People of the Book

by David Stacton

  A dead horse is worse than a dead man, and a dying horse harder to shoot. It is because they are so large and clumsy, because they are sacred animals and do our suffering for us, we feel that. We are fond of them, they have brought us a long way, they haul our burdens, they make us superior to men on foot. They are not too bright, but like simples, roll their eyes when they see what we have in mind. Horses shy; whereas when a man is told he is to be shot, as like as not he stands there dumbly obedient. The more you shoot, the more the obedience.

  To Wallenstein men were nothing but numbers or, if of official rank, a series of marked keys on the room board of a coaching inn. Who is in and who is out? The landlord knows when the tenant dies, hands the porcelain tag over to a new occupant, and smiles. It doesn’t matter. A wicker basket has no identity. It never occurs to the master of the inn, in his blue apron, that in due course he will be removed the same way. He is not morbid.

  The camp was revolting to see. A bullet is impersonal. It comes from nowhere. Even if you see the man who fired it, you do not hold it against him when it stings you. Bad conditions in bivouac are another matter: those show a contempt for man’s physical dignity.

  These poor devils were scarecrows. It had not occurred to Gustavus, in twenty years of war, that men use men, because, though he had done so himself, he had always used them as men, having a preference for those among them who could be treated as such. Here was the charnal house. It made him bite the hair on his lower lip and suck his mustache in. For if you do not happen to believe in evil, you can see who is sick and who is well, and which of the monster births grew up. Evil is nothing but a pleasant mask, compared to the sight of that. Wallenstein was indeed the Black Man.

  There was nothing he could do for these people. Let them go beseech the man who made them. At their openings, the canvas of the abandoned tents hung heavy, like the unsewn flaps of an amputee. There was a wind blowing. It was a cold wind. He had what he had never had before: some sense of the sadness of mortality.

  On Gustavus’ level, it was never thought of that for everything we take, a man must die. And rightly so. To have it otherwise would not suit the book of the man who wants, from the highest motives, to take it from us, which must not be allowed. It is not, perhaps, the survival of the fittest, but every man is fit for something. And so men die. And so shall I. It sounded sentimental and pompous as a rhymed catechism for children.

  On he went.

  Oxenstierna had been summoned out to meet him. He was worried. Superstition may be foolish, we may not be in the grip of inexorable forces, nonetheless life has its tides, and it would be a foolish man who forgot that the moon controls them. Tycho Brahe had calculated high tide for 1632. Frederick Braunborn, the best astrologer of his day, not excepting Herclius, had foretold the death of Antichrist (so was Gustavus known to Vienna) for 1636. And besides, people know more than either they or wisdom will admit. There was something wrong with this winter.

  Snow muffles sound, crisp air carries it. Oxenstierna kept the hills busy with drumbeats and ceremonial riffles. When the party halted, the drumsticks glistened petrified with the chill, and had the glitter of fossil wood.

  The King came out of his camp to meet him, in an easier style, but contrary to his custom, with a rapid accompaniment of guards. They were now in the Thuringian Forest. There is nothing wrong with it. It is just a forest. Yet it makes you look over your shoulder.

  He wished Axel to ride with him part of the way to Urfurt. For several days the two men jogged along, talking in those hushed tones proper to emergency. Profit counts for more than principle, with most men. Gustavus proposed to revive his plan to colonize the West Indies, so to form a commerce. The allies were grumbling; let them take their profit from that. He gave Oxenstierna powers to convene the Powers of Upper Germany, and to form them into four confederated circles, of Swabia, Franconia, and the two Rhines. There were hesitations. He made Axel supreme arbiter of peace and war, with unlimited powers, both as vir togatus and vir sagatus. He had a foolish wife who would need watching, and a six-year-old daughter who would need help. There were some red wax berries beside the road, but no other color in the landscape. Oxenstierna was forty-nine, Gustav thirty-eight. The air was friable as quick cooled glass. Every time you spoke you made hoarfrost. It came out of the mouths of man and beast alike. There were a few rum-tum-tiddle dogs along on these marches. They had deep chests. Nobody knew where they came from.

  They parted outside Arnstadt, Oxenstierna to turn back, Gustavus to go on. It was in a clearing in the woods, through which the road ran. Its ruts were frozen. Sometimes a horse slipped. There was the creak of leather, the ring of metal, when something touched something else by accident. It turned out not to be an easy parting. The King was melancholy. No matter what the age, eagerness brings back the boy; less soon in Oxenstierna perhaps, in whom the boy was deeper buried.

  “Axel,” said Gustavus, who had reined to turn aside and then hesitated.

  Axel hesitated, too.

  “We have worked together for twenty years.”

  Axel thought damn. The thing to do was not to let one’s eyes mist. “Twenty years and eleven months.”

  The two men embraced from horseback. Then they went in opposite directions.

  “God go with you,” said Gustavus, as though he had given his best friend his favorite dog. You could almost see the creature loyally padding with its head down and its tongue out and a worried expression on its forehead, but that was what it had been told to do. God in this sense is a doppelgänger. He sits outside the tent panting with His ears cocked up, and His fur has the shimmer of a young spruce tree.

  Oxenstierna had nothing against dogs. They are the world’s best diplomats, an excellent go-between; they know when to give the show away, and what to do with bones. He had nothing against being a dogsbody, either.

  At his edge of the clearing Gustavus looked back. As though something had been bothering him, Axel, too, turned around. The two men did not wave, but they raised their arms from the elbow, palm out, in that gesture we give to fate. Ave atque vale.

  Then, with a shrug, the Great Chancellor went one way and the Great King the other, and the clearing was empty again.

  Oxenstierna, in his usual methodical way, passed on. Gustavus reached Urfurt on the anniversary of Sts. Simon and Jude, which was not a good omen, received the Queen, and recommended her to the troops and to the magistrates of the city in a manner which was not usual to him.

  “You know, gentlemen, that uncertainty and sublunary affairs are synonymous terms, and that war, particularly, the visitation of heaven for human depravity, is precarious above all things: it is possible that something unfortunate may soon arrive to this my person, and if such be the will of the Supreme Being, transfer to my dear consort that affection and obligation which you owe to me. On these conditions I pray Providence to prosper you.”

  His voice broke. Tears began to find their way down his cheeks, he could not keep them back. “God bless you,” he said, left the magistrates and the Queen, and took the road to overtake his armies, already on their way to Saxony.

  Maria Elanora was the Queen, a piece on the board, an hieratic figure, but Axel was his friend. He could still see him vanishing square-shouldered and forever from that glade. He had never felt more uneasy.

  20

  Lützen is a village, scarcely even that, of no importance whatsoever, not far from Leipzig. There are cairns and cromlechs in the neighborhood and barrows not far off, for it is the gateway to Saxony. Therefore it has been fought over for more than two thousand years. It is where the invader either wins or loses.

  At this place, on the 6th of November, the Swedes won a great victory and commenced the downfall of the Black Man, though the present juncture was no way reconcilable to the true science of war, and led both sides to debate before attacking. Gustavus asked how many miles it might be to the village. Some gentry of the country told him it lay directly under his eye. Since he was shortsighted,
the middle distance was a blur to him, and Lützen, its church and castle, standing on the only high ground hereabouts, seemed closer than they were, a distance of five miles, not nine.

  It stands in the middle of a large plain, a gentle swell of the land. The fields had been plowed for planting, and as there had been a thaw, each furrow was viscid. Only three things interrupted the landscape, the road itself, lined with the swollen knuckles of naked willow trees, and on either side of it, a deep fosse to keep cattle out of the corn. Outside Lützen, a row of windmills with tattered sails creaked around their wooden axles. Two miles from the village, a flussgraben, or water ditch put there to drain wet lands, instead of draining them turned them into a quagmire. Lützen was a booby trap with trees.

  At Gustavus’ command, 18,000 men performed their evolutions, and bent their course toward Lützen, but the clayey ground clung to them up to the mid-leg. They had marched into the unreported swamp. It was red sunset before they had disengaged themselves, driven out a garrison of Croats, taken a standard, and entrenched for the night. The King was not pleased. For the first time in his military life, he was obliged to give battle not absolutely against his judgment, certainly, but his eyesight had deceived him. He purposed to attack two hours before dawn.

  Wallenstein, who was better at outmaneuvering than at fighting, recalled his troops at once. They began to move in to him at midnight, and Gustav Adolf could hear this as he tried to sleep on his brass field cot. It sounded like someone moving about restlessly in the next room of an inn, muttering to himself, unknown, unknowable, terrible, pacing up and down, saying, My God, my God. The next morning the innkeeper, in answer to queries, looks astonished and tells you that room is never occupied.

  Wallenstein had the advantage of higher ground, and at nine in the evening had placed his artillery among the windmills. Had he chosen to fire at night, he might have leveled his guns at that next best thing to a graveyard, a group of men sleeping. But he decided to wait. At ten he ordered his engineers to deepen the fosse on his side of the road, so to the sound of clanking troops was added that of shovels.

  Gustavus, a better commander of ordnance than Wallenstein, had brought nothing of the sort with him, except for a few fieldpieces, two to each regiment. Neither had he brought tents. He spent the night dozing and talking with his officers. The field cot had not been restful, so he had moved into his coach, with his feet up on the opposite seat. There was no ground mist as yet—that rose shortly before dawn—but there was a mist in the sky above him. The Coal Sack was not visible.

  Sometimes he merely sat and contemplated the unnamable. There is a story, current from Silesia to Transylvania, and as old as the weariness of man. One night a doctor is called out in bad weather. He does not wish to go, but the case is urgent and the fee immense. He is driven in his coach (I suppose a coach much like this one) to an obscure and rain-swept castle. He is urgently awaited. He does his best. The patient dies.

  “Now I am Death,” says the young man who has brought him, the scion of the house, with an angry, strangled triumph, the scornful sorrow of the generations succeeding to their role. And so the doctor learns that death, too, has its sadness; death is a dynasty.

  Morbid thoughts. Axel will know what to do. He has always warned me I am too impetuous, I should take more care. I wish my daughter were old enough to know better. As it is, I am the stranger who sends her toys and a regal dispensation from her afternoon nap. Besides, I might win. Without Axel, we could have done nothing; we are two heads on the blue and gold body of Sweden. It is a portent that the sky is overcast, I cannot see my native colors. But I can see my native place. I hope the child measures up. She is a Vasa. But if we exclude Poland, and that has been taken care of, I am the last male in the direct line. Well, at least I was a large one. We did not go out quietly, no more quietly than, in my grandfather’s day, we came in. We were a brawly lot.

  Axel and I have not met often, but he is the one person one hoped always to see again, the one person one has been with, so long, so long. I am a commander. I must straighten up. And as usual, I shall win.

  The mist had descended from the upper sky. Nothing was discernible at a length of two pike staves. Gustavus peered perkily from his carriage, and commanded Divine Service. Fabricius, the royal chaplain, would superintend.

  As the mumbled words of that discourse came from the several battalions lost in the böyg, the King was asked to don body armor. He refused. “The Lord is my armor,” he said. He believed it. God is one’s self on a larger scale, and so never fails; it is only that one has failed one’s self. He consented to wear fresh clothes, a plain cloth coat and a new elkskin waistcoat. He was fond of elkskin waistcoats. He had a severe contusion on his chest that made any heavier covering painful. His Majesty—for so he was; no one had ever been able to deny that except the French, who have no use for character—then left his carriage and confronted the böyg.

  He was by now in one of his regal moods. The past of Sweden, which I embody, is lost in the mists of time. It was an old saw, but old saws in those days could still cut. On the one hand is the mist. On the other hand is time. Behind us lies Sweden. How else would one express it? We are a recent house, but there is something ancient in our blood which understands every tree, every pebble, every shore, every movement of the kelp. Christianity we accepted late, as another name for what we are. When I accept full communion, I do so only because when I was a small boy, pettish perhaps, and frowning, I stirred with my foot a few glaciated stones an inch under the surface, in a still sea pond, and then looked up and saw to the south my Baltic. It smells of the sappy exudation of the spruce. It has the stench of what we are. What else would anyone be proud of? The past of my race stands behind me like a row of trees. What I am runs before me, like a joyful, foolish dog, into the böyg. All deaths are ritual.

  What sentimental tush, said Gustavus, knowing it to be most unsentimentally true, and at once felt himself grown a foot taller. I was born to command, and I really don’t care whether it kills me or not. To command is my vocation.

  Yet here was the böyg before him, that roiling cloud of unknowing, that irradiated dark night of the soul, that mist of memory, which would delude us if it could from our proper goal, by means of the illusory shapes of the loved and the known, the kobolds of our desire to save ourselves, and all to keep Trollheim for the trolls. For we are of no importance, and woe betide the man who says so. Yet if we would be brave, we must remember that. Our only importance lies in our journey’s end, the mission done, the thing rounded out, the message delivered. It will arrive in Cassiopeia, long after the death of the sender. It is a message sent from a watcher to a star.

  The böyg contains everything we ever had or wished to be. Thus does it lead men’s souls astray, and bring them to cast their bodies over the precipice. Whether they fell or jumped, the death is the same; and all in order that the gods of Trollheim shall never be asked a favor.

  At nine in the morning, Gustav II Adolf, fifth, greatest, and last king in the direct line of the House of Vasa, having inspected this phenomenon of which he had always been aware, rode briskly up and down the length of his army, and ordered the 46th and 67th Psalms to be sung, and afterwards addressed the troops as pithily as he did everything else:

  “My companions and friends, show the public this day what you really are. You will find the benediction of heaven taut on the points of your swords. If, on the contrary, you think of flight, and self-preservation, then your infamy is certain, … and not an atom of your bones shall ever return to Sweden.”

  It was his direct style. To his own people he believed in putting things plainly. To the German troops he spoke, instead, of their advantage. He was favored with an ovation. Many things move men’s minds on the same occasion. That does not mean they are not moved. Each man has his böyg. But whatever they tell themselves they fight for, if they feel a reason in their bones, fight they will.

  The armies engaged a little after nine. “If after havi
ng passed so many rivers, scaled numberless fortresses, and fought various battles, your ancient intrepidity has deserted you, stand firm at least some minutes longer, and have the curiosity to see your master die, in the manner he ought, and in the manner he chooses,” exhorted Gustavus.

  Better that, he thought, than to grow stiff and old in white rooms trimmed with gilt, in empty rooms, in state rooms.

  So that day the Swedes won a tactical victory. Wallenstein was forced to flee as far as Prague, which he did readily enough; he was a technician, it was his customary form of locomotion. The sack of his baggage trains made many men rich.

  Unfortunately Gustavus was cut down at a little after eleven in the morning. And there rose suddenly over the battlefield a great mist, a mist of unknowing which rendered men invisible, though their voices could still be heard. To lose their palladium disconcerts some men. Others it drives on.

  A musket ball had shattered the Great King’s left arm. It did not hurt. It would have to be amputated, the bone fragments being many and small, and it had made a slithering, dangling, bloody mess. An Imperialist horseman next cocked a pistol and shot him in the back. The bullet, entering, was warm and horrible as a swift attack of indigestion. It knocked him from his saddle, but as one foot caught in the stirrup, he was dragged along the ground on his chest before he could disengage his twisted leg. This was not so painful as it might have been, because the passage of so many men had broken the crusted surface of the ground, and stirred up and softened the mud beneath. But being dragged by a horse disturbs one’s sense of equilibrium; everything is upside down, one feels like an animal. The trap has sprung. He lay face down while men trampled over him and the world righted itself. The earth, sniffed up that close, has the scent of warm metal. A leaf, a twig and a blade of grass become such a microcosmos as Dürer drew. If the death be as swift as an accident, we are all immortal for a moment before we die, feeling ourselves slide into the microcosmos, faster, faster; it is as exciting as vertigo. The testicles draw up.