer. The cavalrymen, seeing them come, were driven into yet another headlong charge. For them the victory! Not those wretched footmen!
No use. The tercios crept forward.
Finally, the imperial cuirassiers abandoned the saber and fell back on the wheel-lock pistol. They began wheeling in the caracole, firing their pistols at a distance and circling to reload. Those men were mercenaries, when all was said and done. They could not afford to lose their precious horses. And they had already learned, as Pappenheim’s men before them, that the Swedish tactic against heavy cavalry was to aim arquebus and pike at the horses. They had been trained and instructed in that method by their king. Gustav Adolf had long understood that his Swedish ponies were no match for German chargers. So kill the chargers first.
The tercios advanced across the battlefield, at the oblique. Grinding toward the Swedish left, now bent at a right angle away from the original battle line. Like a glacier, those seventeen tercios seemed. Slow—and unstoppable.
But that too was illusion. The glacier was about to calve, under gunfire it had never before encountered. The finest artillery in the world was on the field, that day, under the leadership of the world’s finest artillery commander. Torstensson had needed no orders. His king had not even bothered to send a courier. The young artillery general, as soon as he saw Gustav sending Hepburn and Vitzthum’s men to reinforce Horn, had known what was coming. For all the Swedish king’s strategic caution, he was invariably bold on the battlefield. Torstensson knew that a counterattack was looming, and it was his job to batter the tercios in advance. Batter them, stun them, bleed them. Like a picador in a bullring, he would weaken the beast for the matador.
“Swivel the guns!”
he roared. Torstensson, afoot as always in a battle, raced to stand at the front. It was a day for hat-snatching, it seemed. He tore his own from his head and began waving it.
“Swivel the guns!”
That second roar caused him to choke. There had been a drought in the area that summer, and the plains were dry. The dust thrown up by thousands of horses caught in his throat. Using his hat as a pointer, Torstenson silently emphasized his command.
His gunners were all veterans. Immediately, grunting with exertion at the levering spikes, they began swiveling the field guns to bring enfilade fire on the tercios crossing in front of them.
There were two types of guns in the batteries. The majority, forty-two of them, were the so-called “regimental guns.” Three-pounders: the world’s first genuine field artillery. These cannons were made of cast bronze, with a light, short barrel to make them easily maneuverable in the field. The Swedes, after experimenting, had discovered that by using a reduced powder charge the guns could be fired safely time after time. They were of no use in a siege, but were superbly effective on the battlefield.
The heavier field guns were twelve-pounders. Gustav Adolf had simplified his ordnance drastically over the past years, based on his experience in the Polish wars. He brought only three sizes of cannon with him to Germany—the light and heavier field guns, and twenty-four-pounders for siege work. He had dispensed altogether with the forty-eight-pounder traditionally used in reducing fortifications.
The three-pounders were firing within a few minutes. The twelve-pounders quickly followed suit. By the time Tilly’s infantry neared the angle in their opponent’s line, they were coming under heavy fire from the Swedish artillery.
Understanding that the battle had reached a critical moment, Torstensson was ordering a rate of fire which was just barely short of reckless.
“I want a shot every six minutes!” he bellowed, trotting up and down behind the line of his guns. “Nothing less!” He practically danced with energy, waving his hat. “I’ll hang the crew who gives me less!”
His men grinned. Torstensson always issued blood-curdling threats on the battlefield. And never carried them out. Nor was there any need. His men were well into the rhythm again, and had already reached the round-every-six-minutes rate which was considered the maximum of the day.
They could not keep that up forever, of course. The problem was not with them, but the guns. The cannons had been firing for three hours, now. Each of them had discharged close to thirty rounds. After another ten rounds, at that rate of fire, the guns would be so hot that they would have to sit idle. For at least an hour, probably, to allow the barrels to cool enough to be used safely.
“Let the blasted things melt!”
roared Torstensson. He flung his hat toward Tilly’s tercios.
“I want those battles broken! Broken in pieces, do you hear?”
The grins faded from his gunners’ faces. Torstensson was dead serious now, they knew. If need be, he
would
keep the guns firing long past the point of safety. The artillerymen sweated through the rhythm. So be it. If a crew died because of a burst cannon, so be it. Torstensson himself would pick up the rammer.
Cannonballs began tearing great holes in the tightly packed Catholic formations. Torstensson’s gunners were the finest in the world, and they knew what their commander wanted.
“Grazing shots!”
Torstensson slammed the flat of one hand into the other, as if skipping a stone off a lake. “Nothing but grazing shots! I see two balls in a row plunge into the ground I’ll hang the crew! Hang ’em, do you hear?”
His men laughed. Another idle threat. Almost every round they fired was the good artilleryman’s sought-after “grazing shot.”
The “grazing shot” was useless against fortifications, but against men in the field it was devastating. The balls landed dozens of yards in front of their target and bounced forward at a shallow angle, instead of burying themselves in the ground. From that first bounce, their trajectory was at knee-to-shoulder height. The cast-iron missiles caromed into the packed ranks of the enemy like bowling balls—except these balls destroyed men instead of knocking down pins. Even a three-pound ball, in a grazing shot, could easily kill or maim a dozen men in such close ranks. The twelve-pounders wreaked pure havoc.
Torstensson’s artillery was ripping the tercios like an orca ripping flesh from a great whale. Blood began settling the dust. The men in the rear tercios slogged through mud left by their comrades’ gore—and added their own to the mix.
Graze, graze, graze, graze.
Death wielded his sickle that day, and mercilessly.
Not even Tilly’s men could shrug off that kind of fire. Courageous as always, the recruits following the lead of the veterans; they obeyed their orders and plowed stubbornly toward the angle in the Swedish line. But their formations became more and more ragged and broken. Pikemen were being injured by the weapons of their mates, now, as men stumbled over corpses and lost control of the great blades.
Tilly saw, and grew pale. Near the front of his advancing tercios, he reined in his horse and stared back at the carnage.
“God in Heaven,” he muttered. Wallenstein had tried to warn him of the Swedish artillery.
Wallenstein—that black-hearted Bohemian
! Aye, he—and a dozen Polish officers in Tilly’s service. But Tilly had not believed.
“God in Heaven,” he muttered again. For a moment, he thought of changing his attack. Wheeling, and driving down on those cursed guns.
Wheeling . . .
Tilly dismissed the notion instantly. His battles did not “wheel.”
Could
not wheel. They were instruments of crushing victory, not clever maneuver.
“Victory,” he growled. Seventy-two years old he was, not a day less. Seventy-two years, not one of whose days had ever seen defeat.
“Onward!” he bellowed. The old general drew his sword and trotted toward the front. He waved the sword at the Swedish left.
“Onward!”
he bellowed.
“Victory is there!”
The tercios obeyed, and obeyed, and obeyed—seventeen battles, down the line, slogged tenaciously forward. Not one of them faltered in their duty. Not one tercio, not one rank, not one file, not one man.
Torstensson splattered their entrails across the land.
No matter. Those men had marched through entrails before.
Torstensson painted the soil with their blood.
No matter. Those men had bled before
. Torstensson savaged them like no artillery in their grim experience.
No matter. Tilly had never failed them before.
Murderers many of them were. Thieves and rapists too. Cowards, never.
The broken Swedish angle was in front of them now. Like a bear trailing gore, the tercios were about to mangle their prey.
At last!
“Father Tilly!” they bellowed.
“Jesu-Maria!”
But the angle was not broken. Not any longer. Horn—
trusted Horn, trustworthy Horn
—had reformed the line even before his king’s orders arrived. The Swedish left now formed a solid corner for the battlefield. The imperial heavy cavalry had already broken against that Baltic rock. The tercios lumbered up and did no better.
Pike against pike, the Catholics were easily the equal of their foe. But the Swedish king was a believer in firepower more than cold steel. He had studied the methods of the Dutch, and tested them in Poland and Russia.
At Breitenfeld, the Swedes had a higher arquebus-to-pike ratio than their enemies. More important, Gustav Adolf had trained them to fight in shallow formations, following the Dutch example. Tilly’s arquebusiers were arrayed thirty ranks deep. Most of those arquebuses could not be brought to bear. Gustav’s, not more than six—just enough to allow time to reload while the front ranks fired.
The Swedish pikes held the tercios at bay long enough for the Swedish preponderance in firepower to bring down them down. Tilly’s men never buckled. But they made no headway against the Swedish line. They simply died. And meanwhile, the king of Sweden prepared the death stroke.
Tilly and his tercios could not
wheel
, but Gustav Adolf could. Could, and did.
Chapter 36
The king himself led the charge up the slope, heading toward the imperial guns.
“Gott mit uns!”
he bellowed, waving his cavalrymen forward with his saber.
Behind him, Anders Jönsson rolled his eyes with exasperation. Gustav Adolf carried two wheel-lock pistols at his side, holstered to his saddle. But he never used them in battle. He claimed it was because the weapons were too inaccurate, but his bodyguard was skeptical. The king of Sweden was sensitive about his myopia. Jonsson thought his unwillingness to use pistols was simply because Gustav couldn’t hit the proverbial broad side of a barn.
Anders spurred his horse alongside the king’s. “I’m supposed to be guarding
you
, Highness,” he snarled, “not the other way around.”
Gustav grinned. “Get a faster horse!” he bellowed. Again, he waved the saber. “
Gott mit uns!”
Behind them, the Smalanders and East Gothlanders echoed the words. From either side—the Finns were already curling around the slower Swedes—came the blood-curdling Finnish battle cry.
“
Haakaa päälle!
”
