"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.