Page:EB1911 - Volume 26.djvu/896

Rh next fourteen years Germany was simply the battle-ground of French, Spanish, Austrian and Swedish armies, which, having learned the impunity and advantages of plunder in the school of Mansfeld and Wallenstein, reduced the country to a state of misery that no historian has been able to describe, save by detailing the horrors of one or other village among the thousands that were ruined, and by establishing the net result that Germany in 1648 was worse off than England in 1485, so much worse that while England was the healthier for having passed through the fever of the Wars of the Roses, Germany remained for 150 years more in the stillness of exhaustion.

In the west, though there were no such battles as Wittstock, the campaign of 1636 was one of the most remarkable of the whole war. The Cardinal Infante was not only relieved by the retreat of the Dutch, but also reinforced by a fresh army under a famous cavalry officer, Johann von Weert. He prepared, therefore, to invade France from the north-west. Even though the army that had fought at Avins and Maestricht returned by sea from Holland, the French were too much scattered to offer an effective resistance, and Prince Thomas of Savoy-Carignan and Johann von Weert, the Cardinal Infante's generals, took Corbie, La Capelle, and some other places, passed the Somme and advanced on Compiègne. For a moment Paris

was terror-stricken, but the Cardinal Infante, by ordering Prince Thomas not to go too far in case he were needed to repel a Dutch inroad into Belgium, missed his opportunity. Louis XIII. and Richelieu turned the Parisians from panic to enthusiasm. The burghers armed and drilled, the workmen laboured unceasingly at the dilapidated walls, and the old Huguenot marshal, Jacques Nompart, duc de La Force (d. 1642), standing on the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, raised men for the regular army by the hundred. Money, too, was willingly given, and some 12,000 volunteers went to Compiègne, whither Gaston from Orleans, Longueville from Normandy, and Condé, from Franche Comté, brought levies and reinforcements. Thus the army at Compiègne was soon 