Don Miguel de Salvado leads the attack this time. The breach now looks like a gate which leads straight into the heart of the city, where pillage and looting are to be the reward of the conquerors; and the booty will be rich with the precious belongings of a pack of overfed bourgeois.
That open gate for the moment seems undefended. It is encumbered with fallen masonry, and beyond this appear piles of rubbish, overturned wagons, furniture, débris of all sorts, evidently abandoned by the wretched inhabitants when they fled from their homes. Of Gilles de Crohin and his burghers there is for the moment no sign.
Don Miguel has with him half a company of musketeers, the finest known in Europe, and a company of lancers who have been known to clear an entire city of rebels by their irresistible onrush.
'No falling back, remember!' he commands. 'The first who gives ground is a dead man!'
Up the lancers run on the slippery ground, clinging to the wet earth with naked feet, to the coarse grass and loose stones with their knees. The musketeers remain on the hither side of the moat, three deep in a long battle array; the front lying flat upon the ground, the second kneeling, the third standing, with their muskets levelled against the first enemy who dares to show his face. The pikemen have reached the breach. There is silence on the other side. The officer laughs lustily.
'I told you 'twas but a rabble playing with firearms!'
The words are hardly out of his mouth when a terrific volley of musketry shakes the fast crumbling wall to its foundation. It comes from somewhere behind all those débris—and not only from there, but from some other unknown point, with death-like precision and cold deliberation. The Spanish officer is hit in the face; twelve pikemen throw up their arms and come rolling down on the wet ground.
'What is this hell let loose?' cries the officer savagely, ere he too, blinded with the flow of blood down his face, beats a hasty retreat.
Quick! a messenger to His Highness the Duke of Parma! The breach is so wide now that twenty men could walk easily through it. The enemy is not in sight—and yet, from somewhere unseen, death-dealing musketry frustrates every assault.
'Return to the charge!' is the Duke of Parma's curt command, and sends one of his ablest officers to lead a fresh charge. He himself organizes a diversion, crosses the small rivulet, which flows into the Schelde at the foot of Cantimpré, and trains his artillery upon a vulnerable piece of wall, between the bastion and the river bank. He has the finest culverines known in Europe at this time, made on a new pattern lately invented in England; his cannon balls are the most powerful ever used in warfare, and some of his musketeers know how to discharge ten shots in a quarter of an hour—an accomplishment never excelled even by the French.