This coming and going of the belligerents had lasted now for two and thirty years and there was still no foreseeable end to it. The sowing of the dragon's teeth had yielded a generous harvest—men of iron had indeed sprung from the blood-drenched earth and even women had had to forget what kindness and clemency were. There was now a younger generation who, for this very reason, did not long for peace because they had never known what peace was.
And if the violence of the war had worsened on dry land, it was even more horrendous at sea. At least on land prisoners could be exchanged or ransomed—towns, villages and hamlets could spare themselves burning and sacking by buying off would-be attackers. At sea, however, there were no pardons and no ransoms. It was held to be merciful to put enemy prisoners to the sword without further ado or to hang them from a yardarm and not to slowly torture them to death in the cruellest way possible or to nail them to the deck and sink them along with their captured ship.
Commanding officers and ordinary soldiers on the walls of Fort Liefkenhoek listened with rapt attention to the cannon fire and shared their opinions on it. One person would have one view on the parties to the skirmish, someone else another, but, finally, whispered at first, then louder and more surely, the word went from mouth to mouth among the soldiers:
"The black galley, the black galley again!"
Each of them spat out the same message with a tone between anger and uncanny dread:
"The black galley!"
Towards one o'clock in the morning the wind died down and the cannons too fell silent. Twenty minutes later there was a sudden burst of flame in the far, far distance that left the dark water looking blood-red from an equally bloody flash of lightning. The garish illumination flickered over hundreds of bearded and wild faces on the walls of Forts Liefkenhoek and Lillo and, half a second later, the dull thud of a huge explosion succeeded to the lightshow, with which the skirmish appeared to be at an end, in the same way that a tragedy ends with a catastrophe. No more signs of life could be seen or heard to hint at the continuation of the struggle. Although the garrisons of the Spanish fortresses waited patiently, listening out for a long time, they heard no more signs of gunfire.
"Well, and what do you think about all this, Senyor Jeronimo?" the commandant of Fort Liefkenhoek asked one of his captains, a gaunt elderly man with grey hair and a grey beard, covered with scars from head to toe.
The soldier thus addressed, who until then had been leaning on the parapet a little away from his comrades in arms, shrugged his shoulders.
"Don't ask me about it, sir. By God and the Virgin Mary, I gave up racking my brains a long time ago over what this war has in store for us. My armour has become attached to my skin and I'll hold my ground till Judgement Day, but that's as much as I will do."