the cession of Spandau and Kuestrin:

Which cession Kurfuerst George Wilhelm, though giving all his
prayers to the good cause, could by no means grant. Gustav
had to insist, with more and more emphasis, advancing at
last with military menace upon Berlin itself. He was met by
George Wilhelm and his Council, "in the woods of Coepenick,"
short way to the east of that city; there George Wilhelm and
his Council wandered about, sending messages, hopelessly
consulting, saying among each other, "Que faire? ils ont des
canons." For many hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who
was there like a fixed mile-stone, and to all questions and
comers had only one answer.

On our special question of war and its consequences, read this of the
Thirty Years' one:

But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and towards the
latter times, the exclusive one, was hunger. The opposing
armies tried to starve one another; at lowest, tried each
not to starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at any
rate, to leave nothing eatable in it; what that will mean
for the country we may consider. As the armies too
frequently, and the Kaiser's armies habitually, lived
without commissariat, often enough without pay, all horrors
of war and of being a seat of war, that have been since
heard of, are poor to those then practised, the detail of
which is still horrible to read. Germany, in all eatable
quarters of it, had to undergo the process; tortured, torn
to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in a mortar, under the
iron mace of war. Brandenburg saw its towns seized and
sacked, its country populations driven to despair by the one
party and the other. Three times--first in the
Wallenstein-Mecklenburg times, while fire and sword were the
weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages of
the struggle, when starvation had become the
method--Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre of
conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at their
height. In 1638, three years after that precious "Peace of
Prag,"... the ravages of the starving Gallas and his
Imperialists excelled all precedent,... men ate human flesh,
nay, human creatures ate their own children. "Que faire? ils
ont des canons!"

"We have now arrived at the lowest nadir point" (says Carlyle) "of the
history of Br