The detail of which is still horrible to read.

Germany, in all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the process;--tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar under the iron mace of war.

[Curious incidental details of the state it was reduced to, in the Rhine and Danube Countries, turn up in the Earl of Arundel and Surrey's TRAVELS ("Arundel of the Marbles") as _Ambassador Extraordinary to the Emperor Ferdinando II.

in 1636_ (a small Volume, or Pamphlet, London, 1637).] Brandenburg saw its towns sieged and sacked, its country populations driven to despair, by the one party and the other.

Three times,--first in the Wallenstein Mecklenburg period, while fire and sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when starvation had become the method--Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at their height.