ichelieu;
"six thousand dead or dying were left on the field of battle, where Duke
Bernard encamped till morning."

When day came, he led the troops off to Weisenfeld. The army knew
nothing yet of the king's death. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar had the body
brought to the front. "I will no longer conceal from you," he said, "the
misfortune that has befallen us; in the name of the glory that you have
won in following this great prince, help me to exact vengeance for it,
and to let all the world see that he commanded soldiers who rendered him
invincible, and, even after his death, the terror of his enemies." A
shout arose from the host, "We will follow you whither you will, even to
the end of the earth."

"Those who look for spots on the sun, and find something reprehensible
even in virtue itself, blame this king," says Cardinal Richelieu,
"for having died like a trooper; but they do not reflect that all
conqueror-princes are obliged to do not only the duty of captain, but of
simple soldier, and to be the first in peril, in order to lead thereto
the soldier who would not run the risk without them. It was the case
with Caesar and with Alexander, and the Swede died so much the more
gloriously than either the one or the other, in that it is more becoming
the condition of a great captain and a conqueror to die sword in hand,
making a tomb for his body of his enemies on the field of battle, than to
be hated of his own and poniarded by the hands of his nearest and
dearest, or to die of poison or of drowning in a wine-butt."

Just like Napoleon in Egypt and Italy, Gustavus Adolphus, had performed
the prelude, by numerous wars against his neighbors, to the grand
enterprise which was to render his name illustrious. Vanquished in his
struggle with Denmark in 1613, he had carried war into Muscovy, conquered
towns and provinces, and as early as 1617 he had effected the removal of
the Russians from the shores of the Baltic. The Poles made a pretence of
setting their own king, Sigismund, upon the throne of Sweden; and for
eighteen years Gustavus Adolphus had bravely defended his rights, and
protected and extended his kingdom up to the truce of Altenmarket,
concluded in 1629 through the intervention of Richelieu, who had need of
the young King of Sweden in order to oppose the Emperor Ferdinand and the
dangerous power of the house of Austria. Summoned to Germany by the
Protestant princes who were being oppressed and despoiled, and as