Among the innumerable sanguinary tusslings of this War are counted Three great Battles, Leipzig, Lutzen, Nordlingen. Under one great Captain, Swedish Gustav, and the two or three other considerable Captains, who appeared in it, high passages of furious valor, of fine strategy and tactic, are on record. But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and towards the latter times the exclusive one, was Hunger. The opposing Armies tried to starve one another; at lowest, tried each not to starve. Each trying to eat the country, or at any rate to leave nothing eatable in it: what that will mean for the country, we may consider. As the Armies too frequently, and the Kaiser's Armies habitually, lived without commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors of war and of being a seat of war, that have been since heard of, are poor to those then practised. The detail of which is still horrible to read. Germany, in all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the process;--tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar under the iron mace of war. [Curious incidental details of the state it was reduced to, in the Rhine and Danube Countries, turn up in the Earl of Arundel and Surrey's TRAVELS ("Arundel of the Marbles") as _Ambassador Extraordinary to the Emperor Ferdinando II. in 1636_ (a small Volume, or Pamphlet, London, 1637).] Brandenburg saw its towns sieged and sacked, its country populations driven to despair, by the one party and the other. Three times,--first in the Wallenstein Mecklenburg period, while fire and sword were the weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when starvation had become the method--Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at their height. In 1638, three years after that precious "Peace of Prag," the Swedes (Banier VERSUS Gallas) starving out the Imperialists in those Northwestern parts, the ravages of the starving Gallas and his Imperialists excelled all precedent; and the "famine about Tangermunde had risen so high that men ate human flesh, nay human creatures ate their own children." [1638: Pauli, iv. 604.] _"Que faire; ils ont des canons!_" Chapter XVII. -- DUCHY OF JAGERNDORF. This unfortunate George Wilhelm failed in getting Pommern when due; Pommern, firmly held by the Swedes, was far from him. But that was not the only loss of territory he had. Jagerndorf,--we have heard of Johann George of Jagerndorf, Uncle of this George Wilhelm, how old Joachim Friedrich put him into Jagerndorf, long since, when it fell home to the Electoral House. Jagerndorf is now lost; Johann George is under REICHS-ACHT (Ban of Empire), ever since the Winter-King's explosion, and the thunder-bolts that followed; and wanders landless;--nay he is long since dead, and has six feet of earth for a territory, far away in Transylvania, or the RIESEN-GEBIRGE (Giant Mountains) somewhere. Concerning whom a word now.