A few of the minor Protestant princes now ventured to take arms and join the standard of Gustavus.  The important city of Magdeburg, in Saxony, on the Elbe, espoused his cause.  This city, with its bastions and outworks completely commanding the Elbe, formed one of the strongest fortresses of Europe.  It contained, exclusive of its strong garrison, thirty thousand inhabitants.  It was now evident to Ferdinand that vigorous action was called for.  He could not, consistently with his dignity, recall Wallenstein in the same breath with which he had dismissed him.  He accordingly concentrated his troops and placed them under the command of Count Tilly.  The imperial troops were dispatched to Magdeburg.  They surrounded the doomed city, assailed it furiously, and proclaimed their intention of making it a signal mark of imperial vengeance.  Notwithstanding the utmost efforts of Gustavus to hasten to their relief, he was foiled in his endeavors, and the town was carried by assault on the 10th of May.  Never, perhaps, did earth witness a more cruel exhibition of the horrors of war.  The soul sickens in the contemplation of outrages so fiend-like.  We prefer to give the narrative of these deeds, which it is the duty of history to record, in the language of another.

“All the horrors ever exercised against a captured place were repeated and almost surpassed, on this dreadful event, which, notwithstanding all the subsequent disorders and the lapse of time, is still fresh in the recollection of its inhabitants and of Germany.  Neither age, beauty nor innocence, neither infancy nor decrepitude, found refuge or compassion from the fury of the licentious soldiery.  No retreat was sufficiently secure to escape their rapacity and vengeance; no sanctuary sufficiently sacred to repress their lust and cruelty.  Infants were murdered before the eyes of their parents, daughters and wives violated in the arms of their fathers and husbands.  Some of the imperial officers, recoiling from this terrible scene, flew to Count Tilly and supplicated him to put a stop to the carnage.  ‘Stay yet an hour,’ was his barbarous reply; ’let the soldier have some compensation for his dangers and fatigues.’

“The troops, left to themselves, after sating their passions, and almost exhausting their cruelty in three hours of pillage and massacre, set fire to the town, and the flames were in an instant spread by the wind to every quarter of the place.  Then opened a scene which surpassed all the former horrors.  Those who had hitherto escaped, or who were forced by the flames from their hiding-places, experienced a more dreadful fate.  Numbers were driven into the Elbe, others massacred with every species of savage barbarity—­the wombs of pregnant women ripped up, and infants thrown into the fire or impaled on pikes and suspended over the flames.  History has no terms, poetry no language, painting no colors to depict all the horrors of the scene.  In less than ten hours the most rich, the most flourishing and the most populous town in Germany was reduced to ashes.  The cathedral, a single convent and a few miserable huts, were all that were left of its numerous buildings, and scarcely more than a thousand souls all that remained of more than thirty thousand inhabitants.