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deep into the heart of summer, the city of Haarlem had been closely
beleaguered by an army of thirty thousand Spaniards, most of them
veteran troops under the command of Don Frederic, the son of Alva, and
other generals. Against this disciplined host were opposed the little
garrison of four thousand Hollanders and Germans aided by a few Scotch
and English soldiers, together with a population of about twenty
thousand old men, women and children. From day to day, from week to
week, from month to month, the struggle was waged between these
unequal forces, marked on either side by the most heroic efforts and by
cruelties that would strike our age as monstrous. For in those times the
captive prisoner of war could expect no mercy; indeed, he was fortunate
if he was not hung from a gibbet by the leg to die slowly within eyeshot
of his friends.

There were battles without number, men perished in hecatombs; among the
besieging armies alone over twelve thousand lost their lives, so that
the neighbourhood of Haarlem became one vast graveyard, and the fish in
the lake were poisoned by the dead. Assault, sortie, ambuscade, artifice
of war; combats to the death upon the ice between skate-shod soldiers;
desperate sea fights, attempts to storm; the explosion of mines and
counter-mines that brought death to hundreds--all these became the
familiar incidents of daily life.

Then there were other horrors; cold from insufficient fuel, pestilences
of various sorts such as always attend a siege, and, worse of all for
the beleaguered, hunger. Week by week as the summer aged, the food grew
less and less, till at length there was nothing. The weeds that grew in
the street, the refuse of tanneries, the last ounce of offal, the mice
and the cats, all had been devoured. On the lofty steeple of St. Bavon
for days and days had floated a black flag to tell the Prince of Orange
in Leyden that below it was despair as black. The last attempt at
succour had been made. Batenburg had been defeated and slain, together
with 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 and
sick should be left in the city, while the able-bodied men cut a way
through the battalions of their besiegers. On these non-combatants it
was hoped that the Spaniard would have mercy--as though the Spaniard
could have mercy, he who afterwards dragged the wounded and