As Jacob fretted over his soul, his sons, knowing as sons always do that the war would come to them, increased the training program for the village militia. By the summer of 1625 Krummel possessed a tough, gristy band of forty fighting men which they assumed could hold the approaches to the valley against any foraging parties from either side – but, needless to say, they couldn't hold it against Jacob Slagsted. During that same summer, on a trip to Saxony with the second brewing, he heard that the Danes had entered the war. Jacob had been more or less drunk for seven years now, and although there is some indication that he didn't know who the Danes were, he hated them and decided to throw his strength and manpower on the other side, the Catholic side, the forces of the Virgin.
Off he marched with his small, merry band, provisioned with bread and beer, more frightened of Jacob than any Danes, whoever they might be, and ready for war. Thus the Lutheran conqueror of Krummel joined the Catholic armies of the emperor and, by mistakenly marching south in search of Danes, merged with the army of the mercenary, Wallenstein, Duke of Friedland.
The Duke must have been attracted to this mad, drunken giant because he personally signed the contract with Jacob for these forty men. Jacob and his sons prospered under Wallenstein and were all officers by April of 1626 when they fought Mansfeld at Dessau on the Elbe. In the fall of the same year Jacob commanded a company which returned from Wallenstein's pursuit of Mansfeld to reinforce Tilly against King Christian and his Danes. Jacob's hatred for the Danes hadn't been banked by a year of fighting. In the battle at Lutten, Jacob led a charge on the King's party, killed Christian's horse and, if his blade hadn't stuck in a Danish adjutant's skull, would have killed Christian too. For this Jacob was promoted to second-in-command under Wallenstein's Lieutenant Hans George von Arvim, and with him advanced into Brandenburg in 1627, wintered in Jutland, then took part in the unsuccessful attack of Stralsund on the Pomeranian coast. During the first hour of the attack Bernard's horse was frightened by a Catholic short-round, and it trampled Bernard to death. Jacob somehow blamed the loss on the North Sea, the Danes; he cried for the Virgin, but she obviously preferred the warmer, greener pastures to the south, and his prayers were lost on the gray, northern wind.
But three sons remained. The fighting became occasional; small, inconclusive engagements now and again. In August of 1630 they went with Wallenstein, who had resigned, back to Friedland as part of the Duke's personal staff guard. While resting at Friedland, the Duke gave Jacob title to the lands in the valley of Krummel and a title, Graf Jacob Slagsted of Krummel. But Jacob gave nothing: he lied about the location of the valley. Because of the rest Jacob thankfully missed the sack and burning of Magdeburg, the Virgin City, and Tilly's defeat by the Swedes at Breitenfeld in Saxony.
After two years of rest the Slagsteds marched to join Maximilian of Bavaria. On the march Georg fell to the plague and died in a muddy ditch filled with swimming rats. Jacob seemed old after this; the only joyful note in the journal after the death of Georg is a remark about the death of King Gustavus Adolphus at the Battle of Lutzen: "Ya, sehr gut." The next entry is dated February 25, 1634, the day after Wallenstein had been assassinated by English mercenaries at Eger: "Schade, schade. Ich werde nach Hause weidergehen." Then the long journey home, back to Krummel for the first time in nine years, across fields sown with barren seed, reaped with sorrow, through towns of vacant stares and constant corteges of the living dead, over a land tired, torn, wasted – and the war had come to Krummel too, so that the landscape of war didn't end, but continued beyond all human belief. Jacob closed the road into the valley, hoping to save something, and he closed his heart and locked himself in a room with his Bible, read till his eyes went out, then gave up that ghost he'd held so firmly, the spirit of war. He did his best to live a quiet life in the old monastery, brewing a little beer, having Johann read the Bible, and, if not pleased, at least satisfied to grow old in peace.
But war remained in the hearts of his sons and, with the strength of youth, they found farming too little of life for them. Jacob gave Johann the leather Bible, the journal, and the camphor box when he and Hugo went to France to fight against the Spanish in 1636. (Nothing more is known about Jacob or Krummel; the sons of his body and spirit never returned. The village ceased to exist so long ago, no records even remain, no trace, no knowledge, no sign, even though my father found several valleys where it might have been, could have been, on a six-week leave in '45. God forbid that Jacob's grave should lie wrapped in the red tape of another splintered Germany.)
As to the sons – by 1640 Johann led his own mercenary army of three hundred well-trained, hand-picked men. They were provisioned and not allowed to forage or pillage on friendly lands. They were well paid and, unlike other mercenary troops such as the German lansquenet, uniformed for war instead of show: a tunic with a stiff, thick leather breastplate, boots of waterproof Russian leather, a tight fitting, unadorned helmet. The three hundred were cavalry unlike any other contemporary horsemen: they fought on the ground as often as on horse. In Spain the three hundred held the line against a thousand Spanish, beat them off three times, then attacked and chased them until dark. But the best aspect of the Slagsted of Krummel army was its reliability; contracts were signed for durations instead of months which meant that they wouldn't change sides in the middle of a battle, anyway.
This paid army, because of its compact size, survived the change from mercenary to national armies, and during the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century fought and served as personal guards for every political organization which could afford them. Descendants of Jacob Slagsted controlled the army, maintained its size at three hundred, kept up the family literacy outside military academies, married fine horses of women, and by 1776 had spilled, in love and war, the bloods of Europe: Irish, Dutch, Polish, Magyar, Finn, Swede, Jewish, Alsatian, Prussian, and Greek, at least. But in 1781 the Slagsted-Krummel's, as they were known, came to the New World, and like all who came to America, lost everything in the coming.
They arrived in Boston only to discover the war was over. The ship with the men and arms was impounded by the authorites and guarded by a warship, a refitted cutter which had seen no duty. The brothers in charge, Johann and Otto, were obviously gentlemen because of the size of their bribes and were let ashore. Johann rode to Philadelphia to get the release order, and Otto gambled and drank away all the money in the waterfront pubs of Boston. When Johann returned with a release order, two slick colonialists had another for him, impounding his men as bond servants to fulfill Otto's debts. Johann traded his horse for the family chest, signed the papers, then he and Otto rode south on one horse, knowing, I suppose, what was going to happen. When the colonialists tried to collect their servants, the men – still armed because no one had the nerve to try to disarm them – killed the Americans, blew the cutter to hell, stole the ship, and sailed away into an untraceable sea, perhaps slipping ashore later to add themselves to the great number of scoundrels and cutthroats already in America. Otto managed a commission in the Virginia militia, but Johann, tired of Otto and armies, rode on south and west.