The Saxons gave way at the first shock of the imperial troops, but the King of Sweden had dashed forward, and nothing could withstand him; Tilly himself, hitherto proof against lead and steel, fell wounded in three places; five thousand dead were left on the field of battle; and Gustavus Adolphus dragged at his heels seven thousand prisoners. “Never did the grace of God pull me out of so bad a scrape,” said the conqueror. He halted some time at Mayence, which had just opened its gates to him. Axel Oxenstiern, his most faithful servant and oldest friend, whose intimacy with his royal master reminds one of that between Henry IV. and Sully, came to join him in Germany; he had hitherto been commissioned to hold the government of the conquests won from the Poles. He did not approve of the tactics of Gustavus Adolphus, who was attacking the Catholic League, and meanwhile leaving to the Elector of Saxony the charge of carrying the war into the hereditary dominions of Austria. . . . “Sir,” said he, “I should have liked to offer you my felicitations on your victories, not at Mayence, but at Vienna.” “If, after the battle of Leipzig, the King of Sweden had gone straight to attack the emperor in his hereditary provinces, it had been all over with the house of Austria,” says Cardinal Richelieu; “but either God did not will the certain destruction of that house, which would perhaps have been too prejudicial to the Catholic religion, and he turned him aside from the counsel which would have been more advantageous for him to take, or the same God, who giveth not all to any, but distributeth his gifts diversely to each, had given to this king, as to Hannibal, the knowledge how to conquer, but not how to use victory.”