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"Victory," he growled. Seventy-two years old he was, not a day less. Seventy-two years, not one of whose days had ever seen defeat.
"Onward!" he bellowed. The old general drew his sword and trotted toward the front. He waved the sword at the Swedish left.
"Onward!" he bellowed. "Victory is there!"
The tercios obeyed, and obeyed, and obeyed-seventeen battles, down the line, slogged tenaciously forward. Not one of them faltered in their duty. Not one tercio, not one rank, not one file, not one man.
Torstensson splattered their entrails across the land. No matter. Those men had marched through entrails before. Torstensson painted the soil with their blood. No matter. Those men had bled before. Torstensson savaged them like no artillery in their grim experience. No matter. Tilly had never failed them before.
Murderers many of them were. Thieves and rapists too. Cowards, never.
The broken Swedish angle was in front of them now. Like a bear trailing gore, the tercios were about to mangle their prey.
At last!
"Father Tilly!" they bellowed. "Jesu-Maria!"
But the angle was not broken. Not any longer. Horn-trusted Horn, trustworthy Horn-had reformed the line even before his king's orders arrived. The Swedish left now formed a solid corner for the battlefield. The imperial heavy cavalry had already broken against that Baltic rock. The tercios lumbered up and did no better.
Pike against pike, the Catholics were easily the equal of their foe. But the Swedish king was a believer in firepower more than cold steel. He had studied the methods of the Dutch, and tested them in Poland and Russia.
At Breitenfeld, the Swedes had a higher arquebus-to-pike ratio than their enemies. More important, Gustav Adolf had trained them to fight in shallow formations, following the Dutch example. Tilly's arquebusiers were arrayed thirty ranks deep. Most of those arquebuses could not be brought to bear. Gustav's, not more than six-just enough to allow time to reload while the front ranks fired.
The Swedish pikes held the tercios at bay long enough for the Swedish preponderance in firepower to bring down them down. Tilly's men never buckled. But they made no headway against the Swedish line. They simply died. And meanwhile, the king of Sweden prepared the death stroke.
Tilly and his tercios could not wheel, but Gustav Adolf could. Could, and did.
Chapter 36
The king himself led the charge up the slope, heading toward the imperial guns. "Gott mit uns!" he bellowed, waving his cavalrymen forward with his saber.
Behind him, Anders Jцnsson rolled his eyes with exasperation. Gustav Adolf carried two wheel-lock pistols at his side, holstered to his saddle. But he never used them in battle. He claimed it was because the weapons were too inaccurate, but his bodyguard was skeptical. The king of Sweden was sensitive about his myopia. Jonsson thought his unwillingness to use pistols was simply because Gustav couldn't hit the proverbial broad side of a barn.
Anders spurred his horse alongside the king's. "I'm supposed to be guarding you, Highness," he snarled, "not the other way around."
Gustav gri
Behind them, the Smalanders and East Gothlanders echoed the words. From either side-the Fi
"Haakaa pддlle!"
Ahead of the cavalry charge, positioned almost at the crest of the shallow slope, were the imperial batteries. As slow as the tercios were, the big guns were slower still. Tilly's order for an oblique advance had caught the artillerymen by surprise. They were still hitching up the horses and oxen when Gustav started his charge.
The Catholic gu
One of the gu
"I'm getting out of here," the gu
His partner blanched. The rammer had no experience with Fi
The gu
"That means 'hack them down,' " grunted the gu
The gu
Most of the imperial artillerymen lacked the option of fleeing-or trying to-on horseback. There were few horse-drawn six-pounders in Tilly's army. Catholic armies favored twelve-pounders and huge twenty-four-pounders, drawn by oxen. The gu
"Take the ca
Gustav trotted back and forth on his charger. He had scabbarded his saber and was back to waving his hat. "Turn them around!" he bellowed. His powerful voice, as always, carried well in a battle. "I want those guns turned on Tilly! Now, d'you hear? Now! Move, move, move!"
The Fi
They were slower and less adept than Torstensson's men would have been, of course. But, unlike the cavalry of other armies, Gustav's men were cross-trained to serve as artillery or even, if need be, as infantry. Swedish cavalry, like the cavalry of other nations, was dominated by noblemen. But the Swedish aristocracy had little in the way of continental hauteur-and what little they began with was soon drummed out of them by their king's training and discipline.