CHAPTER XV.

COMFORTS OF WAR.

Struck senseless by a piece of falling timber, as I have related, I lay in a state of blessed unconsciousness of the horrors and of the carnage around me; but I can still remember the gradual struggling back to life again, and a partial relapse into insensibility--a vibrating of the pendulum, as it were, between life and inanity, while many a strange vision floated around me.

My home came before me, and the pleasant voices of other days were in my ears, mingling with the hum of bees, and the rustling leaves of my native forests. I wept with joy to find my feet again on the purple heather--again on Scottish earth; but that joy was tinged with fear and doubt, lest the vision would pass away; for the distant and the present--the past and the future--were conflicting for place and coherence in my mind. I beheld my own home, and the roof beneath which my mother bore me into this world of sorrow; the morning sun seemed to redden the walls of the old grey tower, that rose above the woods of Scottish pine; its dun smoke was curling in the pure air of the mountains. Then methought I was at sea in a small shallop, and I felt the waters heaving beneath me. The Sutors of Cromartie, whose ivied fronts of rock--the home of the sea-bird--guard the _Portus Salutis_ of the ancients, rose before me, with their bases wreathed in surf; mists came around me; the shore receded, and I felt myself alone on the ocean. Farther and farther the boat went seaward, and the shore diminished to a speck. I was feeble and unable to use hand or voice, and I felt that the moment was approaching when I would perish, and the waters close over me.

Then the current of the tide seemed to turn again; the boat was wafted slowly towards the shore; emotions of joy and pain arose within me; old voices came to my ear, and among them were the soft tones of Ernestine. I strove to speak, but my tongue was feeble and fettered; and I tried vainly to embrace her through the mist that enveloped us.

Her voice became more distinct--the shore was very close then; the visionary boat grounded; I felt her hands upon me, and awoke from a stupor, to find myself in the military hospital of Eckernfiörd, with Ernestine kneeling beside me, pale as death--pale as the dead soldiers near us; but bathing my temples with some cool and aromatic essence.

Now, I have no doubt that the imaginary shore from which I seemed to recede, and again approached, was this world; and that in reality my spirit hovered between time and eternity; for, as Doctor Pennicuik informed me afterwards, the contusion on my head, notwithstanding my bonnet of steel, was a very severe one, being upon the very place where I was struck before.

The dead, half stripped, with eyes unclosed and glazed, and with their coagulated blood forming black pools among the straw on which they lay, were stretched at intervals between the wounded and dying. One of the former was a muscular Highlander from the braes of Lochaber, whose breast was gored by three pike wounds; another, close by me also, was a handsome young chevalier of Montgomerie's French musketeers, whose head had been partially fractured by a spirole shot, and his brains were actually oozing over his eyes.

Father d'Eydel had taken off his masquerading doublet, tucked up his shirt sleeves, and like a thoroughly good, but somewhat long-legged and long-armed Samaritan, was dressing wounds and bruises, tying up cuts and slashes, distributing food, refreshments, clean shirts, and dry straw, with a celerity that made old Pennicuik of that Ilk, our chirurgeon-general, declare him well worth a dozen of doctors.

A bed being found for me in an adjacent house, Ian and Phadrig Mhor took me up between them, as if I had been a child, and conveyed me there. Being anxious to have some conversation with Ernestine, I would not permit them to undress me, but lay on the mattress in my doublet and kilt, with a plaid spread over me; and after kind old Sandy Pennicuik (afterwards chief _Medico_ to the Scottish army which invaded England) had dressed my wound, the dear girl was permitted to visit me for a half hour, during which she gave me a brief sketch of her adventures; but, to avoid agitating me unnecessarily, concealed for the present the mystery which involved the fate of Gabrielle.

The half hour during which we were permitted to be alone, passed like a minute; and yet the excitement of it nearly put me into a fever. In fact, Pennicuik fully expected that it would do so; but believed, as he afterwards said, that if the interview was withheld, a fever from vexation might prove more fatal. We embraced each other repeatedly, with that full and impassioned tenderness which the dangers we had both encountered and escaped, and the separation we had endured, made more endearing to us than ever.

For a time we could do nothing but sigh and utter tender appellations, which would seem very droll even to lovers if transferred to paper; although, moreover, none but lovers could understand them.

"Ah! these wars are frightful!" said poor Ernestine, when she had related all her escapes, and heard all mine. "On one side, I tremble for the loss of my father; on the other, for the loss of you."

"But weep no more, Ernestine; a happy time is in store for us all."

"For such scenes as these--for this town with its shattered walls and corpse-strewn streets--you have left those quiet glens and silent hills, of which I have heard my poor father often speak with so much rapture and regret."

"Ay, Ernestine," said I; "but on those blue hills, where the mountain bee sucks the honey from the purple heath, and the white butterfly floats over the yellow broom bells; and in those green glens, where the hirsels graze and the sheep bleat by the whimpling burn, or the smoke of the sequestered cottage ascends through the summer woods--the din of war is often heard, and the gleds and corbies are summoned to a feast from the four winds of heaven. The cross of fire gleams across the country, flung from hand to hand; the war-pipe rings from the echoing rock; the beacon blazes on the muster-place, and the clink of arms with the fierce slogan rise among the lonely hills; tribe pours forth against tribe, with banners waving and pibroch yelling; the heather is in flames--the flocks are seized--the valley is strewn with dead--the cottage is sheeted with fire, and the green sod drenched with the blood of the inmates; for the world never saw quarrels more bitter than the hereditary feuds of our Scottish clans; and while the human heart and the human mind are constituted as they now are, there will be wars and crimes, the sack of cities, and the rush of armies; for men are but men, Ernestine, all the world over."

Three days we remained at Eckernfiörd, burying the dead, collecting provisions, curing the wounded, or embarking them for Zealand. Thanks to the skill of Dr. Pennicuik, and the sisterly attentions of Ernestine, I was able to attend parade on the evening of the fourth day; but I was so ghastly and pale, that one would have imagined all the experiments of the college of physicians had been tried upon me.

So M'Alpine told me, on seeing me almost staggering at the head of my company, and added, "On my honour, Rollo, I did not expect to see you again after hearing that you were wounded; for I thought our Danish doctors would soon do the rest."

"They are much obliged to you for your high opinion of their skill, Angus," said I; "but I have been under the hands, not of a Copenhagener, but a barber-chirurgeon, regularly graduated at King James' College, in the good town of Edinburgh--hence my rapid recovery, perhaps."

Ernestine had by this time informed me of the manner in which she believed Gabrielle had been betrayed into the hands of Merodé; and that she was only some ten or twelve miles distant from us, at Fredricksort on the gulf of Kiel. I would have given the world--had the world been mine--to have been permitted to march a wing of our stout Highland blades to overhaul Merodé in his quarters; but King Christian, who occupied, the house of the Herredsfoged of Wohlder, had other objects in view; and the result of various councils of war, which he, Ian, Count Montgomerie, the Baron Karl, and others, held there, soon became developed.

I may mention that a party under Phadrig Mhor was despatched to the cottage in the wood; but neither Bandolo nor dame Krümpel were found there. After burning it to the ground, they fished the tarn for the portmanteau, which I told them might be kept by the finders; and Gillian M'Bane, who when at home had been an expert pearl-fisher, after diving down once or twice, discovered its locality; the spoil was soon hooked out, and generously distributed by him fairly and equally among the privates of the regiment. It came to a handsome sum per man, and many of our musketeers wore silver buttons and silver-mounted sporrans to the end of their days.

Meanwhile the increasing preparations of the great Albrecht, Count of Wallenstein, who had been created Duke of Friedland, Sagan, Glogau, and Mechlenburg, General of the Baltic and Oceanic seas, compelled Christian IV. to exert himself without delay.

Entering fully into the ambitious views of his master, the Emperor, who, in making him Duke of Mechlenburg, had violated the laws and trampled upon the rights of the Germanic confederation, this great and warlike noble resolved to bend his whole energies to destroy the political independence of Germany, exterminate the heresy of Luther, and conquer Scandinavia. We heard that, for this gigantic project, he was rapidly building and equipping a flotilla of ships and gunboats at Rostock, Weimar, and other Hanse towns, which his Spanish fleet had seized.

Lavishing by thousands florins and ducats, the spoil of ravished kingdoms, on all sides among his reckless favourites and military followers, he led an army a hundred thousand strong across the Elbe, from whence it poured through Saxony and spread along the shores of the Baltic sea. Terror, extortion, outrage, and contribution, levied by beat of drum, at the sword's point, and the cannon's mouth, amassed to Wallenstein in seven years, the vast sum of _sixty thousand millions of dollars_!

Extolling his generosity, his soldiers adored him, while the ruined burghers and rifled boors viewed him with horror and aversion. Thus, amid wealth and rapine, conquest and desolation, splendour, dissipation, and crime, the great army of the Empire flourished, and rolled like a cloud of flame over Germany; while provinces became deserts, and their people perished by famine, by disease, and by the sword.