Page:The Overland Monthly Volume 5 Issue 3.djvu/37



and the swords used by Charlemagne and his warriors were of Roman workmanship. Above Minden, the place is still seen where Wittekind, after his conversion to Christianity, and his own baptism, drove his hordes of pagans—men, women, and children—into the Weser, anxious that they, too, should enjoy the blessing forced upon him at the point of the sword. And when, in turn, other hordes of unbelievers persecuted him and his Christianized people, and he was hard beset, and famishing with thirst on the mountain high above the Weser, his charger, pawing the ground impatiently, struck a spring of clear water that gushed out of the rock, and is still to be seen close by the Wittekind Chapel, on the Margerethen Cluse, at the present day.

Somewhere about this period —750800—three of the churches to be seen here, and within sight of each other—all three built on rising ground above the river, placed in a triangle, an equal distance between them, equal in height and dimensions, their altar to the south and the steeple to the north—are said to have been built by Charlemagne and Pepin the Short, his father. Indeed, all churches up to the sixteenth century were built so as to front in this manner; and until very lately, the Germans held to the custom of burying their dead with the face furned south—toward Palestine. Still one step can we go backward, while onthisground. Thereare burial-mounds found here, and all through Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and toward the Netherlands, built by the Huns, always containing a set number of graves—the largest invariably facing the North Star. But these graves do not hold hideous skeletons: only urns with ashes, and sometimes a few little pieces of bone. The bodies were all burned, and the ashes consigned to earthenware urns, which vary in size according to the rank the person held in life.

Retracing our steps to more modern

times, we find that some of the most decisive battles were fought on this ground in 1762, during the Seven Years' War. The enemy was defeated here, and the whole French artillery driven, or rather decoyed, into a deep bog, where every man and horse of the outfit perished. The feat is said to have been accomplished in this manner: Native German guides were pressed into service by, the enemy, to stretch ropes through a dangerous, swampy territory, by which the vanguard could find the narrow path by night: the intention of the French being to occupy a certain point with their artillery, from where they could surprise the German troops by their fire in the morning. But the guides found means to communicate with some German peasants, and these changed the direction the ropes indicated, so that one gun after another, and horseman after horseman, found a silent grave in the treacherous swamp. Sometime later, Swedes, Prussians, and their English allies fought a battle on the Haller Haide, near Petershagen, and lay encamped in the neighborhood a full season. Up to the present time old flint-lock muskets, horseshoes, and cannon-balls are found on this ground, where the former site of the trenches and breastworks is now to be plainly traced, and even old coins and golden trinkets, finger-rings, and so forth, occasionally fall into the hands of the more fortunate.

Nor has Petershagen been bare of the light which a royal countenance sheds over every thing in a monarchy like this. It is well known, and still the boast of this once important town, that King Frederic the First held Court here, once a year, in the ancient manor-house lying at the other extreme end of the town—a stately place called Bessel's Hof—not so old as Schloss Petershagen, but with a larger number of old paintings, and better-preserved works of art than the other can boast of. Formerly it was the seat of a Prussian Landgrave.