develop it systematically, to place it on a rational basis; in fact, the pioneer in building up a true regular army and national military organisation. He may well be called the father of the present European system of conscription.

In the Middle Ages the military forces were either of the feudal or militia type, who turned out for a short period and returned to their homes on its expiry, or else mercenary bands who hired themselves out to any ruler, irrespective of nationality, who was willing to pay them. Regular soldiers only in the sense that they made war their profession, they were the best troops of their age, but unreliable and naturally averse to vigorous action, where decisive victory would remove the need of their services, and so throw them out of employment.

But despite this drawback, from the collapse of feudalism onwards their importance steadily and inevitably increased, and in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the soldier of fortune was the dominant feature in warfare. Until, and apart from, Gustavus, such embryo standing armies as existed were but an enlarged species of royal bodyguard.

Working to some extent on a foundation laid by the earlier Vasa kings, Gustavus created a national army, raised, paid, fed, and equipped by the State,

with a militia behind it for home defence, which also supplied drafts to the regular forces.

In numerous books the statement is made that Gustavus' armies were raised on a system of land tenure, but a study of the records of the time shows that the "Indelning," peculiar to Sweden, did not uniformly take this form, despite the King's efforts.

...

The orders issued for the kingdom in 1627 bear on this point, and are vividly reminiscent of some features of our Great War experience: "The peasants are to be convoked by districts, the summons being given from the pulpits by the pastors, with the exhortation for every man to attend. . . . The pastors shall first . . . make out a list of all the male inhabitants of fifteen years and upwards, for the correctness of which they are held responsible. The justices and bailiffs of the districts shall see that this is faithfully done by the parish clergy. . . . A jury of twelve men shall be formed, the same who sit at the ting, or district court. With the assistance of this jury, the royal commissioners are to cause the assembled men to be divided into groups or lists of ten each. These are arranged, not according to the number of farms or landed estates, but by the count of heads.1 In conducting the conscription, care is to be exercised that he who is taken for

British alone, mainly Scots, there were 6 generals, 30 colonels, 51 lieutenant-colonels, and 10,000 men. It is an interesting coincidence that in the storm of Frankfort on the Oder, where the Scots took a foremost part in the assault, the last stand of the Imperialists was made by a body of Irish under Colonel Walter Butler.

By these various means Gustavus formed early in 1630 an army of 76,000 men, of whom 43,000 were Swedes; but of this total only 13,000 landed with him in Germany, while David Leslie occupied Stralsund and Rügen with another 6000 a desperately slender force for so gigantic a venture, though another 25,000 came to him as reinforcements before the end of the year. Of the surplus, 16,000 were left to garrison Sweden, and three contingents of from 5000 to 7000 apiece in Finland, the Baltic provinces, and Prussia. As the armies of Wallenstein and Tilly totalled over a hundred thousand in Germany, we may appreciate how fortunate for Gustavus was the former's dismissal.

But heterogeneous as was the Swedish army in race, it was welded into a homogeneous instrument of war by the discipline, unique for the times, that Gustavus maintained, and by the magnetism of his leadership.

Moreover, the numerous foreign elements must not blind

Swedes formed nearly 60 per cent of the total, and with the Scots were the backbone of the army. Wellington's army at Waterloo was fully as mixed, but we regard the battle, and rightly, as a triumph of British staunchness. The Swedish raw material was ideal, stouthearted, inured to hardship, and with a deep-rooted affection for the crown because of the way the Vasa family had always befriended them against the nobles. Again, though their pay was not high, it was regularly paid during the life of Gustavus-in striking contrast to other armies of this time, who had to rely almost entirely on plunder. Instead of the customary haphazard manner of living on the country, Gustavus organised a methodical system of requisitions, and fed his troops, as far as possible, from magazines established at suitable centres, with a regular staff of commissaries, who distributed provisions to the regiments in bulk. Not only did this, one of the most notable of his reforms, prevent his forces dispersing over the countryside to forage and pillage, but it avoided the other common danger of waste-the need for repeated moves into fresh districts. Moreover, it enabled him to reduce the swollen baggage-trains and hordes of camp - followers that were a feature of seventeenth-century armies, and the worst possible brake on mobility. In one army of 40,000 men, no

fewer than 140,000 camp-followers are said to have been counted!

His troops also were systematically quartered, and if occupying a fortified camp were provided with huts or tents; in neither case was discipline relaxed, and the troops were kept up to the mark by properly organised camp and garrison duties. He was also the father of the modern medical service, appointing surgeons to every regiment, and allocating a tithe of all booty for the upkeep of the military hospitals.

With troops so well cared for and so well kept in hand, the maintenance of regular discipline was made possible, and was aided by the strong religious feeling which permeated the Swedish army. Like Cromwell with his " Ironsides "later, Gustavus preferred "such men as made some conscience of what they did," and believed that those who prayed best fought best. Gustavus fully understood the binding and driving force of religion, and even the new model" could not excel the Swedish army in mixing prayer and powder into an explosive compound that would shatter all resistance! Gustavus introduced regular morning and evening prayers, and distributed through the army a special soldiers' prayerbook, and the common sight of generals and privates kneeling side by side in prayer left an indelible impression on observers in Germany. But if religion was used as a driving

force, it unquestionably proved a civilising influence, and the good behaviour and humanity of the Swedish troops became a matter of wonder to the German people, Protestants and Catholics alike, accustomed to regard a protecting army as only a lesser evil than an invading one. In this connection, a point of note is that in the Articles of War, which he wrote in his own hand and published before his first Polish campaign, among the offences punishable by death were pillage, violence to women, and, rather quaintly, "despising

divine service, third offence.' This new military code of his is yet another claim to modernism, and has served as a model for subsequent military law. It was administered by two kinds of court, a higher and a lower, corresponding in function and scope to our " general' and "district" courts-martial. The lower was a regimental court, with the commanding officer as president, and "assessors elected by the whole regiment as members. The code was severe. For a regiment which ran away in action the penalty was the old Roman one of decimation, and the regiment had to do the dirty work of the camp until it retrieved itself. Yet in several respects it was more humane than in nineteenth century armies-in the guarantees it provided against injustice and in the absence of flogging. Similarly the Swedish code compares favourably with certain

Continental armies of the present generation in its ban on striking private soldiers, and on duelling among officers. The story goes that Gustavus on one occasion yielded to the entreaties of two of his officers, and granted special permission for them to meet, and added that he would attend himself. On arrival he said to the duellists, "Now, gentlemen, at it, and stop you not till one is killed. Moreover, I have the provost-marshal with me, who will at once execute the other." A pleasant prospect!

While in general the behaviour of the Swedish troops was exemplary, whether in the territory of friends or foes, and in shining contrast to the customs of the age, it is, of course, possible to exaggerate these good qualities. Time and the hero-worshipping historian are apt to throw a halo round the noble figures of the past, to depict them as angels rather than human beings, and when there is real warrant for admiration this tendency is increased. Under the pressure of circumstances, when supplies from Sweden failed we have the King's own testimony, in a letter to Oxenstierna, that "we have been obliged to carry on the war ex rapto, with great injury and damage to our neighbours. . . . We have nothing to satisfy the soldiers except what we take by pillage and brigandage." In Gustavus himself, though the preux chevalier of his age, a vein of shrewd ness underlay his naturally hu

mane disposition. Thus in the Polish campaign we find him writing: "In order to win over as many of the Poles as possible, the field-marshal will not only forbid all pillage . . . in Polish territory, and punish rigorously all excesses of this kind, but he will favour their commerce in every way possible." In contrast, in his address to the troops before Breitenfeld, he is not so much above his time as to omit the time-honoured incitement: "Now you have in front of you, for the first time, a camp filled with precious booty, afterwards a road which passes the sumptuous village and fertile lands of the Catholics. All that is the price of a single victory."

Happily for his higher fame, acts proved better than words suggested, though acts of plunder were sufficient that year to call from Gustavus a general exhortation to the troops, and a number of executions. But such minor blemishes may well be overlooked in the radiance of his conduct and that of his troops in Bavaria. Here the peasantry maintained a guerilla war of the most atrocious type-even in 1914 the Bavarian troops acquired special notoriety; hundreds of Swedish soldiers caught singly or in small parties were tortured to death, yet Gustavus refrained from revenge. At Landshut, incensed by a special crop of outrages, he declared to the inhabitants, "You deserve to be annihilated by