Page:Gregor The story of Bohemia.pdf/442

 frightful manner. As has already been remarked, their rage was turned against everything that was Catholic. Priests, monks, and especially Jesuits, were seized and put to death without mercy; churches were desecrated, and pictures and other decorations destroyed. Whatever was of value and movable was loaded upon vessels, and sent out of the country by the river Elbe. Several thousand villages and towns were plundered and burned, and the grain in the fields utterly destroyed. The unfortunate inhabitants, seeing the bloodthirsty hordes approaching, fled into the forests, where many of them perished from cold and hunger.

After the death of Banner (1641), General Torstenson assumed the command, and again won so many victories over the Imperial forces that they again fell back to Bohemia.

So many defeats having been sustained by the Catholic armies, the government began to consider as to the cause of such disasters. As the generals did not lack in ability, and the troops generally were superior in numbers to the enemy, it was decided that the cause of the misfortune was cowardice among both officers and privates. It was therefore decided to make a notable example of the most guilty regiment. In 1642 a trial was held in Rokycan, in which the Madlonsky regiment was doomed to serve as a warning to the other divisions in the army. Its flags were torn, its officers beheaded, and every tenth man of the private soldiers was shot.

Three years after this, the Swedes, making their headquarters in Silesia, again made frightful inroads into Bohemia and Moravia. They also gained a sig-