CHAPTER XXVIII
ATONEMENT
Seven months had gone by, seven of the most dreadful months ever livedthrough by human beings. For all this space of time, through the frostsand snows and fogs of winter, through the icy winds of spring, and nowdeep into the heart of summer, the city of Haarlem had been closelybeleaguered by an army of thirty thousand Spaniards, most of themveteran troops under the command of Don Frederic, the son of Alva, andother generals. Against this disciplined host were opposed the littlegarrison of four thousand Hollanders and Germans aided by a few Scotchand English soldiers, together with a population of about twentythousand old men, women and children. From day to day, from week toweek, from month to month, the struggle was waged between theseunequal forces, marked on either side by the most heroic efforts and bycruelties that would strike our age as monstrous. For in those times thecaptive prisoner of war could expect no mercy; indeed, he was fortunateif he was not hung from a gibbet by the leg to die slowly within eyeshotof his friends.
There were battles without number, men perished in hecatombs; among thebesieging armies alone over twelve thousand lost their lives, so thatthe neighbourhood of Haarlem became one vast graveyard, and the fish inthe lake were poisoned by the dead. Assault, sortie, ambuscade, artificeof war; combats to the death upon the ice between skate-shod soldiers;desperate sea fights, attempts to storm; the explosion of mines andcounter-mines that brought death to hundreds--all these became thefamiliar incidents of daily life.
Then there were other horrors; cold from insufficient fuel, pestilencesof various sorts such as always attend a siege, and, worse of all forthe beleaguered, hunger. Week by week as the summer aged, the food grewless and less, till at length there was nothing. The weeds that grew inthe street, the refuse of tanneries, the last ounce of offal, the miceand the cats, all had been devoured. On the lofty steeple of St. Bavonfor days and days had floated a black flag to tell the Prince of Orangein Leyden that below it was despair as black. The last attempt atsuccour had been made. Batenburg had been defeated and slain, togetherwith the Seigneurs of Clotingen and Carloo, and five or six hundred men.Now there was no more hope.
Desperate expedients were suggested: That the women, children, aged andsick should be left in the city, while the able-bodied men cut a waythrough the battalions of their besiegers. On these non-combatants itwas hoped that the Spaniard would have mercy--as though the Spaniardcould have mercy, he who afterwards dragged the wounded and the ailingto the door of the hospital and there slaughtered them in cold blood;aye, and here and elsewhere, did other things too dreadful to writedown. Says the old chronicler, "But this being understood by thewomen, they assembled all together, making the most pitiful cries andlamentations that could be heard, the which would have moved a heart offlint, so as it was not possible to abandon them."
Next another plan was formed: that all the females and helpless shouldbe set in the centre of a square of the fighting men, to march outand give battle to the foe till everyone was slain. Then the Spaniardshearing this and growing afraid of what these desperate men might do,fell back on guile. If they would surrender, the citizens of Haarlemwere told, and pay two hundred and forty thousand florins, no punishmentshould be inflicted. So, having neither food nor hope, they listenedto the voice of the tempter and surrendered, they who had fought untiltheir garrison of four thousand was reduced to eighteen hundred men.