In vain they stormed the heights. Both wings and the centre closed
in upon them, and the day was lost. Tilly fled, wounded, and
narrowly escaped capture. A captain in the Swedish army, who was
called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels
hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol. A staff
officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief. Twilight fell
upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead, two-thirds of
them the flower of the Emperor's army. Blood-stained and
smoke-begrimed, Gustav Adolf and his men knelt on the field and
thanked God for the victory.
Had the King's friend and adviser, Axel Oxenstjerna, been with him
he might have marched upon Vienna then, leaving the Protestant
Estates to settle their own affairs, and very likely have ended the
war. Gustav Adolf thought of Tilly who would return with another
army. Oxenstjerna saw farther, weighing things upon the scales of
the diplomatist.
"How think you we would fare," asked the King once, when the
chancellor saw obstacles in their way which he would brush aside,
"if my fire did not thaw the chill in you?"
"But for my chill cooling your Majesty's fire," was his friend's
retort, "you would have long since been burned up.
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