"Fiddlesticks! You call yourself a student, and don't even know that a cannon ball cannot fly across a river because the water draws it down," cried Dame Sarah, triumphantly, and with that she drove to the top of the hill, where she stood up on the wagon and thence surveyed the course of the skirmish, while her great lout of a coachman, in his fear and anguish, crawled under a wagon, and viewed the fight with his back. And yet the fellow called himself a man!
First of all, five Turkish horsemen appeared on the top of a hill. How many more lay behind the hill, nobody of course could tell.
To the left stretched a large morass covered with rushes, on the right lay an oak forest. The presumption was that the whole thicket was swarming with hidden foes.
So out against the five Turkish horsemen rode just as many and no more, from the Hungarian side, whereupon the five Turks turned tail and galloped off, the Hungarians also instantly returning to their ranks.
Then seven or eight Turkish horsemen reappeared, and began insulting the Hungarians, not with words indeed, which would have been quite thrown away at so great a distance, but with all sorts of outrageous gestures; while the Hungarians, not to be outdone, retaliated in kind with great spirit and originality. Tiring at last, however, of this pantomimic war, eight of the Hungarian horsemen dashed against the Turks with couched lances. In the ensuing mêlée all sixteen lances were splintered to atoms, whereupon the horsemen on both sides returned to their respective places.
At last the Hungarian commander grew weary of these tantalizing tactics, divided his troops into four battalions, and sent one of them off to encompass the forest. On this division coming close up to the outskirts of the wood, a swarm of Turkish horsemen rushed out upon them with loud cries; whereupon the Hungarians feigned flight till they had drawn the pursuers within reach of the second line of battle, when they suddenly turned and drove the Turks, who were now completely surrounded, toward the morass. Here, however, they themselves fell into an ambush of janizaries, who picked them off from among the bushes, and at the same moment from behind the sedges there poured forth a whole stream of horsemen of all sorts, Albanians, Spahis, and Moors, who attacked them on all sides like a swarm of hornets.
The Hungarian captain now set his third division in motion, in which were also Valentine and his comrade Simplex.
Dame Sarah, from the opposite shore, saw how they charged the foe.
"Why, the plucky lad sits on horseback as if he had never learnt anything else all his life! If only his poor father could see him!"
Valentine had never learnt the trade of a soldier, but he did what he thought was the right thing, grasping his father's broad crooked sword in his right hand, and his long three-edged dagger in his left, at the same time throwing his horse's reins over its neck. Simplex, likewise, drew his broadsword and wrapped his wolfskin round his left arm by way of a buckler.