Part 12 (1/2)
”Hollach (Hohenlo) is gone from hence on Friday last,” wrote Davison to Walsingham, ”he will do what he may to recover his reputation lost in the attempt, of Bois-le-Duc; which, for the grief and trouble he hath conceived thereof, hath for the time greatly altered him.”
Meantime the turbulent Scheldt, lashed by the storms of winter, was becoming a more formidable enemy to Parma's great enterprise than the military demonstrations of his enemies, or the famine which was making such havoc, with his little army. The ocean-tides were rolling huge ice-blocks up and down, which beat against his palisade with the noise of thunder, and seemed to threaten its immediate destruction. But the work stood firm. The piles supporting the piers, which had been thrust out from each bank into the stream, had been driven fifty feet into the river's bed, and did their duty well. But in the s.p.a.ce between, twelve hundred and forty feet in width, the current was too deep for pile-driving and a permanent bridge was to be established upon boats. And that bridge was to be laid across the icy and tempestuous flood, in the depth of winter, in the teeth of a watchful enemy, with the probability of an immediate invasion from France, where the rebel envoys were known to be negotiating on express invitation of the King--by half-naked, half-starving soldiers and sailors, unpaid for years, and for the sake of a master who seemed to have forgotten their existence.
”Thank G.o.d,” wrote Alexander, ”the palisade stands firm in spite of the ice. Now with the favour of the Lord, we shall soon get the fruit we have been hoping, if your Majesty is not wanting in that to which your grandeur, your great Christianity, your own interests, oblige you. In truth 'tis a great and heroic work, worthy the great power of your Majesty.” ”For my own part,” he continued, ”I have done what depended upon me. From your own royal hand must emanate the rest;--men, namely, sufficient to maintain the posts, and money enough to support them there.”
He expressed himself in the strongest language concerning the danger to the royal cause from the weak and gradually sinking condition of the army. Even without the French intrigues with the rebels, concerning which, in his ignorance of the exact state of affairs, he expressed much anxiety, it would be impossible, he said, to save the royal cause without men and money.
”I have spared myself,” said the Prince, ”neither day nor night. Let not your Majesty impute the blame to me if we fail. Verdugo also is uttering a perpetual cry out of Friesland for men--men and money.”
Yet, notwithstanding all these obstacles, the bridge was finished at last. On the 25th February, (1585) the day sacred to Saint Matthew, and of fortunate augury to the Emperor Charles, father of Philip and grandfather of Alexander, the Scheldt was closed.
As already stated, from Fort Saint Mary on the Kalloo side, and from Fort Philip, not far from Ordain on the Brabant sh.o.r.e of the Scheldt, strong structures, supported upon piers, had been projected, reaching, respectively, five hundred feet into the stream. These two opposite ends were now connected by a permanent bridge of boats. There were thirty-two of these barges, each of them sixty-two feet in length and twelve in breadth, the s.p.a.ces between each couple being twenty-two feet wide, and all being bound together, stem, stern, and mids.h.i.+ps, by quadruple hawsers and chains. Each boat was anch.o.r.ed at stem and stern with loose cables.
Strong timbers, with cross rafters, were placed upon the boats, upon which heavy frame-work the planked pathway was laid down. A thick parapet of closely-fitting beams was erected along both the outer edges of the whole fabric. Thus a continuous and well-fortified bridge, two thousand four hundred feet in length, was stretched at last from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e.
Each of the thirty-two boats on which the central portion of the structure reposed, was a small fortress provided with two heavy pieces of artillery, pointing, the one up, the other down the stream, and manned by thirty-two soldiers and four sailors, defended by a breastwork formed of gabions of great thickness.
The forts of Saint Philip and St. Mary, at either end of the bridge, had each ten great guns, and both were filled with soldiers. In front of each fort, moreover, was stationed a fleet of twenty armed vessels, carrying heavy pieces of artillery; ten anch.o.r.ed at the angle towards Antwerp, and as many looking down the river. One hundred and seventy great guns, including the armaments of the boats under the bridge of the armada and the forts, protected the whole structure, pointing up and down the stream.
But, besides these batteries, an additional precaution had been taken. On each side, above and below the bridge, at a moderate distance--a bow shot--was anch.o.r.ed a heavy, raft floating upon empty barrels. Each raft was composed of heavy timbers, bound together in bunches of three, the s.p.a.ces between being connected by s.h.i.+ps' masts and lighter spar-work, and with a tooth-like projection along the whole outer edge, formed of strong rafters, pointed and armed with sharp p.r.o.ngs and hooks of iron. Thus a serried phalanx, as it were, of spears stood ever on guard to protect the precious inner structure. Vessels coming from Zeeland or Antwerp, and the floating ice-ma.s.ses, which were almost as formidable, were obliged to make their first attack upon these dangerous outer defences. Each raft; floating in the middle of the stream, extended twelve hundred, and fifty-two feet across, thus protecting the whole of the bridge of boats and a portion of that resting upon piles.
Such was the famous bridge of Parma. The magnificent undertaking has been advantageously compared with the celebrated Rhine-bridge of Julius Caesar. When it is remembered; however; that the Roman work was performed in summer, across a river only half as broad as the Scheldt, free from the disturbing, action of the tides; and flowing through an unresisting country; while the whole character of the structure; intended only to, serve for the single pa.s.sage of an army, was far inferior to the ma.s.sive solidity of Parma's bridge; it seems not unreasonable to a.s.sign the superiority to the general who had surmounted all the obstacles of a northern winter, vehement ebb and flow from the sea, and enterprising and desperate enemies at every point.
When the citizens, at last, looked upon the completed fabric, converted from the ”dream,” which they had p.r.o.nounced it to be, into a terrible reality; when they saw the s.h.i.+ning array of Spanish and Italian legions marching and counter-marching upon their new road; and trampling, as it were; the turbulent river beneath their feet; when they witnessed the solemn military spectacle with which the Governor-General celebrated his success, amid peals of cannon and shouts of triumph from his army, they bitterly bewailed their own folly. Yet even then they could hardly believe that the work had been accomplished by human agency, but they loudly protested that invisible demons had been summoned to plan and perfect this fatal and preter-human work. They were wrong. There had been but one demon--one clear, lofty intelligence, inspiring a steady and untiring hand. The demon was the intellect of Alexander Farnese; but it had been a.s.sisted in its labour by the hundred devils of envy, covetousness, jealousy, selfishness, distrust, and discord, that had housed, not, in his camp, but in the ranks of those who were contending for their hearths and altars.
And thus had the Prince arrived at success in spite of every obstacle. He took a just pride in the achievement, yet he knew by how many dangers he was still surrounded, and he felt hurt at his sovereign's neglect. ”The enterprise at Antwerp,” he wrote to Philip on the day the bridge was completed, ”is so great and heroic that to celebrate it would require me to speak more at large than I like, to do, for fear of being tedious to your Majesty. What I will say, is that the labours and difficulties have been every day so, great, that if your Majesty knew them, you would estimate, what we have done more highly than-you do; and not forget us so utterly, leaving us to die of hunger.”
He considered the fabric in itself almost impregnable, provided he were furnished with the means to maintain what he had so painfully constructed.
”The whole is in such condition,” said he, ”that in opinion of all competent military judges it would stand though all Holland and Zeeland should come to destroy our palisades. Their attacks must be made at immense danger, and disadvantage, so severely can we play upon them with our artillery and musketry. Every boat is, garnished with the most dainty captains and soldiers, so that if the enemy should attempt to a.s.sail us now, they would come back with broken heads.”
Yet in the midst of his apparent triumph he had, at times, almost despair in his heart. He felt really at the last gasp. His troops had dwindled to the mere shadow of an army, and they were forced to live almost upon air.
The cavalry had nearly vanished. The garrisons in the different cities were starving. The burghers had no food for the soldiers nor for themselves. ”As for the rest of the troops,” said Alexander, ”they are stationed where they have nothing to subsist upon, save salt water and the d.y.k.es, and if the Lord does not grant a miracle, succour, even if sent by your Majesty, will arrive too late.” He a.s.sured his master, that he could not go on more than five or six days longer, that he had been feeding his soldiers for a long time from hand to mouth, and that it would soon be impossible for him to keep his troops together. If he did not disband them they would run away.
His pictures were most dismal, his supplications for money very moving but he never alluded to himself. All his anxiety, all his tenderness, were for his soldiers. ”They must have food,” he said: ”'Tis impossible to sustain them any longer by driblets, as I have done for a long time.
Yet how can I do it without money? And I have none at all, nor do I see where to get a single florin.”
But these revelations were made only to his master's most secret ear. His letters, deciphered after three centuries, alone make manifest the almost desperate condition in which the apparently triumphant general was placed, and the facility with which his antagonists, had they been well guided and faithful to themselves, might have driven him into the sea.
But to those adversaries he maintained an att.i.tude of serene and smiling triumph. A spy, sent from the city to obtain intelligence for the anxious burghers, had gained admission into his lines, was captured and brought before the Prince. He expected, of course, to be immediately hanged. On the contrary, Alexander gave orders that he should be conducted over every part of the encampment. The forts, the palisades, the bridge, were all to be carefully exhibited and explained to him as if he had been a friendly visitor ent.i.tled to every information. He was requested to count the pieces of artillery in the forts, on the bridge, in the armada. After thoroughly studying the scene he was then dismissed with a safe-conduct to the city.
”Go back to those who sent you,” said the Prince. ”Convey to them the information in quest of which you came. Apprize them of every thing which you have inspected, counted, heard explained. Tell them further, that the siege will never be abandoned, and that this bridge will be my sepulcher or my pathway into Antwerp.”
And now the aspect of the scene was indeed portentous. The chimera had become a very visible bristling reality. There stood the bridge which the citizens had ridiculed while it was growing before their faces. There scowled the Kowenstyn--black with cannon, covered all over with fortresses which the butchers had so sedulously preserved. From Parma's camp at Beveren and Kalloo a great fortified road led across the river and along the fatal d.y.k.e all the way to the entrenchments at Stabroek, where Mansfeld's army lay. Grim Mondragon held the ”holy cross” and the whole Kowenstyn in his own iron grasp. A chain of forts, built and occupied by the contending hosts of the patriots and the Spaniards, were closely packed together along both banks of the Scheldt, nine miles long from Antwerp to Lillo, and interchanged perpetual cannonades. The country all around, once fertile as a garden, had been changed into a wild and wintry sea where swarms of gun-boats and other armed vessels manoeuvred and contended with each other over submerged villages and orchards, and among half-drowned turrets and steeples. Yet there rose the great bulwark--whose early destruction would have made all this desolation a blessing--unbroken and obstinate; a perpetual obstacle to communication between Antwerp and Zeeland. The very spirit of the murdered Prince of Orange seemed to rise sadly and reproachfully out of the waste of waters, as if to rebuke the men who had been so deaf to his solemn warnings.
Brussels, too, wearied and worn, its heart sick with hope deferred, now fell into despair as the futile result of the French negotiation became apparent. The stately and opulent city had long been in a most abject condition. Many of its inhabitants attempted to escape from the horrors of starving by flying from its walls. Of the fugitives, the men were either scourged back by the Spaniards into the city, or hanged up along the road-side. The women were treated, leniently, even playfully, for it was thought an excellent jest to cut off the petticoats of the unfortunate starving creatures up to their knees, and then command them to go back and starve at home with their friends and fellow-citizens. A great many persons literally died of hunger. Matrons with large families poisoned their children and themselves to avoid the more terrible death by starving. At last, when Vilvoorde was taken, when the baseness of the French King was thoroughly understood, when Parma's bridge was completed and the Scheldt bridled, Brussels capitulated on as favourable terms as could well have been expected.
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