Chapter XIX: The Campaign in Alsace

Our next day's march brought us to Vitry le Francois, a walled town, built of wood. Here we crossed the Marne; the cavalry by a ford, the infantry and artillery by boats and floats; and here a singular episode occurred.

As the soldiers of the seventh battalion of Camp-Marechal Hepburn's regiment of Scots were crossing, a boat full of them overturned; a musketeer, in the confusion and dismay of the moment, grasped a woman who sat next him, believing she was his wife, and swam ashore with her. On reaching the bank, he turned joyfully to embrace her; when, lo! he found that he had saved the wife of another, and left his own, with her babe, to perish in the river, which swept most of these unfortunates away, to drown among the boats and barges, mud and slime, below the ford. The poor soldier, in the first impulse of his grief and despair, threw himself into the stream again, and being heavily armed and accoutred, sank like a stone, though the Laird of Tushielaw, one of our cuirassiers, made a brave attempt to save him.

We were now in Lorraine--the country of the enemy, and our troops began to plunder in every direction; yet we saw little fighting for some days. As for the plunder, it was the fashion of war in France.

'A little legitimate contribution,' the Chevalier Livingstone called it; 'M. le Cardinal would have us to pay for everything here, as we would in the Rue St. Honoré!'

On entering Toul, which until 1550 had been a free city of the German empire, the hundred cuirassiers were the advanced guard of the army; and here I was detailed as one of a foraging-party under the old Marechal de Logis. As the people treated us scurvily, we foraged with such enthusiasm, that with cocked pistols we ransacked bureaux and boxes, as well as barns and pantries; and some of our men realised a very pretty sum. The aspect of our Marechal de Logis, dark, weather-beaten, scaled all over in an old suit of James V.'s time, and whiskered like a seahorse, made the poor Lorrainers yield up the best of everything in the name of king Louis.

'Always take plunder and provender when they are to be had,' was his maxim; 'for in war, we know not when an evil day may come. By Jove, sirs! when I was besieged in Ulm, with old Velt-Marechal Ruthven, I ate more rats than any old tom-cat; for provisions were short, and the wine being bad, it always flew to my head; because it is an empty place, and clear of brain, you young fellows may think; but your own will be light enough when you have soldiered as long as old Patrick Gordon. Forward, my foragers!--hack and manger and spare not!'

On leaving the fertile valley, where the quaint old city of Toul clusters by the bank of the blue Moselle, surrounded by a chain of hills, that are covered to their summits by teeming vineyards, green foliage, and fertility--on leaving it, we took the road direct to Strasbourg and the Rhine, every night engirding our camp and cantonments with strong out-picquets, as we drew nearer the vicinity of the foe.

On the 16th of March, we passed close to the strongly-fortified city of Nanci, the crooked and narrow, quaint and dark streets of which stand in the centre of a beautiful plain; and we Scots thought it worth a month's pay to see old Ramsay's regiment, five thousand strong, marching through its thoroughfares in column, with all their drums and fifes making them echo to the 'East Neuk o' Fife,' the liveliest of all our quick-steps.

We had now marched two hundred and thirty miles from Paris.

The French out-picquet, on the road to our front, alarmed the whole army one night, by firing at a mysterious object which hovered before them in the dark. A party of M. de Brissac's dragoons were ordered out to patrol; but as they always required a long time to grease and blacken their boots and mustachios, Dundrennan, Home, Livingstone, and I galloped forward to ascertain the cause of alarm; and discovered an old cow, riddled with bullets, lying on the roadway. By this time the whole army were under arms, thinking the Imperialists were upon us; and there was no small amount of laughter and grumbling at those young soldiers--_vieilles mustaches_--who caused such a disturbance. The cow we gave to our fourrier-major, and her collops were all simmering in the camp-kettles, long before our trumpets blew _à cheval_ again.

As it neither suited our service, nor the policy of the time, to be absent from church, we were marched to the great cathedral, where we saw mass celebrated with great pomp and ceremony. Many of our reformed Scots shrugged their shoulders, and knitted their brows; but the Marquis de Gordon, who came of a Catholic house, whispered to me,--

'Is it not a sad thing, M. Blane--sad to me, at least--to see a hundred gentlemen of the Scottish Guard mere idle spectators here--strangers before that altar, for which so many of their fathers bent the knee in peace, and laid down their lives in war?'

'My mother's house were Lollards of Kyle,' said I.

Vic, with its old ruined castle of the twelfth century; the marshy plain of Marsal; the little town of Dieuse, and the sedgy banks of the Sielle, were all rapidly passed, without a shot being exchanged; and now we approached the land of strong castles and barrier-towns, as we entered Alsace, a German circle of the Upper Rhine, which was not ceded to France until 1648, prior to which year it belonged to the house of Swabia, who were styled Dukes of Alsace. Here, at a village in which we were quartered, I first tasted that vintage, peculiar to the province, named the stroh, or straw wine; and here we found, that which proved much less pleasant, the bravest of Duke Charles's troops, combined with some of the chosen and hardy lanzknechts of the Empire, garrisoning all the fortresses that lay between us and the far-famed Rhine.

Cardinal de Lavalette, who commanded us, was a son of the famous Duc d'Epernon, and was particularly an adherent and friend of Cardinal Richelieu. With Sir John Hepburn, he had under his baton, another Camp-Marechal, the Viscount de Turenne, whose military genius and brilliant valour rendered him almost the equal of that great cavalier whom a cannon-shot at the siege of Zaberne was to send prematurely to his grave.

The general of the Imperialists was Mathias Count Gallas, a native of Trent, whose reputation and long career of severe and successful service, rendered him a formidable antagonist to the young Cardinal, whose army was to act in conjunction with the Swedes under the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, and to add Alsace to the new conquests of France, whose frontier Richelieu had sworn should be the Rhine.

Though Count Gallas had been guilty of great cruelty in Saxony, the brilliance of his achievements in Bohemia, the skill with which he invested Lauff, and pushed the siege of Mantua, and the greatness of mind he displayed in releasing old Count Thurn, because he would not see a brave enemy perish on the scaffold, together with his fine order of battle at Nordlingen, had gained him such a reputation, that the veteran General Leganez, exclaimed,

'The best officer in the world might learn something from Gallas!'

His head-quarters were now at Worms, from whence he sent out strong detachments to ravage all the country and capture the places still held by the Swedes, before they could be joined by their new allies the French. He stormed Keizar-Loutar; invested Deux-Ponts; and after forcing Count Mansfeldt's lines before Mentz, threw supplies into the city, and thus stood matters when our army halted on the frontier of Alsace.

Having heard from our spies that a thousand of Gallas' cavalry horses were at grass in a verdant hollow near Ingwieler, a little town on the Motter, a tributary of the Rhine, I conceived the idea of decoying, and bringing them all to Lavalette's head-quarters. Full of ardour and enthusiasm, I burned for an opportunity to distinguish myself; and accustomed as I had been to border picqueering and foraging, it seemed an expedition adapted to my skill and capacity. Sir Quentin Home and Lord Dundrennan (they were a pair of inseparables), Raynold Cheyne of Dundargle, the Chevalier, Tushielaw, and another spirit equally reckless, insisted on accompanying me; and on obtaining permission from the Marquis our captain, and from Camp-Marechal Hepburn, we prepared at once to put our scheme in force--quietly and deliberately as we would have done in other days to cross the English frontier, and drive home the fatted beeves of the western wardenrie.

'War is full of rules for practice Mr. Blane,' said the Marquis, as he gave me leave; 'yet it is without any fixed principle; so in this bold stratagem, I trust entirely to your perspicacity, your discernment, and bravery.'

I bowed, and with a beating heart hurried to my tent. I was most anxious that this attempt should be successful, for the eyes of all in the camp were on us, and on me in particular. Our rendezvous was the tent of the Marquis.

'I shall be punctual,' said Cheyne, when I explained my plans.

'Thanks, Raynold, and you Viscount, and Home?'

'We will be punctual as night or death,' said the wild Laird of Redden with his grim smile as we separated.

By my direction seven suits of clothes like those worn by the Croats of Gallas were procured for us. Under their tight jackets we wore our back and breast plates. We invested our nether-persons in wide red pantaloons, which ended in ankle-boots; we put on thick fur caps, and arming ourselves with crooked sabres, daggers, and six pairs of loaded pistols each, (two in the holsters and four in the girdle,) after practising to whoop and to scream, we found ourselves turned into very respectable Croats of whom the Ban himself might have been proud. We chose active little horses, and after meeting at the tent of the Marquis, departed from the camp at sunset, followed, about a mile in our rear, by fifty of the light horse, who were led by the young Marquis de Toneins, and were to cover our retreat, and if necessary aid the attempt.