“They will have the town sooner or later, though, Pierre,” said the elder soldier, despondingly; “for ere long we shall have nought to eat, unless we can chew pike-staves like mutton-bones, and swallow arrow-heads for New Year cakes!”
“Well, these English have no cause to crow over us on that score,” cried his more hopeful comrade; “for, thou know’st, yon Picard who escaped from them to us yester-eve, brought word that the thieves had well-nigh spent their stores, and were at their wits’ end to replenish them.”
“It will end, then, in a match of who can starve the longest,” said Gaspard, with a grim smile; “and at that game I fear them nought, for methinks we Bretons can hold out without food as long as any man alive.”
“Ay, truly; and these cold nights that are coming will try the English rogues hard, encamped as they be in the open field.”
“I fear it will ne’er come as far as that,” put in a third man, who had just come up. “Heard ye not, lads, yon great shouting in the English camp but now? and know ye what it meant?”
“What meant it?” asked both at once.
“Marry, it meant that yon movable tower of theirs is at last ready to attack our walls, and by to-morrow’s sunrise it will be upon us. Even so said a dog of an English archer who stood nigh the wall, and called to me but now in scorn, ‘Make room in your sty, ye Breton piglings; the great sow is coming.’”
His hearers eyed each other in blank dismay, for in that age these formidable engines were the terror of every besieged garrison. The invention of gunpowder, though more than half a century old, had as yet made little difference in war; and not till a century later did the fall of Constantinople before the Turk’s breaching-cannon show the full power of the new artillery. The chief mode of attack was still with high wooden towers, which (protected from fire by a cover of raw hides, and from stones by their sloping roofs and solid build) were pushed close up to the city walls; and while the men who filled the upper story sprang on the ramparts sword in hand, the sappers in the lower one made a breach or beat in a gate, thus combining both modes of assault, mine and escalade.
“If this be so,” said Gaspard, “may God have mercy on us, for we shall find none from man.”
He spoke too truly. In that iron age, though the lives of knights and nobles might be spared for ransom, those of common soldiers were held cheap as flies; and the slaughter of the whole garrison was in such cases so completely a matter of course, that the defenders of the doomed city already counted themselves dead men.