is received with a storm of protests from his officers.  Questenberg and Octavio are deeply concerned to make sure of the adherence to their cause of Octavio’s son, Max, a child of the camp and an especial favorite with Wallenstein.  Max has just arrived at Pilsen as escort of Wallenstein’s wife and of his daughter Thekla, to whom he has lost his heart.  Wallenstein and his masterful sister, Countess Terzky, are also eager to secure Max to their side in the coming conflict, and the Countess tries to persuade Thekla to govern her actions accordingly.  Thekla, however, is nobly frank with Max and warns him to trust only his own heart; for she realizes that the threads of a dark plot are drawing close about herself and Max, though she does not clearly understand what it is.  Meanwhile Terzky and Illo have planned a meeting of Wallenstein’s officers to protest against his withdrawal.  In a splendid banquet scene they present a written agreement (Revers) to stand by the general so far as loyalty to the Emperor will permit, and then, when all are heated with wine, secure signatures to a substituted document from which this reservation of loyalty to the Emperor is omitted.  It is the hope of Illo and Terzky, through the sight of this document, to persuade Wallenstein to open rebellion.  Max Piccolomini, coming late to the banquet from the interview with Thekla, refuses to sign the pledge, not because he sees through the deception, but because he is in no mood for business.  Before morning his father summons him, thinking Max has refused to sign because he scented the intended treason, and reveals to him the whole situation—­the plots of the officers, Wallenstein’s dangerous negotiations with enemies of the Emperor, and his own commission to take command and save whatever he can of loyal troops.  Max is thunder-truck.  He can believe neither Wallenstein’s purpose of treason nor his father’s duplicity in dealing behind the back of his great commander.  He refuses to follow his father’s orders and leaves him with the avowed intention of going to Wallenstein and calling upon him to clear himself of the calumnious charges of the court.  At this point begins the action of Wallenstein’s Death.

In all of his later dramas excepting William Tell, Schiller endeavored to introduce a factor which is called “the dramatic guilt,” a circumstance, usually in the character of the hero but sometimes in his environment, which makes the tragic outcome inevitable and yet leaves room in the breast of the reader or spectator for sympathy with the hero in his fate.  In the case of Wallenstein this “guilt” is the dalliance with the love of power and the possibility of rebellion, not a deliberate intention to commit treason.  In the close of his treatment of Wallenstein in The Thirty Years’ War Schiller says:  “No one of his actions justifies us in considering him convicted of treason. * * * Thus Wallenstein fell, not because he was a rebel, but he rebelled because he fell.”