rs, and another
with three hundred silver moons; and the soldiers' women wore the most
beautiful church dresses and mass vestments, and that some Stradiots
rode in plundered priests' dresses, to the great mirth of their
comrades. In these times also carousers drank to one another in costly
wine from the chalices, and caused long chains to be made of the
plundered gold, from which, according to the old knightly custom, they
severed links to pay for a carousal. But the longer the war lasted the
more rare were these golden times. The devastation of the country
revenged itself fearfully on the army itself; the pale spectre of
hunger, the forerunner of pestilence, glided through the lines of the
camp, and raised its bony hand against every straw hut. Then supplies
from the surrounding districts ceased, the price of provisions was
raised so as to be almost unattainable; a loaf of bread, for example,
in the Swedish army in 1640, at Gotha, cost a ducat. Hollow-eyed pale
faces, sick and dying men, were to be seen in every row of huts; the
vicinity of the camp was pestilential from the decaying bodies of dead
animals. All around was a wilderness of uncultivated fields, blackened
with the ruins of villages, and the camp itself a dismal city of death.

A broad stream of superstition had flowed through the souls of the
people from ancient times up to the present day, and the soldier's life
of the Thirty years; war revived an abundance of peculiar
superstitions, of which a portion continues even now; it is worth while
to dwell a little upon these characteristic phenomena.

The belief that it is possible to make the body proof by magic against
the weapons of the enemy, and on the other hand to make your own arms
fatal to them, is older than the historical life of the German people.
In the earliest times, however, something gloomy was attached to this
art; it might easily become pregnant with fatality, even to its
votaries. The invulnerability was not unconditional, and succumbed to
the stronger counter-magic of the offensive weapon: Achilles had a heel
which was not invulnerable; no weapon could wound the Norse god Baldur,
but the waving of a branch of misletoe by a blind man killed him;
Siegfried had a weak spot between the shoulders, the same which the
soldiers of the Thirty years' war considered also as vulnerable. Among
the numerous Norse traditions are many accounts of charmed weapons: the
sword, the noblest weapon of heroes, wa