Booty was the uncertain gain for which the soldier staked his life, and the hope of it kept him steadfast in the most desperate situations. The pay was moderate, the payment insecure; plunder promised them wine, play, a smart mistress, a gold-laced dress with a plume of feathers, one or two horses, and the prospect of greater importance in the company and of advancement. Vanity, love of pleasure, and ambition, developed this longing to a dangerous extent in the army. The success of a battle was more than once defeated, by the soldiers too soon abandoning themselves to plundering. It often happened that individuals made great booty, but it was almost always dissipated in wild revelry; according to the soldier's adage: "What is won with the drum will be lost with the fifes." The fame of such lucky hits spread through all armies. Sometimes these great gains brought evil results on the fortunate finders.[24] A common soldier of Tilly's army had won great booty at the capture of Magdeburg, it was said to be thirty thousand ducats, and was immediately lost in gambling. Tilly caused him to be hanged after thus accosting him: "With this money you might have lived all your life like a gentleman, but as you have not understood how to make use of it, I cannot see of what use you can be to my Emperor." At the end of the war a man in Königsmark's troop had obtained a similar sum in the suburbs of Prague, and played it away at one sitting. Königsmark wished in like manner to despatch him, but the soldier saved himself by this undaunted answer: "It would be unfair for your Excellence to hang me on account of this loss, as I have hopes of acquiring still greater booty in the city itself." This answer was considered a good omen. In the Bavarian army a soldier in the Holtz infantry was famed for a similar lucky hit. He had been for a long time musketeer, but shortly before the peace had sunk to be a pikeman, and was ill-clad; his shirt hung behind and before out of his hose. This fellow had obtained at the taking of Herbsthausen a barrel filled with French doubloons, so large that he could hardly carry it off. He thereupon absconded secretly from the regiment, dressed himself up like a prince, bought a coach and six beautiful horses, kept many coachmen, lackeys, pages, and _valets de chambre_ in fine liveries, and called himself with dull humour Colonel Lumpus.[25] Then he travelled to Munich, and lived in an inn there splendidly. General Holtz accidentally put up at the same inn, heard much from the landlord of the opulence and qualities of Colonel Lumpus, and could not remember ever having heard this name among the cavaliers of the Roman empire, or among the soldiers of fortune. He therefore commissioned the landlord to invite the stranger to supper. Colonel Lumpus accepted the invitation, and caused to be served up at dessert, in a dish, five hundred new French pistoles and a chain worth a hundred ducats, and said at the same time