Chapter 27
Holstein
May 1636
The Oldenburger captains brought the ferries into Brunsbüttel at high tide, moored, and waited until low tide to offload. The process was not fun, but the captains and sailors were familiar with the waters, loaded and unloaded cattle as their regular occupation, and got the job done. Come in on the high tide; load and unload on the low tide; wait for the high tide to return and go out with it again.
“We’ll stand by for two weeks,” Captain Claus Harmens said. “If you aren’t back by then, you’ll have to get yourselves home.”
They had better be back within two weeks, he thought. This expedition didn’t have so much as a supply wagon or a cook cart. The riders had what they could stuff into their saddle bags; the infantry what they could carry on their backs. At least grass was not in short supply in this season.
Frederik told Captain Meyer and Anton Günther’s officers where they were going and by which route while they were in transit. He’d been all over this landscape as a boy, before he left to study abroad. He didn’t tell them to get things organized. He presumed that they would; that was their job and they were all familiar with the kind of terrain that would be under the horses’ feet. Next stop, Itzehoe, where Duke Johann Friedrich had an administrative center for Gottorp. Which was usually managed by Otto von Buchwald, now a ringleader of the opposing forces.
Frederik talked to von Buchwald’s deputy at length, persuading him to make some resources available to his officers. In the interest of good relations with Gottorp, he would prefer not to compel the man.
He sent Christian Ulrik and Erik Stenbock to Nicholas Pape, the business manager of the local Damenstift, to gather whatever information he might have. They came back saying how luscious Pape’s daughter was; they were married men, the said at dinner, but Frederik was unattached and should drop by the Pape household.
“I’m happily married,” Christian Ulrik said after his second beer, “but that doesn’t mean that I can’t look.” The two continued with some bawdy raillery while Lütkemann contemplated temptation (lead us not into; see also 1 Corinthians 10:13), the evils of fornication (Colossians 3:5 was certainly relevant), and the prohibition upon committing adultery in one’s heart (Matthew 5:27-28).
“Take the frown off your face, chaplain,” Stenbock said. “I know better than to stray from the matrimonial straight and narrow; Kerstin let me know when we got betrothed that if I ever did, she would proceed to the kitchens, locate the largest cast iron frying pan to be found, take it in a firm two-handed grip, and bash me over the head. And laugh as my body lay on the floor with my brains leaking out. But that does not change that Margaretha Pape is ripe and nubile.”
Frederik finally smiled. “No. If I have learned anything from observing young Gustafsson’s dilemmas, it’s to avoid Margarethas. Even Anton Günther’s wife has Margaretha as a middle name. Let this Margaretha marry some ambitious, up-coming young ducal official like Vibeke Kruse’s brother. I plan to stay well out of the path of luscious young Lutheran ladies.”
At home, Margaretha Pape said to her mother that she was sad to have missed seeing Frederik. “The last time the duke was here, I was still playing with dolls, and he patted me on the head. I was impressed.”
Frau Pape laughed. “That was ten years ago, at least.”
But if Margaretha didn’t get to see the duke this time, she got to meet his chaplain. The following day, being surplus to military needs, Lütkemann wandered over to the Damenstift “to inspect the church.” Men, alas, even clergymen, were men, and thus fallible: he might as well look, even if he dared not touch. It would be a decade before he could afford to marry.
Captain Meyer spent the day in the deputy’s office, going over maps with the Oldenburg captains. “From here, we’ll basically be following the course of the Stör river until we’re east of Neumünster. About thirty miles.
Cornelis Duyts was next to him. In this landscape, a hydraulics engineer was not to be wasted.
“By then,” he said, we’ll be close to a hundred fifty feet above sea level. Everything looks flat, but it’s not. A mountaineer might laugh, but for the peninsula, it’s a pretty good height. You can’t call the rise hills, but even a gradual climb will slow things down a bit. It takes a toll on men and horses both.
“There are a lot of large creeks and small rivers, but that’s generally true of the whole duchy. It’s not as if you have anything heavy, like artillery, that you have to worry about getting across them, or bogged down in the bottoms and marshes.
“I only wish we did,” one of the Oldenburgers answered. “We’re going into this poorly armed.”
“I wish,” another one said, “that we had a commander with some meaningful military experience.”
Meyer glared until he shut up, but a third commented, “I wish we knew exactly where von Ahlefeldt has his people. We’re going in blind.”
Matthys Irgens, a copyist for Otto von Buchwald’s deputy, was the person who had been detailed to bring in the maps that Itzehoe had. He stood there patiently, the model of a minor employee waiting to put maps away when those higher in rank finished using them. As soon as the officers adjourned their meeting, he dashed to his room, changed clothes, took a horse from the stables, and headed out to let the boss know that the enemy was on the way.
Hinrich Bothmann, who didn’t have a job assignment that day either and was sitting in the stables gossiping, thought a bit and then followed him all the way to a manor house near Bornhöved.
* * *
Godske von Ahlefeldt had pulled together about five thousand people, but most of them were completely untrained serfs from the Güter. The most he could do with the majority of them was mass them in front of what trained and mounted men he had, using their bodies to break a charge if Frederik made one.
On royal Danish land. The nobles with whom he worked had been sufficiently selfish not to want their own lands and buildings ruined in a military conflict, fields trampled, livestock inevitably marauded by soldiers, whether a commander tried to exercise discipline or not. Under pressure from the rest, he had led this mass onto domanial land that belonged to the king of Denmark. Now only as a landholder rather than as sovereign, Holstein altogether being within the USE, but still Christian’s, still part of Royal Holstein.
Otto von Buchwald was the one who had suggested Bornhöved.
So Ahlefeldt was here. With his forces. With too many young men who were treating it as a picnic expedition. They already had the cooks planning a celebratory banquet for the evening after their great victory-to-be. The villagers had prudently fled, but not quickly enough to take their possessions with them. The cooks were penning up sheep and poultry. Unless the nobles sent back to their estates, the banquet would feature beer rather than wine. Wine cellars were rarely a feature of village houses in Holstein.
He thought wistfully of the wine cellars he had seen in France, back in the days of his grand tour and turned around to ask Buchwald a question when Irgens from Itzehoe came dashing in with, “My lord, the governor has about eight hundred or a thousand men with him altogether; three hundred or so militia he scraped together out of the Stifte of Bremen and Verden . . . ”
Ahlefeldt motioned him to be quiet. “I knew about those. Where did the rest of them come from, and what is he doing at Itzehoe?
“He borrowed five hundred from Oldenburg. With officers.”
Ahlefeldt thanked the clerk. Buchwald told the man to get some food and drink, then hurry back before he was missed.
After Irgens left, profanity poured from Ahlefeldt’s mouth. He had expected Frederik to be coming north by land, around Hamburg; combining the few men he had gathered in the Stifte with the inadequate reinforcements marching up from Minden and USE troops picked up in Hamburg. He had set up, as best as he might, on that basis. Now he would have to pivot the whole mass to face west. In a hurry or at least as much of a hurry as he could manage with this unwieldy group and no clear chain of command.
No way was he going to try to march out to meet Frederik. It had taken a week to get everybody in one spot. He would have to wait and let Frederik find him.
He worried mildly about the under-sized regiment that had been reported as coming north via Altona. If it wasn’t with Frederik, where was it and what was it doing now? Other things were more urgent. He dismissed it from his mind, except for sending his stablemaster Peter Harder with a couple of riders down toward Oldesloe to see if they could locate it.
* * *
Captain Botterbrodt asked questions, so the decoy regiment hadn’t turned south again. A local had told him, “They’re not down that way; not over east, either; decided to fight on somebody else’s land rather than destroying their own estates. They’ve gone up north of Oldesloe and they’re waiting for you. They know you’re coming.”
Botterbrodt looked at Pestel. “What do we do now?”
Pestel shrugged helplessly. “Keep going, I guess.”
At Oldesloe, people told them that “the big army” was up north of Segeberg.
They kept going.
“It would help if we knew where the governor is,” Botterbrodt said.
At Segeberg, the Danish royal officialdom was seething with frustration. “The king withdrew his troops, of course, once the Swede put Holstein into the USE. He couldn’t be perceived as still acting like a sovereign. So it’s down to us. A dozen or so rent collectors and tax specialists, a couple of bookkeepers. The shitty locals thought their backsides were safe enough—it’s not as if the Swedish officials in Mecklenburg are going to get off their duffs to do anything about it. What’s happening to Westphalia is no skin off their noses. Except for having the province’s vote in Lords, the whole ‘the emperor is the duke’ thing has been a farce, if you ask me.
“During Krystalnacht, the CoCs came, the CoC’s left again after they’d accomplished what they wanted, went back into the cities or down into Magdeburg Province, wherever it was that they came from, and there’s been a power vacuum at the local level, outside of the cities, ever since. It’s not as if the Mecklenburg serfs knew how to run pretty much self-governing villages like they have down south, and nobody’s bothered to teach them.
“On up north of here. That’s the best we can tell you.”
“Best be on our way, then,” Botterbrodt said with resignation.
One of the rent collectors came running out after them. “Otto von Buchwald’s main estate, Muggesfelde, isn’t all that far southeast of Bornhöved. Eight miles, maybe? No more than that. If I was Otto and looking for a place to gather up a big batch of people, that’s where I’d head.”
“I wish,” Pestel muttered, “that we had field radios.”
Harder had swung wide to avoid Segeberg and Christian’s remaining officials there. When he got to Oldesloe, the news was that yes, soldiers had marched past, but that was a couple of days ago. Which wasn’t much for him to take back to Ahlefeldt. And he’d have to swing wide around Segeberg going north again. By the time he could deliver this minimal information, the regiment would have gotten to wherever it was going.
* * *
“The governor is way outnumbered,” Bothmann told Duyts when he got back to Itzehoe. By a lot. Five to one, and probably a bit more, from what I could tell. It’s not the kind of territory in which a man can be a surreptitious scout. Climb a tree and you have a clear line of sight for miles when the leaves don’t interfere.”
“You what?”
“Climbed a tree? Ja. Even remembered to tether the horse. But most of them are peasants. You’ve been talking to the governor’s officers. You need to tell them.”
“You need to tell them yourself,” was Duyts’ answer.
Captain Meyer called the governor into the meeting.
The Oldenburg officers were highly skeptical of the estimate Bothmann made in regard to von Ahlefeldt’s numbers.
“I make mathematical calculations,” the boy said, taking no offense. “That’s what I do.”
Frederik decided to keep Bothmann with him.
So there will be another Battle of Bornhöved, he thought. There had been two already. They were famous in Danish history. The first, in the days of Charlemagne, on the Sventanapolje, the Swentine Field, named for the little river, no more than a creek, that rose there and flowed toward the Kiel basin. Its result was that within a few years the border between Denmark and the Holy Roman Empire was set at the Eider River, where it had mostly remained ever since. The second, in the thirteenth century, had been a disaster for the Danes when the Dithmarschers changed sides.
Well, for the purposes of this one, he wasn’t, exactly, a Dane.
Perhaps that could be considered a good omen. If he were a superstitious man.
They would go to Bornhöved.
Where Frederik drew up on a slight rise, looking at the disposition in front of him, Meyer by his side.
* * *
“Herr Governor,” Hinrich Bothmann said tentatively. “Umm, Your Grace? That is . . . ”
“Governor is fine.”
“If I may be so bold as to ask, My Lord Governor, how much military experience do you have?”
“After I finished the Latin school there, I attended the Sorø Akademi that my father established for the training of young officers. Academia Sorana, if you will. For two years. A decade ago.” Frederik smiled thinly. “Then I was sent to obtain a higher education more appropriate to a future ecclesiastical bureaucrat. My only military experience came in helping to conduct a retreat.”
“More than I. As the son of a pastor in Ribe, they gave me only the education deemed suitable for a future Lutheran pastor. I finished the Latin school at Sorø also, but ran away before they could condemn me to the university in Copenhagen. Thus, I have no military training or experience at all. Nonetheless, the quartermaster was talking to one of the local men . . . ”
According to the local man, there was a good-sized cattle drove coming toward the market in Lübeck by an—um—unsanctioned route that—um—bypassed the royal tolls at Segeberg. “There’s a lot of money to be made in Lübeck right now, with so much provisioning needed for the new navy, you understand.”
“Might there, possibly, be rustlers in Holstein?” Frederik asked. “Might, I emphasize.”
“Ah,” the man answered, “not rustlers. The profits from such a drove may well be going, however, to the peasants who have been compelled to pasture and stall the cattle at their own expense rather than to the nobles who are the only class with permission to conduct foreign trade in cattle and who force their serfs to raise the cattle the lords then sell to their own profit.”
He looked up at the sky. “Perhaps you could think of the operation as more along the line of smugglers rather than rustlers.”
Frederik thought about it. “How many?”
“How many what?”
“Cattle.”
“Let me ask.”
The closest that the local man could come was “more than a handful of hundreds.”
Presumably that was less than a thousand. It was hard to be sure, since the man’s arithmetical computations did not extend to the concept of a thousand.
Frederik’s first impulse was to send Bothmann to take a look at the herd and make a better estimate. Then he followed.
Bothmann did whatever magic he did when numbers were involved.
Frederik looked at the cattle. Pied, as the Jutland cattle usually were, either black and white or red and white. More of the former; the black ones seemed to be more common these days. Rangy, these fellows, most of them, coming off the winter—and fellows, most of them. Peasants kept the heifers for future milk and breeding. For which a small number of bulls sufficed. Most males turned into steers and ended up in a slaughterhouse.
The horns weren’t large, but they pointed up and out. An angry Holstein steer could do a lot of damage; put his head down and slash upward, he could gore the stomach out of a man. Or a horse. A thousand pounds of anything could do a lot of damage.
Bothmann came back with his estimate and they returned to the slight rise.
He looked again at the way Ahlefeldt had disposed his far larger forces. Most of those “foot soldiers” the nobles had gathered would be neither volunteers nor mercenaries, any more than his own troops were. But his were not serfs coerced into being there to defend their own absence of any right to justice, placed where they would take most of the casualties.
It was a pity, in a way. Nonetheless . . . he could not let eastern Holstein’s equites ordinarii prevail.
With Christian Ulrik on one side of him and Erik Stenbock on the other, he looked down at the list of instructions that Captain Meyer had drawn up and began to issue orders.
One of the Oldenburg captains mentioned, almost hesitantly, that there was little to be gained in the way of military glory and honor from the governor’s plan.
“I don’t need glory,” Frederik said. “Nor even a great victory. I need for the other side to lose this battle.” He continued to read from Meyer’s list.
Since the orders issuing from the commander’s mouth made a fair amount of sense if the only intention was to win, the Oldenburg captains obeyed them and placed their men accordingly, dividing up under the governor’s two . . . what were they? . . . nobody had ever said exactly what rank those two noblemen from Westphalia might have. But they were clearly going to be in charge of the flanks.
* * *
“Where’s Meijer?” There was no role for Cornelis Duyts now. He was at the back of the field with the chaplain and other noncombatants.
“Haven’t seen him lately. Nor Jansen.”
Gode and Barent had slipped away. They were in enemy territory, among Ahlefeldt’s Gesinde and Insten. Who came from different estates, mostly didn’t know one another, sometimes even spoke slightly different dialects, and certainly had no way of telling an agent provocateur from some other lord’s steward.
“If you see the enemy coming at you, don’t freeze and stand still. Don’t turn around and try to run backwards, because you’ll collide with the Gutsherren and their mounted men. Run sideways. If you’re standing here”—Meijer scratched the turf with a stick—“turn this way and run along the Schwentine. If you’re on the other side, over here”—he scratched again—“turn in the other direction. You won’t all be able to save yourselves, but more of you will live than if you stand here like sheep for the slaughter.”
This was more than anyone else had told them, which was, “stand here.”
“Sheep don’t have to be slaughtered like we usually do, cutting their necks,” one man said. “I heard someone say it once when I helped take a drove down to Lübeck. They can be hanged. ‘Better to be hung for a sheep than for a lamb.’ I wondered then what it meant.”
Gode stifled his exasperation. “Whatever it meant, when you see the enemy coming at you, run sideways.”
It was the best idea he and Barent had been able to come up with for saving as many lives as possible out of this mess. They’d gone to Lübeck to protest about the unjust execution of four men, one of them a simple-minded boy. They’d never intended to stir up something that might kill four thousand more.
The two of them had no idea that Frederik had instructed his inadequate supply of mounted men to move to the sides where they could come in on the enemy’s flanks.
* * *
Frederik sat on his gelding, now with Meyer on one side of him and Bothmann on the other. And a good half-dozen large men who rode well, mounted on the best of the Oldenburger horses, directly behind him. Meyer intended to keep the governor alive.
“The cowherds know what they are to do?”
Meyer nodded.
“Cowboys,” Bothmann said. “I learned about them in Bremen, from the CoC people. That’s what the up-timers had: cowboys. That sounds much more exciting than cowherds. ‘Yippie, ki, yi, o, git along little dogies. You know that Wyoming will be your new home.’ I wonder if Wyoming was in West Virginia.”
Meyer grimaced with annoyance but swallowed his retort. The boy was just nervous.
And who wouldn’t be, at his first battle? The good Lord only knew that he had been. Had probably made less sense than that.
Frederik rather hoped that most of the other side’s infantry would run fast enough; knowing that a lot of them wouldn’t. But without this battle, he would lose all hope of success in governing Westphalia.
He nodded.
Meyer turned and signaled.
From a half-mile away, the cowherds stampeded the drove directly into Ahlefeldt’s front line.
Into a scene that soon looked like one of Hieronymus Bosch’s visions of hell. He had seen those paintings when he studied in the Low Countries.