Towards noon Herse returned and confirmed what his heart, always prepared for the worst turn of events, had already told him: the Junker was in the convent at Erlabrunn with the aged Lady Abbess Antonia von Tronka, his aunt. Apparently he had escaped through a door in the back wall of the castle that led out into the open and by a roofed-over stone stairway that took him down to some boats on the Elbe. Herse reported that at midnight he had reached a village on the river in an oarless and rudderless skiff, much to the astonishment of the inhabitants who had gathered at the sight of the fire at Tronka Castle; he had then left for Erlabrunn in a vehicle from the village. At this news Kohlhaas sighed deeply; he asked whether the horses had been fed and, when he was told that they had, he ordered his men to mount and reached Erlabrunn within three hours. Accompanied by the rumble of a thunderstorm on the distant horizon and with freshly lit torches, he and his troop rode into the courtyard of the convent. The groom Waldmann came to meet him and was just reporting that the writ had been properly handed over when the Abbess and the convent administrator appeared in the doorway, talking to each other in agitation. The administrator, an aged little man with snow-white hair, glared fiercely at Kohlhaas as his armour was strapped on, and boldly ordered the servants surrounding him to sound the alarm bell; meanwhile the Lady Abbess, as white as a sheet, with a silver crucifix in her hand, came down from the terrace and together with all her nuns threw herself on her knees before Kohlhaas’s horse. While Herse and Sternbald overpowered the administrator, who had no sword, and led him off as their prisoner among the horses, Kohlhaas asked her where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was. Unfastening a great ring of keys from her girdle, she answered: ‘In Wittenberg, worthy Kohlhaas!’, and added in a quavering voice: ‘Fear God and do no wrong!’ At this Kohlhaas, hurled back into the hellish torment of unsatisfied revenge, turned his horse and was about to give the order to set the convent on fire, when a huge thunderbolt struck the ground close beside him. Wheeling his horse round to her again, he asked if she had received his writ. The lady answered in a weak and barely audible voice: ‘Only this minute!’ ‘When?’ ‘Two hours, as God is my judge, after my nephew the Junker had already left!’ And when the groom, Waldmann, to whom Kohlhaas turned with menacing looks, had stuttered a confirmation of this, explaining that flood-water from the Mulde had delayed his arrival until now, Kohlhaas regained his composure. A sudden terrible deluge of rain, beating down on the cobbles of the courtyard, extinguished the torches and relieved the anguish in his tormented heart. Briefly saluting the Abbess with his hat he turned his horse round, and shouting ‘Follow me, brothers! The Junker is in Wittenberg!’, he dug in his spurs and rode out of the convent.
As night fell, he stopped at an inn beside the highway, where he had to rest for a day because the horses were so exhausted. Well realizing that he could not challenge a town such as Wittenberg with a band of ten men (for that was his present strength) he composed a second writ. After a short account of what had befallen him in Saxony, he called on ‘every good Christian’, as he put it, ‘to take up his cause against Junker von Tronka as the universal enemy of all Christians’, and promised them ‘pay and other perquisites of war’. In another declaration issued soon after, he styled himself ‘a freeman of the Empire and the world, subject to God alone’. These expressions of his diseased and deluded fanaticism nonetheless brought him an influx of recruits from among riff-raff who, deprived of a living by the peace with Poland, were drawn by the sound of money and the prospect of plunder. So it was that he had thirty or more men with him when he returned along the right bank of the Elbe fully intending to burn Wittenberg to the ground. He camped with his horses and men under the roof of an old dilapidated brick shed in the solitude of a dark wood which in those days encircled the place. No sooner had he learnt from Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the town with the writ, that it had already been made public there, than he and his band broke camp on Whitsun Eve. While the inhabitants were fast asleep he set fire to the town in several places at once, and as his men plundered the outskirts, he fastened up a notice on a church door, stating that he, Kohlhaas, had set fire to the town and that if the Junker were not handed over he would continue to raze it until, as he put it, ‘he would not need to search behind any walls to find him’.
The inhabitants were terrified beyond words at this incredible outrage. Fortunately it was a fairly calm summer’s night and the fire destroyed only nineteen buildings, though these did include a church; but as soon as the flames had been brought under some control towards daybreak, the aged governor, Otto von Gorgas, sent out a company of fifty men to capture the savage monster. The captain in command, however, Gerstenberg by name, adopted such poor tactics that the expedition, so far from defeating Kohlhaas, merely helped him to gain a most formidable military reputation; for when this officer split up his company into several detachments with the object, as he thought, of surrounding and so crushing Kohlhaas, the latter kept his force together, attacked at separate points and defeated his opponent piecemeal. Indeed by the evening of the following day, not one man of this entire troop on which the country had placed its hopes still stood in the field against him. Having lost some of his own men in this skirmish, Kohlhaas on the morning of the next day again set the town alight, and his deadly methods were so effective that a large number of houses and almost all the barns on the outskirts of the city were burnt to the ground. Once more he posted up the self-same writ, this time to the corners of the town hall itself, adding details of the fate of Captain von Gerstenberg whom the governor had sent out and whom he had routed. Outraged by his defiance, the governor set out with some cavalry at the head of a force one hundred and fifty strong. Upon Junker Wenzel von Tronka’s written request, he gave him a bodyguard to protect him against any violence by the people of Wittenberg, who were determined that he should leave the town. After placing patrols in all the surrounding villages and leaving guards along the town walls to prevent any surprise attack, he himself rode out on St Gervaise’s Day to capture the dragon who was devastating the land. The horse-dealer was cunning enough to evade this force; by skilful marching he lured the governor five leagues away from the town, and by various manoeuvres deluded him into thinking that in the face of numerical superiority he had fallen back into Brandenburg; then suddenly, as darkness fell on the third evening, he wheeled back at a gallop to Wittenberg and set it on fire for the third time. Herse, who had slipped into the town in disguise, carried out this dreadful feat, and the flames, fanned by a strong northerly wind, spread so fiercely and voraciously that within three hours they had reduced forty-two houses, two churches, several monasteries and schools and the Electoral governor’s own residence to rubble and ashes. When the governor, who at dawn had believed his opponent to be in Brandenburg, was informed of what had happened, he returned in forced marches to find the town in general uproar. The people in their thousands were besieging the Junker’s house, which had been barricaded with beams and posts, demanding with frenzied clamour his expulsion from the town. Two burgomasters, Jenkens and Otto by name, were standing in their official robes at the head of the entire council, vainly pointing out that they had no choice but to await the return of a courier sent to the President of the State Chancellery to obtain permission for the Junker’s removal to Dresden, where he himself wished to go for a number of reasons. The unreasoning mob, armed with pikes and staves, paid no heed to these words, roughly handled some of the councillors who were calling for drastic measures, and were on the point of storming the house occupied by the Junker and levelling it to the ground when the governor, Otto von Gorgas, entered the town at the head of his cavalry. This worthy gentleman, who was accustomed to inspiring respect and obedience by his mere presence, had managed, as if by way of making amends for the failure of the expedition from which he was returning, to catch three stray members of the incendiary’s band right in front of the city gates. As the prisoners were publicly put in chains, he assured the council in a shrewdly worded spee
ch that he was confident of bringing in Kohlhaas himself the same way before long, for he was hot on his trail; and he thus succeeded, thanks to these various reassuring circumstances, in disarming the crowd’s fears, and putting their minds to some extent at rest about the continued presence of the Junker until the courier returned from Dresden. Accompanied by some cavalrymen he dismounted and, when the pallisades and posts had been removed, entered the house; here he found the Junker repeatedly swooning, and attended by two doctors who were trying to revive him with essences and stimulants. Otto von Gorgas judged that this was not the moment to exchange words with him about his shameful behaviour, but merely told him with a look of silent contempt to get dressed and for his own safety to follow him to quarters reserved for prisoners of rank. When they had put a doublet on the Junker and a helmet on his head and he reappeared in the street, with his breast half exposed to ease his breathing and with the governor and his brother-in-law Count von Gerschau supporting him, a chorus of frightful curses and blasphemies rose to high heaven all round him. The people, whom the lansquenets could barely restrain, called him a blood-sucker, a wretched public menace and tormentor of mankind, the bane of Wittenberg and the ruin of Saxony; and after a pathetic procession through the wreckage of the town, during which his helmet several times fell off without his missing it, so that a knight following behind had to push it back on again, the prison was finally reached and the Junker disappeared into a tower under heavy guard.
Meanwhile the return of the courier with the Electoral resolution brought the town new cause for concern. The government, to which the citizens of Dresden had appealed directly in an urgent petition, was not prepared to grant the Junker permission to reside in the capital until the incendiary had been captured; on the contrary it required the governor to use what power he had at his disposal to protect the Junker where he now was, since he had to be somewhere; on the other hand, the worthy town of Wittenberg was to take comfort from the information that a force of five hundred men under the command of Prince Friedrich of Meissen was already on its way to shield it from further onslaught by Kohlhaas. But the governor well knew that a resolution in these terms could not possibly placate the townsfolk, not only because a number of minor victories scored by the horse-dealer at various points outside Wittenberg had started very ugly rumours about the strength to which his support had grown, but also because the kind of warfare he was waging, at dead of night, with men in disguise, using pitch, straw and sulphur, was new and without parallel and could have rendered ineffectual an even larger force than that brought by the Prince of Meissen. After brief reflection the governor therefore decided to suppress completely the resolution he had received. He simply had a letter in which the Prince of Meissen informed him of his impending arrival posted up all over the town. A covered carriage drove out of the prison-yard at dawn and took the road for Leipzig, accompanied by four heavily armed cavalrymen who intimated, in an equivocal manner, that their destination was the fortress of Pleissenburg. Having thus reassured the townsfolk as to the presence of the ill-starred Junker which had brought fire and the sword upon them, the governor himself set out with a troop of three hundred men to join forces with Prince Friedrich of Meissen. Meanwhile Kohlhaas, thanks to the peculiar role he had assumed in the world, had indeed grown in strength to a hundred and nine men. As he had also laid hands on an arsenal of weapons in Jassen and had armed his band to the teeth with them, he resolved to strike with lightning speed at the double storm he now knew to be approaching, before it could break over him. The very next night he accordingly attacked the Prince of Meissen after dark near Mühlberg. This fight, to his great grief, cost him the life of Herse, who fell at his side in the first exchange of shots; but in his bitter rage at this loss he inflicted, in an engagement lasting three hours, such damage on the Prince, who was unable to marshal his troops in the village, that by daybreak Meissen, badly wounded in several places and with his men in utter disarray, was forced to retreat towards Dresden. Emboldened to madness by this victory, Kohlhaas wheeled upon the governor before the latter could get wind of what had happened, engaging him in broad daylight and in open countryside near the village of Damerow. The battle raged until dusk and, though his losses were appalling, Kohlhaas gained even advantages. Indeed, the next morning he would undoubtedly with his remaining troops have renewed his attack on the governor, who had fallen back into the churchyard at Damerow, had von Gorgas not been informed of the Prince of Meissen’s defeat at Mühlberg and considered it more prudent to retreat similarly to Wittenberg and await a more favourable opportunity. Five days after he had routed both these forces, Kohlhaas reached Leipzig and set three sides of the city on fire.
In the writ which he distributed on this occasion he styled himself ‘an emissary of the Archangel Michael, who has come to punish with fire and sword all those who shall stand on the Junker’s side in this quarrel, and to chastise in them the deceitfulness which now engulfs the whole world’. From the castle at Lützen, which he had captured and where he had entrenched himself, he appealed to the people to join him in establishing a better order of things; and the writ was signed, with a touch of madness, ‘Given at the seat of our Provisional World Government, Lützen Castle’. It was fortunate for the inhabitants of Leipzig that steady rain kept the flames from spreading and that consequently, by speedy application of the existing fire-fighting arrangements, it was possible to confine the blaze to a few shops round the Pleissenburg. Nevertheless there was inexpressible panic in the city at the presence of the mad incendiary with his delusion that the Junker was in Leipzig; and when a troop of a hundred and eighty horse sent into the field against him returned in rout, the city council, not wishing to jeopardize the wealth of Leipzig, had no choice but to barricade all the gates and put the citizens on day and night guard outside the walls. It was in vain that the council had proclamations put up in the surrounding villages declaring categorically that the Junker was not in the Pleissenburg; the horse-dealer posted similar notices insisting that he was, and announcing that even if he were not in the fortress he, Kohlhaas, would continue to act as if he were until told where he really was. The Elector, informed by a courier of Leipzig’s peril, declared that he was already assembling an army of two thousand men, which he would personally command, to capture Kohlhaas. He sternly rebuked Otto von Gorgas for the ambiguous and ill-considered subterfuge which he had used in order to get rid of the incendiary from the neighbourhood of Wittenberg; and there was indescribable confusion throughout Saxony and particularly in the capital when it was discovered that a notice addressed to Kohlhaas from an unknown person had been put up in the villages round Leipzig, stating: ‘Junker Wenzel is with his cousins Hinz and Kunz in Dresden’.
Under these circumstances Dr Martin Luther, relying on the power of persuasive words and on the prestige which his position in the world had given him, undertook the task of inducing Kohlhaas to return within the confines of ordered human society; and in the belief that there was an element of integrity in the incendiary’s heart, he had a proclamation in the following terms posted up in every town and village of the Electorate:
Kohlhaas, you claim to have been sent to wield the sword of justice, but what are you presuming to do in the insanity of your blind passion, you who from head to foot are the very embodiment of injustice? Because the sovereign whose subject you are denied you your rights, your rights in a dispute about some trivial possessions, you have monstrously rebelled with fire and sword, and like a wolf from the wilderness you invade the peaceful community of which he is the protector. You who seduce men with such lies and deceitful allegations, do you suppose they will avail a sinner like you before God on that Day on which the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed? How can you claim that you have been refused justice, when with your savage heart lusting for base personal vengeance you abandoned any attempt to obtain it after your first trifling efforts had failed? A benchful of court functionaries and bailiffs who suppress a letter presented to them or withh
old a judgement they should deliver: are these your sovereign? And do I need to tell you, godless man, that your sovereign knows nothing about your case – indeed that the prince against whom you have revolted does not even know your name? When you stand before God’s throne thinking to accuse him, he will be able to say serenely: Lord, I have done this man no wrong, for my soul is ignorant of his existence. Know that the sword which you bear is the sword of robbery and murder; you are a rebel and no warrior of the just God; your end on earth shall be the wheel and the gallows, and in the world hereafter the damnation that awaits all crime and ungodliness.
The Marquise of O and Other Stories Page 15