The Thirty Years' War - James Aitken Wylie

soldiery were endless, and compliance was
enforced by blows and cruel torturings.
The peasant most probably had hidden his
treasures in the earth on the approach of the host;
but he saw with terror the foreign man-at-arms
exercising a power, which to him seemed magical,
of discovering the place where his hoards were
concealed. If it happened that the soldier was
baffled in the search, the fate of the poor man was
even worse, for then he himself was seized, and by
torments which it would be painful to describe, was
compelled to discover where his money and goods
lay buried. On the fate of his wife and his
daughters we shall be silent. The greatest
imaginable horrors were so customary that their
non-perpetration was a matter of surprise. Of all
was the unhappy husbandman plundered. His
bondman was carried off to serve in the war; his
team was unyoked from the plough to drag the
baggage or the cannon; his flocks and herds were
driven off from the meadow to be slaughtered and
eaten by the army; and the man who had risen in
affluence in the morning, was stripped of all and
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