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they speculated that we were men of little value, or fugitive soldiers, they believed that it would be of little consequence if they persuaded us, though we might die from it, to test the way.”
    Whoever these people were, they “happily and with the utmost mendacity” took the young men to the best place from which to cross. Kircher went first, treading carefully. His companions trailed behind in single file, some paces apart. “I then, as the leader of all, tested the way,” he recounted, but “when now I reached the middle of the river, behold, I saw the entire Rhine exposed before me.” His frightened companions began making their way back to shore, but he had “progressed farther than the solidness of the ice was bearing.” Trying to follow his friends to the riverbank, Kircher saw that the ice was breaking up where they stepped, leaving him “in the middle of an island, as it were.” Once his friends reached the bank, they dropped down on their knees to pray for his safety. As they prayed, they watched him being carried down the river, alone on his floating island of ice.
    Kircher fled to God with his tears. As for his heart, “it held faith in God” and “it even knew that God . . . would never fail his own.” Finally his ice floe was caught against “enormous heaps” of others building up into a jam of unsteady masses. “It was as dangerous as it was difficult to climb over this huge pile of ice fragments,” he recalled. “Still, unless I preferred to die, it had to be attempted.”
    As it happens, most people now are familiar with an image of an icy Rhine near this spot: the nineteenth-century painting
Washington Crossing the Delaware
, by Emmanuel Leutze, who used the Rhine, not the Delaware River, as the basis for the scene. To judge from the way Kircher told the rest of the story in his memoir, however, his crossing was perhaps even more heroic than Washington’s:
    Two altogether inevitable obstacles to passing over this heap presented themselves, the first of which was the slipperiness of the ice, which offered aid in climbing to neither feet nor hands. The other was the cracks, which had come into the fragments straight through to the surface of the water and into which, should I fall, there would be no human hope of escaping.
    What spirit I would possess in the face of so many unavoidable dangers, God alone knows. With fear nevertheless adding diligence to my nature, I went by the manifest aid of God through the smaller bits to the other part of the Rhine, where the river was drawn together by the more solid ice. While I continued thus on my way straight to a point somewhere near to the far shore, behold, I see the Rhine utterly opened. What I should do I was barely able to consider. Retreat was impossible, progress forward was difficult; however, that I remain there, exposed as I was to the harsh cold in the deep winter, completely exhausted by my sufferings, fear and anxiety of spirit, and, furthermore, wounded on my hands and feet by the sharp bits of ice, was nothing more than awaiting death itself. So, no other recourse remained for me but that I reach the opposite shore, which stood only about twenty-four feet away, by swimming (for as a boy I had learned to swim). The undertaking transpired thus: since amidst my swimming I was weighed down by my clothes, I tested for the bottom, and when I had found it, emerging now to my neck, a little after to my breast, and now finally to my knees, I covered with ease the remaining distance.
    Once on the far shore, although his limbs were “stiffened by the vehemence of the cold,” Kircher fell to his knees and thanked God “for so clear a manifestation of divine protection.” Slowly he began the three-hour journey to Neuss by himself. “With the assistance of divine grace I finally reached that town,” he remembered, “where in the college I had