caught with fiendish tortures. The bitterest anger filled Gustav Adolf’s soul when upon his entry into Landshut the burgomaster knelt at his stirrup asking mercy for his city.
“Pray not to me,” he said harshly, “but to God for yourself and for your people, for in truth you have need.”
For once thoughts of vengeance seemed to fill his soul. “No, no!” he thundered when the frightened burgomaster pleaded that his townsmen should not be held accountable for the cruelty of the country-folk, “you are beasts, not men, and deserve to be wiped from the earth with fire and sword.” From out the multitude there came a warning voice: “Will the King now abandon the path of mercy for the way of vengeance and visit his wrath upon these innocent people?” No one saw the speaker. The day was oppressively hot and the King came near fainting in the saddle. As he rode out of the city toward the camp, a bolt of lightning struck the ground beside him and a mighty crash of thunder rolled overhead. Pale and thoughtful, he rode on. But Landshut was spared. That evening General Horn brought the anxious citizens the King’s promise of pardon.
A few weeks later tidings reached Gustav Adolf that Wallenstein and the Elector of Bavaria were marching to effect a junction at Nuernberg. If they took the city, his line of communication was cut and his army threatened. Wallenstein, who was a traitor, had been in disgrace; but he was a great general and in his dire need Emperor Ferdinand had no one else to turn to. So he took him back on his own terms, and in the spring he had an army of forty thousand veterans in the field. This was the host he was leading against Nuernberg. But the King got there first and intrenched himself so strongly that there was no ousting him. Wallenstein followed suit and for eleven weeks the enemies eyed one another from their “lagers,” neither willing to risk an attack. In the end Gustav Adolf tried, but even his Finns could not take the impregnable heights the enemy held. At last he went away with colors flying and bands playing, right under the enemy’s walls, in the hope of tempting him out. But he never stirred.
When Wallenstein was sure he had gone, he burned his camp and turned toward Saxony to punish the Elector for joining the Swedes. A wail of anguish went up from that unhappy land and the King heard it clear across the country. By forced marches he hurried to the rescue of his ally, picking up Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar on the way. At Naumburg the people crowded about him and sought to kiss or even to touch his garments. The King looked sadly at them. “They put their trust in me, poor weak mortal, as if I were the Almighty. It may be that He will punish their folly soon upon the object of their senseless idolatry.” He had come to stay, but when he learned that Wallenstein had sent Pappenheim away to the west, thus weakening his army, and was going into winter quarters at Luetzen, near Leipzig, a half-day’s march from the memorable Breitenfeld, he broke camp at once and hastened to attack him. Starting early, his army reached Luetzen at nightfall on November 15, 1632.
Wallenstein believed the campaign was over for that year and the Swedes in winter quarters, and was taken completely by surprise. Had the King given battle that night, he would have wiped the enemy out. Two things, in themselves of little account, delayed him: a small brook that crossed his path, and the freshly plowed fields. His men were tired after the long march and he decided to let them rest. It was Wallenstein’s chance. Overnight he posted his army north of the highway that leads from Luetzen to Leipzig, dug deep the ditches that enclosed it, and made breastworks of the dirt. Sunrise found sheltered behind them twenty-seven thousand seasoned veterans to whom Gustav Adolf could oppose but twenty thousand; but he had more guns and they were better served.
As the day broke the Swedish army, drawn up in battle array, intoned Luther’s hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God,” and cheered the King. He wore a leathern doublet and a gray mantle. To the pleadings of his officers that he put on armor he replied only, “God is my armor.” “To-day,” he cried as he rode along the lines, “will end all our hardships.” He himself took command of the right wing, the gallant Duke Bernhard of the left. As at Breitenfeld, the rallying cry was, “God with us!”
The King hoped to crush his enemy utterly, and the whole line attacked at once with great fury. From the start victory leaned toward the Swedish army. Then suddenly in the wild tumult of battle a heavy fog settled upon the field. What followed was all confusion. No one knows the rights of it to this day. The King led his famous yellow and blue regiments against the enemy’s left. “The black fellows there,” he shouted, pointing to the Emperor’s cuirassiers in their black armor, “attack them!” Just then an adjutant reported that his infantry was hard pressed. “Follow me,” he commanded, and, clapping spurs to his horse, set off at full speed for the threatened quarter. In the fog he lost his way and ran into the cuirassiers. His two attendants were shot down and a bullet crushed the King’s right arm. He tried to hide the fact that he was wounded, but pain and loss of blood made him faint and he asked the Duke of Lauenburg who rode with him to help him out of the crush. At that moment a fresh troop of horsemen bore down upon them and their leader, Moritz von Falkenberg, shot the King through the body with the exultant cry, “You I have long sought!” The words had hardly left his lips when he fell with a bullet through his head.
The King swayed in the saddle and lost the reins. “Save yourself,” he whispered to the Duke, “I am done for.” The Duke put his arm around him to support him, but the cuirassiers surged against them and tore them apart. The King’s horse was shot in the neck and threw its rider. Awhile he hung by the stirrup and was dragged over the trampled field. Then the horse shook itself free and ran through the lines, spreading the tidings of the King’s fall afar.
A German page, Leubelfing, a lad of eighteen, was alone with the King. He sprang from his horse and tried to help him into the saddle but had not the strength to do it. Gustav Adolf was stout and very heavy. While he was trying to lift him some Croats rode up and demanded the name of the wounded man. The page held his tongue, and they ran him through. Gustav Adolf, to save him, said that he was the King.[1] At that they shot him through the head, and showered blows upon him. When the body was found in the night it was naked. They had robbed and stripped him.
[Footnote 1: This is the story as the page told it. He lived two days.]
The King was dead. Through the Swedish ranks Duke Bernhard shouted the tidings. “Who now cares to live? Forward, to avenge his death!” With the blind fury of the Berserkers of old the Swedes cleared the ditches, stormed the breastworks, and drove the foe in a panic before them. The Duke’s arm was broken by a bullet. He hardly knew it. With his regiment he rode down the crew of one of the enemy’s batteries and swept on. In the midst of it all a cry resounded over the plain that made the runaways halt and turn back.
“Pappenheim! Pappenheim is here!”
He had come with his Walloons in answer to the general’s summons. “Where is the King?” he asked, and they pointed to the Finnish brigade. With a mighty crash the two hosts that had met so often before came together. Wallenstein mustered his scattered forces and the King’s army was attacked from three sides at once. The yellow brigade fell where it stood almost to the last man. The blue fared little better. Slowly the Swedish infantry gave back. The battle seemed lost.
But the tide turned once more. In the hottest fight Pappenheim fell, pierced by three bullets. The “man of a hundred scars” died, exulting that the King whom he hated had gone before. With his death the Emperor’s men lost heart. The Swedes charged again and again with unabated fury. Night closed in with Wallenstein’s centre still unbroken; but he had lost all his guns. Under cover of the darkness he made his escape. The King’s army camped upon the battle-field. The carnage had been fearful; nine thousand were slain. It was Wallenstein’s last fight. With the remnants of his army he retreated to Bohemia, sick and sore, and spent his last days there plotting against his master. He died by an assassin’s hand.
The cathedrals of Vienna, Brussels, and Madrid rang with joyful Te Deums at the news of the King’s death. The Spanish capital celebrated the “triumph” with twelve days of bull-fighting. Emperor Ferdinand was better than his day; he wept at the sight of the King’s blood-stained jacket. The Protestant world trembled; its hope and strength were gone. But the Swedish people, wiping away their tears, resolved stoutly to carry on Gustav Adolf’s work. The men he had trained led his armies to victory on yet many a stricken field. Peace came at length to Europe; the last religious war had been fought and won. Freedom of worship, liberty of conscience, were bought at the cost of the kingliest head that ever wore a crown. The great ruler’s life-work was done.
Gustav Adolf was in his thirty-eighth year when he fell. Of stature he was tall and stout, a fair-haired, blue-eyed giant, stern in war, gentle in the friendships of peace. He was a born ruler of men. Though he was away fighting in foreign lands all the years of his reign, he kept a firm grasp on the home affairs of his kingdom. One traces his hand everywhere, ordering, shaping, finding ways, or making them where there was none. The valuable mines of Sweden were ill managed. The metal was exported in coarse pigs to Germany for very little, worked up there, and resold to Sweden at the highest price. He created a Board of Mines, established smelteries, and the day came when, instead of going abroad for its munitions of war, Sweden had for its customers half Europe. Like Christian of Denmark with whom he disagreed, he encouraged industries and greatly furthered trade and commerce. He built highways and canals, and he did not forget the cause of instruction. Upon the university at Upsala he bestowed his entire personal patrimony of three hundred and thirteen farms as a free gift. His people honor him with cause as the real founder of the Swedish system of education.
The master he was always. Sweden had, on one hand, a powerful, able nobility; on the other, a strong, independent peasantry,–a combination full of pitfalls for a weak ruler, but with equal promise of great things under the master hand. His father had cowed the stubborn nobles with the headsman’s axe. Gustav Adolf drew them to him and imbued them with his own spirit. He found them a contentious party within the state; he left them its strongest props in the conduct of public affairs. Nor was it always with persuasion he worked. His reward for the unjust judge has been quoted. When the council failed to send him supplies in Germany, pleading failure of crops as their excuse, he wrote back: “You speak of the high prices of corn. Probably they are high because those who have it want to profit by the need of others.” And he set a new chief over the finances. On the other hand, he gave shape to the relations between king and people. The Riksdag held its sessions, but the laws that ruled it were so vague that it was no unusual thing for men who were not members at all to attend and join in the debates. Gustav Adolf put an abrupt end to “a state of things that exposed Sweden to the contempt of the nations.” As he ordered it, the initiative remained with the crown; it was the right of the Riksdag to complain and discuss; of the King to “choose the best” after hearing all sides.
As a young prince, Gustav Adolf fell deeply in love with Ebba Brahe, the beautiful daughter of one of Sweden’s most powerful noblemen. The two had been play-mates and became lovers. But the old queen frowned upon the match. He was the coming king, she was a subject, and the queen managed, with the help of Oxenstjerna, who was Gustav’s best friend all through his life, to make him give up his love. “Then I will never marry,” he cried in a burst of tempestuous grief. But when the queen had got Ebba Brahe safely married to one of his father’s famous generals, he wedded the lovely sister of the Elector of Brandenburg. She adored her royal husband, but never took kindly to Sweden, and the people did not like her. They clung to the great king’s early love, and to this day they linger before the picture of the beautiful Ebba in the Stockholm castle when they come from his grave in the Riddarholm church, while they pass the queen’s by with hardly a glance. It is recorded that Ebba made her husband a good and dutiful wife. If her thoughts strayed at times to the old days and what might have been, it is not strange. In one of those moods she wrote on a window-pane in the castle:
I am happy in my lot,
And thanks I give to God.
The queen-mother saw it and wrote under it her own version:
You wouldn’t, but you must.
‘Tis the lot of the dust.
KING AND SAILOR, HEROES OF COPENHAGEN
Of all the foolish wars that were ever waged, it would seem that the one declared by Denmark against Sweden in 1657 had the least excuse. A century before, the two countries had fought through eight bitter years over the momentous question whether Denmark should carry in her shield the three lions that stood for the three Scandinavian kingdoms, the Swedish one having set up for itself in the dissolution of the union between them, and at the end of the fight they were where they had started: each of them kept the whole brood. But this war was without even that excuse. Denmark was helplessly impoverished. Her trade was ruined; the nobles were sucking the marrow of the country. Of the freehold farms that had been its strength scarce five thousand were left in the land. It could hardly pay its way in days of peace. Its strongholds lay in ruins; it had neither arms, ammunition, nor officers. On its roster of thirty thousand men for the national defence were carried the dead and the yet unborn, while the Swedish army of tried veterans had gone from victory to victory under a warlike king. To cap the climax, Copenhagen had been harassed by pestilence that had killed one-fifth of its fifty thousand people.
So ill matched were they when a stubborn king forced a war that could end only in disaster. When one of his councillors advised against the folly, he caned him and sent him into exile. Yet out of the fiery trial this king came a hero; his queen, whose pride and wasteful vanity[1] had done its full share in bringing the country to the verge of ruin, became the idol of the nation. In the hour of its peril she grew to the stature of a great woman who shared danger and hardship with her people and by her example put hope and courage into their hearts.
[Footnote 1: It is of record that Queen Sofie Amalie used one-third of the annual revenues of the country for her household. The menu of a single “rustic dinner” of the court mentions 200 courses and nearly as many kinds of preserves and dessert, served on gold, with wines in corresponding abundance.]
Karl Gustav, the Swedish king, was campaigning in Poland, but as soon as he could turn around he marched his army against Denmark, scattered the forces that opposed him, and before news of his advance had reached Copenhagen knocked at the gate of Denmark demanding “speech of brother Frederik in good Swedish.” A winter of great severity had bridged the Baltic and the sounds of the island kingdom. In two weeks he led his army, horse, foot, and guns, over the frozen seas where hardly a wagon had dared cross before. Great rifts yawned in their way, and whole companies were swallowed up; his own sleigh sank in the deep, but nothing stopped him. Danish emissaries came pleading for peace. He met them on the way to the capital, surrounded by his Finnish horsemen, and gave scant ear to their speeches while he drove on. Before the city he halted and dictated a peace so humiliating that one of the Danish commissioners exclaimed when he came to sign, “I wish I could not write.” Perhaps the same wish troubled the conqueror’s ambitious dreams. The peace was broken as swiftly as made. In five months he was back before Frederik’s capital with his whole army, while a Swedish fleet anchored in the roadstead outside. “What difference does it make to you,” was the contemptuous taunt flung at the anxious envoys who sought his camp, “whether the name of your king is Karl or Frederik so long as you are safe?” He had come to make an end of Denmark.
Copenhagen was almost without defences. The old earth walls mounted only six guns, with breastworks scarce knee-high. In places King Karl could have driven his sleigh into the heart of the city at the head of his army. But for the second time he hesitated when a swift blow would have won all–and lost. Overnight the Danish nation awoke to a fight for its life. King and people, till then strangers, in that hour became one. Frederik the Third met the craven counsel that he fly to Norway with the proud answer, “I will die in my nest, if need be, and my wife with me.” With a shout the burghers swore to fight to the last man. The walls of the city rose as if by magic. Nobles and mechanics, clergy and laborers, students, professors and sailors worked side by side; high-born women wheeled barrows. Every tree was cut down and made into palisades. The crops ripening in the fields were gathered in haste and the cattle driven in. The city had been provisioned for barely a week and garrisoned by four hundred raw recruits. Sailors from the useless ships took out their guns and mounted them in the redoubts. Peasants flocked in and were armed with battle-axes, clubs, and boat-hooks when the supply of muskets gave out. When Karl Gustav drew his lines tight he faced six thousand determined men behind strong walls. The city stood in a ring of blazing fires. Its defenders were burning down the houses and woods beyond the moats to clear the way for their gunners. The King watched the sight from his horse in silence. He knew what it meant; he had fought in the Thirty Years’ War: “Now, I vow, we shall have fighting,” was all he said.
It was not long in coming. On the second night the garrison made a sortie and drove back the invaders, destroying their works with great slaughter. Night after night, and sometimes in the broad day, they returned to the charge, overwhelming the Swedes where least expected, capturing their guns, their supplies, and their outposts. Short of arms and ammunition, they took them in the enemy’s lines. In one of these raids Karl Gustav himself was all but made prisoner. A horseman had him by the shoulder, but he wrenched himself loose and spurred his horse into the sea where a boat from one of the ships rescued him. The defence took on something of the fervor of religious frenzy. Twice a day services were held on the walls of the city; within, the men who could not bear arms, and the women, barricaded the streets with stones and iron chains for the last fight, were it to come. In his place on the wall every burgher had a hundred brickbats or stones piled up for ammunition, and by night when the enemy rained red-hot shot upon the city, he fought with a club or spear in one hand, a torch in the other.
Eleven weeks the battle raged by night and by day. Then a Dutch fleet forced its way through the blockade after a fight in which it lost six ships and two admirals. It brought food, ammunition, and troops. The joy in the city was great. All day the church bells were rung, and the people hailed the Dutch as the saviours of the nation. But when they, too, would thank God for the victory and asked for the use of the University’s hall, they were refused. They were followers of Calvin and their heresies must not be preached in the place set apart for teaching the doctrines of the “pure faith,” said the professors, who were Lutheran. It was the way of the day. The Reformation had learned little from the bigotry of the Inquisition. The Dutchmen had to be content with the court-house. But the siege was not over. Another hard winter closed in with the enemy at the door, burrowing hourly nearer the outworks, and food and fire-wood grew scarcer day by day in the hard-pressed city. When things were at the worst pass in February, the Swedes gathered their hosts for a final assault. In the midnight hour they came on with white shirts drawn over their uniforms to make it hard to tell them from the snow. Karl Gustav himself led the storming party and at last was in the way of “getting speech of brother Frederik,” for the Danish King was as good as his word. He had said that he would die in his nest, and time and again he had to be sternly reasoned with to prevent him from exposing himself overmuch. Where the danger was greatest he was, and beside him ever the queen, all her frivolity gone and forgotten. She who had danced at the court fetes and followed the hounds on the chase as if the world had no other cares, became the very incarnation of the spirit of the bitter and bloody struggle. All through that winter the royal couple lived in a tent among their men, and when the alarm was sounded they were first on foot to lead them. Now that the hour had come, they were in the forefront of the fight.
Where the famous pleasure garden Tivoli now is, the strength of the enemy was massed against the redoubts at the western gate. The name of “Storm Street” tells yet of the doings of that night. King Karl had promised to give over the captured town to be sacked by his army three days and nights, and like hungry wolves they swarmed to the attack, a mob of sailors and workmen with scaling ladders in the van. The moats they crossed in spite of the gaps that had been made in the ice to stop them, but the garrison had poured water over the walls that froze as it ran, until they were like slippery icebergs. A bird could have found no foothold on them. Showers of rocks and junk and clubs fell upon the laddermen. Three times Karl Gustav hurled his columns against them; as often they were driven back, broken and beaten. A few gained a foothold on the walls only to be dashed down to death. The burghers fought for their lives and their homes. Their women carried boiling pitch and poured it over the breastworks, and when they had no more, dragged great beams and rolled them down upon the ladders, sweeping them clear of the enemy. In the hottest fight Gunde Rosenkrantz, one of the king’s councillors, trod on a fallen soldier and, looking into his face, saw that it was his own son breathing his last. He bent over and kissed him, and went on fighting.
In the early morning hour Karl Gustav gave the order to retreat. The attack had failed. Many of his general officers were slain; nearly half of his army was killed, disabled, or captured. Six Swedish standards were taken by the Danes. The moats were filled with the dead. The Swedes had “come in their shrouds.” The guns of the city thundered out a triple salute of triumph and the people sang Te Deums on the walls. Their hardships were not over. Fifteen months yet the city was invested and the home of daily privation; but their greatest peril was past. Copenhagen was saved, and with it the nation; the people had found itself and its king. That autumn a second Swedish army under the veteran Stenbock was massacred in the island of Fyen, and Karl Gustav exclaimed when the beaten general brought him the news, “Since the devil took the sheep he might have taken the buck too.” He never got over it. Three months later he lay dead, and the siege of Copenhagen was raised in May, 1660. It had lasted twenty months.
* * * * *
Seven score years and one passed, and the morning of Holy Thursday[2] saw a British fleet sailing slowly up the deep before Copenhagen, the deck of every ship bristling with guns, their crews at quarters, Lord Nelson’s signal to “close for action” flying from the top of the flag-ship _Elephant_. Between the fleet and the shore lay a line of dismantled hulks on which men with steady eyes and stout hearts were guarding Denmark’s honor. Once more it had been jeopardized by foolish counsel in high places. Danish statesmen had trifled and temporized while England, facing all Europe alone in the fight for her life, made ready to strike a decisive blow against the Armed Neutrality that threatened her supremacy on the sea. Once more the city had been caught unprepared, defenceless, and once more its people rose as one man to meet the danger. But it was too late. Outside, in the Sound, a fleet as great as that led by Nelson waited, should he fail, to finish his work. That was to destroy the Danish ships, if need be to bombard the city and so detach Denmark from the coalition of England’s foes. So she chose to consider such as were not her declared friends.
[Footnote 2: The battle of Copenhagen was fought April 2, 1801.]
Denmark had no fighting ships at home to pit against her. Her sailors were away serving in the merchant marine. She had no practised gunners, nothing but a huddle of dismantled vessels in her navy-yard, most of them half-rotten hulks without masts. Those that had standing rigging were even worse, for none of them had sails and the falling spars in battle lumbered up the decks and menaced the crew. But such as they were she made the most of them. Eighteen hulks were hauled into the channel and moored head and stern. Where they lay they could not be moved. Only the guns on one side were therefore of use, while the enemy could turn and manoeuvre. They were manned by farm lads, mechanics, students, enlisted in haste, not one of whom had ever smelt powder, and these were matched against Nelson’s grim veterans. Even their commander, J. Olfert Fischer, had not been under fire before that day, for Denmark had had peace for eighty years. But his father had served as a midshipman with Tordenskjold and the son did not flinch, outnumbered though his force was, two to one, in men and guns.
The sun shone fair upon the blue waters as the great fleet of thirty-odd fighting ships sailed up from the south. From the city’s walls and towers a mighty multitude watched it come, unmindful of peril from shot and shell; the Danish line was not half a mile away. In the churches whose bells were still ringing when the first gun was fired from the block-ship _Proevestenen_, the old men and women prayed through the long day, for there were few homes in Copenhagen that did not have son, brother, or friend fighting out there. A single gun answered the challenge, now two and three at once, then broadside crashed upon broadside with deafening roar. When at length all was quiet a tremendous report shook the city. It was the flag-ship _Dannebrog_ that blew up. She was on fire with only three serviceable guns left when she struck her colors, but no ship of her name might sail with an enemy’s prize crew on board, and she did not.
The story of that bloody day has been told many times. Briton and Dane hoist their flags on April 2 with equal right, for never was challenge met with more dauntless valor. Lord Nelson owned that of all the hundred and five battles he had fought this was hottest. On the _Monarch_, which for hours was under the most galling fire from the Danish ships, two hundred and twenty of the crew were killed or wounded. “There was not a single man standing,” wrote a young officer on board of her, “the whole way from the mainmast forward, a district containing eight guns a side, some of which were run out ready for firing, others lay dismounted, and others remained as they were after recoiling…. I hastened down the fore ladder to the lower deck and felt really relieved to find somebody alive.” The slaughter on the Danish ships was even greater. More than one-fifth of their entire strength of a little over five thousand men were slain or wounded. Of the eighteen hulls they lost thirteen, but only one were the British able to take home with them. The rest were literally shot to pieces and were burned where they lay. As one after another was silenced, those yet alive on board spiked their last guns, if indeed there were any left worth the trouble, threw their powder overboard and made, for the shore. Twice the Danish Admiral abandoned his burning ship, the last time taking up his post in the island battery Tre Kroner. Each time one of the old hulls was crushed, a Briton pushed into the hole made in the line and raked the remaining ones fore and aft until their decks were like huge shambles. The block-ship _Indfoedsretten_ bore the concentrated fire of five frigates and two smaller vessels throughout most of the battle. Her chief was killed. When the news reached head-quarters on shore, Captain von Schroedersee, an old naval officer who had been retired because of ill health, volunteered to take his place. He was rowed out, but as he came over the side of the ship a cannon-ball cut him in two. _Proevestenen_, as it was the first to fire a shot, held out also to the last. One-fourth of her crew lay dead, and her flag had been shot away three times when the decks threatened to cave in and Captain Lassen spiked his last guns and left the wreck to be burned. All through the fight she was the target of ninety guns to which she could oppose only twenty-nine of her own sixty.
Nelson had promised Admiral Parker to finish the fight in an hour. When the battle had lasted three, Parker signalled to him to stop. Every school-boy knows the story of how Lord Nelson put the glass to his blind eye and, remarking that he could see no signal, kept right on. In the end he had to resort to stratagem to force a truce so that he might disentangle some of his ships that were drifting into great danger in the narrow channel. The ruse succeeded. Crown Prince Frederik, moved by compassion for the wounded whom Nelson threatened to burn with the captured hulks if firing did not stop, ordered hostilities to cease without consulting the Admiral of the fleet, and the battle was over. Denmark’s honor was saved. “Nothing,” wrote our own Captain Mahan, “could place a nation’s warlike fame higher than did her great deeds that day.” All else was lost; for “there had come upon Denmark one of those days of judgment to which nations are liable who neglect in time of peace to prepare for war.” It had been long coming, but it had overtaken her at last and found all the bars down.
Alongside the _Dannebrog_ throughout her fight with Nelson’s flag-ship, and edging ever closer in under the _Elephant’s_ side until at last the marines were sent to man her rail and keep it away with their muskets, lay a floating battery mounting twenty guns under command of a beardless second lieutenant. The name of Peter Willemoes will live as long as the Danish tongue is spoken. Barely graduated from the Naval Academy, he was but eighteen when the need of officers thrust the command of “Floating Battery No. 1” upon him. So gallantly did he acquit himself that Nelson took notice of the young man who, every time a broadside crashed into his ship or overhead, swung his cocked hat and led his men in a lusty cheer. When after the battle he met the Crown Prince on shore, the English commander asked to be introduced to his youthful adversary. “You ought to make an admiral of him,” he said, and Prince Frederik smiled: “If I were to make admirals of all my brave officers, I should have no captains or lieutenants left.” When the _Dannebrog_ drifted on the shoals, abandoned and burning, Willemoes cut his cables and got away under cover of the heavy smoke. Having neither sails nor oars, he was at the mercy of the tide, but luckily it carried him to the north of the Tre Kroner battery, and he reached port with forty-nine of his crew of one hundred and twenty-nine dead or wounded. The people received him as a conqueror returning with victory. His youth and splendid valor aroused the enthusiasm of the whole country. Wherever he went crowds flocked to see him as the hero of “Holy Thursday’s Battle.” Especially was he the young people’s idol. Sailor that he was, he was “the friend of all pretty girls,” sang the poet of that day. He danced and made merry with them, but the one of them all on whom his heart was set, so runs the story, would have none of him, and sent him away to foreign parts, a saddened lover.
Meanwhile much praise had not made him vain. “I did my duty,” he wrote to his father, a minor government official in the city of Odense where four years later Hans Christian Andersen was born on the anniversary day of the battle, “and I have whole limbs which I least expected. The Crown Prince and the Admiral have said that I behaved well.” He was to have one more opportunity of fighting his country’s enemy, and this time to the death.
In the summer of 1807, England was advised that by the treaty of Tilsit Russia and Prussia had secretly joined Napoleon in his purpose of finally crushing his mortal enemy by uniting all the fleets of Europe against her, Denmark’s too, by compulsion if persuasion failed. Without warning a British fleet swooped down upon the unsuspecting nation, busy with the pursuits of peace, bombarded and burned Copenhagen when the Commandant refused to deliver the ships into the hands of the robbers as a “pledge of peace,” and carried away ships, supplies, even the carpenters’ tools in the navy-yard. Nothing was spared. Seventy vessels, sixteen of them ships of the line, fell into their hands, and supplies that filled ninety-two transports beside. A single fighting ship was left to Denmark of all her fleet,–the _Prince Christian Frederik_ of sixty-eight guns. She happened to be away in a Norwegian port and so escaped. Willemoes was on leave serving in the Russian navy, but hastened home when news came of the burning of Copenhagen, and found a berth under Captain Jessen.
On March 22, 1808, the _Prince Christian_, so she was popularly called, hunting a British frigate that was making Danish waters insecure, met in the Kattegat the _Stately_ and the _Nassau_, each like herself of sixty-eight guns. The _Nassau_ was the old _Holsteen_, renamed,–the single prize the victors had carried home from the battle of Copenhagen. Three British frigates were working up to join them. The coast of Seeland was near, but wind and tide cut off escape to the Sound. Captain Jessen ran his ship in close under the shore so that at the last he might beach her, and awaited the enemy there.
The sun had set, but the night was clear when the fight between the three ships began. With one on either side, hardly a pistol-shot away, Jessen returned shot for shot, giving as good as they sent, and with such success that at the end of an hour and a half the Britons dropped astern to make repairs. The _Prince Christian_ drifted, helpless, with rudder shot to pieces, half a wreck, rigging all gone, and a number of her guns demolished. But when the enemy returned he was hailed with a cheer and a broadside, and the fight was on once more. This time they were three to one; one of the British frigates of forty-four guns had come up and joined in.
When the hull of the _Prince Christian_ was literally knocked to pieces, and of her 576 men 69 lay dead and 137 wounded, including the chief and all of his officers who were yet alive, Captain Jessen determined as a last desperate chance to run one of his opponents down and board her with what remained of his crew. But his officers showed him that it was impossible; the ship could not be manoeuvred. There was a momentary lull in the fire and out of the night came a cry, “Strike your colors!” The Danish reply was a hurrah and a volley from all the standing guns. Three broad-sides crashed into the doomed ship in quick succession, and the battle was over. The _Prince Christian_ stood upon the shore, a wreck.
Young Willemoes was spared the grief of seeing the last Danish man-of-war strike its flag. In the hottest of the fight, as he jumped upon a gun the better to locate the enemy in the gloom, a cannon-ball took off the top of his head. He fell into the arms of a fellow officer with the muttered words, “Oh God! my head–my country!” and was dead. In his report of the fight Captain Jessen wrote against his name: “Fell in battle–honored as he is missed.” They made his grave on shore with the fallen sailors, and as the sea washed up other bodies they were buried with them.
The British captured the wreck, but they could only set fire to it after removing the wounded. In the night it blew up where it stood. That was the end of the last ship of Denmark’s proud navy.
THE TROOPER WHO WON A WAR ALONE
Jens Kofoed was the name of a trooper who served in the disastrous war of Denmark against Sweden in Karl Gustav’s day. He came from the island of Bornholm in the Baltic, where he tilled a farm in days of peace. When his troop went into winter quarters, he got a furlough to go home to receive the new baby that was expected about Christmas. Most of his comrades were going home for the holidays, and their captain made no objection. The Swedish king was fighting in far-off Poland, and no one dreamed that he would come over the ice with his army in the depth of winter to reckon with Denmark. So Jens Kofoed took ship with the promise that he would be back in two weeks. But they were to be two long weeks. They did not hear of him again for many moons, and then strange tidings came of his doings. Single-handed he had bearded the Swedish lion, and downed it in a fair fight–strangest of all, almost without bloodshed.
The winter storms blew hard, and it was Christmas eve when he made land, but he came in time to receive, not one new heir, but twin baby girls. Then there were six of them, counting Jens and his wife, and a merry Christmas they all had together. On Twelfth Night the little ones were christened, and then the trooper bethought himself of his promise to get back soon. The storms had ceased, but worse had befallen; the sea was frozen over as far as eye reached, and the island was cut off from all communication with the outer world. There was nothing for it but to wait. It proved the longest and hardest winter any one then living could remember. Easter was at hand before the ice broke up, and let a fishing smack slip over to Ystad, on the mainland. It came back with news that set the whole island wondering. Peace had been made, and Denmark had ceded all its ancient provinces east of the Oeresund to Karl Gustav. Ystad itself and Skaane, the province in which Jens Kofoed had been campaigning, were Swedish now, and so was Bornholm. All unknown to its people, the island had changed hands in the game of war overnight, as it were. A Swedish garrison was coming over presently to take charge.
When Jens Kofoed heard it, he sat down and thought things over. If there was peace, his old captain had no use for him, that was certain; but there might be need of him at home. What would happen there, no one could tell. And there were the wife and children to take care of. The upshot of it all was that he stayed. Only, to be on the safe side, he got the Burgomaster and the Aldermen in his home town, Hasle, to set it down in writing that he could not have got back to his troop for all he might have tried. Kofoed, it will be seen, was a man with a head on his shoulders, which was well, for presently he had need of it.
There were no Danish soldiers in the island, only a peasant militia, ill-armed and untaught in the ways of war; so no one thought of resisting the change of masters. The people simply waited to see what would happen. Along in May a company of one hundred and twenty men with four guns landed, and took possession of Castle Hammershus, on the north shore, the only stronghold on the island, in the name of the Swedish king. Colonel Printzenskoeld, who had command, summoned the islanders to a meeting, and told them that he had come to be their governor. They were to obey him, and that was all. The people listened and said nothing.
Perhaps if the new rulers had been wise, things might have kept on so. The people would have tilled their farms, and paid their taxes, and Jens Kofoed, with all his hot hatred of the enemy he had fought, might never have been heard of outside his own island. But the Swedish soldiers had been through the Thirty Years’ War and plunder had become their profession. They rioted in the towns, doubled the taxes, put an embargo on trade and export, crushed the industries; worse, they took the young men and sent them away to Karl Gustav’s wars in foreign lands. They left only the old men and the boys, and these last they kept a watchful eye on for drafts in days to come. When the conscripts hid in the woods, so as not to be torn from their wives and sweethearts, they organized regular man-hunts as if the quarry were wild beasts, and, indeed, the poor fellows were not treated much better when caught.
All summer they did as they pleased; then came word that Karl Gustav had broken the peace he made, and of the siege of Copenhagen. The news made the people sit up and take notice. Their rightful sovereign had ceded the island to the Swedish king, that was one thing. But now that they were at war again, these strangers who persecuted them were the public enemy. It was time something were done. In Hasle there was a young parson with his heart in the right place, Poul Anker by name. Jens Kofoed sat in his church; he had been to the wars, and was fit to take command. Also, the two were friends. Presently a web of conspiracy spread quietly through the island, gripping priest and peasant, skipper and trader, alike. Its purpose was to rout out the Swedes. The Hasle trooper and parson were the leaders; but their secret was well kept. With the tidings that the Dutch fleet had forced its way through to Copenhagen with aid for the besieged, and had bottled the Swedish ships up in Landskrona, came a letter purporting to be from King Frederik himself, encouraging the people to rise. It was passed secretly from hand to hand by the underground route, and found the island ready for rebellion.
Governor Printzenskoeld had seen something brewing, but he was a fearless man, and despised the “peasant mob.” However, he sent to Sweden for a troop of horsemen, the better to patrol the island and watch the people. Early in December, 1658, just a year after Jens Kofoed, the trooper, had set out for his home on furlough, the governor went to Roenne, the chief city in the island, to start off a ship for the reinforcements. The conspirators sought to waylay him at Hasle, where he stopped to give warning that all who had not paid the heavy war-tax would be sold out forthwith; but they were too late. Master Poul and Jens Kofoed rode after him, expecting to meet a band of their fellows on the way, but missed them. The parson stayed behind then to lay the fuse to the mine, while Kofoed kept on to town. By the time he got there he had been joined by four others, Aage Svendsoen, Klavs Nielsen, Jens Laurssoen, and Niels Gummeloese. The last two were town officers. As soon as the report went around Roenne that they had come, Burgomaster Klaus Kam went to them openly.
The governor had ridden to the house of the other burgomaster, Per Larssoen, who was not in the plot. His horse was tied outside and he just sitting down to supper when Jens Kofoed and his band crowded into the room, and took him prisoner. They would have killed him there, but his host pleaded for his life. However, when they took him out in the street, Printzenskoeld thought he saw a chance to escape in the crowd and the darkness, and sprang for his horse. But his great size made him an easy mark. He was shot through the head as he ran. The man who shot him had loaded his pistol with a silver button torn from his vest. That was sure death to any goblin on whom neither lead nor steel would bite, and it killed the governor all right. The place is marked to this day in the pavement of the main street as the spot where fell the only tyrant who ever ruled the island against the people’s will.
The die was cast now, and there was need of haste. Under cover of the night the little band rode through the island with the news, ringing the church bells far and near to call the people to arms. Many were up and waiting; Master Poul had roused them already. At Hammershus the Swedish garrison heard the clamor, and wondered what it meant. They found out when at sunrise an army of half the population thundered on the castle gates summoning them to surrender. Burgomaster Kam sat among them on the governor’s horse, wearing his uniform, and shouted to the officers in command that unless they surrendered, he, the governor, would be killed, and his head sent in to his wife in the castle. The frightened woman’s tears decided the day. The garrison surrendered, only to discover that they had been tricked. Jens Kofoed took command in the castle. The Swedish soldiers were set to doing chores for the farmers they had so lately harassed. The ship that was to have fetched reenforcements from Sweden was sent to Denmark instead, with the heartening news. They needed that kind there just then.
But the ex-trooper, now Commandant, knew that a day of reckoning was coming, and kept a sharp lookout. When the hostile ship _Spes_ was reported steering in from the sea, the flag of Sweden flew from the peak of Hammershus, and nothing on land betrayed that there had been a change. As soon as she anchored, a boat went out with an invitation from the governor to any officers who might be on board, to come ashore and arrange for the landing of the troops. The captain of the ship and the major in charge came, and were made prisoners as soon as they had them where they could not be seen from the ship. It blew up to a storm, and the _Spes_ was obliged to put to sea, but as soon as she returned boats were sent out to land the soldiers. They sent only little skiffs that could hold not over three or four, and as fast as they were landed they were overpowered and bound. Half of the company had been thus disposed of when the lieutenant on board grew suspicious, and sent word that without the express orders of the major no more would come. But Jens Kofoed’s wit was equal to the emergency. The next boat brought an invitation to the lieutenant to come in and have breakfast with the officers, who would give him his orders there. He walked into the trap; but when he also failed to return, his men refused to follow. He had arranged to send them a sign, they said, that everything was all right. If it did not come, they would sail away to Sweden for help.
It took some little persuasion to make the lieutenant tell about the sign, but in the end Jens Kofoed got it. It turned out to be his pocket-knife. When they saw that, the rest came, and were put under lock and key with their fellows.
The ship was left. If that went back, all was lost. Happily both captain and mate were prisoners ashore. Four boat-loads of islanders, with arms carefully stowed under the seats, went out with the mate of the _Spes_, who was given to understand that if he as much as opened his mouth he would be a dead man. They boarded the ship, taking the crew by surprise. By night the last enemy was comfortably stowed, and the ship on her way to Roenne, where the prisoners were locked in the court-house cellar, with shotted guns guarding the door. Perhaps it was the cruelties practised by Swedish troops in Denmark that preyed upon the mind of Jens Kofoed when he sent the parson to prepare them for death then and there; but better counsel prevailed. They were allowed to live. The whole war cost only two lives, the governor’s and that of a sentinel at the castle, who refused to surrender. The mate of the _Spes_ and two of her crew contrived to escape after they had been taken to Copenhagen, and from them Karl Gustav had the first tidings of how he lost the island.
The captured ship sailed down to Copenhagen with greeting to King Frederik that the people of Bornholm had chosen him and his heirs forever to rule over them, on condition that their island was never to be separated from the Danish Crown. The king in his delight presented them with a fine silver cup, and made Jens Kofoed captain of the island, beside giving him a handsome estate. He lived thirty-three years after that, the patriarch of his people, and raised a large family of children. Not a few of his descendants are to-day living in the United States. In the home of one of them in Brooklyn, New York, is treasured a silver drinking cup which King Frederik gave to the ex-trooper; but it is not the one he sent back with his deputation. That one is still in the island of Bornholm.
CARL LINNE, KING OF THE FLOWERS
Years ago there grew on the Jonsboda farm in Smaland, Sweden, a linden tree that was known far and wide for its great age and size. So beautiful and majestic was the tree, and so wide the reach of its spreading branches, that all the countryside called it sacred. Misfortune was sure to come if any one did it injury. So thought the people. It was not strange, then, that the farmer’s boys, when they grew to be learned men and chose a name, should call themselves after the linden. The peasant folk had no family names in those days. Sven Carlsson was Sven, the son of Carl; and his son, if his given name were John, would be John Svensson. So it had always been. But when a man could make a name for himself out of the big dictionary, that was his right. The daughter of the Jonsboda farmer married; and her son played in the shadow of the old tree, and grew so fond of it that when he went out to preach he also called himself after it. Nils Ingemarsson was the name he received in baptism, and to that he added Linnaeus, never dreaming that in doing it he handed down the name and the fame of the friend of his play hours to all coming days. But it was so; for Parson Nils’ eldest son, Carl Linne, or Linnaeus, became a great man who brought renown to his country and his people by telling them and all the world more than any one had ever known before about the trees and the flowers. The King knighted him for his services to science, and the people of every land united in acclaiming him the father of botany and the king of the flowers.
They were the first things he learned to love in his baby world. If he was cross, they had but to lay him on the grass in the garden and put a daisy in his hand, and he would croon happily over it for hours. He was four years old when his father took him to a wedding in the neighborhood. The men guests took a tramp over the farm, and in the twilight they sat and rested in the meadow, where the spring flowers grew. The minister began telling them stories about them; how they all had their own names and what powers for good or ill the apothecary found in the leaves and root of some of them. Carl’s father, though barely out of college, was a bright and gifted man. One of his parishioners said once that they couldn’t afford a whole parson, and so they took a young one; but if that was the way of it, the men of Stenbrohult made a better bargain than they knew. They sat about listening to his talk, but no one listened more closely than little Carl. After that he had thought for nothing else. In the corner of the garden he had a small plot of his own, and into it he planted all the wild flowers from the fields, and he asked many more questions about them than his father could answer. One day he came back with one whose name he had forgotten. The minister was busy with his sermon.
“If you don’t remember,” he said impatiently, “I will never tell you the name of another flower.” The boy went away, his eyes wide with terror at the threat; but after that he did not forget a single name.
When he was big enough, they sent him to the Latin school at Wexioe, where the other boys nicknamed him “the little botanist.” His thoughts were outdoors when they should have been in the dry books, and his teachers set him down as a dunce. They did not know that his real study days were when, in vacation, he tramped the thirty miles to his home. Every flower and every tree along the way was an old friend, and he was glad to see them again. Once in a while he found a book that told of plants, and then he was anything but a dunce. But when his father, after Carl had been eight years in the school, asked his teachers what they thought of him, they told him flatly that he might make a good tailor or shoemaker, but a minister–never; he was too stupid.
That was a blow, for the parson of Stenbrohult and his wife had set their hearts on making a minister of Carl, and small wonder. His mother was born in the parsonage, and her father and grandfather had been shepherds of the parish all their lives. There were tears in the good minister’s eyes as he told Carl to pack up and get ready to go back home; he had an errand at Dr. Rothman’s, but would return presently. The good doctor saw that his patient was heavy of heart and asked him what was wrong. When he heard what Carl’s teachers had said, he flashed out:
“What! he not amount to anything? There is not one in the whole lot who will go as far as he. A minister he won’t be, that I’ll allow, but I shall make a doctor of him such as none of them ever saw. You leave him here with me.” And the parson did, comforted in spite of himself. But Carl’s mother could not get over it. It was that garden, she declared, and when his younger brother as much as squinted that way, she flew at him with a “You dare to touch it!” and shook him.
When Dr. Rothman thought his pupil ready for the university, he sent him up to Lund, and the head-master of the Latin School gave him the letter he must bring, to be admitted. “Boys at school,” he wrote in it, “may be likened to young trees in orchard nurseries, where it sometimes happens that here and there among the saplings there are some that make little growth, or even appear as wild seedlings, giving no promise; but when afterwards transplanted to the orchard, make a start, branch out freely, and at last yield satisfactory fruit.” By good luck, though, Carl ran across an old teacher from Wexioe, one of the few who had believed in him and was glad to see him. He took him to the Rector and introduced him with warm words of commendation, and also found him lodgings under the roof of Dr. Kilian Stobaeus.
Dr. Stobaeus was a physician of renown, but not good company. He was one-eyed, sickly, lame in one foot, and a gloomy hypochondriac to boot. Being unable to get around to his patients, he always had one or two students to do the running for him and to learn as best they might, in doing it. Carl found a young German installed there as the doctor’s right hand. He also found a library full of books on botany, a veritable heaven for him. But the gate was shut against him; the doctor had the key, and he saw nothing in the country lad but a needy student of no account. Perhaps the Rector had passed the head-master’s letter along. However, love laughs at locksmiths, and Carl Linnaeus was hopelessly in love with his flowers. He got on the right side of the German by helping him over some hard stiles in the _materia medica_. In return, his fellow student brought him books out of the library when the doctor had gone to bed, and Carl sat up studying the big tomes till early cockcrow. Before the house stirred, the books were back on their shelves, the door locked, and no one was the wiser.
No one except the doctor’s old mother, whose room was across the yard. She did not sleep well, and all night she saw the window lighted in her neighbor’s room. She told the doctor that Carl Linnaeus fell asleep with the candle burning every single night, and sometime he would upset it and they would all be burned in their beds. The doctor nodded grimly; he knew the young scamps. No doubt they both sat up playing cards till dawn; but he would teach them. And the very next morning, at two o’clock, up he stumped on his lame foot to Carl’s room, in which there was light, sure enough, and went in without knocking.
Carl was so deep in his work that he did not hear him at all, and the doctor stole up unperceived and looked over his shoulder. There lay his precious books, which he thought safely locked in the library, spread out before him, and his pupil was taking notes and copying drawings as if his life depended upon it. He gave a great start when Dr. Stobaeus demanded what he was doing, but owned up frankly, while the doctor frowned and turned over his notes, leaf by leaf.
“Go to bed and sleep like other people,” he said gruffly, yet kindly, when he had heard it all, “and hereafter study in the daytime;” and he not only gave him a key to his library, but took him to his own table after that. Up till then Carl had merely been a lodger in the house.
When he was at last on the home stretch, as it seemed, an accident came near upsetting it all. He was stung by an adder on one of his botanizing excursions, so far from home and help that the bite came near proving fatal. However, Dr. Stobaeus’ skill pulled him through, and in after years he got square by labelling the serpent _furia infernalis_–hell-fury–in his natural history. It was his way of fighting back. All through his life he never wasted an hour on controversy. He had no time, he said. But once when a rival made a particularly nasty attack upon him, he named a new plant after him, adding the descriptive adjective _detestabilis_–the detestable so-and-so. On the whole, he had the best of it; for the names he gave stuck.
It was during his vacation after the year at Lund that Linnaeus made a catalogue of the plants in his father’s garden at Stenbrohult that shows us the country parson as no mean botanist himself; for in the list, which is preserved in the Academy of Sciences at Stockholm, are no less than two hundred and twenty-four kinds of plants. Among them are six American plants that had found their way to Sweden. The poison ivy is there, though what they wanted of that is hard to tell, and the four-o’clock, the pokeweed, the milkweed, the pearly everlasting, and the potato, which was then (1732) classed as a rare plant. Not until twenty years later did they begin to grow it for food in Sweden.
When Carl Linnaeus went up to Upsala University, his parents had so far got over their disappointment at his deserting the ministry that they gave him a little money to make a start with; but they let him know that no more was coming–their pocket-book was empty. And within the twelvemonth, for all his scrimping and saving, he was on the point of starvation. He tells us himself that he depended on chance for a meal and wore his fellow students’ cast-off clothes. His boots were without soles, and in his cheerless attic room he patched them with birch bark and card board as well as he could. He was now twenty-three years old, and it seemed as if he would have to give up the study that gave him no bread; but still he clung to his beloved flowers. They often made him forget the pangs of hunger. And when the cloud was darkest the sun broke through. He was sitting in the Botanical Garden sketching a plant, when Dean Celsius, a great orientalist and theologian of his day, passed by. The evident poverty of the young man, together with his deep absorption in his work, arrested his attention; he sat down and talked with him. In five minutes Carl had found a friend and the Dean a helper. He had been commissioned to write a book on the plants of the Holy Land and had collected a botanical library for the purpose, but the work lagged. Here now was the one who could help set it going. That day Linnaeus left his attic room and went to live in the Dean’s house. His days of starvation were over.
In the Dean’s employ his organizing genius developed the marvellous skill of the cataloguer that brought order out of the chaos of groping and guessing and blundering in which the science of botany had floundered up till then. Here and there in it all were flashes of the truth, which Linnaeus laid hold of and pinned down with his own knowledge to system and order. Thus the Frenchman, Sebastian Vaillant, who had died a dozen years before, had suggested a classification of flowers by their seed-bearing organs, the stamens and pistils, instead of by their fruits, the number of their petals, or even by their color, as had been the vague practice of the past. Linnaeus seized upon this as the truer way and wrote a brief treatise developing the idea, which so pleased Dr. Celsius that he got his young friend a license to lecture publicly in the Botanical Garden.
The students flocked to hear him. His message was one that put life and soul into the dry bones of a science that had only wearied them before. The professor of botany himself sat in the front row and hammered the floor with his cane in approval. But his very success was the lecturer’s undoing. Envy grew in place of the poverty he had conquered. The instructor, Nils Rosen, was abroad taking his doctor’s degree. He came home to find his lectures deserted for the irresponsible teachings of a mere undergraduate. He made grievous complaint, and Linnaeus was silenced, to his great good luck. For so his friend the professor, though he was unable to break the red tape of the university, got him an appointment to go to Lapland on a botanical mission. His enemies were only too glad to see him go.
Linnaeus travelled more than three thousand miles that summer through a largely unknown country, enduring, he tells us, more hardships and dangers than in all his subsequent travels. Again and again he nearly lost his life in swollen mountain streams, for he would not wait until danger from the spring freshets was over. Once he was shot at as he was gathering plants on a hillside, but happily the Finn who did it was not a good marksman. Fish and reindeer milk were his food, a pestilent plague of flies his worst trouble. But, he says in his account of the trip, which is as fascinating a report of a scientific expedition as was ever penned, they were good for something, after all, for the migrating birds fed on them. From his camps on lake or river bank he saw the water covered far and near with swarms of ducks and geese. The Laplander’s larder was easily stocked.
He came back from the dangers of the wild with a reputation that was clinched by his book “The Flora of Lapland,” to find the dragon of professional jealousy rampant still at Upsala. His enemy, Rosen, persuaded the senate of the university to adopt a rule that no un-degreed man should lecture there to the prejudice of the regularly appointed instructors. Tradition has it that Linnaeus flew into a passion at that and drew upon Rosen, and there might have been one regular less but for the interference of bystanders. It may be true, though it is not like him. Men wore side-arms in those days just as some people carry pistols in their hip-pockets to-day, and with as little sense. At least they had the defence, such as it was, that it was the fashion. However, it made an end of Linnaeus at Upsala for the time. He sought a professorship at Lund, but another got it. Then he led an expedition of his former students into the Dalecarlia mountains and so he got to Falun, where Baron Reuterholm, one of Sweden’s copper magnates, was seeking a guide for his two sons through the region where his mines were.
Linnaeus was not merely a botanist, but an all around expert in natural science. He took charge of the boys and, when the trip was ended, started a school at Falun, where he taught mineralogy. It had been hit or miss with the miners up till then. There was neither science nor system in their work. What every-day experience or the test of fire had taught a prospector, in delving among the rocks, was all there was of it. Linnaeus was getting things upon a scientific basis, when he met and fell in love with the handsome daughter of Dr. Moraeus. The young people would marry, but the doctor, though he liked the mineralogist, would not hear of it till he could support a wife. So he gave him three years in which to go abroad and get a degree that would give him the right to practise medicine anywhere in Sweden. The doctor’s daughter gave him a hundred dollars she had saved, and her promise to wait for him.
He went to Harderwyk in Holland and got his degree at the university there on the strength of a thesis on the cause of malarial fever, with the conclusions of which the learned doctors did not agree; but they granted the diploma for the clever way in which he defended it. On the way down he tarried in Hamburg long enough to give the good burghers a severe jolt. They had a seven-headed serpent that was one of the wonders of the town. The keen sight of the young naturalist detected the fraud at once; the heads were weasels’ heads, covered with serpent’s skin and cunningly sewed on the head of the reptile. The shape of the jaws betrayed the trick. But the Hamburgers were not grateful. The serpent was an asset. There was a mortgage on it of ten thousand marks; now it was not worth a hundred. They took it very ill, and Linnaeus found himself suddenly so unpopular that he was glad to get out of town overnight. What became of the serpent history does not record.
Linnaeus had carried more than his thesis on malarial fever with him to Holland. At the bottom of his trunk were the manuscripts of two books on botany which, he told his sweetheart on parting, would yet make him famous. Probably she shook her head at that. Pills and powders, and broken legs to set, were more to her way of thinking, and her father’s, too. If only he had patients, fame might take care of itself. But now he put them both to shame. At Leyden he found friends who brought out his first book, “Systema Naturae,” in which he divides all nature into the three kingdoms known to every child since. It was hardly more than a small pamphlet, but it laid the foundation for his later fame. To the enlarged tenth edition zooelogists point back to this day as to the bed-rock on which they built their science. The first was quickly followed by another, and yet another. Seven large volumes bearing his name had come from the press before he set sail for home, a whole library in botany, and a new botany at that, so simple and sensible that the world adopted it at once.
Dr. Hermann Boerhaave was at that time the most famous physician in Europe. He was also the greatest authority on systematic botany. Great men flocked to his door, but the testy old Dutchman let them wait until it suited him to receive them. Peter the Great had to cool his heels in his waiting-room two long hours before his turn came. Linnaeus he would not see at all–until he sent him a copy of his book. Then he shut the door against all others and summoned the author. The two walked through his garden, and the old doctor pointed proudly to a tree which was very rare, he said, and not in any of the books. Yes, said Linnaeus, it was in Vaillant’s. The doctor knew better; he had annotated Vaillant’s botany himself, and it was not there. Linnaeus insisted, and the doctor, in a temper, went for the book to show him. But there it was; Linnaeus was right. Nothing would do then but he must stay in Holland. Linnaeus demurred; he could not afford it. But Dr. Boerhaave knew a way out of that. He had for a patient Burgomaster Cliffort, a rich old hypochondriac with whom he could do nothing because he would insist on living high and taking too little exercise. When he came again he told him that what he needed was a physician in daily attendance upon him, and handed him over to Linnaeus.
“He will fix your diet and fix your garden, too,” was his prescription. The Burgomaster was a famous collector and had a wondrous garden that was the apple of his eye. He took Linnaeus into his house and gave him a ducat a day for writing his menu and cataloguing his collection. That was where his books grew, and the biggest and finest of them was “Hortus Cliffortianus,” the account of his patron’s garden.
Armed with letters from Dr. Boerhaave and the Burgomaster, he took one stronghold of professional prejudice after another. Not without a siege. One of them refused flatly to surrender. That was Sir Hans Sloan, the great English naturalist, to whom Dr. Boerhaave wrote in a letter that is preserved in the British Museum: “Linnaeus, who bears this letter, is alone worthy of seeing you, alone worthy of being seen by you. He who shall see you both together shall see two men whose like will scarce ever be found in the world.” And the doctor was no flatterer, as may be inferred from his treatment of Peter the Great. But the aged baronet had had his own way so long, and was so well pleased with it, that he would have nothing to do with Linnaeus. At Oxford the learned professor Dillenius received him with no better grace. “This,” he said aside to a friend, “is the young man who confounds all botany,” and he took him rather reluctantly into his garden. A plant that was new to him attracted Linnaeus’ attention and he asked to what family it belonged.
“That is more than you can tell me,” was the curt answer.
“I can, if you will let me pluck a flower and examine it.”
“Do, and be welcome,” said the professor, and his visitor after a brief glance at the flower told its species correctly. The professor stared.
“Now,” said Linnaeus, who had kept his eyes open, “what did you mean by the crosses you had put all through my book?” He had seen it lying on the professor’s table, all marked up.
“They mark the errors you made,” declared the other.
“Suppose we see about that,” said the younger man and, taking the book, led the way. They examined the flowers together, and when they returned to the study all the pride had gone out of the professor. He kept Linnaeus with him a month, never letting him out of his sight and, when he left, implored him with tears to stay and share his professorship; the pay was enough for both.
A letter that reached him from home on his return to Holland made him realize with a start that he had overstayed his leave. It was now in the fourth year since he had left Sweden. All the while he had written to his sweetheart in the care of a friend who proved false. He wanted her for himself and, when the three years had passed, told her that Carl would never come back. Dr. Moraeus was of the same mind, and had not a real friend of the absent lover turned up in the nick of time Linnaeus would probably have stayed a Dutchman to his death. Now, on the urgent message of his friend, he hastened home, found his Elisabeth holding out yet, married her and settled down in Stockholm to practise medicine.
Famous as he had become, he found the first stretch of the row at home a hard one to hoe. His books brought him no income. Nobody would employ him, “even for a sick servant,” he complained. Envious rivals assailed him and his botany, and there were days when herring and black bread was fare not to be despised in Dr. Linnaeus’ household. But he kept pegging away and his luck changed. One well-to-do patient brought another, and at last the queen herself was opportunely seized with a bad cough. She saw one of her ladies take a pill and asked what it was. Dr. Linnaeus’ prescription for a cold, she said, and it always cured her right up. So the doctor was called to the castle and his cure worked there, too. Not long after that he set down in his diary that “Now, no one can get well without my help.”
But he was not happy. “Once, I had flowers and no money,” he said; “now, I have money and no flowers.” That they appointed him professor of medicine at Upsala did not mend matters. His lectures were popular and full of common sense. Diet and the simple life were his hobbies, temperance in all things. He ever insisted that where one man dies from drinking too much, ten die from overeating. Children should eat four times a day, grown-ups twice, was his rule. The foolish fashions and all luxury he abhorred. He himself in his most famous years lived so plainly that some said he was miserly, and his clothes were sometimes almost shabby. The happiest day of his life came when he and his old enemy Rosen, whom he found filling the chair of botany at the university, and with whom he made it up soon after they became fellow members of the faculty, exchanged chairs with the ready consent of the authorities. So, at last, Linnaeus had attained the place he coveted above all others, and the goal of his ambition was reached.
He lived at Upsala thirty-seven years and wrote many books. His students idolized him. They came from all over the world. Twice a week in summer, on Wednesday and Saturday, they sallied forth with him to botanize in field and forest, and when they had collected specimens all the long day they escorted the professor home through the twilight streets with drums and trumpets and with flowers in their hats. But however late they left him at his door, the earliest dawn saw him up and at his work, for the older he grew the more precious the hours that remained. In summer he was accustomed to rise at three o’clock; in the dark winter days at six.
He found biology a chaos and left it a science. In his special field of botany he was not, as some think, the first. He himself catalogued fully a thousand books on his topic. But he brought order into it; he took what was good and, rejecting the false, fashioned it into a workable system. In the mere matter of nomenclature, his way of calling plants, like men, by a family name and a given name wrought a change hard to appreciate in our day. The common blue grass of our lawns, for instance, he called, and we call it still, _Poa pratensis_. Up to his time it had three names and one of them was _Gramen pratense paniculatum majus latiore folio poa theophrasti_. Dr. Rydberg, of the New York Botanical Gardens, said aptly at the bicentenary of his birth, that it was as if instead of calling a girl Grace Darling one were to say “Mr. Darling’s beautiful, slender, graceful, blue-eyed girl with long, golden curls and rosy cheeks.”
The binomial system revolutionized the science. What the lines of longitude and latitude did for geography Linnaeus’ genius did for botany. And he did not let pride of achievement persuade him that he had said the last word. He knew his system to be the best till some one should find a better, and said so. The King gave him a noble name and he was proud of it with reason–vain, some have said. But vanity did not make the creature deny the Creator. He ever tried to trace science to its author. When the people were frightened by the “water turning to blood” and overzealous priests cried that it was a sign of the wrath of God, he showed under the magnifying glass the presence of innumerable little animals that gave the water its reddish tinge, and thereby gave offence to some pious souls. But over the door of his lecture room were the words in Latin: “Live guiltless–God sees you!” and in his old age, seeing with prophetic eye the day of bacteriology that dawned a hundred years after his death, he thanked God that He had permitted him to “look into His secret council room and workshop.”
He was one of the clear thinkers of all days, uniting imagination with sound sense. It was Linnaeus who discovered that plants sleep like animals. The Pope ordered that his books, wherever they were found in his dominions, should be burned as materialistic and heretical; but Linnaeus lived to see a professor in botany at Rome dismissed because he did not understand his system, and another put in his place who did, and whose lectures followed his theories. When he was seventy he was stricken with apoplexy, while lecturing to his students, and the last year of his life was full of misery. “Linnaeus limps,” is one of the last entries in his diary, “can hardly walk, speaks unintelligibly, and is scarce able to write.” Death came on January 10, 1778.
Under the white flashes of the northern lights in the desolate land he explored in his youth, there grows in the shelter of the spruce forests a flower which he found and loved beyond any other, the _Linnaea borealis_, named after him. In some pictures we have of him, he is seen holding a sprig of it in his hand. It is the twin flower of the northern Pacific coast and of Labrador, indeed of the far northern woods from Labrador all the way to Alaska, that lifts its delicate, sweet-scented pink bells from the moss with gentle appeal, “long overlooked, lowly, flowering early” despite cold and storm, typical of the man himself.
NIELS FINSEN, THE WOLF-SLAYER
Hard by the town of Thorshavn, in the Faroee islands, a little lad sat one day carving his name on a rock. His rough-coated pony cropped the tufts of stunted grass within call. The grim North Sea beat upon the shore below. What thoughts of the great world without it stirred in the boy he never told. He came of a people to whom it called all through the ages with a summons that rarely went unheeded. If he heard he gave no sign. Slowly and laboriously he traced in the stone the letters N.R.F. When he had finished he surveyed his work with a quiet smile. “There!” he said, “that is done.”
The years went by, and a distant city paused in its busy life to hearken to bells tolling for one who lay dead. Kings and princes walked behind his coffin and a whole people mourned. Yet in life he had worn no purple. He was a plain, even a poor man. Upon his grave they set a rock brought from the island in the North Sea, just like the other that stands there yet, and in it they hewed the letters N.R.F., for the man and the boy were one. And he who spoke there said for all mankind that what he wrought was well done, for it was done bravely and in love.
Niels Ryberg Finsen was born in 1860 in the Faroee islands, where his father was an official under the Danish Government. His family came of the sturdy old Iceland stock that comes down to our time unshorn of its strength from the day of the vikings, and back to Iceland his people sent him to get his education in the Reykjavik Latin school, after a brief stay in Denmark where his teachers failed to find the key to the silent, reserved lad. There he lived the seven pregnant years of boyhood and youth, from fourteen to twenty-one, and ever after there was that about him that brought to mind the wild fastnesses of that storm-swept land. Its mountains were not more rugged than his belief in the right as he saw it.
The Reykjavik school had a good name, but school and pupils were after their own kind. Conventional was hardly the word for it. Some of the “boys” were twenty and over. Finsen loved to tell of how they pursued the studies each liked best, paying scant attention to the rest. In their chosen fields they often knew much more than the curriculum called for, and were quite able to instruct the teacher; the things they cared less about they helped one another out with, so as to pass examinations. For mere proficiency in lessons they cherished a sovereign contempt. To do anything by halves is not the Iceland way, and it was not Niels Finsen’s. All through his life he was impatient with second-hand knowledge and borrowed thinking. So he worked and played through the long winters of the North. In the summer vacations he roamed the barren hills, helped herd the sheep, and drank in the rough freedom of the land and its people. At twenty-one the school gave him up to the university at Copenhagen.
Training for life there was not the heyday of youthful frolicking we sometimes associate with college life in our day and land. Not until he was thirty could he hang up his sheepskin as a physician. Yet the students had their fun and their sports, and Finsen was seldom missing where these went on. He was not an athlete because already at twenty-three the crippling disease with which he battled twenty years had got its grip on him, but all the more he was an outdoor man. He sailed his boat, and practised with the rifle until he became one of the best shots in Denmark. And it is recorded that he got himself into at least one scrape at the university by his love of freedom.
The country was torn up at that time by a struggle between people and government over constitutional rights, and it had reached a point where a country parish had refused to pay taxes illegally assessed, as they claimed. It was their Boston tea-party. A delegation of the “tax refusers” had come to Copenhagen, where the political pot was boiling hot over the incident. The students were enthusiastic, but the authorities of the university sternly unsympathetic. The “Reds” were for giving a reception to the visitors in Regentsen, the great dormitory where, as an Iceland student, Finsen had free lodging; but it was certain that the Dean would frown upon such a proposition. So they applied innocently for permission to entertain some “friends from the country,” and the party was held in Finsen’s room. Great was the scandal when the opposition newspapers exploited the feasting of the tax refusers in the sacred precincts of the university. To the end of his days Finsen chuckled over the way they stole a march on the Dean.
For two or three years after getting his degree he taught in the medical school as demonstrator, eking out his scant income by tutoring students in anatomy. His sure hand and clear decision in any situation marked him as a practitioner of power, and he had thoughts once of devoting himself to the most delicate of all surgery,–that of the eye. He was even then groping for his life-work, without knowing it, for it was always light, light–the source or avenue or effect of it–that held him. And presently his work found him.
It has been said that Finsen was a sick man. A mysterious malady[1] with dropsical symptoms clutched him from the earliest days with ever tightening grip, and all his manhood’s life he was a great but silent sufferer. Perhaps it was that; perhaps it was the bleak North in which his young years had been set that turned him to the light as the source of life and healing. He said it himself: “It was because I needed it so much, I longed for it so.” Probably it was both. Add to them his unique power of turning the things of everyday life to account in his scientific research, and one begins to understand at once his success and his speedy popularity. He dealt with the humble things of life, and got to the heart of things on that road. And the people comprehended; the wise men fell in behind him–sometimes a long way behind.
[Footnote 1: The autopsy which he himself ordered on his death-bed as his last contribution to medical knowledge, showed it to be a slow ossification of the membrane of the heart, involving the liver and all the vital organs. He was “tapped” for dropsy more than twenty times.]
In the yard of Regentsen there grows a famous old linden tree. Standing at his window one day and watching its young leaf sprout, Finsen saw a cat sunning itself on the pavement. The shadow of the house was just behind it and presently crept up on pussy who got up, stretched herself, and moved into the sunlight. In a little while the shadow overtook her there, and pussy moved once more. Finsen watched the shadow rout her out again and again. It was clear that the cat liked the sunlight.
A few days later he stood upon a bridge and saw a little squad of insects sporting on the water. They drifted down happily with the stream till they came within the shadow of the bridge, when they at once began to work their way up a piece to get a fresh start for a sunlight sail. Finsen knew just how they felt. His own room looked north and was sunless; his work never prospered as it did when he sat with a friend whose room was on the south side, where the sun came in. It was warm and pleasant; but was that all? Was it only the warmth that made the birds break into song when the sun came out on a cloudy day, made the insects hum joyously and man himself walk with a more springy step? The housekeeper who “sunned” the bed-clothes and looked with suspicion on a dark room had something else in mind; the sun “disinfected” the bedding. Finsen wanted to know what it was in the sunlight that had this power, and how we could borrow it and turn it to use.
The men of science had long before analyzed the sunlight. They had broken it up into the rays of different color that together make the white light we see. Any boy can do it with a prism, and in the band or spectrum of red, yellow, green, blue, and violet that then appears, he has before him the cipher that holds the key to the secrets of the universe if we but knew how to read it aright; for the sunlight is the physical source of all life and of all power. The different colors represent rays with different wave-lengths; that is, they vibrate with different speed and do different work. The red vibrate only half as fast as the violet, at the other end of the spectrum, and, roughly speaking, they are the heat carriers. The blue and violet are cold by comparison. They are the force carriers. They have power to cause chemical changes, hence are known as the chemical or actinic rays. It is these the photographer shuts out of his dark room, where he intrenches himself behind a ruby-colored window. The chemical ray cannot pass that; if it did it would spoil his plate.
This much was known, and it had been suggested more than once that the “disinfecting” qualities of the sunlight might be due to the chemical rays killing germs. Finsen, experimenting with earthworms, earwigs, and butterflies, in a box covered with glass of the different colors of the spectrum, noted first that the bugs that naturally burrowed in darkness became uneasy in the blue light. As fast as they were able, they got out of it and crawled into the red, where they lay quiet and apparently content. When the glass covers were changed they wandered about until they found the red light again. The earwigs were the smartest. They developed an intelligent grasp of the situation, and soon learned to make straight for the red room. The butterflies, on the other hand, liked the red light only to sleep in. It was made clear by many such experiments that the chemical rays, and they only, had power to stimulate, to “stir life.” Finsen called it that himself. In the language of the children, he was getting “warm.”
That this power, like any other, had its perils, and that nature, if not man, was awake to them, he proved by some simple experiments with sunburn. He showed that the tan which boys so covet was the defence the skin puts forth against the blue ray. The inflammation of sunburn is succeeded by the brown pigmentation that henceforth stands guard like the photographer’s ruby window, protecting the deeper layers of the skin. The black skin of the negro was no longer a mystery. It is his protection against the fierce sunlight of the tropics and the injurious effect of its chemical ray.
Searching the libraries in Copenhagen for the records of earlier explorers in his field, and finding little enough there, Finsen came across the report of an American army surgeon on a smallpox epidemic in the South in the thirties of the last century. There were so many sick in the fort that, every available room being filled, they had to put some of the patients into the bomb-proof, to great inconvenience all round, as it was entirely dark there. The doctor noted incidentally that, as if to make up for it, the underground patients got well sooner and escaped pitting. To him it was a curious incident, nothing more. Upon Dr. Finsen, sitting there with the seventy-five-year-old report from over the sea in his hand, it burst with a flood of light: the patients got well without scarring _because_ they were in the dark. Red light or darkness, it was all the same. The point was that the chemical rays that could cause sunburn on men climbing glaciers, and had power to irritate the sick skin, were barred out. Within a month he jolted the medical world by announcing that smallpox patients treated under red light would recover readily and without disfigurement.
The learned scoffed. There were some of them who had read of the practice in the Middle Ages of smothering smallpox patients in red blankets, giving them red wine to drink and hanging the room with scarlet. Finsen had not heard of it, and was much interested. Evidently they had been groping toward the truth. How they came upon the idea is not the only mystery of that strange day, for they knew nothing of actinic rays or sunlight analyzed. But Finsen calmly invited the test, which was speedy in coming.
They had smallpox in Bergen, Norway, and there the matter was put to the proof with entire success; later in Sweden and in Copenhagen. The patients who were kept under the red light recovered rapidly, though some of them were unvaccinated children, and bad cases. In no instance was the most dangerous stage of the disease, the festering stage, reached; the temperature did not rise again, and they all came out unscarred.
Finsen pointed out that where other methods of treatment such as painting the face with iodine or lunar caustic, or covering it with a mask or with fat, had met with any success in the past, the same principle was involved of protecting the skin from the light, though the practitioner did not know it. He was doing the thing they did in the middle ages, and calling them quacks.
It is strange but true that Dr. Finsen had never seen a smallpox patient at that time, but he knew the nature of the disease, and that the sufferer was affected by its eruption first and worst on the face and hands–that is to say, on the parts of the body exposed to the light–and he was as sure of his ground as was Leverrier when, fifty years before, he bade his fellow astronomers look in a particular spot of the heavens for an unknown planet that disturbed the movements of Uranus. And they found the one we call Neptune there.
Presently all the world knew that the first definite step had been taken toward harnessing in the service of man the strange force in the sunlight that had been the object of so much speculation and conjecture. The next step followed naturally. In the published account of his early experiments Finsen foreshadows it in the words, “That the beginning has been made with the hurtful effects of this force is odd enough, since without doubt its beneficial effect is far greater.” His clear head had already asked the question: if the blue rays of the sun can penetrate deep enough into the skin to cause injury, why should they not be made to do police duty there, and catch and kill offending germs–in short, to heal?
Finsen had demonstrated the correctness of the theory that the chemical rays have power to kill germs. But it happens that these are the rays that possess the least penetration. How to make them go deeper was the problem. By an experiment that is, in its simplicity, wholly characteristic of the man, he demonstrated that the red blood in the deeper layers of the skin was the obstacle. He placed a piece of photographic paper behind the lobe of his wife’s ears and concentrated powerful blue rays on the other side. Five minutes of exposure made no impression on the paper; it remained white. But when he squeezed all the blood out of the lobe, by pressing it between two pieces of glass, the paper was blackened in twenty seconds.
That night Finsen knew that he had within his grasp that which would make him a rich man if he so chose. He had only to construct apparatus to condense the chemical rays and double their power many times, and to apply his discovery in medical practice. Wealth and fame would come quickly. He told the writer in his own simple way how he talked it over with his wife. They were poor. Finsen’s salary as a teacher at the university was something like $1200 a year. He was a sick man, and wealth would buy leisure and luxury. Children were growing up about them who needed care. They talked it out together, and resolutely turned their backs upon it all. Hand in hand they faced the world with their sacrifice. What remained of life to him was to be devoted to suffering mankind. That duty done, what came they would meet together. Wealth never came, but fame in full measure, and the love and gratitude of their fellow-men.
There is a loathsome disease called lupus, of which, happily, in America with our bright skies we know little. Lupus is the Latin word for wolf, and the ravenous ailment is fitly named, for it attacks by preference the face, and gnaws at the features, at nose, chin, or eye, with horrible, torturing persistence, killing slowly, while the patient shuts himself out from the world praying daily for death to end his misery.
In the north of Europe it is sadly common, and there had never been any cure for it. Ointments, burning, surgery–they were all equally useless. Once the wolf had buried its fangs in its victim, he was doomed to inevitable death. The disease is, in fact, tuberculosis of the skin, and is the most dreadful of all the forms in which the white plague scourges mankind–was, until one day Finsen announced to the world his second discovery, that lupus was cured by the simple application of light.
It was not a conjecture, a theory, like the red-light treatment for smallpox; it was a fact. For two years he had been sending people away whole and happy who came to him in despair. The wolf was slain, and by this silent sufferer whose modest establishment was all contained within a couple of small shanties in a corner of the city hospital grounds, at Copenhagen.
There was a pause of amazed incredulity. The scientific men did not believe it. Three years later, when the physician in charge of Finsen’s clinic told at the medical congress in Paris of the results obtained at the Light Institute, his story was still received with a polite smile. The smile became astonishment when, at a sign from him, the door opened and twelve healed lupus patients came in, each carrying a photograph of himself as he was before he underwent the treatment. Still the doctors could not grasp it. The thing was too simple as matched against all their futile skill.
But the people did not doubt. There was a rush from all over Europe to Copenhagen. Its streets became filled with men and women whose faces were shrouded in heavy bandages, and it was easy to tell the new-comers from those who had seen “the professor.” They came in gloom and misery; they went away carrying in their faces the sunshine that gave them back their life. Finsen never tired, when showing friends over his Institute, of pointing out the joyous happiness of his patients. It was his reward. For not “science for science’s sake,” or pride in his achievement, was his aim and thought, but just the wish to do good where he could. Then, in three more years, they awarded him the great Nobel prize for signal service to humanity, and criticism was silenced. All the world applauded.
“They gave it to me this year,” said Finsen, with his sad little smile, “because they knew that next year it would have been too late.” And he prophesied truly. He died nine months later.
All that is here set down seems simple enough. But it was achieved with infinite toil and patience, by the most painstaking experiments, many times repeated to make sure. In his method of working Finsen was eminently conservative and thorough. Nothing “happened” with him. There was ever behind his doings a definite purpose for which he sought a way, and the higher the obstacles piled up the more resolutely he set his teeth and kept right on. “The thing is not in itself so difficult,” he said, when making ready for his war upon the wolf, “but the road is long and the experiments many before we find the right way.”
He took no new step before he had planted his foot firmly in the one that went before; but once he knew where he stood, he did not hesitate to question any scientific dogma that opposed him, always in his own quiet way, backed by irrefutable facts. In a remarkable degree he had the faculty of getting down through the husk to the core of things, but he rejected nothing untried. The little thing in hand, he ever insisted, if faithfully done might hold the key to the whole problem; only let it be done _now_ to get the matter settled.
Whatever his mind touched it made perfectly clear, if it was not so already. As a teacher of anatomy he invented a dissecting knife that was an improvement on those in use, and clamps for securing the edges of a wound in an operation. As a rifle shot he made an improved breech; as a physician, observing the progress of his own disease, an effective blood powder for anaemia. At the Light Institute, which friends built for him, and the government endowed, he devised the powerful electric lamps to which he turned in the treatment of lupus, for the sun does not shine every day in Copenhagen; and when it did not, the lenses that gathered the blue rays and concentrated them upon the swollen faces were idle. And gradually he increased their power, checking the heat rays that would slip through and threatened to scorch the patient’s skin, by cunning devices of cooling streams trickling through the tubes and the hollow lenses.
Nothing was patented; it was all given freely to the world. The decision which he and his wife made together was made once for all. When the great Nobel prize was given to him he turned it over to the Light Institute, and was with difficulty persuaded to keep half of it for himself only when friends raised an equal amount and presented it to the Institute.
Finsen knew that his discoveries were but the first groping steps upon a new road that stretched farther ahead than any man now living can see. He was content to have broken the way. His faith was unshaken in the ultimate treatment of the whole organism under electric light that, by concentrating the chemical rays, would impart to the body their life-giving power. He himself was beyond their help. Daily he felt life slipping from him, but no word of complaint passed his lips. He prescribed for himself a treatment that, if anything, was worse than the disease. Only a man of iron will could have carried it through.
A set of scales stood on the table before him, and for years he weighed every mouthful of food he ate. He suffered tortures from thirst because he would allow no fluid to pass his lips, on account of his tendency to dropsy. Through it all he cheerfully kept up his labors, rejoicing that he was allowed to do so much. His courage was indomitable; his optimism under it all unwavering. His favorite contention was that there is nothing in the world that is not good for something, except war. That he hated, and his satire on the militarism of Europe as its supreme folly was sharp and biting.
Of such quality was this extraordinary man of whom half the world was talking while the fewest, even in his own home city, ever saw him. Fewer still knew him well. It suited his temper and native modesty, as it did the state of his bodily health, to keep himself secluded. His motto was: “_bene vixit qui bene latuit_–he has lived well who has kept himself well hidden”–and his contention was always that in proportion as one could keep himself in the background his cause prospered, if it was a good cause. When kings and queens came visiting, he could not always keep in hiding, though he often tried. On one of his days of extreme prostration the dowager empress of Russia knocked vainly at his door. She pleaded so hard to be allowed to see Dr. Finsen that they relented at last, and she sat by his bed and wept in sympathy with his sufferings, while he with his brave smile on lips that would twitch with pain did his best to comfort her. She and Queen Alexandra, both daughters of King Christian, carried the gospel of hope and healing from his study to their own lands, and Light Institutes sprang up all over Europe.
In his own life he treated nearly nineteen hundred sufferers, two-thirds of them lupus patients, and scarce a handful went from his door unhelped. When his work was done he fell asleep with a smile upon his lips, and the “universal judgment was one of universal thanksgiving that he had lived.” He was forty-three years old.
When the news of his death reached the Rigsdag, the Danish parliament, it voted his widow a pension such as had been given to few Danes in any day. The king, his sons and daughters, and, as it seemed, the whole people followed his body to the grave. The rock from his native island marks the place where he lies. His work is his imperishable monument. His epitaph he wrote himself in the speech another read when the Nobel prize was awarded him, for he was then too ill to speak.
“May the Light Institute grasp the obligation that comes with its success, the obligation to maintain what I account the highest aim in science–truth, faithful work, and sound criticism.”