DonHollway.com: The Lion of the North

	The Lion of the North
	by Don Hollway
	Originally published as “Triumph of Flexible Firepower,” in MILITARY HISTORY, Feb. 1996

Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus invents modern warfare at Breitenfeld, 1631.

After seven months outside the walls the besiegers launched their final assault on the German city of Magdeburg. From the east they rushed the bastion guarding the bridgeworks over the River Elbe; through the outlying suburbs, razed and gutted with trenchworks, they filtered to the foot of the north wall, where one of the towers guarding the gate had crumbled under unrelenting cannon fire. The few sentries posted there, caught in the middle of morning prayers, were quickly dispatched. The remaining defenders, outnumbered more than ten to one, surrendered or died—mostly both—as 25,000 Imperial troops flooded into the city.

All through the winter of 1630/31 these hard-bitten mercenaries had lain in the mud and filth of the trenches outside Magdeburg, dreaming of the loot within. Now they filled the streets: drunken pikemen and musketeers dragging ill-gotten plunder and captive women; cuirassiers plunging their chargers through shop windows and over fleeing burghers; officers vainly trying to marshal their uncontrollable men; drumbeats and gunshots, pleading and screams, and finally, inevitably, the crackle of flame.

At noon some 20 fires blazed up almost simultaneously. Within hours, wind-whipped and blazing together, they were consuming the city. It was all the Imperial commanders could do to herd soldiers and citizenry alike beyond the walls; as it was large numbers were cut off and perished as the city went up blocks at a time. Of Magdeburg’s 30,000 citizens only 5000 survived (mostly women spirited off to the Imperial camp before the onset of destruction). For them there was only one question: Why had their deliverer not come? Where was the King of Sweden—the Lion of the North? Where was Gustavus Adolphus?

120 miles to the east, at Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, the king sat mired in fruitless entreaty. His paltry force of Swedish peasants had driven an imperial army into the city and successfully taken it days before. He was poised to plunge cross-country to the aid of Magdeburg. All that prevented him from doing so, and saving Germany, was the Germans themselves.

Thirteen years into the Thirty Years War only losers remained on the field of northern Germany. The Holy Roman Empire, if nominally united by force, was in fact irrevocably sundered, its German princes and potentates hopelessly opposed. The rebellious Lutherans and Calvinists of the Protestant Union had lost nearly everything; their counterparts in the Catholic League had lost their independence to the Hapsburg emperor, Ferdinand II. The victorious imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, who’d claimed 66 estates and a duchy as his personal spoils of war, had become the most powerful man in Germany—too powerful for the comfort of the Emperor, who’d cashiered him. His subordinate Johannes, Count Tilly, commanding the army of the Catholic League, found himself reluctantly saddled with Wallenstein’s nefarious mercenaries as well. Ferdinand himself, his grip on the empire finally secure, had suddenly grown too strong for the balance of European power. What had begun as a minor religious struggle had become a European war of international proportion, in which Germany would ultimately lose a third of her population, and some areas more than half.

From Sweden Gustavus Adolphus had viewed with apprehension Catholic expansion in Germany, especially along the coast of the Baltic, which he aspired to make a Swedish lake. As a boy he’d taken full part in Swedish affairs and helped lead the armies of his father Karl IX. He’d studied the doctrines of Maurice of Nassau, the Dutch general who’d fought the Spanish to a standstill in the long struggle for his country’s independence. In that age infantry still relied on the pike as much as gunpowder; cavalry, on the other hand, had grown so enamored of the pistol that it resembled mobile artillery more than the hard-charging chivalry of old. In an age dominated by siege warfare, pike formations and mercenary armies, Maurice favored native-born conscripts fighting a war of movement and firepower.

Upon Karl’s death 16-year-old Gustavus had followed and furthered Maurice’s example. He formed his father’s militia of woodsmen and peasants into the hard core of what was to become Europe’s most formidable army, defeating Poland, Denmark and Russian in succession.

The rise of Swedish power had not gone unnoticed in the south. Ferdinand had in fact sent aid to the Poles to forestall the Swedish threat. But France’s prime minister Cardinal Richelieu preferred a Germany of bickering Protestants to one of Catholics united under the Hapsburgs. He countered with an offer of truce and financial backing to Gustavus, who by 1630 was ready to invade Germany. The “Swedish Phase” of the Thirty Years War had begun.

In July he crossed the Baltic with 13,000 men, mostly native Swedes with a complement of Scottish and Irish mercenaries, but a puny force with which to take on the 100,000 soldiers of the Empire. Gustavus, as self-styled Protector of Protestantism, expected to fill his ranks with grateful Germans. But the presence of another army, even a friendly one, in those days when all armies lived off the land—that is to say, by looting—did not thrill his hosts. Though Gustavus kept his men on a tight rein, the Saxons and Brandenburgers remained as suspicious of him as of their Emperor, and determined to remain independent of both. “They know not whether they would be Lutheran or popish, imperialist or German, slave or free,” fumed Gustavus. Their de facto leader, the Saxon Elector John George, avoided commitment to Gustavus, sought a settlement with Ferdinand, and set about raising an army of his own.

Meanwhile Tilly, his troops quartered in the Oder Valley, also found himself on unfriendly ground. Wallenstein, who now owned that part of Germany, not only refused to feed and shelter his former army but threatened to ally with the Swedes. The Catholic forces would not survive another winter where they were. Tilly, some 70 years old, had grown exceedingly cautious and indecisive, but at the urging of his heavy cavalry commander, Count Gottfried Pappenheim, he settled on a siege of Magdeburg, the prosperous fortress-city which commanded the Elbe River and had so far resisted Imperial domination.

To champion Magdeburg would prove Gustavus’ sincerity and give him a strategic base, but without German aid he could do little. He sent Hessian colonel Dietrich von Falkenburg with orders to hold the city until the main Swedish force could relieve him.

Von Falkenburg found it easier to strengthen the city’s fortifications than its fortitude. The mixed population of Protestants and Catholics, uncertain whether his presence would prevent or invite attack, included a large contingent of imperial sympathizers. “There is little wisdom here, we live from day to day,” reported the colonel to the king.

With the Gustavus still loose on the field Tilly, who had doubts that Magdeburg could be taken, sent Pappenheim to conduct the siege. Bold, dashing, and wholly unsuited to the slow reduction of fortifications, Pappenheim set to knocking off the city’s outlying redoubts one by one.

As the imperial noose tightened von Falkenburg set fire to the suburbs, destroyed the bridge over the Elbe and withdrew the defenders behind the city walls. The citizens, frantic to avoid the sack which inevitably followed a city’s capture, began to urge surrender.

John George still refused to back Gustavus, who in fact feared to come to Magdeburg’s aid with the Saxon army to his rear. He tried to distract Tilly by capturing Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, but the latter simply delivered to Magdeburg’s city council a choice: unconditional surrender or total destruction.

Despite von Falkenburg’s efforts the council seemed ready to yield, but on the morning of the 20th, with Tilly’s messenger within the walls awaiting an answer, the imperialists attacked. Some said the treachery was Tilly’s; others said Pappenheim, afraid the city might avoid a sack, attacked on his own. In any event the surprise was total. Von Falkenburg, killed in the first moments, didn’t live to see the burgermeisters’ fears borne out beyond their worst nightmares.

It took three days for Magdeburg to burn itself out. By then there remained only a blistered, blackened wasteland where the city had stood. Just to make way for Tilly’s grand entrance required that 6,000 bodies be dumped into the Elbe; it took two more weeks to clear the rest of the city of corpses, which choked the river for miles downstream. By then Tilly had ceremoniously renamed the newly Catholicized city Marienburg, but knew its destruction would haunt him: “Our danger has no end, for the Protestant Estates will without doubt be only strengthened in their hatred by this.”

For John George, pinned between Tilly’s rapacious mercenaries and Gustavus’ invaders, the time had come to choose: With his source of provisions gone up in smoke Tilly now had little option but to turn east, into Saxony. At the end of August he invaded with 36,000 men; on September 11th John George signed a treaty of alliance with Gustavus.

The new allies got off to an inauspicious start. Within three days Leipzig, threatened with the fate of Magdeburg, surrendered to Tilly. Barely had the Imperial troops begun to loot the city, however, when word came that as many as 45,000 men of the combined Swedish-Saxon army were advancing down the road from Düben.

The cautious Tilly, with reinforcements gathering in the south and nothing to gain by battle, probably would’ve settled for a siege. Pappenheim, however, rode out seeking contact. Late on the evening of the 16th word came back that he’d found it—that he was, in fact, unable to safely withdraw. Gustavus’ dispatches make no mention of action that night; whether Tilly believed Pappenheim or not, he was obliged to support him.

September 17th dawned misty and muggy. “In the gray of morning,” wrote Gustavus, “I ordered the bugles to sound the march, and as between us and Leipsic (sic) there were no woods, I deployed the army into battle order and marched toward that city. After an hour and a half’s march, we saw the enemy’s vanguard with artillery on a hill in our front, and behind it the bulk of his army.”

It was about 9 AM. The Swedes and their Saxon allies had reached the River Lober, today an inconsequential brook but then an obstacle of some import, which runs along the north side of the vast Leipzig plain. A little over a mile away, on a brow of slightly rising ground between the villages of Seehausen and Breitenfeld (“wide field”), the morning sun rose over the 36,000 men of the Imperial army: a wall of pikes, muskets, cannon and horseflesh fully two and a quarter miles from end to end. Fronted with cannon and flanked with heavy cavalry they stood in the Spanish fashion, in seventeen huge battalions of up to 2,000 men apiece, each a bristling battle-square of pikemen protected by small detachments of musketeers at the corners. These were the tercios, Macedonian phalanxes for the gunpowder age, mobile fortresses of flesh and steel which had lumbered roughshod over Europe and made the Hapsburgs masters of half the known world. They fully expected to crush the Swedes by sheer weight, as they had all enemies before them. Cheers of “Father Tilly!” and “Jesu-Maria!” followed the Imperial general as he rode down the line on his famous white charger.

The Swedes and Saxons formed columns to ford the Lober. Pappenheim’s horsemen did what they could to disrupt the crossing, but soon fell back to the tercios’ left flank, out of the way of the Imperial cannon. Tilly had 26 artillery pieces, the lighter ones in front-center and the heaviest on the center-right, where they covered the allied advance. The Swedes and Saxons emerged from the Lober onto the Breitenfeld plain under a pall of black-powder smoke and dust, out of which poured a slow but steady rain of heavy cannon balls.

On the left John George’s well-equipped Saxons lined up in gleaming armor and resplendent accouterments, but in some unremarkable formation which has gone unnoted. “A cheerful and beautiful company to see,” noted Gustavus, with markedly little comment on their fighting ability. (For his part John George described the Swedes as “not nearly as bad as we were led to believe.”)

Gustavus had spent his French money on arms and training rather than finery; his men were not so richly caparisoned. They had none of the looted ornaments which decorated the Imperial ranks. They wore uniforms only where their outfits were cut from the same cloth; as a recognition sign they stuck green branches in their hats and helmets. Gustavus himself went without armor (the heavy cuirass bothered an old musket-ball wound), and wore only his customary buff leather coat and a green feather in his hat.

His men deployed, not in Spanish battalions but in formations of their king’s own design: infantrymen—predominantly musketeers—spread just six deep, with light cavalry and artillery interspersed among them instead of concentrated at key points in the line. To Tilly and his veterans these brigades, as Gustavus called them, must’ve seemed flimsy compared to their own massive squares. But Gustavus put his faith in muskets protected by pikes, not pikes protected by muskets.

To avoid the acrid clouds of dust and smoke coming off the Imperial ranks, Gustavus determined to shift his entire line to his right. It was a dangerous move which exposed his weakest flank—the left, manned by the Saxons and already bearing the brunt of the Imperial artillery barrage—to possible attack.

But Tilly, reluctant to attack prematurely, contented himself in letting his cannon tear up the enemy ranks. The thinly_spread Swedish brigades, however, offered little impediment to the passage of cannon balls, and by noon the Swedes’ own guns were ready to reply.

Gustavus and his brilliant artillery commander, Lennart Torstensson, had cut down the number of gun types in order to simplify and increase production. In addition to the usual battery of 24_pounder field guns, they’d furnished each regiment with a pair of four-pounders, useless against city walls but quite sufficient as antipersonnel weapons. To increase rate of fire they’d come up with the first artillery shell—a wooden case wired to the shot—and drilled their gun crews relentlessly. Now it paid off. The Swedish gunners began to return fire three times more quickly than the Imperials could deal it out. And the tercios were simply to big to miss. The effect on them was disastrous. The forward ranks took the brunt of it, but any ball passing through a man in front still had ten or twelve more behind him to hit, and for every pikeman who went down there fell a 30-foot iron-tipped pike to trip and impale his mates.

The imperialists stood it for two and a half hours. Finally Pappenheim had taken enough. Gustavus’ move to the right threatened his left; the impatient cavalry commander would not sit still to be outflanked. Family legend had it that a Pappenheim would save Germany by slaying an invading king; Gottfried Heinrich meant to make good that prophecy, with or without orders. With his 5,000 heavily-armored cuirassiers he circled wide to the left, keeping just outside musket range, intending to come in behind the Swedish line and carry all before him at a single shattering blow.

Perhaps Tilly understood Swedish tactics better than Pappenheim gave him credit. Seeing his impetuous colonel ride out the imperial general muttered, “This fellow will rob me of my honor and reputation, and the Emperor of his lands and people.” Nevertheless, while Pappenheim occupied the Swedes Tilly set about striking their weakest point—their Saxon allies.

The massive tercios turned ponderously oblique right and began to move forward; the light cavalry on their right made straight for the Saxon lines. As these Croatian horsemen, hardened by generations of conflict with their neighbors in the Turkish empire, emerged screaming from under the dust and smoke John George’s green recruits began to waver. The Saxons had barely held up under the pounding of the imperial cannon; faced with the oncoming mass of Tilly’s veterans they broke with barely a shot fired. John George himself was said not to have reined in until 15 miles away; some of his cavalry found enough courage to sack the helpless Swedish baggage wagons before following him.

It was about 4 PM, and the tide had turned against the Swedes. Tilly now had half again as many men. Poised on the Swedish left flank, sweating the captured Saxon cannon around to fire down the length of the enemy line, the Croatians sweeping around to take them in the rear, Tilly had all but won the battle. If Pappenheim’s impetuous charge had succeeded he had won. Double envelopment—the dream and nightmare of all generals since Hannibal annihilated the Roman legions at Cannae. It was a brilliant maneuver, one which few other generals could have gotten out of tercios (and in fact one of Tilly’s had moved so far out in pursuit of the Saxons that it was effectively out of the fight).

On far side of the field, however, things were not all going Pappenheim’s way. For behind the thinly-spread Swedish brigades, and up to now hidden from Pappenheim, stood a second echelon—a reserve of musketeers and cavalry. The imperialists had charged not into the Swedes’ rear but between their ranks, and into a crossfire.

For the cuirassiers it was too late to back out. They fancied themselves the last vestiges of medieval chivalry, and indeed Pappenheim’s favorite tactic—a headlong, full-speed gallop with sword and lance in the style of the knights of old—might’ve carried the day. But as an imperial officer he adhered to imperial doctrine. His regiments, each a thousand men strong, rode ten across and 100 deep. As their foremost ranks came within range, they stopped and drew not swords but wheel-lock pistols. Loosing a ragged volley they wheeled about on their big German chargers, in the maneuver known as the caracole, and rode to the rear to make room for the next in line to fire. This continuous and concentrated fire could blast an opening even in a tercio.

But as with Tilly’s cannon fire, most of the fusillade passed harmlessly through the Swedes. Gustavus’ musketeers simply knelt, revealing a second rank crouching over them, and a third standing behind them, all leveling advanced snaplocks and wheel-lock muskets. The cannoneers had wheeled their light guns completely around; packed full of grapeshot they amounted to huge shotguns.

A thunderous volley slashed through Pappenheim’s cuirassiers, a murderous sleet of grape and 20mm musketballs, cutting down horses and horsemen alike without regard for rank or armor. While the imperialists still reeled from the impact the Swedish musketeers rotated rearward with clockwork precision, using the shortened reloading drill and paper cartridges which their king had provided for them, even as the next ranks moved up to maintain the fire.

To their credit the imperialists carried through with the caracole seven times while their fellows tumbled screaming from the saddle and their horses tripped over the broken remains of the fallen. Finally the Swedish cavalry judged the time right to put them out of their misery, and countercharged.

Gustavus hadn’t settled for the polite caracole. On their wiry mountain ponies his men, armored only in corselets and pot helmets, charged three deep and all out. As the range closed the first and possibly second ranks had time for one shot each. Then it was naked steel they drew, swords longer than the imperialists’ for greater reach, as they crashed onto Pappenheim’s stunned cavaliers.

The imperial attack came apart. Far beyond retreating to their own lines, the survivors fled the field altogether. Pursuing cavalry would’ve cut them to pieces. Gustavus, however, ordered his horsemen back into line: Pappenheim had removed himself as a threat, but the Swedes were far from out of danger. Most of them, in fact, were effectively out of the fight.

On the far side of the field the greater part of the Imperial army stood poised to concentrate its attack on the very end of the Swedish line. Had that line been composed of ponderous tercios, lined up in each others way, Gustavus would’ve had no hope of extricating them from the ensuing disaster. But this was his moment, and he knew it. Now he would prove the superiority of the brigade over the battalion.

On the left his reserves had thrown back Tilly’s horsemen much as they had Pappenheim’s; now they formed a new line, at right angles to their own front ranks, pouring into the ditch along the Düben road and blocking the Imperial advance. While they held Tilly at bay Gustavus put his right into motion. With their battle-cry “God with us!” the brigades swung across the field like a cracking whip, the line so long that their extreme right ended up entirely across the field, charging down the former enemy line until they came upon the imperial field guns still in position at the far end.

The 30 or more horses required to move each cannon had gone to the Imperial rear before the start of battle; the big guns were more or less immobile, still facing onto the position formerly held by John George’s Saxons, and now by Tilly’s squares. Making short work of the Imperial gunners, the Swedes quickly turned the guns loose on their former owners, sending 24-pound balls to tear great bloody swaths down the length of the Imperial lines. Meanwhile Torstensson turned his own guns to bear, Swedish musketeers moved up to blast the enemy in the face, and Swedish cavalry closed in on both sides to hold their targets in place.

The reverse was swift and complete. Suddenly it was Tilly who was enveloped, and cut off from Leipzig as well. In those ranks where so recently had rung cries of “Victoria” men now found themselves in a terrible trap. The imperialists, too disorganized to attack, too well-ordered to run, could only stand and be cut down. The “wide field” had become a Cannae after all.

Exposed to the blowtorch of close-range Swedish fire the stately tercios came apart like melting steel, fragments streaming away in retreat, slumping in defeat. Mercenaries always know when to quit; the survivors of Tilly’s now outmoded strategy could be thankful that “Magdeburg quarter” had not yet become the Protestant battle-cry.

By 6 PM it was all over. Gustavus, who’d been in the forefront of the battle all day, dismounted and led his troops in prayer. His army had lost less than 3,000 men, mostly to the opening cannon barrage.

Tilly himself, with a shattered arm and wounds in chest and neck, barely made good his escape, at one point having to cut his way free of over a dozen Swedish soldiers. He made it back to Leipzig with about four regiments, not enough to hold the city. The next morning they continued the retreat, linking up with Pappenheim and the wayward tercio, which by removing itself from the battle had escaped destruction.

They left behind them on the wide field of battle nearly a hundred battle flags, all their cannon, and 7,000 dead. As a further insult, the 6,000 imperialists captured, true to their mercenary heritage, promptly enlisted in the Swedish army. Gustavus marched into Leipzig stronger than ever.

By his military genius he’d saved Germany from Hapsburg domination. The city of Dresden proclaimed September 17th henceforth a holiday. Breitenfeld, a victory of movement and firepower over weight of formation, has been called the first battle of the modern age, and Gustavus the father of modern warfare. His tactics were still in use by Marlborough, 70 years later. But in a war of unmatched brutality his conduct and noble purpose were Gustavus’ most lasting legacy. Some two centuries after the battle at Breitenfeld a memorial was erected on the battlefield, with a simple inscription: “Freedom of belief for all the world.”

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