less than 2000 men, and of them
above 1000 lay wounded and sick in the camp.

Here were several regiments which I saw drawn out to their arms that
could not make up above seventy or eighty men, officers and all, and
those half starved with hunger, almost naked, and in a lamentable
condition. From thence I went into the town, and there things were
still in a worse condition, the houses beaten down, the walls and
works ruined, the garrison, by continual duty, reduced from 4500 men
to less than 800, without clothes, money, or provisions, the brave
governor weak with continual fatigue, and the whole face of things in
a miserable case.

The French generals had just sent them 30,000 crowns for present
supply, which heartened them a little, but had not the truce been made
as it was, they must have surrendered upon what terms the Spaniards
had pleased to make them.

Never were two armies in such fear of one another with so little
cause; the Spaniards afraid of the French whom the plague had
devoured, and the French afraid of the Spaniards whom the siege had
almost ruined.

The grief of this mistake, together with the sense of his master,
the Spaniards, leaving him without supplies to complete the siege of
Casale, so affected the Marquis Spinola, that he died for grief, and
in him fell the last of that rare breed of Low Country soldiers, who
gave the world so great and just a character of the Spanish infantry,
as the best soldiers of the world; a character which we see them so
very much degenerated from since, that they hardly deserve the name of
soldiers.

I tarried at Milan the rest of the winter, both for the recovery of my
health, and also for supplies from England.

Here it was I first heard the name of Gustavus Adolphus, the king of
Sweden, who now began his war with the emperor; and while the king
of France was at Lyons, the league with Sweden was made, in which the
French contributed 1,200,000 crowns in money, and 600,000 per annum
to the attempt of Gustavus Adolphus. About this time he landed in
Pomerania, took the towns of Stettin and Stralsund, and from thence
proceeded in that prodigious manner of which I shall have occasion to
be very particular in the prosecution of these Memoirs.

I had indeed no thoughts of seeing that king or his armies. I had
been so roughly handled already, that I had given over the thoughts
of appearing among the fighting people, and resolved in the spring
to pursue my journey to V