Go, Captain, Greet the Danish King 91that evening the main armies met and took up positions. It was then
too late to fight, but by morning Bethlen had gone, as he too was not
willing to risk a direct challenge. Wallenstein was ready for a battle but
not for a chase, having left his baggage train and supplies well to the
rear.^16 In any case Bethlen’s lighter and more mobile forces would have
been hard to follow, difficult to catch, and probably impossible to pin
down to a battle. A wild-goose chase across the Hungarian plains offered
Wallenstein little prospect of success but a fair chance of disaster if
Bethlen led him too far from his base and supply lines.
In fact Wallenstein had achieved precisely the objectives of a good
general. He had protected the Austrian heartland, neutralised the
emperor’s enemies, and in the end driven them from the field. Within
a fortnight Bethlen was making peace overtures and ready to go home,
while Mansfeld, ill and out of money, was dead by the end of the year, a
fate which had overtaken the ‘mad Halberstädter’ earlier in the summer.
Bethlen too was ill, and although he survived a couple of years he did
no more campaigning, leaving it to his successor to resume the role of
thorn in the Habsburg side.^17 Nevertheless Wallenstein had to keep his
sick and starving army in the field well into December until Bethlen
had withdrawn, increasing his bitterness at the failures in Vienna and in
Hungary to make adequate arrangements, indeed scarcely any attempt,
to provide them with food, supplies or pay.
A thorn in the side for Wallenstein personally was the persistent criti-
cism from armchair strategists in Vienna, ‘women, clerics and various
rascally Italians’, as he called them.^18 Most of the courtiers understood
little of the realities of war and were impressed only by spectacular vic-
tories, while the unemployed officers and the Imperial war council, the
‘rascally Italians’, the envious and the place-seekers, took every oppor-
tunity to feed these prejudices and to undermine the general. Angry
and resentful at their sniping, Wallenstein was feeling the strain of his
first year in high command. The military situation had been difficult,
and his hesitations suggest that he was not yet fully confident in his
new role, a problem exacerbated by a divided command and differing
opinions in dealing with a common enemy. Nor had he had time to
find and establish his own senior staff officers, so that he was desper-
ately overworked in trying to do himself all that needed to be done. For
provision of a field marshal (then one rank below lieutenant-general)
as his deputy he was dependent on Vienna, although the old school of
lordly, leisurely, Spanish-trained cavaliers which held sway there was
neither to his taste nor in tune with his robust approach to organisation
and duty. The first, Count Rombaldo Collalto, who was president of the