On the double-quick his columns of spearmen charged down the heights, swept the Saxons from the field, and fell upon the Swedish left.  The shock was tremendous.  General Gustav Horn gave back to let his second line come up, and held the ground stubbornly against fearful odds.  Word was brought the King of his danger.  With the right wing that had crushed Pappenheim he hurried to the rescue.  In the heat of the fight the armies had changed position, and the Swedes found themselves climbing the hill upon which Tilly’s artillery was posted.  Seeing this, the King made one of the rapid movements that more than once won him the day.  Raising the cry, “Remember Magdeburg!” he carried the position with his Finns by a sudden overwhelming assault, and turned the guns upon the dense masses of the enemy fighting below.

In vain they stormed the heights.  Both wings and the centre closed in upon them, and the day was lost.  Tilly fled, wounded, and narrowly escaped capture.  A captain in the Swedish army, who was called Long Fritz because of his great height, was at his heels hammering him on the head with the butt of his pistol.  A staff officer shot him down in passing, and freed his chief.  Twilight fell upon a battle-field where seven thousand men lay dead, two-thirds of them the flower of the Emperor’s army.  Blood-stained and smoke-begrimed, Gustav Adolf and his men knelt on the field and thanked God for the victory.

Had the King’s friend and adviser, Axel Oxenstjerna, been with him he might have marched upon Vienna then, leaving the Protestant Estates to settle their own affairs, and very likely have ended the war.  Gustav Adolf thought of Tilly who would return with another army.  Oxenstjerna saw farther, weighing things upon the scales of the diplomatist.

“How think you we would fare,” asked the King once, when the chancellor saw obstacles in their way which he would brush aside, “if my fire did not thaw the chill in you?”

“But for my chill cooling your Majesty’s fire,” was his friend’s retort, “you would have long since been burned up.”  The King laughed and owned that he was right.

Instead of bearding the Emperor in his capital he turned toward the Rhine where millions of Protestants were praying for his coming and where his army might find rest and abundance.  The cathedral city of Wuerzburg he took by storm.  The bishop who ruled it fled at his approach, but the full treasury of the Jesuits fell into his hands.  The Madonna of beaten gold and the twelve solid silver apostles, famous throughout Europe, were sent to the mint and coined into money to pay his army.  In the cellar they found chests filled with ducats.  The bottom fell out of one as they carried it up and the gold rolled out on the pavement.  The soldiers swarmed to pick it up, but a good many coins stuck to their pockets.  The King saw it and laughed:  “Since you have them, boys, keep them.”  The dead were still lying in the castle yard after the siege, a number of monks among them.  The color of some of them seemed high for corpses.  “Arise from the dead,” he said waggishly, “no one will hurt you,” and the frightened monks got upon their feet and scampered away.