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Defoe, Daniel, 1661-1731

"Memoirs of a Cavalier A Military Journal of the Wars in Germany, and the Wars in England. From the Year 1632 to the Year 1648."

He had posted his army in the suburbs of the town,
and drawn lines round the whole circumference, so that he begirt
the whole city with his army. His works were large, the ditch deep,
flanked with innumerable bastions, ravelins, horn-works, forts,
redoubts, batteries, and palisadoes, the incessant work of 8000 men
for about fourteen days; besides that, the king was adding something
or other to it every day, and the very posture of his camp was
enough to tell a bigger army than Wallenstein's that he was not to be
assaulted in his trenches.
The king's design appeared chiefly to be the preservation of the
city; but that was not all. He had three armies acting abroad in
three several places. Gustavus Horn was on the Moselle, the chancellor
Oxenstiern about Mentz, Cologne, and the Rhine, Duke William and
Duke Bernhard, together with General Baner, in Bavaria. And though he
designed they should all join him, and had wrote to them all to that
purpose, yet he did not hasten them, knowing that while he kept the
main army at bay about Nuremberg, they would, without opposition,
reduce those several countries they were acting in to his power.


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