Go, Captain, Greet the Danish King 85can be placed even on what are supposed to be the best accounts of a
battle. ... It is impossible to say when each important occurrence took
place, or in what order.’ There are good reasons for this. Battles were
frequently confused affairs, and the participants themselves rarely had
a full picture of events, so that subsequent accounts involve piecing
together partial, impressionistic and often inconsistent reports to work
out what might have happened. The term ‘battlefield’ is itself mislead-
ing, suggesting a conveniently open and something like level discrete
area, whereas in fact troops, particularly cavalry, might range widely
over territory broken up by streams, ditches, hills, woods, villages and
other obstructions to both movement and vision; 10,000 infantry
could well be spread out over two miles or more, so that a commander
would often not have had a clear view of their disposition. Worse still,
once action commenced the guns of the period quickly created ‘such
an awful smoke ... that we could scarcely see a pistol-shot in front of
us’, as a Bavarian officer recorded after one such engagement.^4
The battle for the Dessau bridge is a good example of the numbers
problem. Mann, in his biography of Wallenstein, puts Mansfeld’s army
at 10,000 men, whereas Guthrie calculates less than 7000 in his study
of the battles of the Thirty Years War. Of these Mann states that 3000
to 4000 were killed, against Guthrie’s estimate of somewhere over 1000.
Conversely Mann reports 1500 taken prisoner against Guthrie’s 3000,
so that according to Mann Mansfeld escaped with 5000 survivors while
Guthrie says that it was only about 2000. Neither gives figures for
Wallenstein’s forces, although Guthrie contends that he had at least
twice as many men as Mansfeld, that is upwards of 14,000 by his calcu-
lation, whereas Diwald, in his Wallenstein biography, puts his strength
at 21,000 infantry and six regiments of cavalry.^5
The Theatrum Europaeum, a major contemporary chronicle, made
a speciality of elaborate copperplate illustrations, including detailed
plans of battles commissioned from experienced military officers, and
these give very helpful pictures of the terrain as it then was, together
with such features as earthworks and other defences. A drawing in
the Theatrum (given as Plate 6 in this book) shows that the Dessau
bridge, which was some distance north of the town, spanned both
the Elbe and its wide flood plain. It is depicted as a narrow structure
built on piers, with small Imperialist forts on the south side and a
substantial defensive enclosure around the bridgehead on the north,
and with protective wings and trenches securing a strip of land along
the river bank in both directions. The whole area to the south was
heavily wooded, so that the road along which the Imperialist troops