A passionate exclamation broke from Hoogstraaten as he and De Louverwal read the dispatch; it roused William, who took up the agent's letter and read it slowly.
This contained fuller details of the disaster brought by a Spanish soldier to Maestricht, where Van Baren had been.
He now wrote to the Prince that only a handful of the rebels had escaped, and that they, with Count Louis, had swum the Ems and fled into Germany. He wrote of the ghastly butchery which had followed the victory, how all the dikes and swamps were red, and the sky red also with burning crops and houses, for Alva had laid waste Friesland from end to end, sparing neither woman nor child.
And against this background of horrors stood out the desperate heroism of Louis who had dashed again and again among his reluctant troops, who had hurled himself single-handed on the enemy, who had, when the gunners had fled, fired his only artillery—the Groningen cannon, the poor spoils of Heiliger Lee—with his own hand, going from one to the other with the firebrand; and that desperate volley had been the last volley of the rebels.
When William read of his brother's piteous and splendid attempts to turn back the dark tides of disaster, when he read of the slaying and burning of his little army ("the dead were so thick they choked the river"), he rose with a movement of intolerable agony, and a sharp sound unconsciously escaped him—the cry of one swiftly and unexpectedly wounded.
"O Christ! O, Christ!" muttered Hoogstraaten, and he looked about him bewildered. "Who will give us levies now? How shall we do anything?"
De Louverwal turned his face away and wept.
The Prince still said nothing; he loosened his falling collar and wiped his face and neck bathed in cold sweat; he put his hand to his throat, and his lips parted as if he stifled; then he closed his mouth firmly and continued to pass the handkerchief over his face.
It was the same unconscious gesture of mental agony that Lamoral Egmont had used on the scaffold.
"Ah, Highness," cried Hoogstraaten—"ah, Highness, what news is this?" and his voice was hoarse with love and pity and wrath.