"Colonel Dittfurt," cried General Kinkel, in a doleful voice, "you see that further resistance is useless. We must surrender!"
"No!" shouted the colonel, pale with rage; "no, we shall not surrender; no, we shall not Incur the disgrace of laying down our arms before this ragged mob. We can die, but shall not surrender! Forward, my brave soldiers, forward!"
And Dittfurt rushed furiously, followed by his soldiers, upon the
Tyrolese who were approaching at this moment.
Suddenly he reeled back. Two bullets had hit him at the same time, and the blood streamed from two wounds. But these wounds, instead of paralyzing his courage, inflamed it still more. He overcame his pain and weakness, and, brandishing his sword, rushed forward.
A third bullet whistled up and penetrated his breast. He sank down; blood streamed from his mouth and his nose.
The Tyrolese burst into deafening cheers, and approached the fallen officer to take his sword from him. But he sprang once more to his feet, he would not fall alive into the hands of the peasants; he felt that he had to die, but he would die like a soldier on the field of Honor, and not as a prisoner of the peasants. Livid as a corpse, his face covered with gore, his uniform saturated with blood, Dittfurt reeled forward, and drove his soldiers, with wild imprecations, entreaties, and threats toward the hospital, whence the Tyrolese poured their murderous fire into the ranks of the Bavarians. But scarcely had he advanced a few steps when a fourth bullet struck him and laid him prostrate.
His regiment, seized with dismay, shouted out that it would surrender, and, in proof of this intention, the soldiers laid down their arms.
The Bavarian cavalry, to avoid the disgrace of such a capitulation, galloped in wild disorder toward the gate and the Hofgarten. But there Speckbacher had taken position with the peasants, who, mostly armed only with pitchforks, had hurried to the scene of the combat from the immediate environs of Innspruck. But these pitchforks seemed to the panic-stricken cavalry to be terrible, murderous weapons; cannon would have appeared to them less dreadful than the glittering pitchforks, with which the shouting peasants rushed upon them, and which startled not only the soldiers but their horses also. The soldiers thought the wounds made by pitchforks more horrible and ignominious than utter defeat, and even death. Thunderstruck at their desperate position, hardly knowing what befell them, unable to offer further resistance, they allowed themselves to be torn from their horses by the peasants, to whom they handed their arms in silence. The Tyrolese then mounted the horses, and in a triumphant procession, headed by Joseph Speckbacher, they conducted their prisoners back to Innspruck. [Footnote: Hormayr's "History of Andreas Hofer," vol. i., p. 250.]
There the enemy had likewise surrendered in the mean time, and the barracks which, until yesterday, had been the quarters of the oppressors of the Tyrolese, the Bavarian soldiers, became now the prisons of the defeated. Escorted by the peasants, the disarmed and defenceless Bavarians were hurried into the barracks, whose doors closed noisily behind them.
Innspruck was now free; not an armed Bavarian soldier remained in the city, but the Tyrolese, to the number of upward of fifteen thousand, poured into the streets, and the citizens joined them exultingly, and thanked the courageous peasants for delivering them from the foreign yoke. The city, which for three hours had been a wild scene of terror, havoc, bloodshed, and death, resounded now at the hour of mid-day with cheers and exultation; nothing was heard but hurrahs, songs, and cheers for the Emperor Francis and the beloved Tyrol.