1632

Back, but not dismayed. Tilly and his men had won the first great Catholic victory in the Thirty Years War, the Battle of the White Mountain. Eleven years had since passed, and with them came many more triumphs. That army had been accused-and rightly-of many crimes over those years. Of cowardice, not once.

Again, they charged; again, with sabering fury. And, again, were driven back.

The infantry tercios lumbered nearer. The cavalrymen, seeing them come, were driven into yet another headlong charge. For them the victory! Not those wretched footmen!

No use. The tercios crept forward.

Finally, the imperial cuirassiers abandoned the saber and fell back on the wheel-lock pistol. They began wheeling in the caracole, firing their pistols at a distance and circling to reload. Those men were mercenaries, when all was said and done. They could not afford to lose their precious horses. And they had already learned, as Pappenheim's men before them, that the Swedish tactic against heavy cavalry was to aim arquebus and pike at the horses. They had been trained and instructed in that method by their king. Gustav Adolf had long understood that his Swedish ponies were no match for German chargers. So kill the chargers first.

The tercios advanced across the battlefield, at the oblique. Grinding toward the Swedish left, now bent at a right angle away from the original battle line. Like a glacier, those seventeen tercios seemed. Slow-and unstoppable.

***

But that too was illusion. The glacier was about to calve, under gunfire it had never before encountered. The finest artillery in the world was on the field, that day, under the leadership of the world's finest artillery commander. Torstensson had needed no orders. His king had not even bothered to send a courier. The young artillery general, as soon as he saw Gustav sending Hepburn and Vitzthum's men to reinforce Horn, had known what was coming. For all the Swedish king's strategic caution, he was invariably bold on the battlefield. Torstensson knew that a counterattack was looming, and it was his job to batter the tercios in advance. Batter them, stun them, bleed them. Like a picador in a bullring, he would weaken the beast for the matador.

"Swivel the guns!" he roared. Torstensson, afoot as always in a battle, raced to stand at the front. It was a day for hat-snatching, it seemed. He tore his own from his head and began waving it.

"Swivel the guns!" That second roar caused him to choke. There had been a drought in the area that summer, and the plains were dry. The dust thrown up by thousands of horses caught in his throat. Using his hat as a pointer, Torstenson silently emphasized his command.

His gunners were all veterans. Immediately, grunting with exertion at the levering spikes, they began swiveling the field guns to bring enfilade fire on the tercios crossing in front of them.

There were two types of guns in the batteries. The majority, forty-two of them, were the so-called "regimental guns." Three-pounders: the world's first genuine field artillery. These cannons were made of cast bronze, with a light, short barrel to make them easily maneuverable in the field. The Swedes, after experimenting, had discovered that by using a reduced powder charge the guns could be fired safely time after time. They were of no use in a siege, but were superbly effective on the battlefield.

The heavier field guns were twelve-pounders. Gustav Adolf had simplified his ordnance drastically over the past years, based on his experience in the Polish wars. He brought only three sizes of cannon with him to Germany-the light and heavier field guns, and twenty-four-pounders for siege work. He had dispensed altogether with the forty-eight-pounder traditionally used in reducing fortifications.

The three-pounders were firing within a few minutes. The twelve-pounders quickly followed suit. By the time Tilly's infantry neared the angle in their opponent's line, they were coming under heavy fire from the Swedish artillery.

Understanding that the battle had reached a critical moment, Torstensson was ordering a rate of fire which was just barely short of reckless.

"I want a shot every six minutes!" he bellowed, trotting up and down behind the line of his guns. "Nothing less!" He practically danced with energy, waving his hat. "I'll hang the crew who gives me less!"

His men grinned. Torstensson always issued blood-curdling threats on the battlefield. And never carried them out. Nor was there any need. His men were well into the rhythm again, and had already reached the round-every-six-minutes rate which was considered the maximum of the day.