The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

where he established his camp, which he fortified
with a ditch eight feet deep and twelve wide,[13]
within which rose redoubts and bastions mounted
with 300 cannon. Wallenstein, advancing from
Bohemia, and joined by the army under the Elector
of Bavaria, pitched his camp of 60,000 men on the
other side of the town. Europe watched with
breathless anxiety, expecting every day the
decisive trial of strength between these two armies.
Gustavus strove by every expedient to draw his
great antagonist into battle, but Wallenstein had
adopted a strategy of famine. The plan succeeded.
The land was not able to bear two such mighty
hosts, and the scene of the encampment became a
field of horrors. The horses died in thousands for
want of forage; the steaming putridity of the
unburied carcasses poisoned the air, and the
effluvia, joined to the famine, proved more fatal to
the soldiers of both camps than would the bloodiest
battle. In the city of Nuremberg 10,000 inhabitants
died. Gustavus Adolphus had lost 20,000 of his
soldiers; the imperialists had lost, it is to be
presumed, an equal number; the villages around
Nuremberg were in ashes; the plundered peasantry
164