So for two weary months plague, famine and wounds did their fell work inside and out. The hospitals were full to overflowing. The graves could not be dug fast enough to hold the dead. The countless victims of hunger and pestilence lay for days in the trenches, poisoning the air. In the streets were strewn the half-decayed bodies of men and horses, eaten of pigs. But if the Protestants suffered so did the Imperialists. And always Wallenstein sat implacable on the height refusing to join battle, waiting grimly till starvation should have done its work and the sack of Magdeburg could be repeated. For Gustavus must either attack Wallenstein in his impregnable position or march away the city to its fate. The arrival of reinforcements, which increased the King's army to 50,000 men, determined him to make a general assault on the Alte Veste and the northern side of the camp. It will be clear to anyone who examines the ground that this was an almost impossible undertaking, the forlornest of forlorn hopes. What desperate courage could do was done. For ten hours the Swedes stormed undaunted against fearful odds and with fearful losses. Three times they got actual footing in the Burgstall itself; three times they were hurled back. At last Gustavus, who had had a piece of the sole of his right boot shot off, and had always been in the thickest part of the fight, dragging the cannon to points of vantage and aiming them with his own hands, was obliged to relinquish the desperate enterprise. "We have done a stupid thing to-day," was his comment. For the first time in his life, indeed, he was conquered, because he was not conqueror. But Wallenstein's claws were cut: he had suffered little less than Gustavus in the fight round the Alte Veste. Nuremberg was saved for the present, for Wallenstein was in no condition to prosecute a siege. After fifteen days, therefore (September 8), Gustavus, unable to stay for lack of supplies, and failing to entice the enemy into battle on the plain, marched away into Thuringia, and two months later, on the field of Lutzen, he fell in the moment of victory when he had defeated his old enemy. Before that, however, ten days after he had departed, and a week after Wallenstein had broken up his camp, Gustavus came back to Fürth and looked at what had been the enemy's position. It is said that he had breakfast on the round stone table still to be found at the Alte Veste, and known as the _Schweden Tisch_. Once more, in October, he returned, drove the Imperial troops out of the Nuremberg territory, and took his last farewell of the town.