168 Wallenstein
Gustavus could expect his army to start to melt away as it had after the
failed attack on the Alte Veste.
Nevertheless Wallenstein could not contemplate a prolonged siege of
Naumburg, with his army in an undefended position, in the open and
the cold. Nor was constructing a camp, as he had done at Nuremberg,
feasible with the weather already bad and winter at hand. Men and
their families needed proper shelter, or sickness, death and deser-
tion would soon start to take their toll on his own army. Although
his forces were temporarily superior to Gustavus’s, he too was aware
that Lüneburg at Torgau would soon have enough men to redress the
balance, and precautions would have to be taken to prevent him reach-
ing Gustavus. Then there was Arnim with the main Saxon army in
Silesia. Wallenstein did not know accurately where he was, although at a
probable distance of 150 miles or more he was not an immediate threat,
but he might have been able to send some cavalry to join Lüneburg at
Torgau. Wallenstein had summoned Gallas, but he was 100 miles away,
south of Dresden, where he was making slow progress trying to haul his
artillery through the hills in bad weather. Meanwhile Aldringer lingered
on in Bavaria with some 8000 men in response to Maximilian’s press-
ing appeals, despite the general’s summons and Gustavus’s departure.^24
However reinforcements would not solve the immediate problem that
the Swedish position in Naumburg could not feasibly be taken by storm.
The Imperialist army would have to move.
Wallenstein recognised that Gustavus would probably break out as
soon as he himself withdrew, but where would he go? He had an urgent
need of both winter quarters and reinforcements, but to the east lay
not only the occupied city of Leipzig, controlling the road to Torgau,
but a series of towns across southern Saxony which had been taken
by Gallas and Holk, while Wallenstein also had forces facing Arnim in
Silesia. On the other hand there was no substantial Imperialist army to
the north-west, so that it seemed more likely that the king would head
in that direction, instructing Lüneburg to move west to join him. If so
his first destination would probably be the city of Halle, twenty miles
to the north, which – unknown to Wallenstein – was the rendezvous
Gustavus had originally given Lüneburg, although his order had not
been received.^25 Halle lay not in Saxony but in the territory of the arch-
bishopric of Magdeburg, and beyond and west of the city were a number
of prosperous towns, among them Quedlinburg and Halberstadt, in an
area in which Wallenstein had himself wintered in 1626–27. Halle was
Protestant, it had a strong castle, and it was the only large fortified place
within a day’s march of Naumburg not already in Imperialist hands.