He gained his experience fighting for various armies during the Thirty Years' War, then still raging in Germany. However, he is very professional, and remains loyal to an employer to the end of his contract.

Walter Scott's ' A Legend of Montrose', set in Scotland during the Civil War of the 1640s includes the finely drawn character Dugald Dalgetty, an experienced mercenary who does not fight out of political or religious conviction, but purely for the love of carnage.In ' The Legend of Sleepy Hollow', from Washington Irving's Knickerbocker Tales, the infamous Headless Horseman was said to be the ghost of a Hessian who had been decapitated by a cannonball during the American Revolution.