Gustavus now ordered the attack.  A solid column emerged from his ranks, crossed the road, in breathless silence approached the trenches, while both armies looked on.  They were received with a volcanic sheet of flame which prostrated half of them bleeding upon the sod.  Gustavus ordered column after column to follow on to support the assailants, and to pierce the enemy’s center.  In his zeal he threw himself from his horse, seized a pike, and rushed to head the attack.  Wallenstein energetically ordered up cavalry and artillery to strengthen the point so fiercely assailed.  And now the storm of war blazed along the whole lines.  A sulphureous canopy settled down over the contending hosts, and thunderings, shrieks, clangor as of Pandemonium, filled the air.  The king, as reckless of life as if he had been the meanest soldier, rushed to every spot where the battle raged the fiercest.  Learning that his troops upon the left were yielding to the imperial fire, he mounted his horse and was galloping across the field swept by the storm of war, when a bullet struck his arm and shattered the bone.  Almost at the same moment another bullet struck his breast, and he fell mortally wounded from his horse, exclaiming, “My God! my God!”

The command now devolved upon the Duke of Saxe Weimar.  The horse of Gustavus, galloping along the lines, conveyed to the whole army the dispiriting intelligence that their beloved chieftain had fallen.  The duke spread the report that he was not killed, but taken prisoner, and summoned all to the rescue.  This roused the Swedes to superhuman exertions.  They rushed over the ramparts, driving the infantry back upon the cavalry, and the whole imperial line was thrown into confusion.  Just at that moment, when both parties were in the extreme of exhaustion, when the Swedes were shouting victory and the imperialists were flying in dismay, General Pappenheim, with eight fresh regiments of imperial cavalry, came galloping upon the field.  This seemed at once to restore the battle to the imperialists, and the Swedes were apparently undone.  But just then a chance bullet struck Pappenheim and he fell, mortally wounded, from his horse.  The cry ran through the imperial ranks, “Pappenheim is killed and the battle is lost.”  No further efforts of Wallenstein were of any avail to arrest the confusion.  His whole host turned and fled.  Fortunately for them, the darkness of the approaching night, and a dense fog settling upon the plain, concealed them from their pursuers.  During the night the imperialists retired, and in the morning the Swedes found themselves in possession of the field with no foe in sight.  But the Swedes had no heart to exult over their victory.  The loss of their beloved king was a greater calamity than any defeat could have been.  His mangled body was found, covered with blood, in the midst of heaps of the slain, and so much mutilated with the tramplings of cavalry as to be with difficulty recognized.