For fourteen days after this action, the two armies still continued in front of each other, each in the hope that the other would be the first to give way.  Every day reduced their provisions, and, as scarcity became greater, the unbridled excesses of the furious soldiers exercised the wildest outrages on the peasantry.  The increasing distress broke up all discipline and order in the Swedish camp; and the German regiments, in particular, distinguished themselves for the ravages they practised indiscriminately on friend and foe.  The weak hand of a single individual could not check excesses, encouraged by the silence, if not the actual example, of the inferior officers.  These shameful breaches of discipline, on the maintenance of which he had hitherto justly prided himself, severely pained the king; and the vehemence with which he reproached the German officers for their negligence, bespoke the liveliness of his emotion.  “It is you yourselves, Germans,” said he, “that rob your native country, and ruin your own confederates in the faith.  As God is my judge, I abhor you, I loathe you; my heart sinks within me whenever I look upon you.  Ye break my orders; ye are the cause that the world curses me, that the tears of poverty follow me, that complaints ring in my ear—­’The King, our friend, does us more harm than even our worst enemies.’  On your account I have stripped my own kingdom of its treasures, and spent upon you more than 40 tons of gold;[61] while from your German empire I have not received the least aid.  I gave you a share of all that God had given to me; and had ye regarded my orders I would have gladly shared with you all my future acquisitions.  Your want of discipline convinces me of your evil intentions, whatever cause I might otherwise have to applaud your bravery.”

Nuremberg had exerted itself, almost beyond its power, to subsist for eleven weeks the vast crowd which was compressed within its boundaries; but its means were at length exhausted, and the king’s more numerous party was obliged to determine on a retreat.  By the casualties of war and sickness, Nuremberg had lost more than 10,000 of its inhabitants, and Gustavus Adolphus nearly 20,000 of his soldiers.  The fields around the city were trampled down, the villages were in ashes, the plundered peasantry lay faint and dying on the highways; foul odors infected the air, and bad food, the exhalations from so dense a population, and so many putrifying carcasses, together with the heat of the dog-days, produced a desolating pestilence which raged among men and beasts, and long after the retreat of both armies, continued to load the country with misery and distress.  Affected by the general distress, and despairing of conquering the steady determination of the Duke of Friedland, the king broke up his camp on the 5th of September, leaving in Nuremberg a sufficient garrison.  He advanced in full order of battle before the enemy, who remained motionless and did not attempt in the least to harass his retreat.