The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 04

Kohlhaas exclaimed in alarm, "Dearest Lisbeth, what are you doing? God has blessed me with wife and children and worldly goods; am I today for the first time to wish that it were otherwise?" He sat down gently beside his wife, who at these words had flushed up and fallen on his neck. "Tell me!" said he, smoothing the curls away from her forehead. "What shall I do? Shall I give up my case? Do you wish me to go to Tronka Castle, beg the knight to restore the horses to me, mount and ride them back home?"

Lisbeth did not dare to cry out, "Yes, yes, yes!" She shook her head, weeping, and, clasping him close, kissed him passionately.

"Well, then," cried Kohlhaas, "if you feel that, in case I am to continue my trade, justice must be done me, do not deny me the liberty which I must have in order to procure it!"

With that he stood up and said to the groom who had come to tell him that the chestnut horse was saddled, "To-morrow the bay horses must be harnessed up to take my wife to Schwerin." Lisbeth said that she had an idea! She rose, wiped the tears from her eyes, and, going over to the desk where he had seated himself, asked him if he would give her the petition and let her go to Berlin in his stead and hand it to the Elector. For more reasons than one Kohlhaas was deeply moved by this change of attitude. He drew her down on his lap, and said, "Dearest wife, that is hardly practicable. The sovereign is surrounded by a great many people; whoever wishes to approach him is exposed to many annoyances."

Lisbeth rejoined that, in a thousand cases, it was easier for a woman to approach him than it was for a man. "Give me the petition," she repeated, "and if all that you wish is the assurance that it shall reach his hands, I vouch for it; he shall receive it!"

Kohlhaas, who had had many proofs of her courage as well as of her wisdom, asked her how she intended to go about it. To this she answered, looking shamefacedly at the ground, that the castellan of the Elector's palace had paid court to her in former days, when he had been in service in Schwerin; that, to be sure, he was married now and had several children, but that she was not yet entirely forgotten, and, in short, her husband should leave it to her to take advantage of this circumstance as well as of many others which it would require too much time to enumerate. Kohlhaas kissed her joyfully, said that he accepted her proposal, and informed her that for her to lodge with the wife of the castellan would be all that was necessary to enable her to approach the sovereign inside the palace itself. Then he gave her the petition, had the bay horses harnessed, and sent her off, well bundled up, accompanied by Sternbald, his faithful groom.

Of all the unsuccessful steps, however, which he had taken in regard to his suit, this journey was the most unfortunate. For only a few days later Sternbald entered the courtyard again, leading the horses at a walk before the wagon, in which lay his wife, stretched out, with a dangerous contusion of the chest. Kohlhaas, who approached the wagon with a white face, could learn nothing coherent concerning the cause of the accident. The castellan, the groom said, had not been at home; they had therefore been obliged to put up at an inn that stood near the palace. Lisbeth had left this inn on the following morning, ordering the servant to stay behind with the horses; not until evening had she returned, and then only in this condition. It seemed she had pressed forward too boldly toward the person of the sovereign, and without any fault of his, but merely through the rough zeal of a body-guard which surrounded him, she had received a blow on the chest with the shaft of a lance. At least this was what the people said who, toward evening, had brought her back unconscious to the inn; for she herself could talk but little for the blood which flowed from her mouth. The petition had been taken from her afterward by a knight. Sternbald said that it had been his wish to jump on a horse at once and bring the news of the unfortunate accident to his master, but, in spite of the remonstrances of the surgeon who had been called in, she had insisted on being taken back to her husband at Kohlhaasenbrück without previously sending him word. She was completely exhausted by the journey and Kohlhaas put her to bed, where she lived a few days longer, struggling painfully to draw breath.

They tried in vain to restore her to consciousness in order to learn the particulars of what had occurred; she lay with fixed, already glassy eyes, and gave no answer.

Once only, shortly before her death, did she recover consciousness. A minister of the Lutheran church (which religion, then in its infancy, she had embraced, following the example of her husband) was standing beside her bed, reading in a loud solemn voice, full of emotion, a chapter of the Bible, when she suddenly looked up at him with a stern expression, and, taking the Bible out of his hand, as though there were no need to read to her from it, turned over the leaves for some time and seemed to be searching for some special passage. At last, with her fore-finger she pointed out to Kohlhaas, who was sitting beside her bed, the verse: "Forgive your enemies; do good to them that hate you." As she did so she pressed his hand with a look full of deep and tender feeling, and passed away.

Kohlhaas thought, "May God never forgive me the way I forgive the Squire!" Then he kissed her amid freely flowing tears, closed her eyes, and left the chamber.

He took the hundred gold gulden which the bailiff had already sent him for the stables in Dresden, and ordered a funeral ceremony that seemed more suitable for a princess than for her—an oaken coffin heavily trimmed with metal, cushions of silk with gold and silver tassels, and a grave eight yards deep lined with stones and mortar. He himself stood beside the vault with his youngest child in his arms and watched the work. On the day of the funeral the corpse, white as snow, was placed in a room which he had had draped with black cloth.

The minister had just completed a touching address by the side of the bier when the sovereign's answer to the petition which the dead woman had presented was delivered to Kohlhaas. By this decree he was ordered to fetch the horses from Tronka Castle and, under pain of imprisonment, not to bring any further action in the matter. Kohlhaas put the letter in his pocket and had the coffin carried out to the hearse.

As soon as the mound had been raised, the cross planted on it, and the guests who had been present at the interment had taken their departure, Kohlhaas flung himself down once more before his wife's empty bed, and then set about the business of revenge.

He sat down and made out a decree in which, by virtue of his own innate authority, he condemned the Squire Wenzel Tronka within the space of three days after sight to lead back to Kohlhaasenbrück the two black horses which he had taken from him and over-worked in the fields, and with his own hands to feed the horses in Kohlhaas' stables until they were fat again. This decree he sent off to the Squire by a mounted messenger, and instructed the latter to return to Kohlhaasenbrück as soon as he had delivered the document.

As the three days went by without the horses being returned, Kohlhaas called Herse and informed him of what he had ordered the Squire to do in regard to fattening them. Then he asked Herse two questions: first, whether he would ride with him to Tronka Castle and fetch the Squire; and, secondly, whether Herse would be willing to apply the whip to the young gentleman after he had been brought to the stables at Kohlhaasenbrück, in case he should be remiss in carrying out the conditions of the decree. As soon as Herse understood what was meant he shouted joyfully—"Sir, this very day!" and, throwing his hat into the air, he cried that he was going to have a thong with ten knots plaited in order to teach the Squire how to curry-comb. After this Kohlhaas sold the house, packed the children into a wagon, and sent them over the border. When darkness fell he called the other servants together, seven in number, and every one of them true as gold to him, armed them and provided them with mounts and set out for the Tronka Castle.

At night-fall of the third day, with this little troop he rode down the toll-gatherer and the gate-keeper who were standing in conversation in the arched gateway, and attacked the castle. They set fire to all the outbuildings in the castle inclosure, and, while, amid the outburst of the flames, Herse hurried up the winding staircase into the tower of the castellan's quarters, and with blows and stabs fell upon the castellan and the steward who were sitting, half dressed, over the cards, Kohlhaas at the same time dashed into the castle in search of the Squire Wenzel. Thus it is that the angel of judgment descends from heaven; the Squire, who, to the accompaniment of immoderate laughter, was just reading aloud to a crowd of young friends the decree which the horse-dealer had sent to him, had no sooner heard the sound of his voice in the courtyard than, turning suddenly pale as death, he cried out to the gentlemen—"Brothers, save yourselves!" and disappeared. As Kohlhaas entered the room he seized by the shoulders a certain Squire, Hans Tronka, who came at him, and flung him into the corner of the room with such force that his brains spurted out over the stone floor. While the other knights, who had drawn their weapons, were being overpowered and scattered by the grooms, Kohlhaas asked where the Squire Wenzel Tronka was. Realizing the ignorance of the stunned men, he kicked open the doors of two apartments leading into the wings of the castle and, after searching in every direction throughout the rambling building and finding no one, he went down, cursing, into the castle yard, in order to place guards at the exits.

In the meantime, from the castle and the wings, which had caught fire from the out-buildings, thick columns of smoke were rising heavenward. While Sternbald and three busy grooms were gathering together everything in the castle that was not fastened securely and throwing it down among the horses as fair spoils, from the open windows of the castellan's quarters the corpses of the castellan and the steward, with their wives and children, were flung down into the courtyard amid the joyful shouts of Herse. As Kohlhaas descended the steps of the castle, the gouty old housekeeper who managed the Squire's establishment threw herself at his feet. Pausing on the step, he asked her where the Squire Wenzel Tronka was. She answered in a faint trembling voice that she thought he had taken refuge in the chapel. Kohlhaas then called two men with torches, and, since they had no keys, he had the door broken open with crowbars and axes. He knocked over altars and pews; nevertheless, to his anger and grief, he did not find the Squire.

It happened that, at the moment when Kohlhaas came out of the chapel, a young servant, one of the retainers of the castle, came hurrying upon his way to get the Squire's chargers out of a large stone stable which was threatened by the flames. Kohlhaas, who at that very moment spied his two blacks in a little shed roofed with straw, asked the man why he did not rescue the two blacks. The latter, sticking the key in the stable-door, answered that he surely must see that the shed was already in flames. Kohlhaas tore the key violently from the stable-door, threw it over the wall, and, raining blows as thick as hail on the man with the flat of his sword, drove him into the burning shed and, amid the horrible laughter of the bystanders, forced him to rescue the black horses. Nevertheless, when the man, pale with fright, reappeared with the horses, only a few moments before the shed fell in behind him, he no longer found Kohlhaas. Betaking himself to the men gathered in the castle inclosure, he asked the horse-dealer, who several times turned his back on him, what he was to do with the animals now.

Kohlhaas suddenly raised his foot with such terrible force that the kick, had it landed, would have meant death; then, without answering, he mounted his bay horse, stationed himself under the gateway of the castle, and, while his men continued their work of destruction, silently awaited the break of day.

When the morning dawned the entire castle had burned down and only the walls remained standing; no one was left in it but Kohlhaas and his seven men. He dismounted from his horse and, in the bright sunlight which illuminated every crack and corner, once more searched the inclosure. When he had to admit, hard though it was for him to do so, that the expedition against the castle had failed, with a heart full of pain and grief he sent Herse and some of the other men to gather news of the direction in which the Squire had fled. He felt especially troubled about a rich nunnery for ladies of rank, Erlabrunn by name, which was situated on the shores of the Mulde, and whose abbess, Antonia Tronka, was celebrated in the neighborhood as a pious, charitable, and saintly woman. The unhappy Kohlhaas thought it only too probable that the Squire, stripped as he was of all necessities, had taken refuge in this nunnery, since the abbess was his own aunt and had been his governess in his early childhood. After informing himself of these particulars, Kohlhaas ascended the tower of the castellan's quarters in the interior of which there was still a habitable room, and there he drew up a so-called "Kohlhaas mandate" in which he warned the country not to offer assistance to Squire Wenzel Tronka, against whom he was waging just warfare, and, furthermore, commanded every inhabitant, instead, relatives and friends not excepted, to surrender him under penalty of death and the inevitable burning down of everything that might be called property.

This declaration he scattered broadcast in the surrounding country through travelers and strangers; he even went so far as to give Waldmann, his servant, a copy of it, with definite instructions to carry it to Erlabrunn and place it in the hands of Lady Antonia. Thereupon he had a talk with some of the servants of Tronka Castle who were dissatisfied with the Squire and, attracted by the prospect of plunder, wished to enter the horse-dealer's service. He armed them after the manner of foot-soldiers, with cross-bows and daggers, taught them how to mount behind the men on horseback, and after he had turned into money everything that the company had collected and had distributed it among them, he spent some hours in the gateway of the castle, resting after his sorry labor.

Toward midday Herse came and confirmed what Kohlhaas' heart, which was always filled with the most gloomy forebodings, had already told him—namely, that the Squire was then in the nunnery of Erlabrunn with the old Lady Antonia Tronka, his aunt. It seemed that, through a door in the rear wall behind the castle, leading into the open air, he had escaped down a narrow stone stairway which, protected by a little roof, ran down to a few boats on the Elbe. At least, Herse reported that at midnight the Squire in a skiff without rudder or oars had arrived at a village on the Elbe, to the great astonishment of the inhabitants who were assembled on account of the fire at Tronka Castle and that he had gone on toward Erlabrunn in a village cart.

Kohlhaas sighed deeply at this news; he asked whether the horses had been fed, and when they answered "Yes," he had his men mount, and in three hours' time he was at the gates of Erlabrunn. Amid the rumbling of a distant storm on the horizon, he and his troop entered the courtyard of the convent with torches which they had lighted before reaching the spot. Just as Waldmann, his servant, came forward to announce that the mandate had been duly delivered, Kohlhaas saw the abbess and the chapter-warden step out under the portal of the nunnery, engaged in agitated conversation. While the chapter-warden, a little old man with snow-white hair, shooting furious glances at Kohlhaas, was having his armor put on and, in a bold voice, called to the men-servants surrounding him to ring the storm-bell, the abbess, white as a sheet, and holding the silver image of the Crucified One in her hand, descended the sloping driveway and, with all her nuns, flung herself down before Kohlhaas' horse.

Herse and Sternbald overpowered the chapter-warden, who had no sword in his hand, and led him off as a prisoner among the horses, while Kohlhaas asked the abbess where Squire Wenzel Tronka was. She unfastened from her girdle a large ring of keys, and answered, "In Wittenberg, Kohlhaas, worthy man!"—adding, in a shaking voice, "Fear God, and do no wrong!" Kohlhaas, plunged back into the hell of unsatisfied thirst for revenge, wheeled his horse and was about to cry, "Set fire to the buildings!" when a terrific thunder-bolt struck close beside him. Turning his horse around again toward the abbess he asked her whether she had received his mandate. The lady answered in a weak, scarcely audible voice—"Just a few moments ago!" "When?" "Two hours after the Squire, my nephew, had taken his departure, as truly as God is my help!" When Waldmann, the groom, to whom Kohlhaas turned with a lowering glance, stammered out a confirmation of this fact, saying that the waters of the Mulde, swollen by the rain, had prevented his arriving until a few moments ago, Kohlhaas came to his senses. A sudden, terrible downpour of rain, sweeping across the pavement of the courtyard and extinguishing the torches, relaxed the tension of the unhappy man's grief; doffing his hat curtly to the abbess, he wheeled his horse, dug in his spurs, calling "Follow me, my brothers; the Squire is in Wittenberg," and left the nunnery.

The night having set in, he stopped at an inn on the highroad, and had to rest here for a day because the horses were so exhausted. As he clearly saw that with a troop of ten men (for his company numbered that many now) he could not defy a place like Wittenberg, he drew up a second mandate, in which, after a short account of what had happened to him in the land, he summoned "every good Christian," as he expressed it, to whom he "solemnly promised bounty-money and other perquisites of war, to take up his quarrel against Squire Tronka as the common enemy of all Christians." In another mandate which appeared shortly after this he called himself "a free gentleman of the Empire and of the World, subject only to God"—an example of morbid and misplaced fanaticism which, nevertheless, with the sound of his money and the prospect of plunder, procured him a crowd of recruits from among the rabble, whom the peace with Poland had deprived of a livelihood. In fact, he had thirty-odd men when he crossed back to the right side of the Elbe, bent upon reducing Wittenberg to ashes.

He encamped with horses and men in an old tumble-down brick-kiln, in the solitude of a dense forest which surrounded the town at that time. No sooner had Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the city with the mandate, brought him word that it was already known there, than he set out with his troop on the eve of Whitsuntide; and while the citizens lay sound asleep, he set the town on fire at several points simultaneously. At the same time, while his men were plundering the suburbs, he fastened a paper to the door-post of a church to the effect that "he, Kohlhaas, had set the city on fire, and if the Squire were not delivered to him he would burn down the city so completely that," as he expressed it, "he would not need to look behind any wall to find him."

The terror of the citizens at such an unheard-of outrage was indescribable, though, as it was fortunately a rather calm summer night, the flames had not destroyed more than nineteen buildings, among which, however, was a church. Toward daybreak, as soon as the fire had been partially extinguished, the aged Governor of the province, Otto von Gorgas, sent out immediately a company of fifty men to capture the bloodthirsty madman. The captain in command of the company, Gerstenberg by name, bore himself so badly, however, that the whole expedition, instead of subduing Kohlhaas, rather helped him to a most dangerous military reputation. For the captain separated his men into several divisions, with the intention of surrounding and crushing Kohlhaas; but the latter, holding his troop together, attacked and beat him at isolated points, so that by the evening of the following day, not a single man of the whole company in which the hopes of the country were centred, remained in the field against him. Kohlhaas, who had lost some of his men in these fights, again set fire to the city on the morning of the next day, and his murderous measures were so well taken that once more a number of houses and almost all the barns in the suburbs were burned down. At the same time he again posted the well-known mandate, this time, furthermore, on the corners of the city hall itself, and he added a notice concerning the fate of Captain von Gerstenberg who had been sent against him by the Governor, and whom he had overwhelmingly defeated.

The Governor of the province, highly incensed at this defiance, placed himself with several knights at the head of a troop of one hundred and fifty men. At a written request he gave Squire Wenzel Tronka a guard to protect him from the violence of the people, who flatly insisted that he must be removed from the city. After the Governor had had guards placed in all the villages in the vicinity, and also had sentinels stationed on the city walls to prevent a surprise, he himself set out on Saint Gervaise's day to capture the dragon who was devastating the land. The horse-dealer was clever enough to keep out of the way of this troop. By skilfully executed marches he enticed the Governor five leagues away from the city, and by means of various manoeuvres he gave the other the mistaken notion that, hard pressed by superior numbers, he was going to throw himself into Brandenburg. Then, when the third night closed in, he made a forced ride back to Wittenberg, and for the third time set fire to the city. Herse, who crept into the town in disguise, carried out this horrible feat of daring, and because of a sharp north wind that was blowing, the fire proved so destructive and spread so rapidly that in less than three hours forty-two houses, two churches, several convents and schools, and the very residence of the electoral governor of the province were reduced to ruins and ashes.

The Governor who, when the day broke, believed his adversary to be in Brandenburg, returned by forced marches when informed of what had happened, and found the city in a general uproar. The people were massed by thousands around the Squire's house, which was barricaded with heavy timbers and posts, and with wild cries they demanded his expulsion from the city. Two burgomasters, Jenkens and Otto by name, who were present in their official dress at the head of the entire city council, tried in vain to explain that they absolutely must await the return of a courier who had been dispatched to the President of the Chancery of State for permission to send the Squire to Dresden, whither he himself, for many reasons, wished to go. The unreasoning crowd, armed with pikes and staves, cared nothing for these words. After handling rather roughly some councilors who were insisting upon the adoption of vigorous measures, the mob was about to storm the house where the Squire was and level it to the ground, when the Governor, Otto von Gorgas, appeared in the city at the head of his troopers. This worthy gentleman, who was wont by his mere presence to inspire people to respectful obedience, had, as though in compensation for the failure of the expedition from which he was returning, succeeded in taking prisoner three stray members of the incendiary's band, right in front of the gates of the city. While the prisoners were being loaded with chains before the eyes of the people, he made a clever speech to the city councilors, assuring them that he was on Kohlhaas' track and thought that he would soon be able to bring the incendiary himself in chains. By force of all these reassuring circumstances he succeeded in allaying the fears of the assembled crowd and in partially reconciling them to the presence of the Squire until the return of the courier from Dresden. He dismounted from his horse and, accompanied by some knights, entered the house after the posts and stockades had been cleared away. He found the Squire, who was falling from one faint into another, in the hands of two doctors, who with essences and stimulants were trying to restore him to consciousness. As Sir Otto von Gorgas realized that this was not the moment to exchange any words with him on the subject of the behavior of which he had been guilty, he merely told him, with a look of quiet contempt, to dress himself, and, for his own safety, to follow him to the apartments of the knight's prison. They put a doublet and a helmet on the Squire and when, with chest half bare on account of the difficulty he had in breathing, he appeared in the street on the arm of the Governor and his brother-in-law, the Count of Gerschau, blasphemous and horrible curses against him rose to heaven. The mob, whom the lansquenets found it very difficult to restrain, called him a bloodsucker, a miserable public pest and a tormentor of men, the curse of the city of Wittenberg, and the ruin of Saxony. After a wretched march through the devastated city, in the course of which the Squire's helmet fell off several times without his missing it and had to be replaced on his head by the knight who was behind him, they reached the prison at last, where he disappeared into a tower under the protection of a strong guard. Meanwhile the return of the courier with the decree of the Elector had aroused fresh alarm in the city. For the Saxon government, to which the citizens of Dresden had made direct application in an urgent petition, refused to permit the Squire to sojourn in the electoral capital before the incendiary had been captured. The Governor was instructed rather to use all the power at his command to protect the Squire just where he was, since he had to stay somewhere, but in order to pacify the good city of Wittenberg, the inhabitants were informed that a force of five hundred men under the command of Prince Friedrich of Meissen was already on the way to protect them from further molestation on the part of Kohlhaas.

The Governor saw clearly that a decree of this kind was wholly inadequate to pacify the people. For not only had several small advantages gained by the horse-dealer in skirmishes outside the city sufficed to spread extremely disquieting rumors as to the size to which his band had grown; his way of waging warfare with ruffians in disguise who slunk about under cover of darkness with pitch, straw, and sulphur, unheard of and quite without precedent as it was, would have rendered ineffectual an even larger protecting force than the one which was advancing under the Prince of Meissen. After reflecting a short time, the Governor determined therefore to suppress altogether the decree he had received; he merely posted at all the street corners a letter from the Prince of Meissen, announcing his arrival. At daybreak a covered wagon left the courtyard of the knight's prison and took the road to Leipzig, accompanied by four heavily armed troopers who, in an indefinite sort of way, let it be understood that they were bound for the Pleissenburg. The people having thus been satisfied on the subject of the ill-starred Squire, whose existence seemed identified with fire and sword, the Governor himself set out with a force of three hundred men to join Prince Friedrich of Meissen. In the mean time Kohlhaas, thanks to the strange position which he had assumed in the world, had in truth increased the numbers of his band to one hundred and nine men, and he had also collected in Jessen a store of weapons with which he had fully armed them. When informed of the two tempests that were sweeping down upon him, he decided to go to meet them with the speed of the hurricane before they should join to overwhelm him. In accordance with this plan he attacked the Prince of Meissen the very next night, surprising him near Mühlberg. In this fight, to be sure, he was greatly grieved to lose Herse, who was struck down at his side by the first shots but, embittered by this loss, in a three-hour battle he so roughly handled the Prince of Meissen, who was unable to collect his forces in the town, that at break of day the latter was obliged to take the road back to Dresden, owing to several severe wounds which he had received and the complete disorder into which his troops had been thrown. Kohlhaas, made foolhardy by this victory, turned back to attack the Governor before the latter could learn of it, fell upon him at midday in the open country near the village of Damerow, and fought him until nightfall, with murderous losses, to be sure, but with corresponding success. Indeed, the next morning he would certainly with the remnant of his band have renewed the attack on the Governor, who had thrown himself into the churchyard at Damerow, if the latter had not received through spies the news of the defeat of the Prince at Mühlberg and therefore deemed it wiser to return to Wittenberg to await a more propitious moment.

Five days after the dispersion of these two bodies of troops, Kohlhaas arrived before Leipzig and set fire to the city on three different sides. In the mandate which he scattered broadcast on this occasion he called himself "a vicegerent of the archangel Michael who had come to visit upon all who, in this controversy, should take the part of the Squire, punishment by fire and sword for the villainy into which the whole world was plunged." At the same time, having surprised the castle at Lützen and fortified himself in it, he summoned the people to join him and help establish a better order of things. With a sort of insane fanaticism the mandate was signed: "Done at the seat of our provisional world government, our ancient castle at Lützen."