Giving thanks in a world of horrors
During the groaning evil of the Thirty Years War, a pastor wrote the hymn “Now thank we all our God.”
At Calw, the pastor saw a woman gnawing the raw flesh off a dead horse on which a hungry dog and some ravens were also feeding...In Rhineland [the city magistrates] watched the graveyards against marauders who sold the flesh of the newly buried for food ....Acorns, goats' skins, grass, were all cooked in Alsace; cats, dogs, and rats were sold in the market at Worms....
Cicely Veronica Wedgwood's The Thirty Years War is loaded with passages equally repugnant. She found it difficult, I'm sure, to describe the scene without documenting the bloody horrors all around.
Between 1618 and 1648, political and religious hatred teamed up to create a war in which the Austrians and Swedes and just about anyone else looking for power on the continent took turns thrashing the very life out of the German people and countryside.
To those who lived through it, the steel wheels of that war must have seemed to grind on endlessly. So many thousands deserted farms and homes for protection in the old walled-in cities that, soon enough, there was no room.
