" They
fell seventy feet and escaped almost without a scratch, which fact
was accepted by the Catholics of that strenuous day as proof of
their miraculous preservation; by the Protestants as evidence that
the devil ever takes care of his own.
It was the tiny spark that set Europe on fire. Out of it grew the
Thirty Years' War, the most terrible that ever scourged the
civilized world. When Catholic League and Evangelical Union first
mustered their armies, Bohemia had a prosperous population of four
million souls; when the war was over there were less than eight
hundred thousand alive in that unhappy land, and the wolves that
roamed its forests were scarcely more ferocious than the human
starvelings who skulked among the smoking ruins of burned towns and
hamlets. Other states fared little better. Two centuries did not
wipe out the blight of those awful years when rapine and murder,
inspired by bigotry and hate, ran riot in the name of religion.
In the gloom and horror of it all a noble figure stands forth alone.
It were almost worth the sufferings of a Thirty Years' War for the
world to have gained a Gustav Adolf. The "snow-king" the Emperor's
generals named him when he first appeared on German soil at the head
of his army of Northmen, and they prophesied that he would speedily
melt, once the southern sun shone upon his host.
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