The Marquise of O and Other Stories (14 page)

As the third night was falling he assaulted the castle with this handful of men, riding down the toll-keeper and the guard who were standing in conversation in the gateway. They set fire to every outhouse in the curtilage, and as these burst into flames Kohlhaas rushed into the castle to find the Junker, while Herse dashed up the spiral staircase into the warden's tower and fell with cut and thrust upon him and the steward, who were sitting half undressed playing cards together. It was as if the avenging angel of heaven had descended on the place. The Junker, amid much laughter, was in the act of reading aloud to a gathering of young friends the edict issued to him by the horse-dealer: but no sooner had he heard the latter's voice in the courtyard than, turning as white as a sheet, he cried out to the company: ‘Brothers, save yourselves!' and vanished. Kohlhaas entered
the hall, seized Junker Hans von Tronka, as he came towards him, by the jerkin and hurled him into a corner, dashing out his brains against the stones. As his men overpowered and dispersed the other noblemen, who had drawn their swords, he demanded to know where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was; but in their dazed bewilderment none of them could tell him, and when, after kicking down the doors of two rooms that led into the wings of the castle, he had searched everywhere in the vast building but found no one, Kohlhaas went down into the courtyard, cursing, to see that the exits were guarded. In the meantime heavy smoke was billowing skywards from the castle, which with all its wings had caught fire from the burning outhouses, and while Sternbald and three grooms busied themselves dragging out everything that was movable, heaving it over the horses as legitimate plunder, Herse with triumphant shouts hurled the corpses of the warden, the steward and their wives and children out of the open windows of the tower. As Kohlhaas was coming downstairs from the castle the gouty old housekeeper who managed the Junker's household threw herself at his feet, and stopping on the stairs he asked her where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was. When she replied in a weak trembling voice that she thought he had taken refuge in the chapel, he called over two grooms with torches and, having no key, told them to break open the door with crowbars and axes; he overturned the altar and pews, but to his fury found no trace of the Junker. By chance, just as Kohlhaas was coming out of the chapel again, a young groom who served at Tronka Castle rushed up to take the Junker's chargers out of a large stone-built stable that was in danger of catching fire. At exactly that instant Kohlhaas espied his two blacks in a small thatched shed and asked the groom why he was not rescuing them. When the latter said that the shed was already on fire and put the key in the stable door, Kohlhaas violently snatched it out of the keyhole, threw it over the wall, and amid terrible laughter from his
men as they looked on, let fall a hail of blows on the boy with the flat of his sword and drove him into the burning shed to save the blacks. Yet when the groom emerged, white with terror and holding the horses, only a few moments before the shed collapsed behind him, he could not find Kohlhaas. When he joined the other grooms in the courtyard and asked the horse-dealer, who turned his back on him several times, what he should now do with the animals, Kohlhaas suddenly raised his foot to him in so terrifying a manner that if he had delivered the kick it would have killed him. Then, without a further word, he mounted his bay, rode to the castle-gate and, while the grooms continued their plundering, he silently awaited daybreak.

When morning came the entire castle had been burnt out, leaving nothing but walls and no one but Kohlhaas and his seven men in it. He dismounted and again searched every nook and cranny of the site, which was now bathed in bright sunshine. Hard as it was for him, he had to admit that the expedition to the castle had failed and so, with his heart full of sorrow and anguish, he dispatched Herse and some of the grooms to discover in which direction the Junker had taken flight. He was especially perturbed at the thought of a wealthy convent called Erlabrunn, situated on the banks of the Mulde: its Abbess, Antonia von Tronka, was known in the district as a pious, generous and saintly woman, and to the luckless Kohlhaas it seemed only too likely that the Junker, bereft of all necessities, had sought refuge at this convent, since the Abbess was his own aunt and had brought him up in early childhood. In the warden's tower there was still a room fit to be lived in, and when Kohlhaas had received this information he went up to it and composed what he called a ‘Declaration under the Writ of Kohlhaas' in which he called upon the country to withhold all aid and comfort from Junker Wenzel von Tronka, against whom he was engaged in a just war; instead he required every inhabitant, not excepting his relatives and
friends, to surrender the Junker to Kohlhaas on pain of death and the certain destruction by fire of whatever they possessed. He had this declaration distributed throughout the region by travellers and strangers, and in particular he gave his groom Waldmann a copy with express instructions to deliver it personally to the lady Antonia, Abbess of Erlabrunn. Thereupon he spoke to a number of the servants at Tronka Castle who had been ill-satisfied with the Junker and, attracted by the thought of plunder, wanted to serve Kohlhaas instead. He armed them as infantrymen with cross-bows and short-swords, and instructed them how to ride behind the mounted grooms. And when he had sold off everything that the men had collected and distributed the money among them, he took in the castle gateway a few hours' rest from his grim labours.

Towards noon Herse returned and confirmed what his heart, always prepared for the worst turn of events, had already told him: the Junker was in the convent at Erlabrunn with the aged Lady Abbess Antonia von Tronka, his aunt. Apparently he had escaped through a door in the back wall of the castle that led out into the open and by a roofed-over stone stairway that took him down to some boats on the Elbe. Herse reported that at midnight he had reached a village on the river in an oarless and rudderless skiff, much to the astonishment of the inhabitants who had gathered at the sight of the fire at Tronka Castle; he had then left for Erlabrunn in a vehicle from the village. At this news Kohlhaas sighed deeply; he asked whether the horses had been fed and, when he was told that they had, he ordered his men to mount and reached Erlabrunn within three hours. Accompanied by the rumble of a thunderstorm on the distant horizon and with freshly lit torches, he and his troop rode into the courtyard of the convent. The groom Waldmann came to meet him and was just reporting that the writ had been properly handed over when the Abbess and the convent administrator appeared in the doorway,
talking to each other in agitation. The administrator, an aged little man with snow-white hair, glared fiercely at Kohlhaas as his armour was strapped on, and boldly ordered the servants surrounding him to sound the alarm bell; meanwhile the Lady Abbess, as white as a sheet, with a silver crucifix in her hand, came down from the terrace and together with all her nuns threw herself on her knees before Kohlhaas's horse. While Herse and Sternbald overpowered the administrator, who had no sword, and led him off as their prisoner among the horses, Kohlhaas asked her where Junker Wenzel von Tronka was. Unfastening a great ring of keys from her girdle, she answered: ‘In Wittenberg, worthy Kohlhaas!', and added in a quavering voice: ‘Fear God and do no wrong!' At this Kohlhaas, hurled back into the hellish torment of unsatisfied revenge, turned his horse and was about to give the order to set the convent on fire, when a huge thunderbolt struck the ground close beside him. Wheeling his horse round to her again, he asked if she had received his writ. The lady answered in a weak and barely audible voice: ‘Only this minute!' ‘When?' ‘Two hours, as God is my judge, after my nephew the Junker had already left!' And when the groom, Waldmann, to whom Kohlhaas turned with menacing looks, had stuttered a confirmation of this, explaining that flood-water from the Mulde had delayed his arrival until now, Kohlhaas regained his composure. A sudden terrible deluge of rain, beating down on the cobbles of the courtyard, extinguished the torches and relieved the anguish in his tormented heart. Briefly saluting the Abbess with his hat he turned his horse round, and shouting ‘Follow me, brothers! The Junker is in Wittenberg!', he dug in his spurs and rode out of the convent.

As night fell, he stopped at an inn beside the highway, where he had to rest for a day because the horses were so exhausted. Well realizing that he could not challenge a town such as Wittenberg with a band of ten men (for that
was his present strength) he composed a second writ. After a short account of what had befallen him in Saxony, he called on ‘every good Christian', as he put it, ‘to take up his cause against Junker von Tronka as the universal enemy of all Christians', and promised them ‘pay and other perquisites of war'. In another declaration issued soon after, he styled himself ‘a freeman of the Empire and the world, subject to God alone'. These expressions of his diseased and deluded fanaticism nonetheless brought him an influx of recruits from among riff-raff who, deprived of a living by the peace with Poland, were drawn by the sound of money and the prospect of plunder. So it was that he had thirty or more men with him when he returned along the right bank of the Elbe fully intending to burn Wittenberg to the ground. He camped with his horses and men under the roof of an old dilapidated brick shed in the solitude of a dark wood which in those days encircled the place. No sooner had he learnt from Sternbald, whom he had sent in disguise into the town with the writ, that it had already been made public there, than he and his band broke camp on Whitsun Eve. While the inhabitants were fast asleep he set fire to the town in several places at once, and as his men plundered the outskirts, he fastened up a notice on a church door, stating that he, Kohlhaas, had set fire to the town and that if the Junker were not handed over he would continue to raze it until, as he put it, ‘he would not need to search behind any walls to find him'.

The inhabitants were terrified beyond words at this incredible outrage. Fortunately it was a fairly calm summer's night and the fire destroyed only nineteen buildings, though these did include a church; but as soon as the flames had been brought under some control towards daybreak, the aged governor, Otto von Gorgas, sent out a company of fifty men to capture the savage monster. The captain in command, however, Gerstenberg by name, adopted such poor tactics that the expedition, so far from defeating Kohlhaas,
merely helped him to gain a most formidable military reputation; for when this officer split up his company into several detachments with the object, as he thought, of surrounding and so crushing Kohlhaas, the latter kept his force together, attacked at separate points and defeated his opponent piecemeal. Indeed by the evening of the following day, not one man of this entire troop on which the country had placed its hopes still stood in the field against him. Having lost some of his own men in this skirmish, Kohlhaas on the morning of the next day again set the town alight, and his deadly methods were so effective that a large number of houses and almost all the barns on the outskirts of the city were burnt to the ground. Once more he posted up the self-same writ, this time to the corners of the town hall itself, adding details of the fate of Captain von Gerstenberg whom the governor had sent out and whom he had routed. Outraged by his defiance, the governor set out with some cavalry at the head of a force one hundred and fifty strong. Upon Junker Wenzel von Tronka's written request, he gave him a bodyguard to protect him against any violence by the people of Wittenberg, who were determined that he should leave the town. After placing patrols in all the surrounding villages and leaving guards along the town walls to prevent any surprise attack, he himself rode out on St Gervaise's Day to capture the dragon who was devastating the land. The horse-dealer was cunning enough to evade this force; by skilful marching he lured the governor five leagues away from the town, and by various manoeuvres deluded him into thinking that in the face of numerical superiority he had fallen back into Brandenburg; then suddenly, as darkness fell on the third evening, he wheeled back at a gallop to Wittenberg and set it on fire for the third time. Herse, who had slipped into the town in disguise, carried out this dreadful feat, and the flames, fanned by a strong northerly wind, spread so fiercely and voraciously that within three hours they had reduced forty-two houses, two churches, several
monasteries and schools and the Electoral governor's own residence to rubble and ashes. When the governor, who at dawn had believed his opponent to be in Brandenburg, was informed of what had happened, he returned in forced marches to find the town in general uproar. The people in their thousands were besieging the Junker's house, which had been barricaded with beams and posts, demanding with frenzied clamour his expulsion from the town. Two burgomasters, Jenkens and Otto by name, were standing in their official robes at the head of the entire council, vainly pointing out that they had no choice but to await the return of a courier sent to the President of the State Chancellery to obtain permission for the Junker's removal to Dresden, where he himself wished to go for a number of reasons. The unreasoning mob, armed with pikes and staves, paid no heed to these words, roughly handled some of the councillors who were calling for drastic measures, and were on the point of storming the house occupied by the Junker and levelling it to the ground when the governor, Otto von Gorgas, entered the town at the head of his cavalry. This worthy gentleman, who was accustomed to inspiring respect and obedience by his mere presence, had managed, as if by way of making amends for the failure of the expedition from which he was returning, to catch three stray members of the incendiary's band right in front of the city gates. As the prisoners were publicly put in chains, he assured the council in a shrewdly worded speech that he was confident of bringing in Kohlhaas himself the same way before long, for he was hot on his trail; and he thus succeeded, thanks to these various reassuring circumstances, in disarming the crowd's fears, and putting their minds to some extent at rest about the continued presence of the Junker until the courier returned from Dresden. Accompanied by some cavalrymen he dismounted and, when the pallisades and posts had been removed, entered the house; here he found the Junker repeatedly swooning, and attended by two
doctors who were trying to revive him with essences and stimulants. Otto von Gorgas judged that this was not the moment to exchange words with him about his shameful behaviour, but merely told him with a look of silent contempt to get dressed and for his own safety to follow him to quarters reserved for prisoners of rank. When they had put a doublet on the Junker and a helmet on his head and he reappeared in the street, with his breast half exposed to ease his breathing and with the governor and his brother-in-law Count von Gerschau supporting him, a chorus of frightful curses and blasphemies rose to high heaven all round him. The people, whom the lansquenets could barely restrain, called him a blood-sucker, a wretched public menace and tormentor of mankind, the bane of Wittenberg and the ruin of Saxony; and after a pathetic procession through the wreckage of the town, during which his helmet several times fell off without his missing it, so that a knight following behind had to push it back on again, the prison was finally reached and the Junker disappeared into a tower under heavy guard.