This statement of the losses of Germany, however, was but a small part of the suffering endured. Only two commanders, Gustavus Adolphus and Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar, preserved rigid discipline among their troops, and prevented them from plundering the people. All others allowed, or were powerless to prevent, the most savage outrages. During the last ten or twelve years of the war both Protestants and Catholics vied with each other in deeds of barbarity; the soldiers were nothing but highway robbers, who maimed and tortured the country people to make them give up their last remaining property, and drove hundreds of thousands of them into the woods and mountains to die miserably or live as half-savages. Multitudes of others flocked to the cities for refuge, only to be visited by fire and famine. In the year 1637, when Ferdinand II. died, the want was so great that men devoured each other, and even hunted down human beings like deer or hares, in order to feed upon them. Great numbers committed suicide, to avoid a slow death by hunger: on the island of Rügen many poor creatures were found dead, with their mouths full of grass, and in some districts attempts were made to knead earth into bread. Then followed a pestilence which carried off a large proportion of the survivors. A writer of the time exclaims: "A thousand times ten thousand souls, the spirits of innocent children butchered in this unholy war, cry day and night unto God for vengeance, and cease not: while those who have caused all these miseries live in peace and freedom, and the shout of revelry and the voice of music are heard in their dwellings!" [Sidenote: 1648.] In character, in intelligence and in morality, the German people were set back two hundred years. All branches of industry had declined, commerce had almost entirely ceased, literature and the arts were suppressed, and except the astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Kepler there was no contribution to human knowledge. Even the modern High-German language, which Luther had made the classic tongue of the land, seemed to be on the point of perishing. Spaniards and Italians on the Catholic, Swedes and French on the Protestant side, flooded the country with foreign words and expressions, the use of which soon became an affectation with the nobility, who did their best to destroy their native language. Wallenstein's letters to the Emperor were a curious mixture of German, French, Spanish, Italian and Latin.