I have a little house in Auerbach, just north of Heidelberg, which sits in the shadow of the Odenwald, a range of hills which runs north-south along the left bank of the Rhine. The highest peak is Melibokus, which towers above my house, and just beside it is another nameless summit on which sits the Auerbacher Schloss, the castle to which my village once belonged.
The castle, its red sandstone floodlit vividly at night, provides the perfect backdrop against which stratus may be viewed. This is the very lowest type of cloud, often seen clinging to the mountain-tops in mild, soft, drizzly weather, or scurrying low across the sky in ragged patches on a wet and windy day. As the stratus, in the quietness of the night, wafts across this fairy-tale facade upon its lofty pinnacle, I am often reminded of the lines of Goldsmith, of:
. . . some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,
While around its breast the rolling clouds are spread.
The castle nowadays is just ruin, albeit well preserved. And recently it occurred to me to find out how this came to be. I found the awful answer in a local history book: "In 1674, French troops under the Vicomte de Turenne passed through the area, and the inhabitants of Auerbach left their defenceless homes to seek refuge in the castle on the hill. On June 14th, Scottish highlanders and adventurers from Ireland in the service of the French entered the empty village and razed it to the ground. Then they attacked the castle; it held out for two days, but on the 16th, some say by treason, the attackers gained access to the battlements, and the main building of the castle was destroyed."
It was we Irish, it seems, who destroyed the Auerbacher Schloss. The 17th century, of course, was a time when many of our best and bravest thought it wise to seek employment in the service of King Louis. And, at least by the standards of the time, we seem to have behaved with some restraint: "Seven of the villagers were killed, and about twice that number seriously wounded. Three or four of the women of the town were ravished."
That, in Europe in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War, was very timid stuff indeed. And the chronicler goes on intriguingly: "The then vicar of Auerbach was a witness to these terrible events, and made detailed notes in the register of his local church." For this I must wait until my German has improved.