Leatherface: A Tale of Old Flanders

"Or offered thee a bribe from the tyrant," cried others.

"We'll hang thee along with the prisoners if thou darest to turn against us," added Peter Balde spitefully.

"Hang me then, friends, an ye list," he said with a loud laugh, "but let me speak while ye get the gallows ready. Walloons," he added, turning to the prisoners who were regarding him with utter bewilderment, in which past terror still held sway, "ye are our kith and kin. Together we have groaned under the most execrable tyrant the world has even known. To-day I offer you the power to strike one blow at the tyrant-a blow from which he will never recover-a blow which will help you to win that which every Netherlander craves for: Liberty! Will ye help us to strike that blow and cover yourselves with glory?"

"Aye! aye!" came from the Walloons with one stupendous cry of hope and of relief.

"Will you fight with us?"

"Yes!"

"Die with us?"

"Yes!"

"For the freedom of the Netherlands?"

"For Liberty!" they cried.

But all the while murmurings were going on among the Flemings. Their hatred of the Walloons who had borne arms against their own native land and for its subjugation under the heel of an alien master was greater almost than their hatred against the Spaniards.

"The Walloons? Horror!" they shouted, even whilst Mark was infusing some of his own ardent enthusiasm into the veins of those five hundred prisoners. "Shame on thee, van Rycke!" whilst one man who has remained nameless to history cried out loudly: "Traitor!"

"Aye! traitor thou!" retorted van Rycke, "who wouldst prefer the lust of killing to that of victory!"

"Burghers of Ghent," he continued, "in the name of our sacred Motherland, I entreat you release these men; let me have them as soldiers under our banner … let me have them as brothers to fight by our side … you would shed their blood and steep your souls in crime, let them shed theirs for Liberty, and cover themselves with glory!"

"Yes! yes!" came from the leaders and from the phalanx of fighting men who stood closest to their hero.

"Yes! yes! release them! Let them fight for us!"

The call was taken back and echoed and re-echoed until the high-vaulted roof rang with the enthusiastic shouts.

"Walloons, will you fight with us?" they asked.

"To the death!" replied the prisoners.

"One country, one people, one kindred," rejoined Mark with solemn earnestness, "henceforth there will be neither Flemings nor Walloons, just Netherlanders standing shoulder to shoulder to crush the tyrant of us all!"

"Netherlanders! Orange and Liberty!" cried Walloons and Flemings in unison.

"Give them back their own arms, provosts," commanded Mark, "our untrained men have not known how to use them! and follow me, friends! We have not gathered our reinforcements together yet. In half an hour we shall have two thousand brothers under our flag!"

"Long live Leatherface! To arms, brothers!" were the last shouts which rang through the hall, ere Mark van Rycke led his followers away to the nearest guild-house and then to the next, where two thousand Walloon prisoners were by the magic of his patriotism and his enthusiasm transformed into two thousand friends.

VI

Once more the roar of artillery and of musketry fills the air. It is long before the evening Angelus has begun to ring, but from far away the news has come to every captain at the city gates that reinforcements are on the way from Dendermonde. No one can respect a truce which hid the blackest perfidy ever perpetrated by a tyrannical master against a brave people. As soon as the news has filtrated into the heart of the city the Orangists rush to their arms, reinforced by two thousand trained troops; their battle cry becomes triumphant.

"Netherlands! Orange! and Liberty!" resounds defiantly from end to end of the city.

The besieging force rush the Kasteel! they sow the open tract of ground around the moat with their heroic dead; again and again they rush for the breach: culverins and falconets upon the ramparts are useless after a while: and a shower of heavy stones falls upon the plucky assailants. There are five hundred Walloon bowmen now who know how to shoot straight, and some musketeers who vie with the Spaniards for precision. They cover the advance of the halberdiers and the pikemen, who return to the charge with the enthusiasm born of renewed hope.

The Brügge gate has fallen, the Waalpoort is in the insurgents' hands: Captain Serbelloni at the Braepoort is hard pressed, and up in the Meeste Toren of the Kasteel Alva paces up and down like a caged tiger.

"Bracamonte or nightfall!" he cries with desperate rage, for he cannot understand why the Dendermonde troops are detained.

"Surely that rabble has not seized all the gates!" Twice he has ordered a sortie! twice the moat has received a fresh shower of dead. The breach has become wider: the Orangist halberdiers are fighting foot by foot up the walls. They have succeeded in throwing their bridge made of pikes and lances across the moat, and soon they are crossing in their hundreds.

"Heavens above, how come they to be so numerous?"

Captain de Avila has been severely wounded: three younger captains have been killed. The Orangist falconets-a light piece of artillery and not easy to use-works incessantly upon the breach. Alva himself is everywhere. His doublet and hose are torn, too, his breast-plate and tassets are riddled with arrow-shot; he bleeds profusely from the hand. His face is unrecognisable beneath a covering of smoke and grime. Rage and fear have made him hideous-not fear of personal danger, for to this he is wholly indifferent, but fear of defeat, of humiliation, of the heavy reprisals which that contemptible rabble will exact.

He insults his soldiers and threatens them in turn; he snatches musket or crossbow, directs, leads, commands … and sees his wildest hopes shattered one by one.

The din and confusion from the city itself is hardly heard above the awful pandemonium which reigns in and around the besieged Kasteel. The Vleeshhuis on the Schelde is a mass of flames; the roof suddenly falls in with a terrific crash which seems to shake the very earth to its depths: there is not a single window left in the Meeste-Toren, and the rooms, as well as the yard below, are littered with broken glass.

"We have no more balls left, Magnificence," reports the captain in charge of the artillery. "What must we do?"

"Do?" cries the Duke of Alva fiercely. "Throw yourselves into the moat or get the musketeers to turn their muskets against you; for of a certainty you will be massacred within the hour."

Inside the city it is hell let loose. Fighting-hand to hand, pike to pike-goes on in every street, on every bridge, under every doorway, aye! even beneath the cathedral porch. The doors of the houses have all been broken open and men who are wounded and exhausted crawl under them for shelter and safety. The women and children had all been ordered to go inside their own homes before the first battle cry of the Orangists rang out; a goodly number of them, however, took refuge in the churches, and there were defended by companies of Walloons posted at the doors.

The bridges are fought for inch by inch; when at last they fell into the hands of the Orangists they are destroyed one by one.

Hell let loose indeed! Desperate men fighting for freedom against a tyrant who has never known defeat. The evening Angelus was never rung on that Lord's Day-the feast of the Holy Redeemer-but at the hour when day first fades into evening Mark van Rycke-superb, undaunted and glowing now with the ardour of victory-leads the final assault on the Kasteel.

"Netherlanders! For Liberty!" he cries.

A stone has hit his shoulder, there is a huge cut across his face, the sleeve has been torn right out of his doublet, his bare arm and the hand which wields an unconquered sword gleam like metal in the fast gathering twilight.

"To the breach!" he calls, and is the first to scramble down the declivity of the moat and on to the heap of masonry which fills the moat here to the top of the bank.

An arrow aimed at his head pierces his right arm, a stone hurled from above falls at his feet and raises a cloud of dust which blinds him, a heavy fragment hits him on the head; he stumbles and falls backwards, down to the brink of the moat.

"Never mind me," he calls, "for Liberty, Netherlanders! The Kasteel is yours! hold on!"

He has managed to hold on for dear life to the rough stones on the declivity, crawling along the top of the bank to escape being trampled on by the pikemen. The latter have a hot time at the breach: the Spanish musketeers, under the Duke of Alva's own eyes, are firing with remarkable accuracy and extraordinary rapidity, whilst from the ramparts the shower of heavy stones makes deadly havoc: twice the Walloons have given ground-they are led by Laurence van Rycke now-who twice returns to the charge.

Mark struggles to his feet: "Hold on, Walloons! the Kasteel is ours," he cries.

And while the Walloons continue the desperate fighting at the breach, he gathers together a company of Flemish swordsmen, the pick of his little army, those who have stuck closely to him throughout the past two days, who have fought every minute, who have been decimated, lost their provosts and their captains, but have never once cried "Halt!" and never thought of giving in.

A hundred or so of them are all that is left: they carry their sword in their right hand and a pistol in their left. They follow Mark round the walls to where the moat melts into the wide tract of morass which surrounds the north-east side of the Kasteel.

The shadow from the high walls falls across the marshy ground, the men move round silently whilst behind them at the breach and on the bridge the noise of musketry and falling masonry drowns every other sound.

Now the men halt, and still in silence they strip to their skins; then with their pistols in their right hand and their sword between their teeth they plunge ankle deep into the mud. They are men of Ghent every one of them-men of the Low Countries who know their morasses as mariners know the sea: they know how to keep their foothold in these slimy tracks, where strangers would inevitably be sucked into a hideous grave.