Young Willemoes was spared the grief of seeing the last Danish man-of-war strike its flag.  In the hottest of the fight, as he jumped upon a gun the better to locate the enemy in the gloom, a cannon-ball took off the top of his head.  He fell into the arms of a fellow officer with the muttered words, “Oh God! my head—­my country!” and was dead.  In his report of the fight Captain Jessen wrote against his name:  “Fell in battle—­honored as he is missed.”  They made his grave on shore with the fallen sailors, and as the sea washed up other bodies they were buried with them.

The British captured the wreck, but they could only set fire to it after removing the wounded.  In the night it blew up where it stood.  That was the end of the last ship of Denmark’s proud navy.

THE TROOPER WHO WON A WAR ALONE

Jens Kofoed was the name of a trooper who served in the disastrous war of Denmark against Sweden in Karl Gustav’s day.  He came from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic, where he tilled a farm in days of peace.  When his troop went into winter quarters, he got a furlough to go home to receive the new baby that was expected about Christmas.  Most of his comrades were going home for the holidays, and their captain made no objection.  The Swedish king was fighting in far-off Poland, and no one dreamed that he would come over the ice with his army in the depth of winter to reckon with Denmark.  So Jens Kofoed took ship with the promise that he would be back in two weeks.  But they were to be two long weeks.  They did not hear of him again for many moons, and then strange tidings came of his doings.  Single-handed he had bearded the Swedish lion, and downed it in a fair fight—­strangest of all, almost without bloodshed.

The winter storms blew hard, and it was Christmas eve when he made land, but he came in time to receive, not one new heir, but twin baby girls.  Then there were six of them, counting Jens and his wife, and a merry Christmas they all had together.  On Twelfth Night the little ones were christened, and then the trooper bethought himself of his promise to get back soon.  The storms had ceased, but worse had befallen; the sea was frozen over as far as eye reached, and the island was cut off from all communication with the outer world.  There was nothing for it but to wait.  It proved the longest and hardest winter any one then living could remember.  Easter was at hand before the ice broke up, and let a fishing smack slip over to Ystad, on the mainland.  It came back with news that set the whole island wondering.  Peace had been made, and Denmark had ceded all its ancient provinces east of the Oeresund to Karl Gustav.  Ystad itself and Skaane, the province in which Jens Kofoed had been campaigning, were Swedish now, and so was Bornholm.  All unknown to its people, the island had changed hands in the game of war overnight, as it were.  A Swedish garrison was coming over presently to take charge.