me of war, died, and were buried,
leaving war to rage for years to come above their unquiet, desecrated
graves.

In these disintegrating centuries, women of all classes suffered to the
uttermost. The lowest became beasts, like the men who debauched them. By
thousands, and tens of thousands, women followed the armies. Every
soldier, from the private to the highest officer, was allowed to take
with him into the field his wife or mistress frequently both and as many
other female relatives as he pleased. Even grandmothers were frequently
seen in camp. Schiller's picture of the old marketwoman in Wallenstein's
Camp is not overdrawn.

Women in the army cooked, washed, mended, and, more or less skilfully,
nursed the sick and wounded. They were not taken to the field, however,
as ministering angels. The bald truth is that women were kept in the
army for the sole purpose of gratifying man's lust. With every newly
recruited regiment that started for the front went hundreds of
respectable young girls torn unwillingly from their humble homes. After
every decisive battle, women formed a large part of the spoils of war
borne off by the victors. Children, mostly born out of wedlock, swarmed.
Gustavus Adolphus made a vain attempt to keep women out of the army. He
established tent schools for the children. Women in the field were under
martial law. Frequently, for minor offences they were stripped, flogged,
and drummed out of camp. The discipline of the field schools was very
severe. Once, it is related, a cannon ball crashed through a school
tent, killing half a dozen children. But the survivors, more afraid of
their schoolmaster than of death, kept on with their tasks as if nothing
had happened.

For woman there could be, there was, but one outcome of this army life,
moral degradation. Grimmelshausen, in his _Simplicius Simplicissimus_,
one of the greatest satires ever written, gives a horribly revolting
picture of women in camp during the Thirty Years' War. There is no doubt
that the picture is a true one, for Grimmelshausen, a nobleman and a
powerful writer, was an eyewitness of the horrors which he describes in
this life story of a vagabond adventurer in the long and terrible war.

Neither wealth nor high birth could screen women from the anxieties, the
sorrows, and the miseries of war. Philippine Welser, of Augsburg, was
probably the last patrician woman in Germany to receive Renaissance
training. The Welser family of burgher-