Soon two parties formed in the camp, eternally quarrelling and disputing, the one side saying: “the Prince is a traitor,” the other answering that the accusers lied in their throat and that they would make them swallow their lie. Distrust spread and grew like a spot of oil. They came to blows in groups of six, of eight, or a dozen men; fighting with every weapon of single combat, even with arquebuses.
One day the prince came up at the noise, marching between two parties. A bullet carried away his sword from his side. He put an end to the combat and visited the whole camp to show himself, that it might not be said: “The Silent One is dead, and the war is dead with him.”
The next day, towards midnight, in misty weather, Ulenspiegel being on the point of coming out from a house where he had been to sing a Flemish love song to a Walloon girl, heard at the door of the cottage beside the house a raven’s croak thrice repeated. Other croakings answered from a distance, thrice by thrice. A country churl came to the door of the cottage. Ulenspiegel heard footsteps on the highway.
Two men, speaking Spanish, came to the rustic, who said to them in the same tongue:
“What have you done?”
“A good piece of work,” said they, “lying for the king. Thanks to us, captains and soldiermen say to one another in distrust:
“‘It is through vile ambition that the prince is resisting the king; he is but waiting to be feared by him and to receive cities and lordships as a pledge of peace; for five hundred thousand florins he will abandon the valiant lords that are fighting for the countries. The duke has offered him a full amnesty with a promise and an oath to restore to their estates himself and all the highest leaders of the army, if they would re-enter into obedience to the king. Orange means to treat with him alone by himself.’
“The partisans of the Silent One answered us:
“‘The duke’s offer is a treacherous trap. He will pay them no heed, recalling the fate of Messieurs d’Egmont and de Hoorn. Well they know it, Cardinal de Granvelle, being at Rome, said at the time of the capture of the Counts: “They take the two gudgeons, but they leave the pike; they have taken nothing since the Silent remains still to take.”’”
“Is the variance great in the camp?” said the rustic.