IV
The second picture which the historian shows us is more dispiriting and more grim. It is a picture of Cambray in the last days of July. The Spanish armies have invested the city completely for over eight weeks, and Cambray has been thrown entirely on her own resources and the activities of a few bold spirits for the barest necessities of life. Starvation—grim and unrelenting—is taking her toll of the exhausted population; disease begins to haunt the abodes of squalor and of misery.
France has promised aid and France still tarries.
Mayhap France has forgotten long ago.
In Cambray now a vast silence reigns—the silence of impending doom. The streets are deserted during the day, the church bells are silent. Only at evening, in the gloom, weird and melancholy sounds fill the air, groans and husky voices, and at times the wild shriek of some demented brain.
Cambray has fought for her liberty; now she is enduring for it—and enduring it with a fortitude and determination, which is one Of the most glorious entries in the book of the recording angel. Every morning at dawn the heralds of the Spanish commander mount the redoubt on the Bapaume road, and with a loud flourish of brass trumpets they demand in the name of His Majesty the King of Spain the surrender of the rebel city. And every day the summons is answered by a grim and defiant silence. After which, Cambray settles down to another day of suffering.
The city fathers have worked wonders in organization. From the first, the distribution of accumulated provisions has been systematic and rigidly fair. But those distributions, from being scanty have become wholly insufficient, and lives that before flickered feebly, have gone out altogether, while others continue a mere struggle for existence, which would be degrading were its object not so sublime.
Cambray will not surrender! She would sooner starve and rot and be consumed by fire, but with her integrity whole, her courage undoubted, the honour of her women unsullied. Disease may haunt her streets, famine knock at every door; but at least while her citizens have one spark of life left in their bodies, while their emaciated hands have a vestige of power wherewith to grasp a musket, no Spanish soldier shall defile her pavements, no Spanish commander work his tyrannical will with her.
Cambray will not surrender! She believes in her defender and her saviour!—in his words that France will presently come with invincible might and powerful armies, when all her sufferings will be turned to relief and to joy. And every evening when lights are put out and darkness settles down upon the stricken city, wrapping under her beneficent mantle all the misery, the terrors and the heroism, men and women lay themselves down to their broken rest with a last murmur of hope, a last invocation to God for the return of the hero in whom lies their trust.