Before the Forest

Hold the fortress by all means possible was the order from Vienna. Hard to imagine obeying it as more and more soldiers come, endless and unrelenting: twelve thousand foot, six thousand cavalry.

“There is power, and magic, in growing things,” one of the oldest monks had told her kindly. “The land protects those who care for it. Remember that, my child.”

By November, the bodies of the city’s living have become the graves of the dead.

Last time the siege, and the hunger that came with it, had been hardest on Breisach’s poor. She had helped at the monastery when she could, picking fruit, plucking vegetables from the gardens, handing out bags of rationed flour to the poor who came, desperate and frightened, to the gates.

The Imperial fortress of Breisach surrendered on the seventeenth day of December in the year of our Lord 1638. The city commander, Baron von Reinach, was permitted to leave honorably, bearing his colors and two cannon. He retreated to Strasbourg, four hundred soldiers—all that remained of Breisach’s garrison—and countless citizens with him.