Wallenstein gazed sternly on the climbing roofs and splendid mansions, the gabled houses and innumerable turrets of the beleaguered city. To-day, a modern tower, some eighty feet high, rears its head above the woods that crown the hill, and the adjoining inn is a favourite place of resort with the inhabitants of Fürth and Nuremberg. But some few traces of the old fortress and of Wallenstein's entrenchments may yet be found, and he who loves "to summon up remembrance of things past" will find food enough for his imagination when he attempts to reconstruct the scene of that terrible encampment. For terrible it was both to besiegers and besieged. Gustavus was cut off from his base of supplies in the Upper Danube and Rhine by this great entrenched camp south-west of Nuremberg, and all the roads leading into Franconia were scoured by Wallenstein's light Croatian cavalry. Though provisions had at first been plentiful, the resources of the city were soon strained to the uttermost by the influx of peasants who had fled for refuge from the country. The mills and bakeries were unable to supply bread fast enough to the starving inhabitants, so that mobs fought outside the bakers' shops in their desperate haste for food. Famine laid hold of the city first, then of the Swedish, and finally of the Imperial camp. And in the path of famine followed, as ever, pestilence. Pestilence in July, in a mediæval city, crowded with grim soldiers, grown shrunken and meagre, with starving women and whitefaced children--it would require the pen of a Flaubert or a Zola to describe. Worse than all for Gustavus to bear, when want came to be felt in the army, there came the relaxation of that discipline on which he had prided himself. The citizens complained that his Swedish troops were behaving like Austrian banditti. Sending for the chief Germans in his service, the King rated them soundly in a famous oration. Never was his Majesty seen before in such a rage. "They are no Swedes who commit these crimes," he said truly enough, "but you Germans yourselves. You princes, counts, lords, and noblemen, are showing great disloyalty and wickedness on your own fatherland, which you are ruining. You colonels and officers, from the highest to the lowest, it is you who steal and rob everyone, without making any exceptions.