The Reformation caused a slight ripple in the placid pond of Krummel; Jacob and the one-eyed man, who had silently appeared the next day, ran the brewery, the brothers became laborers, and the villagers farmed as always. Jacob married in a mass ceremony in which he married all the other brothers and their sinful women. Life was peaceful; living was good. Jacob's old wounds didn't ache so badly, and the beer sales to John George kept Jacob from drinking the village out of house and barrel. Oh, an occasional befuddled tax collector from the abbot's office blundered into the village; those unconverted by drink and fine living were buried with full rites by Jacob in the forest. But another came searching accompanied by five men-at-arms, and wasn't so easily disposed of. So Jacob, the one-eyed man, and several of Jacob's friends who had found shelter in the village began training the young men of the village in the varied pleasures of combat. The farmers and brewers took well to the excitement of pike and musket, and defeated, in ambush, several larger groups of tax men, some of whom came from the abbot's office and others from a duchy in Bohemia who unfortunately mistook Krummel for some other delinquent village. But all in all these were the quiet years, and during them Jacob produced four living sons, Johann, Georg, Bernard and Hugo.
But Europe wasn't quiet; the Holy Roman Empire was begetting wars as plentifully as soldiers bastard children in a foreign land. In 1618 the new Catholic deputy-governor and his secretary, appointed by Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, King of Bohemia, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, had been attacked by a Protestant mob in Prague. The mob heaved the new deputy-governor and his secretary out of an upper-story window, exclaiming, "Now call on your Mary to save you!" When they looked out the window they saw, some sixty feet below, the two good Catholics running across the lawn.
Two years later when Jacob heard about the incident while on a trip to Dresden, he remarked in his journal, "She did, my God, She did." He began drinking heavily before breakfast and feeling badly about it. And once more he walked alone in the hills.
While Jacob brooded, Central Europe stumbled through the beginnings of the Thirty Years' War, and it wasn't long before this match between pestilence and war, with man as the loser, provided Jacob with more evidence of the Blessed Virgin's interference in worldly affairs. At the Battle of the Neiber River the Margrave of Baden led Protestant forces against the Catholics, Spanish under Cordoba and Bavarians under Tilly. The superior reformers had nearly carried the day when suddenly the figure of the Virgin was seen to rise over the Protestant lines. The Catholics, devout souls all, rallied, regrouped and re-charged, shattering the Protestant lines with the courage of their devotion. (An ammunition dump in the Protestant rear had exploded and the resultant pillar of fire and smoke had been so identified by some nameless, abstract soul – which I suppose only proves that, in spite of all the grand military academies and their graduates, battles, and perhaps wars, are as wonderfully absurd in execution as poetry.) When Jacob heard of the miracle he actually wept (his tears, as tears will, still stain the journal pages); he cried for days as he clambered about the wooded hills, crawling as often as he walked, followed by a small boy carrying a small keg of beer.
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.)