A pleasant farm hidden away in a garden. It is springtide. The garden is a blaze of white. Apple-trees in blossom. Beneath their boughs a man and a girl are standing close intertwined.
Beyond, on the other side of the hedge, they are passing along the village street. Their friends of the village. Their hour has come.
The girl's head is resting heavily on his breast, and her arm trembling round his neck. "Stay with me, only stay one day more. The wedding was to have been tomorrow. You will never come back! And we are so young—so very young. Look, how the blossom is falling. You, too, will lie on the ground like that, so dead and white. And I shall waste away and fade."
Then he looks into her eyes—sad unto death and fearful. "So you wish me to stay behind, and the others to go and die for us?"
She shakes her head without a word, and looks up at him with a smile amid her tears. Then he kisses her, and clasps her hand in farewell.
V
The groups have assembled. They have grown from day to day, and drawn nearer and nearer to the enemy.
And now the two armies are arrayed against each other—eye to eye. On the plain yonder you can see them—the Spanish troops flashing in steel—so close that you can distinguish their yellow faces in the sunlight.
What is their quest here on foreign soil? They are selling their blood for a hireling's wage, and turning themselves into hangmen to lay a free people in chains.
A distant glow is still glowering to the heavens. The last villages through which the Spanish dogs passed. They have left smoke and ruin behind them. Mangled corpses, the wailing of children. What do the strangers care? They have come into the country for loot.