Flensburg in northern Germany, formerly the Danish town of Flensborg, showing the harbour and the neat squares around it. The town is twinned with the City of Carlisle in Cumbria.
THE Swedish Deluge was an overwhelming invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 1650s, pitching Sweden, Holland, Russia and Denmark into a rolling conflict of many battles and changes of side.
It seems that after one engagement, a Danish soldier from Flensburg was awaiting medical attention in the company of a bottle of beer when he heard a groan, and turned to see a wounded Swede lying near him. Putting aside enmity, he cradled the man’s head and plied his bottle.
At that moment, there was a sharp crack! and a searing pain in his shoulder. The Swede had shot him. ‘Rascal!’ cried our kindly Dane, ‘for that you must be punished.’ He drank off half the beer with terrible severity. ‘There’ he said. ‘Now you shall have only half.’
The Danish King, Frederick III, heard about this, and sent for the Flensburg man. ‘Why did you not slay the renegade?’ he asked.
‘Sire,’ came the shocked reply, ‘I could never kill a wounded enemy.’
For a similar tale about Elizabethan courtier and poet Sir Philip Sidney, see ‘Thy Necessity is Yet Greater than Mine’.
Précis
In the Dano-Swedish Wars of the 1650s, so the tale goes, a Danish soldier tried to help a wounded enemy by giving him a bottle of beer. However, the heartless Swede shot and wounded his benefactor, and by way of punishment, the scandalised Dane confiscated half the beer — as if that were punishment enough for his assailant’s treachery. (59 / 60 words)