Siege of Ostend--The Marquis Spinola made commander-in-chief of the
besieging army--Discontent of the troops--General aspect of the
operations--Gradual encroachment of the enemy.
The scene again shifts to Ostend. The Spanish cabinet, wearied of the
slow progress of the siege, and not entirely satisfied with the generals,
now concluded almost without consent of the archdukes, one of the most
extraordinary jobs ever made, even in those jobbing days. The Marquis
Spinola, elder brother of the ill-fated Frederic, and head of the
illustrious Genoese family of that name, undertook to furnish a large sum
of money which the wealth of his house and its connection with the great
money-lenders of Genoa enabled him to raise, on condition that he should
have supreme command of the operations against Ostend and of the foreign
armies in the Netherlands. He was not a soldier, but he entered into a
contract, by his own personal exertions both on the exchange and in the
field, to reduce the city which had now resisted all the efforts of the
archduke for more than two years. Certainly this was an experiment not
often hazarded in warfare. The defence of Ostend was in the hands of the
best and moat seasoned fighting-men in Europe. The operations were under
the constant supervision of the foremost captain of the age; for Maurice,
in consultation with the States-General, received almost daily reports
from the garrison, and regularly furnished advice and instructions as to
their proceedings. He was moreover ever ready to take the field for a
relieving campaign. Nothing was known of Spinola save that he was a
high-born and very wealthy patrician who had reached his thirty-fourth
year without achieving personal distinction of any kind, and who, during
the previous summer, like so many other nobles from all parts of Europe,
had thought it worth his while to drawl through a campaign or two in the
Low Countries. It was the mode to do this, and it was rather a stigma
upon any young man of family not to have been an occasional looker on at
that perpetual military game. His brother Frederic, as already narrated;
had tried his chance for fame and fortune in the naval service, and had
lost his life in the adventure without achieving the one or the other.
This was not a happy augury for the head of the family. Frederic had made
an indifferent speculation. What could the brother hope by taking the
field against Maurice of Nassau and Lewis William and the Baxes and
Meetkerkes? Nevertheless the archduke eagerly accepted his services,
while the Infanta, fully confident of his success before he had ordered a
gun to be fired, protested that if Spinola did not take Ostend nobody
would ever take it. There was also, strangely enough, a general feeling
through the republican ranks that the long-expected man had come.
Thus a raw volunteer, a man who had never drilled a hundred men, who had
never held an officer's commission in any army in the world, became, as
by the waving of a wand, a field-marshal and commander-in-chief at a most
critical moment in history, in the most conspicuous position in
Christendom, and in a great war, now narrowed down to a single spot of
earth, on which the eyes of the world were fixed, and the daily accounts
from which were longed for with palpitating anxiety. What but failure and
disaster could be expected from such astounding policy? Every soldier in
the Catholic forces--from grizzled veterans of half a century who had
commanded armies and achieved victories when this dainty young Italian
was in his cradle, down to the simple musketeer or rider who had been
campaigning for his daily bread ever since he could carry a piece or
mount a horse was furious with discontent or outraged pride.
Very naturally too, it was said that the position of the archdukes had
become preposterous. It was obvious, notwithstanding the pilgrimages of
the Infanta to our Lady of Hall, to implore not only the fall of Ostend,
but the birth of a successor to their sovereignty, that her marriage
would for ever remain barren. Spain was already acting upon this theory,
it was said, for the contract with Spinola was made, not at Brussels, but
at Madrid, and a foreign army of Spaniards and Italians, under the
supreme command of a Genoese adventurer, was now to occupy indefinitely
that Flanders which had been proclaimed an independent nation, and duly
bequeathed by its deceased proprietor to his daughter.
Ambrose Spinola, son of Philip, Marquis of Venafri, and his wife,
Polyxena Grimaldi, was not appalled by the murmurs of hardly suppressed
anger or public criticism. A handsome, aristocratic personage, with an
intellectual, sad, but sympathetic face, fair hair and beard, and
imposing but attractive presence--the young volunteer, at the beginning
of October, made his first visit of inspection in the lines before
Ostend. After studying the situation of affairs very thoroughly, he
decided that the operations on the Gullet or eastern side, including
Bucquoy's dike, with Pompey Targone's perambulatory castles and floating
batteries, were of secondary importance. He doubted the probability of
closing up a harbour, now open to the whole world and protected by the
fleets of the first naval power of Europe, with wickerwork, sausages, and
bridges upon barrels. His attention was at once concentrated on the
western side, and he was satisfied that only by hard fighting and steady
delving could he hope to master the place. To gain Ostend he would be
obliged to devour it piecemeal as he went on.
Whatever else might be said of the new commander-in-chief, it was soon
apparent that, although a volunteer and a patrician, he was no milksop.
If he had been accustomed all his life to beds of down, he was as ready
now to lie in the trenches, with a cannon for his pillow, as the most
ironclad veteran in the ranks. He seemed to require neither sleep nor
food, and his reckless habit of exposing himself to unnecessary danger
was the subject of frequent animadversion on the part both of the
archdukes and of the Spanish Government.
It was however in his case a wise temerity. The veterans whom he
commanded needed no encouragement to daring deeds, but they required
conviction as to the valour and zeal of their new commander, and this was
afforded them in overflowing measure.
It is difficult to decide, after such a lapse of years, as to how much of
the long series of daily details out of which this famous siege was
compounded deserves to be recorded. It is not probable that for military
history many of the incidents have retained vital importance. The world
rang, at the beginning of the operations, with the skill and inventive
talent of Targone, Giustiniani, and other Italian engineers, artificers,
and pyrotechnists, and there were great expectations conceived of the
effects to be produced by their audacious and original devices. But time
wore on. Pompey's famous floating battery would not float, his moving
monster battery would not move. With the one; the subtle Italian had
intended to close up the Gullet to the States' fleets. It was to rest on
the bottom at low water at the harbour's mouth, to rise majestically with
the flood, and to be ever ready with a formidable broadside of fifty
pounders against all comers. But the wild waves and tempests of the North
Sea soon swept the ponderous toy into space, before it had fired a gun.
The gigantic chariot, on which a moveable fort was constructed, was still
more portentous upon paper than the battery. It was directed against that
republican work, defending the Gullet, which was called in derision the
Spanish Half-moon. It was to be drawn by forty horses, and armed with no
man knew how many great guns, with a mast a hundred and fifty feet high
in the centre of the fort, up and down which played pulleys raising and
lowering a drawbridge long enough to span the Gullet.
It was further provided with anchors, which were to be tossed over the
parapet of the doomed redoubt, while the assailants, thus grappled to the
enemy's work, were to dash over the bridge after having silenced the
opposing fire by means of their own peripatetic battery.
Unfortunately for the fame of Pompey, one of his many wheels was crushed
on the first attempt to drag the chariot to the scene of anticipated
triumph, the whole structure remained embedded in the sand, very much
askew; nor did all the mules and horses that could be harnessed to it
ever succeed in removing it an inch out of a position, which was anything
but triumphant.
It seemed probable enough therefore that, so far as depended on the
operations from the eastern side, the siege of Ostend, which had now
lasted two years and three months, might be protracted for two years and
three months longer. Indeed, Spinola at once perceived that if the
archduke was ever to be put in possession of the place for which he had
professed himself ready to wait eighteen years, it would be well to leave
Bucquoy and Targone to build dykes and chariots and bury them on the east
at their leisure, while more energy was brought to bear upon the line of
fortifications of the west than had hitherto been employed. There had
been shooting enough, bloodshed enough, suffering enough, but it was
amazing to see the slight progress made. The occupation of what were
called the external Squares has been described. This constituted the
whole result of the twenty-seven months' work.
The town itself--the small and very insignificant kernel which lay
enclosed in such a complicated series of wrappings and layers of
defences--seemed as far off as if it were suspended in the sky. The old
haven or canal, no longer navigable for ships, still served as an
admirable moat which the assailants had not yet succeeded in laying
entirely dry. It protected the counterscarp, and was itself protected by
an exterior aeries of works, while behind the counterscarp was still
another ditch, not so broad nor deep as the canal, but a formidable
obstacle even after the counterscarp should be gained. There were nearly
fifty forts and redoubts in these lines, of sufficient importance to have
names which in those days became household words, not only in the
Netherlands, but in Europe; the siege of Ostend being the one military
event of Christendom, so long as it lasted. These names are of course as
much forgotten now as those of the bastions before Nineveh. A very few of
them will suffice to indicate the general aspect of the operations. On
the extreme southwest of Ostend had been in peaceful times a polder--the
general term to designate a pasture out of which the sea-water had been
pumped--and the forts in that quarter were accordingly called by that
name, as Polder Half-moon, Polder Ravelin, or great and little Polder
Bulwark, as the case might be. Farther on towards the west, the
north-west, and the north, and therefore towards the beach, were the West
Ravelin, West Bulwark, Moses's Table, the Porcupine, the Hell's Mouth,
the old church, and last and most important of all, the Sand Hill. The
last-named work was protected by the Porcupine and Hell's Mouth, was the
key to the whole series of fortifications, and was connected by a curtain
with the old church, which was in the heart of the old town.
Spinola had assumed command in October, but the winter was already
closing in with its usual tempests and floods before there had been time
for him to produce much effect. It seemed plain enough to the besieged
that the object of the enemy would be to work his way through the Polder,
and so gradually round to the Porcupine and the Sand Hill. Precisely in
what directions his subterraneous passages might be tending, in what
particular spot of the thin crust upon which they all stood an explosion
might at any moment be expected, it was of course impossible to know.
They were sure that the process of mining was steadily progressing, and
Maurice sent orders to countermine under every bulwark, and to secretly
isolate every bastion, so that it would be necessary for Spinola to make
his way, fort by fort, and inch by inch.
Thus they struggled drearily about under ground, friend and foe, often as
much bewildered as wanderers in the catacombs. To a dismal winter
succeeded a ferocious spring. Both in February and March were westerly
storms, such as had not been recorded even on that tempest-swept coast
for twenty years, and so much damage was inflicted on the precious Sand
Hill and its curtain, that, had the enemy been aware of its plight, it is
probable that one determined assault might have put him in possession of
the place. But Ostend was in charge of a most watchful governor, Peter
van Gieselles, who had succeeded Charles van der Noot at the close of the
year 1603. A plain, lantern jawed, Dutch colonel; with close-cropped
hair, a long peaked beard, and an eye that looked as if it had never been
shut; always dressed in a shabby old jerkin with tarnished flowers upon
it, he took command with a stout but heavy heart, saying that the place
should never be surrendered by him, but that he should never live to see
the close of the siege. He lost no time in repairing the damages of the
tempest, being ready to fight the west wind, the North Sea, and Spinola
at any moment, singly or conjoined. He rebuilt the curtain of the Sand
Hill, added fresh batteries to the Porcupine and Hell's Mouth, and amused
and distracted the enemy with almost daily sorties and feints. His
soldiers passed their days and nights up to the knees in mud and sludge
and sea-water, but they saw that their commander never spared himself,
and having a superfluity of food and drink, owing to the watchful care of
the States-General, who sent in fleets laden with provisions faster than
they could be consumed, they were cheerful and content.
On the 12th March there was a determined effort to carry the lesser
Polder Bulwark. After a fierce and bloody action, the place was taken by
storm, and the first success in the game was registered for Spinola. The
little fort was crammed full of dead, but such of the defenders as
survived were at last driven out of it, and forced to take refuge in the
next work. Day after day the same bloody business was renewed, a mere
monotony of assaults, repulses, sallies, in which hardly an inch of
ground was gained on either side, except at the cost of a great pile of
corpses. "Men will never know, nor can mortal pen ever describe," said
one who saw it all, "the ferocity and the pertinacity of both besiegers
and besieged." On the 15th of March, Colonel Catrice, an accomplished
Walloon officer of engineers, commanding the approaches against the
Polder, was killed. On the 21st March, as Peter Orieselles was taking his
scrambling dinner in company with Philip Fleming, there was a report that
the enemy was out again in force. A good deal of progress had been made
during the previous weeks on the south-west and west, and more was
suspected than was actually known. It was felt that the foe was steadily
nibbling his way up to the counterscarp. Moreover, such was the emulation
among the Germans, Walloons, Italians, and Spaniards for precedence in
working across the canal, that a general assault and universal explosion
were considered at any instant possible. The governor sent Fleming to see
if all was right in the Porcupine, while he himself went to see if a new
battery, which he had just established to check the approaches of the
enemy towards the Polder Half-moon and Ravelin in a point very near the
counterscarp, was doing its duty. Being, as usual, anxious to reconnoitre
with his own eyes, he jumped upon the rampart. But there were
sharp-shooters in the enemy's trenches, and they were familiar with the
governor's rusty old doublet and haggard old face. Hardly had he climbed
upon the breastwork when a ball pierced his heart, and he fell dead
without a groan. There was a shout of triumph from the outside, while the
tidings soon spread sadness through the garrison, for all loved and
venerated the man. Philip Fleming, so soon as he learned the heavy news,
lost no time in unavailing regrets, but instantly sent a courier to
Prince Maurice; meantime summoning a council of superior officers, by
whom Colonel John van Loon was provisionally appointed commandant.
A stately, handsome man, a good officer, but without extensive
experience, he felt himself hardly equal to the immense responsibility of
the post, but yielding to the persuasions of his comrades, proceeded to
do his best. His first care was to secure the all-important Porcupine,
towards which the enemy had been slowly crawling with his galleries and
trenches. Four days after he had accepted the command he was anxiously
surveying that fortification, and endeavouring to obtain a view of the
enemy's works, when a cannon-ball struck him on the right leg, so that he
died the next day. Plainly the post of commandant of Ostend was no
sinecure. He was temporarily succeeded by Sergeant-Major Jacques de
Bievry, but the tumults and confusion incident upon this perpetual change
of head were becoming alarming. The enemy gave the garrison no rest night
nor day, and it had long become evident that the young volunteer, whose
name was so potent on the Genoa Exchange, was not a man of straw nor a
dawdler, however the superseded veterans might grumble. At any rate the
troops on either side were like to have their fill of work.
On the 2nd April the Polder Ravelin was carried by storm. It was a most
bloody action. Never were a few square feet of earth more recklessly
assailed, more resolutely maintained. The garrison did not surrender the
place, but they all laid down their lives in its defence. Scarcely an
individual of them all escaped, and the foe, who paid dearly with heaps
of dead and wounded for his prize, confessed that such serious work as
this had scarce been known before in any part of that great
slaughter-house, Flanders.
A few days later, Colonel Bievry, provisional commandant, was desperately
wounded in a sortie, and was carried off to Zeeland. The States-General
now appointed Jacques van der Meer, Baron of Berendrecht, to the post of
honour and of danger. A noble of Flanders, always devoted to the
republican cause; an experienced middle-aged officer, vigilant,
energetic, nervous; a slight wiry man, with a wizened little face, large
bright eyes, a meagre yellow beard, and thin sandy hair flowing down upon
his well-starched ruff, the new governor soon showed himself inferior to
none of his predecessors in audacity and alertness. It is difficult to
imagine a more irritating position in many respects than that of
commander in such an extraordinary leaguer. It was not a formal siege.
Famine, which ever impends over an invested place, and sickens the soul
with its nameless horrors, was not the great enemy to contend against
here. Nor was there the hideous alternative between starving through
obstinate resistance or massacre on submission, which had been the lot of
so many Dutch garrisons in the earlier stages of the war. Retreat by sea
was ever open to the Ostend garrison, and there was always an ample
supply of the best provisions and of all munitions of war. But they had
been unceasingly exposed to two tremendous enemies. During each winter
and spring the ocean often smote their bastions and bulwarks in an hour
of wrath till they fell together like children's toys, and it was always
at work, night and day, steadily lapping at the fragile foundations on
which all their structures stood. Nor was it easy to give the requisite
attention to the devouring sea, because all the materials that could be
accumulated seemed necessary to repair the hourly damages inflicted by
their other restless foe.
Thus the day seemed to draw gradually but inexorably nearer when the
place would be, not captured, but consumed. There was nothing for it, so
long as the States were determined to hold the spot, but to meet the
besieger at every point, above or below the earth, and sell every inch of
that little morsel of space at the highest price that brave men could
impose.
So Berendrecht, as vigilant and devoted as even Peter Gieselles had ever
been, now succeeded to the care of the Polders and the Porcupines, and
the Hell's Mouths; and all the other forts, whose quaint designations had
served, as usually is the case among soldiers, to amuse the honest
patriots in the midst of their toils and danger. On the 18th April, the
enemy assailed the great western Ravelin, and after a sanguinary
hand-to-hand action, in which great numbers of officers and soldiers were
lost on both sides, he carried the fort; the Spaniards, Italians,
Germans, and Walloons vieing with each other in deeds of extraordinary
daring, and overcoming at last the resistance of the garrison.
This was an important success. The foe had now worked his way with
galleries and ditches along the whole length of the counterscarp till he
was nearly up with the Porcupine, and it was obvious that in a few days
he would be master of the counterscarp itself.
A less resolute commander, at the head of less devoted troops, might have
felt that when that inevitable event should arrive all that honour
demanded would have been done, and that Spinola was entitled to his city.
Berendrecht simply decided that if the old counterscarp could no longer
be held it was time to build a new counterscarp. This, too, had been for
some time the intention of Prince Maurice. A plan for this work had
already been sent into the place, and a distinguished English engineer,
Ralph Dexter by name, arrived with some able assistants to carry it into
execution. It having been estimated that the labour would take three
weeks of time, without more ado the inner line was carefully drawn,
cutting off with great nicety and precision about one half the whole
place. Within this narrowed circle the same obstinate resistance was to
be offered as before, and the bastions and redoubts of the new
entrenchment were to be baptized with the same uncouth names which two
long years of terrible struggle had made so precious. The work was very
laborious; for the line was drawn straight through the town, and whole
streets had to be demolished and the houses to their very foundations
shovelled away. Moreover the men were forced to toil with spade in one
hand and matchlock in the other, ever ready to ascend from the ancient
dilapidated cellars in order to mount the deadly breach at any point in
the whole circumference of the place.
It became absolutely necessary therefore to send a sufficient force of
common workmen into the town to lighten the labours of the soldiers.
Moreover the thought, although whistled to the wind, would repeatedly
recur, that, after all, there must be a limit to these operations, and
that at last there would remain no longer any earth in which to find a
refuge.
The work of the new entrenchment went slowly on, but it was steadily
done. Meantime they were comforted by hearing that the stadholder had
taken the field in Flanders, at the head of a considerable force, and
they lived in daily expectation of relief. It will be necessary, at the
proper moment, to indicate the nature of Prince Maurice's operations. For
the present, it is better that the reader should confine his attention
within the walls of Ostend.
By the 11th May, the enemy had effected a lodgment in a corner of the
Porcupine, and already from that point might threaten the new
counterscarp before it should be completed. At the same time he had
gnawed through to the West Bulwark, and was busily mining under the
Porcupine itself. In this fort friend and foe now lay together, packed
like herrings, and profited by their proximity to each other to vary the
monotony of pike and anaphance with an occasional encounter of epistolary
wit.
Thus Spanish letters, tied to sticks, and tossed over into the next
entrenchment, were replied to by others, composed in four languages by
the literary man of Ostend, Auditor Fleming, and shot into the enemy's
trenches on cross-bow bolts.
On the 29th May, a long prepared mine was sprung beneath the Porcupine.
It did its work effectively, and the 29 May assailants did theirs no less
admirably, crowding into the breach with headlong ferocity, and after a
long and sanguinary struggle with immense lose on both sides, carrying
the precious and long-coveted work by storm. Inch by inch the defenders
were thus slowly forced back toward their new entrenchment. On the same
day, however, they inflicted a most bloody defeat upon the enemy in an
attempt to carry the great Polder. He withdrew, leaving heaps of slain,
so that the account current for the day would have balanced itself, but
that the Porcupine, having changed hands, now bristled most formidably
against its ancient masters. The daily 'slaughter had become sickening to
behold. There were three thousand effective men in the garrison. More
could have been sent in to supply the steady depletion in the ranks, but
there was no room for more. There was scarce space enough for the living
to stand to their work, or for the dead to lie in their graves. And this
was an advantage which could not fail to tell. Of necessity the besiegers
would always very far outnumber the garrison, so that the final success
of their repeated assaults became daily more and more possible.
Yet on the 2nd June the enemy met not only with another signal defeat,
but also with a most bitter surprise. On that day the mine which he had
been so long and so laboriously constructing beneath the great Polder
Bulwark was sprung with magnificent effect. A breach, forty feet wide,
was made in this last stronghold of the old defences, and the soldiers
leaped into the crater almost before it had ceased to blaze, expecting by
one decisive storm to make themselves masters at last of all the
fortifications, and therefore of the town itself. But as emerging from
the mine, they sprang exulting upon the shattered bulwark, a
transformation more like a sudden change in some holiday pantomime than a
new fact in this three years' most tragic siege presented itself to their
astonished eyes. They had carried the last defence of the old
counterscarp, and behold--a new one, which they had never dreamed of,
bristling before their eyes, with a flanking battery turned directly upon
them. The musketeers and pikemen, protected by their new works, now
thronged towards the assailants; giving them so hearty a welcome that
they reeled back, discomfited, after a brief but severe struggle, from
the spot of their anticipated triumph, leaving their dead and dying in
the breach.
Four days later, Berendrecht, with a picked party of English troops,
stole out for a reconnaissance, not wishing to trust other eyes than his
own in the imminent peril of the place.
The expedition was successful. A few prisoners were taken, and valuable
information was obtained, but these advantages were counterbalanced by a
severe disaster. The vigilant and devoted little governor, before
effecting his entrance into the sally port, was picked off by a
sharpshooter, and died the next day. This seemed the necessary fate of
the commandants of Ostend, where the operations seemed more like a
pitched battle lasting three years than an ordinary siege. Gieselles, Van
Loon, Bievry, and now Berendrecht, had successively fallen at the post of
duty since the beginning of the year. Not one of them was more sincerely
deplored than Berendrecht. His place was supplied by Colonel Uytenhoove,
a stalwart, hirsute, hard-fighting Dutchman, the descendant of an ancient
race, and seasoned in many a hard campaign.
The enemy now being occupied in escarping and furnishing with batteries
the positions he had gained, with the obvious intention of attacking the
new counterscarp, it was resolved to prepare for the possible loss of
this line of fortifications by establishing another and still narrower
one within it.
Half the little place had been shorn away by the first change. Of the
half which was still in possession of the besieged about one-third was
now set off, and in this little corner of earth, close against the new
harbour, was set up their last refuge. They called the new citadel Little
Troy, and announced, with pardonable bombast, that they would hold out
there as long as the ancient Trojans had defended Ilium. With perfect
serenity the engineers set about their task with line, rule, and level,
measuring out the bulwarks and bastions, the miniature salients,
half-moons, and ditches, as neatly and methodically as if there were no
ceaseless cannonade in their ears, and as if the workmen were not at
every moment summoned to repel assaults upon the outward wall. They sent
careful drawings of Little Troy to Maurice and the States, and received
every encouragement to persevere, together with promises of ultimate
relief.
But there was one serious impediment to the contemplated construction of
the new earth-works. They had no earth. Nearly everything solid had been
already scooped away in the perpetual delving. The sea-dykes had been
robbed of their material, so that the coming winter might find besiegers
and besieged all washed together into the German Ocean, and it was hard
digging and grubbing among the scanty cellarages of the dilapidated
houses. But there were plenty of graves, filled with the results of three
years' hard fighting. And now, not only were all the cemeteries within
the precincts shovelled and carted in mass to the inner fortifications,
but rewards being offered of ten stivers for each dead body, great heaps
of disinterred soldiers were piled into the new ramparts. Thus these
warriors, after laying down their lives for the cause of freedom, were
made to do duty after death. Whether it were just or no thus to disturb
the repose--if repose it could be called--of the dead that they might
once more protect the living, it can scarcely be doubted that they took
ample revenge on the already sufficiently polluted atmosphere.
On the 17th June the foe sprang a mine under the western bulwark; close
to a countermine exploded by the garrison the day before. The assailants
thronged as merrily as usual to the breach, and were met with customary
resolution by the besieged; Governor Uytenhoove, clad in complete armour,
leading his troops. The enemy, after an hour's combat, was repulsed with
heavy loss, but the governor fell in the midst of the fight. Instantly he
was seized by the legs by a party of his own men, some English
desperadoes among the number, who, shouting that the colonel was dead,
were about to render him the last offices by plundering his body. The
ubiquitous Fleming, observing the scene, flew to the rescue and, with the
assistance of a few officers, drove off these energetic friends, and
taking off the governor's casque, discovered that he still breathed. That
he would soon have ceased to do so, had he been dragged much farther in
his harness over that jagged and precipitous pile of rubbish, was
certain. He was desperately wounded, and of course incapacitated for his
post. Thus, in that year, before the summer solstice, a fifth commandant
had fallen.
On the same day, simultaneously with this repulse in the West Bulwark,
the enemy made himself at last completely master of the Polder. Here,
too, was a savage hand-to-hand combat with broadswords and pikes, and
when the pikes were broken, with great clubs and stakes pulled from the
fascines; but the besiegers were victorious, and the defenders sullenly
withdrew with their wounded to the inner entrenchments.
On the 27th June, Daniel de Hartaing, Lord of Marquette, was sent by the
States-General to take command in Ostend. The colonel of the Walloon
regiment which had rendered such good service on the famous field of
Nieuport, the new governor, with his broad, brown, cheerful face, and his
Milan armour, was a familiar figure enough to the campaigners on both
sides in Flanders or Germany.
The stoutest heart might have sunk at the spectacle which the condition
of the town presented at his first inspection. The States-General were
resolved to hold the place, at all hazards, and Marquette had come to do
their bidding, but it was difficult to find anything that could be called
a town. The great heaps of rubbish, which had once been the outer walls,
were almost entirely in the possession of the foe, who had lodged himself
in all that remained of the defiant Porcupine, the Hell's Mouth, and
other redoubts, and now pointed from them at least fifty great guns
against their inner walls. The old town, with its fortifications, was
completely honeycombed, riddled, knocked to pieces, and, although the
Sand Hill still held out, it was plain enough that its days were numbered
unless help should soon arrive. In truth, it required a clear head and a
practised eye to discover among those confused masses of prostrate
masonry, piles of brick, upturned graves, and mounds of sand and rubbish,
anything like order and regularity. Yet amid the chaos there was really
form and meaning to those who could read aright, and Marquette saw, as
well in the engineers' lines as in the indomitable spirit that looked out
of the grim faces of the garrison, that Ostend, so long as anything of it
existed in nature, could be held for the republic. Their brethren had not
been firmer, when keeping their merry Christmas, seven years before,
under the North Pole, upon a pudding made of the gunner's cartridge
paste, or the Knights of the Invincible Lion in the horrid solitudes of
Tierra del Fuego, than were the defenders of this sandbank.
Whether the place were worth the cost or not, it was for my lords the
States-General to decide, not for Governor Marquette. And the decision of
those "high and mighty" magistrates, to whom even Maurice of Nassau bowed
without a murmur, although often against his judgment, had been plainly
enough announced.
And so shiploads of deals and joists, bricks, nails, and fascines, with
requisite building materials, were sent daily in from Zeeland, in order
that Little Troy might be completed; and, with God's help, said the
garrison, the republic shall hold its own.
And now there were two months more of mining and countermining, of
assaults and repulses, of cannonading and hand-to-hand fights with pikes
and clubs. Nearer and nearer, day by day, and inch by inch, the foe had
crawled up to the verge of their last refuge, and the walls of Little
Troy, founded upon fresh earth and dead men's bones, and shifting sands,
were beginning to quake under the guns of the inexorable volunteer from
Genoa. Yet on the 27th August there was great rejoicing in the
beleaguered town. Cannon thundered salutes, bonfires blazed, trumpets
rang jubilant blasts, and, if the church-bells sounded no merry peals, it
was because the only church in the place had been cut off in the last
slicing away by the engineers. Hymns of thanksgiving ascended to heaven,
and the whole garrison fell on their knees, praying fervently to Almighty
God, with devout and grateful hearts. It was not an ignoble spectacle to
see those veterans kneeling where there was scarce room to kneel, amid
ruin and desolation, to praise the Lord for his mercies. But to explain
this general thanksgiving it is now necessary for a moment to go back.
ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
Began to scatter golden arguments with a lavish hand
Certain number of powers, almost exactly equal to each other
Conceit, and procrastination which marked the royal character
Do you want peace or war? I am ready for either
Eloquence of the biggest guns
Even the virtues of James were his worst enemies
Gold was the only passkey to justice
If to do be as grand as to imagine what it were good to do
It is certain that the English hate us (Sully)
Logic of the largest battalions
Made peace--and had been at war ever since
Nations tied to the pinafores of children in the nursery
Natural tendency to suspicion of a timid man
Not safe for politicians to call each other hard names
One of the most contemptible and mischievous of kings (James I)
Peace founded on the only secure basis, equality of strength
Peace seemed only a process for arriving at war
Repose under one despot guaranteed to them by two others
Requires less mention than Philip III himself
Rules adopted in regard to pretenders to crowns
Served at their banquets by hosts of lackeys on their knees
Take all their imaginations and extravagances for truths
The expenses of James's household
The pigmy, as the late queen had been fond of nicknaming him
To negotiate with Government in England was to bribe
Unproductive consumption being accounted most sagacious
War was the normal condition of Christians
We have been talking a little bit of truth to each other
What was to be done in this world and believed as to the next
You must show your teeth to the Spaniard
HISTORY OF THE UNITED NETHERLANDS
From the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce--1609
By John Lothrop Motley
History United Netherlands, Volume 77, 1604-1605