Page:Gregor The story of Bohemia.pdf/444



There is scarcely a parallel where a nation was plunged into such depths of misery as Bohemia during the Thirty Years’ War. War is a frightful evil in modern times, when some regard is paid to the rights of individuals, and soldiers are regularly recruited troops belonging to the respective nations; but in those days the individual did not seem to have any rights, and the soldiers, being hordes of bloodthirsty mercenaries, were equally a terror to the people across whose territory they marched, whether they belonged to the enemy or to their own sovereign. With such barbaric hordes crossing and recrossing the country in all directions. Bohemia was left in a condition most pitiable.

Thousands of villages were plundered and destroyed, so that they disappeared from the face of the earth, and never again were rebuilt. The larger towns, either in part or entirely, were reduced to cinders, and long years passed before they were even partially rebuilt. Vast tracts of land lay waste for lack of hands to cultivate them. The wretched peasants, deprived of their tools, cattle, and all other means of cultivating the soil, eked out a miserable existence by aiding each other as best they could, hitching themselves to the plow, and other unnatural methods of labor. The cities, deprived of their population, not only by the war, but also by the exile of the Protestants, languished for