One to Count Cadence

by James Crumley

  “God, how I hated him. How glad I was when I exchanged the airplanes for women and the dreams ended. But I never forgot that face, that beaklike nose and that evil moustache drooping past the corners of his mouth. He was a dark German, an Asiatic German, not at all a warm, sunburnt Nordic German. His face looked like the word ‘Hun’ sounds, and his eyes always made me think of the Black Forest, even after I learned that it was in West Germany. And later when I was older and had a real war to deal with, when I found out it wasn’t anything except stupid and evil and cruel and without honor, his face became all that dark, primitive nature, that dark, throbbing blood, that fogged crossroads where evil meets beauty, and…” He stopped; perhaps at the crossroads he paused once again, then went on because he thought he knew the way.

  “Guess I got carried away. But I haven’t talked about the dreams since the War, or even thought about them, and was glad to forget… until I saw your crazy, roaring eyes and mad face straining up at me as if I were the enemy, and I thought you were someone I knew. Then I realized you were the Baron’s son — no, the Baron himself, and so I… What the hell are you grinning about?” he asked, seeming half-angry. “What’s so damned funny?”

  I told him.

  * * *

  Once upon a time (yes, once upon a time, for this too is a fairy tale as all history is, and it, even more like history, makes its truth not from fact but from belief and, yes, I do believe) near where the present borders of East and West Germany and Czechoslovakia share a common point, where the old boundaries of Bavaria, Bohemia, and Saxony once merged in that indefinite way politics and religion and war joined in those days, there used to be a small village, called Krummel. The village served a small, nameless (as far as the journals of the first of us are concerned) monastery which brewed a tiny amount of a special heavy beer, described as being as good and as thick as black bread. The village, lying in a small valley served by a single road of sorts which ended at the village, or beyond, as you will, existed solely for the purpose of growing grain, hops and such for the brewery. The monastery and thus the village belonged, ostensibly, to an old abbot in Hof, but it had been many years since the abbot had made the rough, long trip through a range of rugged hills to Krummel, and by the period which most concerns me, the monastery regulations were quite lax. In fact the only difference between a monk and a villager was where the man worked, brewery or fields. As you might expect, Krummel suffered a peaceful isolation, nearly untroubled by visitors from the world.

  Sometime during the early years of the seventeenth century, though, a visitor did appear; one Jacob Slagsted, driving a combined medicine-peddler’s wagon, selling magic, feats of strength, stinking (thus potent) herbs, tinkering skills, and various domestic goods. This Slagsted seems to have been a giant of a man, but agile enough for his own wizardry. And even more impressive, he could read. He claimed to be a retired, reformed mercenary, and there may even be some truth in the village gossip which said, “Reformed into a highwayman.” There were even those who claimed that Slagsted was hiding from both the authorities and his own merry band of cutpurses.

  He took a several weeks’ advantage of the hospitality of the monks, spending more for the beer than he took in for his goods and services, and in fact created a small economic boom in Krummel during his visit. There were many sad faces among monk, villager, and wife when Jacob finally left. He wasn’t your run-of-the-mill peddler, though, and wasn’t quickly forgotten, what with his breaking logs on his head and slipping pigeons and larks and finches out of the air and great, passionate readings from his Good Book in Latin, a large, leather copy which he kept in a carved camphor chest fit for at least a duke or a heathen Turk. No, he was not quickly forgotten. Nor, I suppose, did he forget the isolated village, the quiet valley, the fine beer, for he returned five years later.

  The villagers found his wagon one winter morning; his horse hipshot, lather frozen on its flanks, still standing unharnessed. Slagsted was huddled in the wagon box, a great, red shield of blood frozen on his chest. The monks, as monks in spite of their religion will, were kind to him, carried him into the monastery, revived him with crude brandy and shook their heads at Jacob’s tale of assault by highwaymen and attempted robbery and a gallant fight against overwhelming odds. Some may have doubted his story, but none doubted that he would die before morning, and the shelter and care they offered was to a dying man. But the old devil wouldn’t give up the ghost, and once he had his hands firmly around it, he wouldn’t leave the village. Through the long winter he stayed, helpful at small tasks, beer casks, and tales as he repaired crockery and tin for the village hausfrauen. Oh, the heathen wars he had lived over, the fighting, the looting… But as spring came, Slagsted went more often for singular walks, roaming the stubbled, muddy fields or the small, irregular hills near the edge of the valley, and once even disappeared into the forest for several days. He returned, but when asked where he had been, he merely gave a deep, serene smile in answer. Somehow, however these things happen, the rumor started that Jacob Slagsted, man of uncertain origin, man of Low German, High German, Bohemian and other unknown tongues, had been seen conversing with the Virgin during his wanderings.

  Then came the freshest day of spring, dawn in the sky like a blush, the air like spring water, and Jacob Slagsted standing on a nearby hill, silhouetted against a rosy horizon, standing still and black, his arms stretched for heaven.

  The villagers noticed first, then called the monks, and they all gathered at the foot of the hill, awed and silent. Jacob stood as he was for what seemed hours as the villagers and the monks kept their watch. Then with a motion so swift as not to be seen, Jacob cast himself upon the earth, and above him rose a shadowy, wavering figure of white, a small cloud of fog on a fog-less morning, a translucence, a virginal white. Jacob remained against the hilltop until the figure dissolved in the breeze, then he knelt in prayer, his voice deep and echoing across the valley, his prayer in an unknown tongue. When he finished he strolled quietly down the hill and that same day, in an unusual, unheard of ceremony, took his vows as a monk, then embarked on a daily ritual of ordeal, fasting, hairshirts, prayer, and flagellation. Such piety had not been seen in many years; some of the older monks even cried. Ah, there were those, those who doubted, who claimed Jacob’s miracle to be of his own doing, created out of a wisp of gauze, a bit of smoke, and a handful of wind; but there will always be those who doubt.

  No one could deny, though, Jacob’s devotion to duty, his piety, or his love for the prayer and the fast. If the truth be known, Jacob quickly embarrassed the other brothers — even those who had shed a tear or two — about their vows of poverty, chastity, and sobriety so loosely taken. Even worse, this Jacob-come-lately to the Church became a constant nuisance with his endless preaching against those brothers who kept wives of a sort which indeed included all those who had ever been young enough.

  “Chastity, chastity fills the soul with purity, purity,” he would chant at night in a low voice which invaded every polluted cell.

  “Aye, he can speak of chastity, him who’s had half the heathen bitches in this world and the next, already,” one brother complained.

  Brother Jacob so troubled the Father Superior about the laxity of the morals within and without the monastery walls that the old soul left his desk one morning, walked back to Hof to live with his married sister, and left the administrative chair in the spiritual hands of Brother Jacob.

  And with this event began another period of quietude. The spiritual leader of the brewery again wandered the hills and forest, occasionally seen walking slowly, hands clasped devoutly before him, head bowed, followed by a one-eyed little man with a ring in his ear. The rumors ran again, except that now Brother Jacob had been talking with Satan instead of the Virgin and that the pious brother was negotiating for his (the devil’s) salvation. But all remained quiet for the present, and the rumors died a worthy death. (It was during this time, I believe, that Jacob slipped into Hof with the yearly tithe for the old a
bbot, and released a dozen pigeons from the sleeve of his habit, and, during the confusion, nipped all the records of the monastery. Within the year the village was forgotten — few knew where it really was, anyway — forgotten, except for a few stout beer-drinkers who momentarily raised their watery eyes above their stomachs, belched and complained about their beer. Jacob somehow made arrangements to cart the beer north to Dresden for John George, Elector of Saxony.)

  Things were easy now; Brother Jacob drank more and preached less and took a woman — more than his share, it was said. Then the Reformation came to Krummel one drunken, rainy night as Jacob Slagsted, Protestant spy and revolutionary, drove the good brothers out in the rain with a large sword he had hidden in his now rotting wagon. The brothers huddled in the rain, in the cold wind until they converted. Jacob dispensed with baptism, claiming God’s own tears of joy water enough for any good follower of Luther. The brewery was seized in the name of good business; Jacob had laid his plans well, recruited some of the younger brothers and villagers secretly, and carried the coup with little bloodshed and less sweat.

  The Reformation caused a slight ripple in the placid pond of Krummel; Jacob and the one-eyed man, who had silently appeared the next day, ran the brewery, the brothers became laborers, and the villagers farmed as always. Jacob married in a mass ceremony in which he married all the other brothers and their sinful women. Life was peaceful; living was good. Jacob’s old wounds didn’t ache so badly, and the beer sales to John George kept Jacob from drinking the village out of house and barrel. Oh, an occasional befuddled tax collector from the abbot’s office blundered into the village; those unconverted by drink and fine living were buried with full rites by Jacob in the forest. But another came searching accompanied by five men-at-arms, and wasn’t so easily disposed of. So Jacob, the one-eyed man, and several of Jacob’s friends who had found shelter in the village began training the young men of the village in the varied pleasures of combat. The farmers and brewers took well to the excitement of pike and musket, and defeated, in ambush, several larger groups of tax men, some of whom came from the abbot’s office and others from a duchy in Bohemia who unfortunately mistook Krummel for some other delinquent village. But all in all these were the quiet years, and during them Jacob produced four living sons, Johann, Georg, Bernard and Hugo.

  But Europe wasn’t quiet; the Holy Roman Empire was begetting wars as plentifully as soldiers bastard children in a foreign land. In 1618 the new Catholic deputy-governor and his secretary, appointed by Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, King of Bohemia, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, had been attacked by a Protestant mob in Prague. The mob heaved the new deputy-governor and his secretary out of an upper-story window, exclaiming, “Now call on your Mary to save you!” When they looked out the window they saw, some sixty feet below, the two good Catholics running across the lawn.

  Two years later when Jacob heard about the incident while on a trip to Dresden, he remarked in his journal, “She did, my God, She did.” He began drinking heavily before breakfast and feeling badly about it. And once more he walked alone in the hills.

  While Jacob brooded, Central Europe stumbled through the beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War, and it wasn’t long before this match between pestilence and war, with man as the loser, provided Jacob with more evidence of the Blessed Virgin’s interference in worldly affairs. At the Battle of the Neiber River the Margrave of Baden led Protestant forces against the Catholics, Spanish under Cordoba and Bavarians under Tilly. The superior reformers had nearly carried the day when suddenly the figure of the Virgin was seen to rise over the Protestant lines. The Catholics, devout souls all, rallied, regrouped and re-charged, shattering the Protestant lines with the courage of their devotion. (An ammunition dump in the Protestant rear had exploded and the resultant pillar of fire and smoke had been so identified by some nameless, abstract soul — which I suppose only proves that, in spite of all the grand military academies and their graduates, battles, and perhaps wars, are as wonderfully absurd in execution as poetry.) When Jacob heard of the miracle he actually wept (his tears, as tears will, still stain the journal pages); he cried for days as he clambered about the wooded hills, crawling as often as he walked, followed by a small boy carrying a small keg of beer.

  As Jacob fretted over his soul, his sons, knowing as sons always do that the war would come to them, increased the training program for the village militia. By the summer of 1625 Krummel possessed a tough, gristy band of forty fighting men which they assumed could hold the approaches to the valley against any foraging parties from either side — but, needless to say, they couldn’t hold it against Jacob Slagsted. During that same summer, on a trip to Saxony with the second brewing, he heard that the Danes had entered the war. Jacob had been more or less drunk for seven years now, and although there is some indication that he didn’t know who the Danes were, he hated them and decided to throw his strength and manpower on the other side, the Catholic side, the forces of the Virgin.

  Off he marched with his small, merry band, provisioned with bread and beer, more frightened of Jacob than any Danes, whoever they might be, and ready for war. Thus the Lutheran conqueror of Krummel joined the Catholic armies of the emperor and, by mistakenly marching south in search of Danes, merged with the army of the mercenary, Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland.

  The Duke must have been attracted to this mad, drunken giant because he personally signed the contract with Jacob for these forty men. Jacob and his sons prospered under Wallenstein and were all officers by April of 1626 when they fought Mansfeld at Dessau on the Elbe. In the fall of the same year Jacob commanded a company which returned from Wallenstein’s pursuit of Mansfeld to reinforce Tilly against King Christian and his Danes. Jacob’s hatred for the Danes hadn’t been banked by a year of fighting. In the battle at Lutten, Jacob led a charge on the King’s party, killed Christian’s horse and, if his blade hadn’t stuck in a Danish adjutant’s skull, would have killed Christian too. For this Jacob was promoted to second-in-command under Wallenstein’s Lieutenant Hans George von Arvim, and with him advanced into Brandenburg in 1627, wintered in Jutland, then took part in the unsuccessful attack of Stralsund on the Pomeranian coast. During the first hour of the attack Bernard’s horse was frightened by a Catholic short-round, and it trampled Bernard to death. Jacob somehow blamed the loss on the North Sea, the Danes; he cried for the Virgin, but she obviously preferred the warmer, greener pastures to the south, and his prayers were lost on the gray, northern wind.

  But three sons remained. The fighting became occasional; small, inconclusive engagements now and again. In August of 1630 they went with Wallenstein, who had resigned, back to Friedland as part of the Duke’s personal staff guard. While resting at Friedland, the Duke gave Jacob title to the lands in the valley of Krummel and a title, Graf Jacob Slagsted of Krummel. But Jacob gave nothing: he lied about the location of the valley. Because of the rest Jacob thankfully missed the sack and burning of Magdeburg, the Virgin City, and Tilly’s defeat by the Swedes at Breitenfeld in Saxony.

  After two years of rest the Slagsteds marched to join Maximilian of Bavaria. On the march Georg fell to the plague and died in a muddy ditch filled with swimming rats. Jacob seemed old after this; the only joyful note in the journal after the death of Georg is a remark about the death of King Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Lutzen: “Ya, sehr gut.” The next entry is dated February 25, 1634, the day after Wallenstein had been assassinated by English mercenaries at Eger: “Schade, schade. Ich werde nach Hause weidergehen.” Then the long journey home, back to Krummel for the first time in nine years, across fields sown with barren seed, reaped with sorrow, through towns of vacant stares and constant corteges of the living dead, over a land tired, torn, wasted — and the war had come to Krummel too, so that the landscape of war didn’t end, but continued beyond all human belief. Jacob closed the road into the valley, hoping to save something, and he closed his heart and locked himself in a room with his Bible, read till his eyes went out, then ga
ve up that ghost he’d held so firmly, the spirit of war. He did his best to live a quiet life in the old monastery, brewing a little beer, having Johann read the Bible, and, if not pleased, at least satisfied to grow old in peace.

  But war remained in the hearts of his sons and, with the strength of youth, they found farming too little of life for them. Jacob gave Johann the leather Bible, the journal, and the camphor box when he and Hugo went to France to fight against the Spanish in 1636. (Nothing more is known about Jacob or Krummel; the sons of his body and spirit never returned. The village ceased to exist so long ago, no records even remain, no trace, no knowledge, no sign, even though my father found several valleys where it might have been, could have been, on a six-week leave in ‘45. God forbid that Jacob’s grave should lie wrapped in the red tape of another splintered Germany.)

  As to the sons — by 1640 Johann led his own mercenary army of three hundred well-trained, hand-picked men. They were provisioned and not allowed to forage or pillage on friendly lands. They were well paid and, unlike other mercenary troops such as the German lansquenet, uniformed for war instead of show: a tunic with a stiff, thick leather breastplate, boots of waterproof Russian leather, a tight fitting, unadorned helmet. The three hundred were cavalry unlike any other contemporary horsemen: they fought on the ground as often as on horse. In Spain the three hundred held the line against a thousand Spanish, beat them off three times, then attacked and chased them until dark. But the best aspect of the Slagsted of Krummel army was its reliability; contracts were signed for durations instead of months which meant that they wouldn’t change sides in the middle of a battle, anyway.

  This paid army, because of its compact size, survived the change from mercenary to national armies, and during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century fought and served as personal guards for every political organization which could afford them. Descendants of Jacob Slagsted controlled the army, maintained its size at three hundred, kept up the family literacy outside military academies, married fine horses of women, and by 1776 had spilled, in love and war, the bloods of Europe: Irish, Dutch, Polish, Magyar, Finn, Swede, Jewish, Alsatian, Prussian, and Greek, at least. But in 1781 the Slagsted-Krummel’s, as they were known, came to the New World, and like all who came to America, lost everything in the coming.