Читать книгу History of the British Army (Vol.1&2) - J. W. Fortescue - Страница 17

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It is now needful to turn to the second and perhaps more important school of the British Army. As in the Low Countries we found English and Scots fighting side by side, but gave to the English, as their numerical preponderance demanded, the greater share of attention, so now in the German battlefields of the Thirty Years' War we shall see them again ranked together, but must devote ourselves for the same reason to the actions of the Scots.

The North Britons seem to have found their way very quickly to the banners of Gustavus Adolphus, and to have fought with him in his earlier campaigns long before he had established himself as the champion of Protestantism. To mention but two memorable names, Sir John Hepburn and Sir Alexander Leslie had risen to high rank in his service many years before he crossed the Baltic for his marvellous campaigns in Germany. But to trace the history of the famous Scottish regiments aright, they must be briefly followed from their first departure from Scotland to take service under King Christian the Fourth of Denmark, who curiously enough forms the link that connects the two schools of Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus.

1626,

August 17.

It was in reliance on promises of subsidy from the English King Charles the First that Christian first levied an army and took the field for the Protestant cause. His plan was for a defensive campaign, but this was impossible unless his soldiers were regularly paid, which they would be, as he hoped, with English money. Needless to say, Charles when the moment came was unable to fulfil his promise; Christian was driven to take the offensive and was completely defeated by Tilly at Lutter. The unhappy king appealed indignantly to Charles for help, but Charles could send nothing but four English regiments which had been raised for service in the Low Countries two years before, and were now, through the prevailing maladministration in every department of English affairs, weak, disorganised and useless. Their numbers were however supplemented by the press-gang, and a body of some five thousand men, unpaid and ill-found, ripe for disease and disorder, were shipped off to the Elbe.

A little earlier than the defeat at Lutter one of the many gentlemen-adventurers in Scotland, Sir Donald Mackay, had obtained leave from King Charles to raise and transport five thousand men for King Christian's ally, the famous free lance, Count Ernest Mansfeld. It does not appear that he succeeded in recruiting even half of that number, for heavy drafts had already been made upon the centre and south of Scotland for levies. Still some two thousand men were collected by fair means or foul, and even if some of them were taken from the Tolbooth at Edinburgh, it was fitting that in a corps so famous there should be representatives from the Heart of Midlothian. But it is certain that a goodly proportion were taken from the northern counties and in particular from the district of the Clan Mackay, and that these took the field in their national costume and so were the first organised body deserving the name of a kilted regiment. The officers, from their names and still more from their subsequent behaviour, seem to have been without exception gentlemen of birth and standing, worthy to represent their nation. Some of them probably had already experience of war; one at least, Robert Munro, the historian of the regiment, had served in the Scottish body-guard of the King of France, and had learned from sad experience the meaning of the word discipline.[144]

1627.

The regiment sailed in divisions from Cromarty and Aberdeen and arrived at Glückstadt on the Elbe in October 1626. The winter was spent in training the men, but not without riot and brawling. The officers were constantly quarrelling, and there was so little discipline among the men that a sergeant actually fell out of the ranks when at drill to cudgel a foreign officer who had maltreated one of his comrades. Meanwhile Count Mansfeld, who had originally hired the regiment, was dead, and in March 1627 Sir Donald Mackay offered its services to the King of Denmark. Christian accordingly reviewed it, and having first inspected the ranks on parade, "drums beating, colours flying, horses neighing," saw it march past and paid it a handsome compliment. The men were then drawn, after the fashion of the landsknechts, into a ring, where they took the oath and listened to a rehearsal of the articles of war; and so their services began. Half of them were despatched with the English regiments to Bremen, and the remainder were stationed at Lauenburg to guard the passage of the Elbe.

July.

After a vast deal of marching and counter-marching four companies, under Major Dunbar, were left at Boitzenburg, at the junction of the Boitze and the Elbe, while Mackay with the remaining seven was moved to Ruppin. Three days after Mackay's departure, Tilly's army, ten thousand strong, marched up to Boitzenburg and prepared to push forward into Holstein. Dunbar knowing his own weakness had strengthened his defences, but eight hundred men was a small garrison against an army. On the very first night he made a successful sortie; and on the next day the Imperialist army assaulted his works at all points. The first attack was repulsed with loss of over five hundred men to the assailants. Reinforcements were brought up; the attack was renewed and again beaten off, and finally a third and furious onslaught was made on the little band of Scots. In the midst of the fighting the ammunition of the garrison failed and its fire ceased. The Imperialists, guessing the cause, made a general rush for the walls. The Scots met them at first with showers of sand torn from the ramparts, and presently falling in with pike and butt of musket fought the Imperialists hand to hand, and after a desperate struggle drove them out with the loss of another five hundred men. Tilly then drew off and crossed the Elbe higher up, and Dunbar by Christian's order marched proudly out of Boitzenburg. This was the first engagement of Mackay's regiment, a fitting prelude to work that was to come.[145]

October.

The headquarters of the regiment was presently moved from Ruppin to Oldenburg to hold the pass against Tilly's advance, and here they too came into action. They were ill supported by their foreign comrades, for the Danes gave way, the Germans of Christian's army took to their heels, and the brunt of the engagement fell upon half the regiment of Scots. After two hours of heavy fighting they were relieved by the other half, and so the two divisions, taking turn and turn, maintained the struggle against vastly superior numbers from seven in the morning till four in the afternoon, when the enemy at last drew off owing to the darkness. The spirit shown by the Scots was superb. Ensign David Ross received a bullet in the chest; he retired for a few minutes to get the wound dressed, and returned to the fight; nor did he afterwards miss an hour's duty on the plea that he was wounded. Hector Munro of Coull, being shot through the foot, refused to retire till he had fired away all his ammunition, and before he could do so was shot in the other foot also. Yet another, Hugh Murray, being ordered to bring away his brother's corpse under a heavy fire, swore that he would first empty his brother's bandoliers against the enemy, and was shot in the eye, though not fatally, while fulfilling his oath. Yet these were young soldiers, of so little experience that they left their reserve of ammunition exposed, and suffered heavily from the explosion of a barrel of powder. They lost sixteen officers and four hundred men that day.

That night the Danish army retreated to Heiligenhaven, but some German Reiters that were attached to it were so unsteady that they speedily turned the retreat into a flight; and when the harbour was reached the cavalry crowded on to the mole to seize all the transport-vessels for themselves. Sir Donald Mackay, who was himself wounded, was not the man to suffer his regiment to be sacrificed; he calmly ordered his pikemen to advance, swept the whole of the Reiters into the sea, seized the nearest ship, brought others out of the roadstead and proceeded to the work of embarkation. The last boat's load shoved off surrounded by the enemy's horse, and the last of the Scots, a gallant boy named Murchison, though wounded in the head and shot through the arm, swam off to the boat under a heavy fire, only to die two days later of his injuries. The rest of the Danish army, thirty-five troops of horse and forty companies of foot, surrendered without a blow. Hence it is hardly surprising that, when next the Scots found themselves in quarters alongside Danish horse, there was a furious riot which cost the lives of seven or eight men before it could be suppressed. But in truth Mackay's regiment was so much weakened by its losses that both colonel and lieutenant-colonel returned perforce to Scotland to raise recruits.

1628.

I shall not follow the various small actions of the earlier part of the campaign of 1628 in Holstein, though many of them were brilliant enough. It must suffice that Scotch and English fought constantly side by side not only against the enemy, but once riotously against the Danes themselves, whom they considered to be unduly favoured in the matter of rations. In May the Imperialists moved up in force to occupy Stralsund; and the burghers having appealed to Christian for assistance received from him the seven companies, now reduced to eight hundred men, of Mackay's regiment.

June 26.

On arrival their commanding officer at once selected the most dangerous post in the defences, as in honour bound, and for six weeks the regiment was harassed to death by exhausting duty. The men took their very meals at their posts, and Monro, who was now a major, mentions that he never once took off his clothes. They suffered heavily too from the enemy's fire, a single cannon shot strewing the walls with the brains of no fewer than fourteen men; but still they held out. At last Wallenstein came up in person, impatient at the delay, and vowed that he would take the town in three nights though it hung by a chain between heaven and earth. His first assault was hurled back by the Scots with the loss of a thousand men. But the Highlanders also had been severely punished; three officers and two hundred men had been killed outright, and seven more officers were wounded. On the following night the attack was renewed and again repulsed, but the garrison was now compelled to open a parley in order to gain time; and the negotiations were prolonged until the arrival of a second Scottish regiment under Lord Spynie enabled the defenders to renew their defiance.

1630.

February.

Shortly after the King of Sweden charged himself with the defence of Stralsund. Alexander Leslie, whom we shall meet again, was appointed to take the command, and Mackay's and Spynie's regiments after a final sortie were withdrawn to Copenhagen. Of Mackay's, five hundred had been killed outright in the siege, and a bare hundred only remained unwounded; in fact the regiment required virtually to be reconstructed. The work of recruiting and reorganisation occupied the winter months, at the close of which the corps, now raised to ten companies and fifteen hundred men, was honourably discharged from the service of Denmark, and free to join itself, as it presently did, to Gustavus Adolphus.

Its first duty was to learn the new drill and discipline introduced by the King of Sweden; and as his system was destined to be accepted later by all the armies of Europe, no better place can be found than this, when it was just brought to perfection and first taught to British soldiers, to give some brief account of it.

The infantry of Gustavus Adolphus, as of all other civilised armies at that period, was made up of pikemen and musketeers, and beyond all doubt had originally been trained and organised on the models of the Spanish and the Dutch. Enough has already been said of these to enable the reader to follow the reforms introduced by the Swedish king. First as regards weapons: the old long pike was cut down from a length of fifteen or eighteen feet to the more modest dimension of eleven feet, and the old clumsy musket with its heavy rest was replaced by a lighter weapon which could be fired from the shoulder without further support. The defensive armour of the pikeman was also reduced to back, breast, and tassets; and thus both divisions of the infantry, carrying less weight than heretofore, were enabled to move more rapidly and to accomplish longer marches without fatigue. This was a first step towards the mobility which the great soldier designed to oppose to the old-fashioned forces of mass and weight.

Next as to the tactics of infantry: Gustavus's first improvement was to reduce the old formation from ten ranks to six; his second and more important was to withdraw the musketeers from their old station in the flanks of companies, and to mass pikes and shot into separate bodies. It is abundantly evident that he looked upon the development of the fire of musketry as of the first importance in war, and to this end he sought to render the musketeers independent of the protection of the pikes. This idea led him to a curious revival of old methods, nothing less than a modification of the stakes which were seen in the hands of the English at Hastings and Agincourt, and which now took the name of hog's bristles or Swedish feathers. This, however, was a small matter compared to his improvement in the method of maintaining a continuous fire. Pescayra's system was one which, on the face of it, was not suited to young or unsteady troops. In theory it was a very simple matter that the ranks should fire and file off to the rear in succession, but in practice the temptation to men to get the firing done as quickly as possible and to seek shelter behind the ranks of their comrades was a great deal too strong. The retirement was apt to be executed with an unseemly haste which was demoralising to the whole company, and there was no certainty that the retiring ranks, instead of resuming their place in rear, would not disappear from the field altogether. Gustavus therefore made the ranks that had fired retire through[146] instead of outside their companies, where, through judicious posting of officers and non-commissioned officers, any disposition to hurry could be checked by the blow of a halberd across the shins or by such other expedients as the reader's imagination may suggest. In an advance, again, he made the rear ranks move up successively through the front ranks, and in a retreat caused the front ranks to retire through the rear.

This reform was as much moral as tactical; but the next made a great stride towards modern practice. Not content with reducing ten ranks to six Gustavus on occasions would double those six into three, and by making the front rank kneel enabled the fire of all three to be delivered simultaneously. Here is seen the advantage of abolishing the old musket-rest, with which such a concentration of fire would have been impossible. Still following out his leading principle, he encouraged the use of cartridges to hasten the process of loading; and finally to perfect his work he introduced a new tactical unit, the peloton, called by Munro plotton and later naturalised among us as the platoon of musketeers, which consisted of forty-eight men, eight in rank and six in file, all of course carefully trained to the new tactics. Yet with all these changes the drill was of the simplest; if men could turn right, left, and about, and double their ranks and files, that was sufficient.

In the matter of pure organisation Gustavus again improved upon all existing systems. First he made the companies of uniform strength, one hundred and twenty-six men, distributed into twenty-one rots or files, and six corporalships. A corporalship of pikes consisted of three files, and of musketeers of four files;[147] and to every file was appointed a rottmeister[148] or leader, who stood in the front, and an unter-rottmeister or sub-leader, who stood in the rear rank. Both of these received higher pay than the private soldier. Two sergeants, four under-sergeants and a quartermaster-sergeant completed the strength of non-commissioned officers, while three pipers and as many drums made music for all. Moreover each company carried a kind of reserve with it in the shape of eighteen supernumerary men who bore the name of passe-volans, the old slang term for fictitious soldiers since the days of Hawkwood, and; were allowed to the captain as free men, unmustered. The officers of course were as usual captain, lieutenant, and ensign.

Eight such companies constituted a regiment, which was thus one thousand and eight men strong, with a colonel, lieutenant-colonel, and major over all. The regimental staff included many officials borrowed from the landsknechts' model for the trial and punishment of offenders, and for a complete novelty, four surgeons. The provision of medical aid had formerly been left to the captains, and it is to Gustavus that we owe the first example of a sounder medical organisation.

Four companies or half of such a regiment were called either a squadron or by the Italian name battaglia, to which must be traced our modern word battalion. Two such regiments were called a brigade, which marks the latest advance in organisation made by Gustavus. Maurice of Nassau had been before him in the formation of brigades but had not reduced them to uniform strength. The Swedish brigades had a stereotyped formation for battle, and were called after the colour of their standards, the white, the blue, the yellow, and finally the green, better known as the Scots Brigade, which is that wherein we are chiefly interested.

Passing next to the cavalry, the marks of Gustavus's reforming hand are not less evident. The force at large was divided into cuirassiers and dragoons. Of these the latter, who were armed with muskets and were simply mounted infantry, may be dismissed without further observation. The cuirassiers, except outwardly, bore a strong resemblance to the Reiters, for, though stripped of all defensive armour except cuirass and helmet, they still carried two pistols as well as the sword. Gustavus, however, here as with the infantry, took a line of his own. He began by reducing the depth of the ranks from the bottomless profundity of the Reiters to three or at most four; and though he still opened his attack with the pistol and so far adhered to missile tactics he to a considerable extent combined with them the action by shock. As in the infantry, it was Pescayra's system that he wished to supersede. The Reiters, as we know by the testimony of many eye-witnesses, were often so anxious to go to the rear and reload that they fired their pistols at absurd ranges, sometimes indeed hardly waiting to fire before they turned about. Unable to apply to cavalry the system which he had adopted for the infantry, and failing in common with all his contemporaries to grasp the principle that, since a horse has four legs and a man two, the evolutions of horse and foot must be fundamentally different, Gustavus none the less determined that his cuirassiers should at all events come to close quarters with their enemy. He therefore trained them not to fire till they could see the white of their opponents' eyes, and having fired to strike in with the sword.

Hence he has the credit, which is not wholly undeserved, of having restored shock-action, and is said to have made his cavalry charge at the gallop; but the first statement is misleading, and the second in the face of contemporary accounts incredible. In the first place, the sword is a singularly ineffective weapon against mailed men, and a true restorer of shock-action would almost certainly have reverted to the lance. In the second place, mounted men who open their attack with pistols will infallibly check their horses at the moment of firing in order to ensure greater accuracy of aim. Lastly, Gustavus's favourite plan for the attack of cavalry was to intersperse his squadrons with platoons of musketeers, which advanced with them within close range[149] and fired a volley into the enemy's horse. This preliminary over, the cuirassiers advanced, fired their pistols, fell in with the sword, and retired; by which time the musketeers had reloaded and were ready with another volley. Close range of the musket of those days would not have allowed space for a body of horse to gather way for a shock-attack in the modern sense, and it is therefore more than doubtful whether the Swedish squadrons charged at higher speed than the trot. Gustavus's system was in fact simply a revival of Edward the First's at Falkirk, which had already been developed with great success by Pescayra at Pavia. Nevertheless, by reducing the depth of squadrons and insisting that his men should come to close quarters, Gustavus unquestionably did very much for the improvement of cavalry.[150]

Most remarkable of all were his reforms in the matter of artillery. Profoundly impressed by the power of field-guns he spared no effort to make them lighter and more mobile, so as to be at once easily manœuvred and capable of transport in larger numbers. Here again Maurice had been before him, not without success, but Gustavus possessed in the person of a Scotch gentleman, Sir Alexander Hamilton, an artillerist of wider views than lay to the hand of the great Dutch soldier. Hamilton's first experiment was to make leathern guns,[151] strengthened by hoops of metal and with apparently a core of tin, which could easily be carried on a pony's back or stacked away by the dozen in a waggon. Gustavus used them frequently in his earlier campaigns but discarded them at latest after the battle of Breitenfeld, finding that their life did not extend beyond ten or a dozen rounds. He then fell back on light two-pounders and four-pounders, which required few horses for draught, and could be loaded and fired by a skilful crew more rapidly even than a musket. A few such guns were attached to each regiment and called regimental pieces; and very effective they were presently found to be.

Further, Gustavus was a consummate engineer, as fond of the spade as Maurice himself, and a past master of field-fortification. On stepping ashore in Germany he first fell on his knees and prayed, and then picking up a spade began to dig with his own hands. This, it may here be mentioned once for all, was the one point in his system which the Scots could not endure; they always grumbled when called upon to use the spade, and in spite of the King's occasional reproaches, always made less progress with field-works in a given time than any other corps in the army.

Lastly, to turn to broader principles, the great innovation of Gustavus, visible in all his reforms, was to match mobility against the old system of weight. He never massed his troops in unwieldy bodies, but distributed them in smaller and more flexible divisions, allowing plenty of space for facility of manœuvre. His order of battle was that which was customary in his time, consisting of two lines with infantry in the centre and cavalry on the flanks; but he always allowed three hundred yards of distance between the first and second line, and erected the practice of keeping a reserve, which had been intermittently observed for centuries, into an established principle. Again, he carefully studied the effective combination of the three arms with a thoroughness unknown since the days of Zizca, supplying artillery to his infantry, and supporting impartially horse with foot and foot with horse. Finally, as the backbone of all, he enforced with a strictness that had never been seen before him the observance of discipline.

1631.

Such was the Army and such the General to which Mackay's regiment now joined itself. In June 1630 it embarked for Germany as part of the thirteen thousand men which formed the Swedish army, half of the companies at Elfsknaben, the remainder under Munro at Pillau. The latter detachment was wrecked off Rügenwalde, which was held by the Imperialists, and lost everything; but having made shift to obtain arms calmly attacked the Imperial garrison and captured the town—as daring a feat of arms as ever was done by Scotsmen. After several small engagements Monro rejoined his headquarters at Stettin, and in January 1631 Gustavus, who boasted with justice that his army was as effective for a winter's as for a summer's campaign, invaded Brandenburg and marched for the Oder. The Scotch were organised into the famous Scots Brigade, consisting of four picked regiments—Hepburn's, Mackay's, Stargate's, and Lumsden's, the whole under the command of Sir John Hepburn.

May.

We must pass over the operations in Brandenburg, where the Scots Brigade distinguished itself repeatedly, and come forthwith to Saxony, whither Gustavus had been called from the Oder by Tilly's advance upon Magdeburg. Arriving too late to save the unhappy city he entrenched himself at Werben, at the junction of the Elbe and the Havel, and gave the world a first notable example of his skill as an engineer. Tilly, having lost six thousand men in the vain attempt to storm the entrenchments, invaded Saxony, whither Gustavus at once followed him and offered him battle on the plain of Leipsic.

On the 7th of September Tilly took up his position facing north, on a low line of heights running from the village of Breitenfeld on the west to that of Seehausen on the east. His army was drawn up in a single line. On each wing as usual was posted the cavalry, seven regiments under Pappenheim on the left, seven more under Furstenburg on the right, all drawn up in the dense columns beloved of Charles the Fifth. In the centre was Tilly himself, with eighteen regiments of infantry, his famous Walloons among them, massed together in the old heavy Spanish formation. On the heights above him were his guns. The whole force numbered forty thousand men, and their General was a man who, though seventy years of age, had never lost a battle.

Sept. 7.

On the other side the armies of Gustavus and of his allies the Saxons were drawn up in two lines. On the left were the Saxons, fourteen thousand strong, and on the right, with which alone we need concern ourselves, the Swedes. In touch with the Saxon right, the Swedish left under Field-Marshal Horn was made up, both in the first and second lines, of six regiments of horse, with four platoons of musketeers between each regiment. The right wing under Gustavus himself was similarly composed. In the centre the first line was made up of four half brigades of foot, supported by a regiment of cavalry and eight platoons of Scots; and the second line of three brigades, of which Hepburn's was one. In rear of both lines was a reserve of cavalry, and in the extreme rear a further reserve, the first ever seen, of artillery.

The battle opened as usual with a duel of artillery, which was continued from noon till half-past two, the Swedish guns, more numerous and better served than Tilly's, firing three shots to the enemy's one. Then Pappenheim, on Tilly's left, lost patience, and setting his cavalry in motion without orders came down upon the Swedish right. He was met by biting volleys from the platoons of musketeers and charges from the cuirassiers at their side; his men shrank from the fire, and edging leftward across the front of Gustavus's wing swept down towards its rear. General Bauer, in command of the reserve cavalry of the first line, at once moved out and broke into them; and the whole Swedish right coming into action drove back Pappenheim's horse, after a hard struggle, in disorder. Gustavus checked the pursuit, for Tilly had pushed forward a regiment of infantry in support of Pappenheim, and turning all his force on this unhappy corps annihilated it.

On the Imperialists' left Furstenburg, following Pappenheim's example, had also charged, and had driven the entire Saxon army before him like chaff before the wind.[152] He followed them in hot pursuit; and had Tilly at once advanced with his centre against Field-Marshal Horn, the situation of the Swedes would have been critical, for their left was now completely uncovered. But owing to the faulty disposition of his artillery Tilly could not advance directly without putting his guns out of action, and he therefore followed in the track of Furstenburg to turn Horn's left flank. The delay gave Horn time to make dispositions to meet the attack. Hepburn's brigade came quickly up with another brigade in support, and the Scots after one volley charged the hostile infantry with the pike and routed it completely. Gustavus meanwhile had again advanced with his cavalry on the right, and sweeping down on the flank of Tilly's battery captured all his guns and turned them against himself. The battle was virtually over, but four splendid old Walloon regiments stood firm to the last, and though reduced to but six hundred men retreated at nightfall in good order.

The victory was crushing; and yet of all the Swedish infantry two brigades alone had been engaged, and of these the Scots had done the greater share of the work. The battle marks the death-day of the old dense formations and the triumph of mobility over weight, and is therefore of particular interest to a nation whose strength is to fight in line.

1632.

From Leipsic Gustavus marched for the Main, where the Scots were as usual put forward for every desperate service, and held his winter court at Mainz. In the spring of the following year he marched down to the line of the Danube with forty thousand men, forced the passage of the Lech in the teeth of Tilly's army, entered Bavaria and by May was at Munich. Then hearing that the towns on the Danube in his rear were threatened he turned back to Donauwörth, whence he was called away by the movements of Wallenstein in Saxony to Nürnberg. Such marching had not been since the days of Zizca. He now turned Nürnberg, as he had turned Werben in the previous year, into a vast entrenched camp; for he had now but eighteen thousand men against Wallenstein's seventy thousand, and it behoved him to make the most of his position. Wallenstein, however, without risking an engagement, took the simpler course of making also an entrenched camp, cutting off Gustavus's supplies from the Rhine and Danube, and reducing him by starvation. Reinforcements came to the Swedes, which raised their army to five-and-thirty thousand men; Wallenstein allowed them to pass in unmolested to consume the provisions the quicker. The pinch of hunger began to make itself felt in the Swedish camp, pestilence raged among the unhappy troops, and at last Gustavus in desperation launched his army in a vain assault upon Wallenstein's entrenchments. For twelve hours his men swarmed up the rugged and broken hill with desperate courage, three times obtaining a momentary footing and as often beaten back. The cannonade was kept up all night, and it was not till ten o'clock on the following morning that the Swedes retreated, leaving four thousand dead behind them. The Scots Brigade suffered terribly. Monro, out of a detachment of five hundred men, lost two hundred killed alone, besides wounded and missing. His lieutenant-colonel who relieved him at night brought back but thirty men next morning. Other corps had lost hardly less heavily, and Gustavus, foiled for once, retreated to Neustadt, leaving one-third of his force dead around Nürnberg.

1634,

August 26.

Sir John Hepburn, in consequence of a quarrel with the Swedish king, now took leave of him and entered the service of France; and the Scots Brigade, weakened to a mere shadow, was left behind at Dunkerswald to await reinforcements, while Gustavus marched away to his last battlefield at Lützen. We need follow the fortunes of the Brigade little further. The famous regiments, together with the other Scots and English in the Swedish service, now some thirteen thousand men, did abundance of hard and gallant work before the close of the war. The ranks of Mackay's regiment were again swelled to twelve companies and fifteen hundred men, but at Nördlingen it was almost annihilated, and emerged with the strength of a single company only. Times had changed, and discipline had decayed since the death of Gustavus; and in 1635, on alliance of France with Sweden, and the outbreak of war between France and Spain, the fragments of all the Scotch regiments were merged together, and passed into the service of France under the command of the veteran Sir John Hepburn as the Regiment d'Hebron.

1636.

There for a short period let us leave it, wrangling with Regiment Picardie for precedence, claiming, on the ground that some officers of the Scottish Guard had joined it, to be the oldest regiment in the world,[153] and earning the nickname of Pontius Pilate's guards. Hepburn commanded it for but one year, for he fell at its head at the siege of Saverne, but it fought through many actions and many sieges, the battle of Rocroi not the least of them, before it returned to the British Isles. We shall meet with it again before that day under a new name, and under yet a third name shall grow to know it well.

Authorities.—Munro's Expedition is far the most valuable; it has been abridged and supplemented by Mr. John Mackay in his Old Scots Brigade. Harte's Life of Gustavus wrestles manfully with the military details, which are very clearly summed up in Mr. Fletcher's Gustavus in the Heroes of the Nations Series. Some few details will be found also in Fieffé's Histoire des troupes Etrangères.