When times were prosperous, a battle won, a rich city plundered, or an opulent district laid under contribution, everything was plentiful, food and drink cheap; and it once happened, in the last year of the war, that in the Bavarian camp a cow was bought for a pipe of tobacco. The Croats of the Imperial army in Pomerania, in the winter of 1630 and 1631, had their girdles overlaid with gold, and whole plates of gold and silver on the breast. Paul Stockmann, a pastor at Lützen, relates, that in the Imperial army, before the battle of Lützen, one horseman had his horse decorated with a quantity of golden stars, and another with three hundred silver moons; and the soldiers' women wore the most beautiful church dresses and mass vestments, and that some Stradiots rode in plundered priests' dresses, to the great mirth of their comrades. In these times also carousers drank to one another in costly wine from the chalices, and caused long chains to be made of the plundered gold, from which, according to the old knightly custom, they severed links to pay for a carousal. But the longer the war lasted the more rare were these golden times. The devastation of the country revenged itself fearfully on the army itself; the pale spectre of hunger, the forerunner of pestilence, glided through the lines of the camp, and raised its bony hand against every straw hut. Then supplies from the surrounding districts ceased, the price of provisions was raised so as to be almost unattainable; a loaf of bread, for example, in the Swedish army in 1640, at Gotha, cost a ducat. Hollow-eyed pale faces, sick and dying men, were to be seen in every row of huts; the vicinity of the camp was pestilential from the decaying bodies of dead animals. All around was a wilderness of uncultivated fields, blackened with the ruins of villages, and the camp itself a dismal city of death. A broad stream of superstition had flowed through the souls of the people from ancient times up to the present day, and the soldier's life of the Thirty years' war revived an abundance of peculiar superstitions, of which a portion continues even now; it is worth while to dwell a little upon these characteristic phenomena.