Toward midday soldiers approached them. First a group of pikemen: feral people with shaggy beards. Some had open wounds, others were dragging sacks full of booty. A smell of sweat, disease, and blood hung over them, and they gazed with small, hostile eyes. They were followed by covered wagons, on which their women and children were sitting. A few of the women were holding infants tight. We saw only the devastation of the bodies, the fat count wrote later, but whether friend or foe could not be discerned, for they carried no standard.
After the pikemen came a good dozen horsemen.
“Godspeed,” said a man who was apparently their leader. “Where are you bound?”
“For the abbey,” said the fat count.
“We’re just coming from there. Nothing to eat there.”
“We’re not looking for food. We’re looking for Tyll Ulenspiegel.”
“Yes, he’s there. We saw him, but we had to make off when the Kaiser’s men came.”
The fat count turned pale.
“Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you. I’m Hans Kloppmess from Hamburg. I was once one of the Kaiser’s men too. And maybe I’ll be one again, who knows? A soldier has a trade, no less than a carpenter or baker. The army is my guild. There in the wagon I have a wife and children. I have to feed them. At the moment the French aren’t paying anything, but when they do pay, then it will be more than you get from the Kaiser. In Westphalia the great lords are negotiating peace. When the war ends, all the men will get their outstanding pay, you can count on that, because without the pay we would refuse to go home, the lords are afraid of that. Nice horses you have there!”
“Thank you,” said the fat count.
“Could really use them,” said Hans Kloppmess.
Worriedly the fat count turned to look at his dragoons.
“Where are you coming from?” asked Hans Kloppmess.
“Vienna,” the fat count said hoarsely.
“I was almost in Vienna once,” said the horseman next to Hans Kloppmess.
“What, really?” asked Hans Kloppmess. “You, in Vienna?”
“Only almost. Didn’t make it there.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing happened, I didn’t make it to Vienna.”
“Keep away from Starnberg,” said Hans Kloppmess. “It would be best to head south past Gauting, then toward Herrsching, then from there to the abbey. The road is still open to foot travelers. But hurry. Turenne and Wrangel have already crossed the Danube. Soon sparks will be flying.”
“We’re no foot travelers,” said Karl von Doder.
“Just wait and see.”
No command was necessary, no consultation. All of them spurred their horses. The fat count bent down over the neck of the animal and held on tight, clinging to both reins and mane. He saw the earth spraying under the hooves, he heard shouts behind him, he heard the report of a shot, he resisted the temptation to look back.
They rode and rode, and kept on riding and riding. His back ached unbearably, he had no strength left in his legs, and he didn’t dare turn his head. Alongside him rode Franz Kärrnbauer, in front of him rode Konrad Purner and Karl von Doder, behind him rode Stefan Purner.
Finally they stopped. The horses were steaming with sweat. Everything went black before the fat count’s eyes. He slid out of the saddle. Franz Kärrnbauer supported him and helped him dismount. The soldiers hadn’t followed them. It had begun to snow. Whitish gray flakes drifted in the air. When he caught one of them on his finger, he recognized that it was ash.
Karl von Doder patted his horse’s neck. “South past Gauting, he said, then toward Herrsching. The horses are thirsty, they need water.”
They mounted again. Silently they rode through the falling ash. They no longer encountered anyone, and in the late afternoon they saw above them the tower of the abbey.
Here Martin von Wolkenstein’s life’s chronicle makes a leap: he doesn’t say a word about the steep ascent beyond Herrsching, which cannot have been easy for the horses, nor is there anything about the half-destroyed abbey building and no description of the monks. This was due to his memory, of course, but it was probably due even more to the nervous impatience that came over him while writing. And so readers find him two turbid lines later already opposite the abbot, in the early morning hours of the next day.
They sat on two stools in an empty hall. The furniture had been looted, destroyed, or burned. There had been tapestries too, said the abbot, silver candleholders and a large cross made of gold above the door arch over there. Now the light came from a single pitchwood torch. Father Friesenegger spoke matter-of-factly and tersely; nonetheless, the fat count’s eyes fell shut several times. Again and again he started, only to notice that the gaunt man had meanwhile gone on talking. The fat count would have liked to take a rest, but the abbot wanted to tell him about the past years, he wanted the Kaiser’s envoy to know exactly what the abbey had undergone. When the fat count would write his life’s chronicle in the days of Leopold I, by which time he was constantly mixing up things, people, and years, he would recall with envy Father Friesenegger’s flawless memory.
The hard years had failed to harm the abbot’s mind, he wrote. His eyes had been sharp and attentive, his words well chosen, his sentences long and well formed, yet veracity was not everything: he had been unable to shape the welter of events into stories, and so it had been difficult to follow him. Over the years soldiers had overrun the abbey time and time again: the imperial troops had taken what they needed, then the Protestant troops had come and had taken what they needed. Then the Protestants had withdrawn, and the imperial troops had come back and had taken what they needed: animals and wood and boots. Then the imperial troops had withdrawn, but they had left a contingent of guards there, and then marauding soldiers who belonged to no army had come, and the guards had driven them away, or they had driven the guards away, either one or the other or perhaps one first and the other later, the fat count wasn’t certain, nor did it matter, for the guards had withdrawn again, and either the imperial troops or the Swedes had come to take what they needed: animals and wood and clothes and above all, naturally, boots, if there had been any boots left. The wood too was already gone. The next winter the peasants of the surrounding villages had taken refuge in the abbey. People had lain in all the halls, in all the closets, in even the smallest corridor. The hunger, the contaminated wells, the cold, the wolves!
“Wolves?”
They had penetrated the houses, the abbot said, at first only at night, but soon during the day too. The people had fled into the woods and there had killed and eaten the smaller animals and then cut down the trees to keep from freezing to death—this had made the wolves so hungry that they lost all fear and timidity. Like nightmares come to life they descended on the villages, like monsters out of old fairy tales. With hungry eyes they appeared in rooms and stables, without the slightest fear of knives or pitchforks. On the worst winter days they had even found their way into the abbey. One of the animals had attacked a woman with an infant and torn the child from her hands.
No, this was not exactly what had happened; the abbot had spoken only of the fear for the small children. But for some reason the idea that an infant could be devoured by a wolf before its mother’s eyes had so captivated the fat count, who at this time already had five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, that he believed the abbot might well have told him this too, which was why, amid eloquent apologies for the fact that he did not have the right to spare the reader what followed, he inserted a profoundly gruesome description including cries of pain, horror, the growling of the wolf, sharp teeth, and blood.