Part 10

Bengerd, or Berengaria, was a Portuguese princess whom Valdemar married in spite of the warning, two years later. As the people had loved the fair Dagmar, so they hated the proud Southern beauty, whether with reason or not. The story of her “morning gift,” as it has come down to us through the mists of time, is very different from the other. She asks the King, so the ballad has it, to give her Samsö, a great and fertile island, and “a golden crown for every maid,” but he tells her not to be quite so greedy:

There be full many an honest maid with not dry bread to eat.

Undismayed, Bengerd objects that Danish women have no business to wear silken gowns, and that a good horse is not for a peasant lad. The King replies patiently that what a woman can buy she may wear for him, and that he will not take the lad’s horse if he can feed it. Bengerd is not satisfied. “Let bar the land with iron chains” is her next proposal, that neither man nor woman enter it without paying tax. Her husband says scornfully that Danish kings have never had need of such measures, and never will. He is plainly getting bored, and when she keeps it up, and begrudges the husbandman more than “two oxen and a cow,” he loses his temper, and presumably there is a matrimonial tiff. Very likely most of this is fiction, bred of the popular prejudice. The King loved her, that is certain. She was a beautiful high-spirited woman, so beautiful that many hundreds of years after, when her grave was opened, the delicate oval of her skull excited admiration yet. But the people hated her. Twenty generations after her death it was their custom when passing her grave to spit on it with the exclamation “Out upon thee, Bengerd! God bless the King of Denmark”; for in good or evil days they never wavered in their love and admiration for the king who was a son of the first Valdemar, and the heir of his greatness and of that of the sainted Absalon. Tradition has it that Bengerd was killed in battle, having gone with her husband on one of his campaigns. “It was not heard in any place,” says the folk-song wickedly, “that any one grieved for her.” But the King mourned for his beautiful queen to the end of his days.

Bengerd bore Valdemar three sons upon whom he lavished all the affection of his lonely old age. Erik he chose as his successor, and to keep his brothers loyal to him he gave them great fiefs and thus, unknowing, brought on the very trouble he sought to avoid, and set his foot on the path that led to Denmark’s dismemberment after centuries of bloody wars. For to his second son Abel he gave Slesvig, and Abel, when his brother became king, sought alliance with the Holstein count Adolf, the very one who had led the Germans at the fatal battle of Bornhöved. The result was a war between the brothers that raged seven years, and laid waste the land. Worse was to follow, for Abel was only “Abel in name, but Cain in deed.” But happily the old King’s eyes were closed then, and he was spared the sight of one brother murdering the other for the kingdom.

Some foreboding of this seems to have troubled him in his last years. It is related that once when he was mounting his horse to go hunting he fell into a deep reverie, and remained standing with his foot in the stirrup a long time, while his men wondered, not daring to disturb him. At last one of them went to remind him that the sun was low in the west. The King awoke from his dream, and bade him go at once to a wise old hermit who lived in a distant part of the country. “Ask him,” he said, “what King Valdemar was thinking of just now, and bring me his answer.” The knight went away on his strange errand, and found the hermit. And this was the message he brought back: “Your lord and master pondered as he stood by his horse, how his sons would fare when he was dead. Tell him that war and discord they shall have, but kings they will all be.” When the King heard the prophecy he was troubled in mind, and called his sons and all his great knights to a council at which he pleaded with them to keep the peace. But though they promised, he was barely in his grave when riot and bloodshed filled the land. The climax was reached when Abel inveigled his brother to his home with fair words and, once he had him in his power, seized him and gave him over to his men to do with “as they pleased.” They understood their master only too well, and took King Erik out on the fjord in an open boat, and killed him there, scarce giving him time to say his prayers. They weighted his body with his helmet, and sank it in the deep.

Abel made oath with four and twenty of his men that he was innocent of his brother’s blood, and took the crown after him. But the foul crime was soon avenged. Within a few years he was himself slain by a peasant in a rising of his own people. For a while his body lay unburied, the prey of beast and bird, and when it was interred in the Slesvig cathedral there was no rest for it. “Such turmoil arose in the church by night that the monks could not chant their vigils,” and in the end they took him out, and buried him in a swamp, with a stake driven through the heart to lay his ghost. But clear down to our time when people ceased to believe in ghosts, the fratricide was seen at night hunting through the woods, coal-black and on a white horse, with three fiery dogs trailing after; and blue flames burned over the sea where they vanished. That was how the superstition of the people judged the man whom the nobles and the priests made king, red-handed.

Christopher, the youngest of the three brothers, was king last. His end was no better than that of the rest. Indeed, it was worse. Hardly yet forty years old, he died—poisoned, it was said, by the Abbot Arnfast, in the sacrament as he knelt at the altar-rail in the Ribe cathedral. He was buried in the chancel where the penitents going to the altar walk over his grave. So, of all Valdemar’s four sons, not one died a peaceful, natural death. But kings they all were.

Valdemar was laid in Ringsted with his great father. He sleeps between his two queens. Dagmar’s grave was disturbed in the late middle ages by unknown vandals, and the remains of Denmark’s best-loved queen were scattered. Only a golden cross, which she had worn in life, somehow escaped, and found its way in course of time into the museum of antiquities at Copenhagen, where it now is, its chief and priceless treasure. There also is a braid of Queen Bengerd’s hair that was found when her grave was opened in 1855. The people’s hate had followed her even there, and would not let her rest. The slab that covered her tomb had been pried off, and a round stone dropped into the place made for her head. Otherwise her grave was undisturbed.

“Truly then fell the crown from the heads of Danish men,” says the old chronicle of King Valdemar’s death, and black clouds were gathering ominously even then over the land. But in storm and stress, as in days that were fair, the Danish people have clung loyally to the memory of their beloved King and of his sweet Dagmar.

Footnotes:

Pronounced as Strangle, with the l left out.

Pronounced Reebe, in two syllables.

A coin, probably.

That was the beginning of the Slesvig-Holstein question that troubled Europe to our day; for the fashion set by Abel other rulers of his dukedom followed, and by degrees Slesvig came to be reckoned with the German duchies, whereas up till then it had always been South-Jutland, a part of Denmark proper.

HOW THE GHOST OF THE HEATH WAS LAID

On the map of Europe the mainland of Denmark looks like a beckoning finger pointing due north and ending in a narrow sand-reef, upon which the waves of the North Sea and of the Kattegat break with unceasing clamor and strife. The heart of the peninsula, quite one-fourth of its area, was fifty years ago a desert, a barren, melancholy waste, where the only sign of life encountered by the hunter, gunning for heath-fowl and plover, was a rare shepherd tending a few lonesome sheep, and knitting mechanically on his endless stocking. The two, the lean sheep and the long stocking, together comprised the only industries which the heath afforded and was thought capable of sustaining. A great change has taken place within the span of a single life, and it is all due to the clear sight and patient devotion of one strong man, the Gifford Pinchot of Denmark. The story of that unique achievement reads like the tale of the Sleeping Beauty who was roused from her hundred years’ sleep by the kiss of her lover prince. The prince who awoke the slumbering heath was a captain of engineers, Enrico Dalgas by name.

Not altogether fanciful is the conceit. Barren, black, and desolate, the great moor gripped the imagination as no smiling landscape of field and forest could—does yet, where enough of it remains. Far as eye reaches the dun heather covers hill and plain with its sombre pall. Like gloomy sentinels, furry cattails nod in the bog where the blue gentian peeps timidly into murky pools; the only human habitation in sight some heath boer’s ling-thatched hut, flanked by rows of peat stacks in vain endeavor to stay the sweep of the pitiless west wind. On the barrows where the vikings sleep their long sleep, the plover pipes its melancholy lay; between steep banks a furtive brook steals swiftly by as if anxious to escape from the universal blight. Over it all broods the silence of the desert, drowsy with the hum of many bees winging their swift way to the secret feeding-places they know of, where mayflower and anemone hide under the heather, witness that forests grew here in the long ago. In midsummer, when the purple is on the broom, a strange pageant moves on the dim horizon, a shifting mirage of sea and shore, forest, lake, and islands lying high, with ships and castles and spires of distant churches—the witchery of the heath that speaks in the tales and superstitions of its simple people. High in the blue soars the lark, singing its song of home and hope to its nesting mate. This is the heath which, denying to the hardest toil all but the barest living, has given of its poetry to the Danish tongue some of its sweetest songs.

But in this busy world day-dreams must make way for the things that make the day count, castles in the air to homes upon the soil. The heath had known such in the dim past. It had not always been a desert. The numberless cairns that lie scattered over it, sometimes strung out for miles as if marking the highways of the ancients, which they doubtless do, sometimes grouped where their villages stood, bear witness to it. Great battles account for their share, and some of them were fought in historic times. On Grathe Heath the young King Valdemar overcame his treacherous rival Svend. Alone and hunted, the beaten man sought refuge, Saxo tells us, behind a stump, where he was found and slain by one of the King’s axemen. A chapel was built on the spot. More than seven centuries later (in 1892) they dug there, and found the bones of a man with skull split in two.

The stump behind which the wretched Svend hid was probably the last representative of great forests that grew where now is sterile moor. In the bogs trunks of oak and fir are found lying as they fell centuries ago. The local names preserve the tradition, with here and there patches of scrub oak that hug the ground close, to escape the blast from the North Sea. There is one such thicket near the hamlet of Taulund—the name itself tells of long-forgotten groves—and the story runs among the people yet that once squirrels jumped from tree to tree without touching ground all the way from Taulund to Gjellerup church, a stretch of more than five miles to which the wild things of the woods have long been strangers. In the shelter of the old forests men dwelt through ages, and made the land yield them a living. Some cairns that have been explored span over more than a thousand years. They were built in the stone age, and served the people of the bronze and iron ages successively as burial-places, doubtless the same tribes who thus occupied their homesteads from generation to generation. That they were farmers, not nomads, is proved by the clear impression of grains of wheat and barley in their burial urns. The seeds strayed into the clay and were burned away, but the impression abides, and tells the story.

Clear down to historic times there was a thrifty population in many of the now barren spots. But a change was slowly creeping over the landscape. The country was torn by long and bloody wars. The big men fought for the land and the little ones paid the score, as they always do. They were hunted from house and home. Next the wild hordes of the Holstein counts overran Jutland. Its towns were burned, the country laid waste. Great fires swept the forests. What ravaging armies had left was burned in the smelteries. In the sandy crust of the heath there is iron, and swords and spears were the grim need of that day. The smelteries are only names now. They went, but they took the forests with them, and where the ground was cleared the west wind broke through, and ruin followed fast. Last of all came the Black Death, and set its seal of desolation upon it all. When it had passed, the country was a huge graveyard. The heath had moved in. Rovers and smugglers found refuge there; honest folk shunned it. Under the heather the old landmarks are sometimes found yet, and deep ruts made by wheels that long since ceased to turn.

In the Eighteenth Century men began to think of reclamation. A thousand German colonists were called in and settled on the heath, but it was stronger than they, and they drifted away until scarce half a hundred families remained. The Government tried its hand, but there was no one who knew just how, and only discouragement resulted. Then came the war with Germany in 1864, that lost to Denmark a third of her territory. The country lay prostrate under the crushing blow. But it rose above defeat and disaster, and once more expectant eyes were turned toward the ancient domain that had slipped from its grasp. “What was lost without must be won within” became the national slogan. And this time the man for the task was at hand.

Enrico Mylius Dalgas was by the accident of birth an Italian, his father being the Danish consul in Naples; by descent a Frenchman; by choice and training a Dane, typical of the best in that people. He came of the Huguenot stock that left France after the repeal of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and scattered over Europe, to the great good of every land in which it settled. They had been tillers of the soil from the beginning, and at least two of the family, who found homes in Denmark, made in their day notable contributions to the cause of advanced, sensible husbandry. Enrico’s father, though a merchant, had an open eye for the interests which in later years claimed the son’s life-work. In the diary of a journey through Sweden he makes indignant comment upon the reckless way in which the people of that country dealt with their forests. That he was also a man of resolution is shown by an incident of the time when Jew-baiting was having its sorry day in Denmark. An innkeeper mistook the dark-skinned little man for a Jew, and set before him a spoiled ham, retorting contemptuously, when protest was made, that it was “good enough for a Sheeny.” Without further parley Mr. Dalgas seized the hot ham by its shank and beat the fellow with it till he cried for mercy. The son tells of the first school he attended, when he was but five years old. It was kept by the widow of one of Napoleon’s generals, a militant lady who every morning marshalled the school, a Lilliputian army with the teachers flanking the line like beardless sergeants in stays and petticoats, and distributed rewards and punishments as the great Emperor was wont to do after a battle. For the dunces there was a corner strewn with dried peas on which they were made to kneel with long-eared donkey caps adorning their luckless heads. Very likely it was after an insult of this kind that Enrico decided to elope to America with his baby sister. They were found down by the harbor bargaining with some fishermen to take them over to Capri en route for the land of freedom. The elder Dalgas died while the children were yet little, and the widow went back to Denmark to bring up her boys there.

They were poor, and the change from the genial skies of sunny Italy to the bleak North did not make it any easier for them. Enrico’s teacher saw it, and gave him his overcoat to be made over. But the boys spotted it and squared accounts with their teacher by snowballing the wearer of the big green plaid until he was glad to leave it at home, and go without. He was in the military school when war broke out with Germany in 1848. Both of his brothers volunteered, and fell in battle. Enrico was ordered out as lieutenant, and put on the shoulder-straps joyfully, to the great scandal of his godfather in Milan, who sympathized with the German cause. When the young soldier refused to resign he not only cut him off in his will, but took away a pension of four hundred kroner he had given his mother in her widowhood. If he had thoughts of bringing them over by such means, he found out his mistake. Mother and son were made of sterner stuff. Dalgas fought twice for his country, the last time in 1864, as a captain of engineers.

It was no ordinary class, the one of 1851 that resumed its studies in the military high school. Two of the students did not answer roll-call; their names were written among the nation’s heroic dead. Some had scars and wore the cross for valor in battle. All were first lieutenants, to be graduated as captains. Dalgas had himself transferred from the artillery to the engineers, and was detailed as road inspector. So the opportunity of his life came to him.

There were few railways in those days; the highways were still the great arteries of traffic. Dalgas built roads that crossed the heath, and he learned to know it and the strong and independent, if narrow, people who clung to it with such a tenacious grip. He had a natural liking for practical geology and for the chemistry of the soil, and the deep cuts which his roads sometimes made gave him the best of chances for following his bent. The heath lay as an open book before him, and he studied it with delight. He found the traces of the old forests, and noted their extent. Occasionally the pickaxe uncovered peat deposits of unsuspected depth and value. Sometimes the line led across the lean fields, and damages had to be discussed and assessed. He learned the point of view of the heath farmer, sympathized with his struggles, and gained his confidence. Best of all, he found a man of his own mind, a lawyer by the name of Morville, himself a descendant of the exiled Huguenots. It is not a little curious that when the way was cleared for the Heath Society’s great work, in its formal organization with M. Mourier-Petersen, a large landowner, as their associate in its management, the three men who for a quarter of a century planned the work and marked out the groove in which it was to run were all of that strong stock which is by no means the most common in Denmark.

With his lawyer friend Captain Dalgas tramped the heath far and wide for ten years. Then their talks had matured a plan. Dalgas wrote to the Copenhagen newspapers that the heath could be reclaimed, and suggested that it should be done by the State. They laughed at him. “Nothing better could have happened,” he said in after years, “for it made us turn to the people themselves, and that was the road to success, though we did not know it.” In the spring of 1866 a hundred men, little and big landowners most of them, met at his call, and organized the Heath Society with the object of reclaiming the moor. Dalgas became its managing director.

To restore to the treeless waste its forest growth was the fundamental idea, for until that was done nothing but the heather could grow there. The west wind would not let it. But the heath farmer shook his head. It would cost too much, and give too little back. What he needed was water and marl. Could the captain help them to these?—that was another matter. The little streams that found their way into the heath and lost it there, dire need had taught them to turn to use in their fields; not a drop escaped. But the river that ran between deep banks was beyond their reach. Could he show them how to harness that? Dalgas saw their point. “We are working, not for the dead soil, but for the living men who find homes upon it,” he told his associates, and tree planting was put aside for the time. They turned canal diggers instead. Irrigation became their aim and task; the engineer was in his right place. The water was raised from the stream and led out upon the moor, and presently grass grew in the sand which the wiry stems of the heather had clutched so long. Green meadows lined the water-runs, and fragrant haystacks rose. To the lean sheep was added a cow, then two. The farmer laid by a little, and took in more land for cultivation. That meant breaking the heath. Also, it meant marl. The heath is lime-poor; marl is lime in the exact form in which it best fits that sandy soil. It was known to exist in some favored spots, but the poor heath farmer could not bring it from a distance. So the marl borer went with the canal digger. Into every acre he drove his auger, and mapped out his discoveries. At last accounts he had found marl in more than seventeen hundred places, and he is not done yet. Where there was none, Dalgas’s Society built portable railways into the moor far enough to bring it to nearly every farmer’s door.

It was as if a magic wand had been waved over the heath. With water and marl, the means were at hand for fighting it and winning out. Heads that had drooped in discouragement were raised. The cattle keep increased, and with it came the farmer’s wealth. Marl changes the character of the heath soil; with manure to fertilize it there was no reason why it should not grow crops—none, except the withering blast of the west wind. The time for Dalgas to preach tree planting had come.