rland and Swiss glory, each
flew joyously to meet danger and death, and counted not the number of the
enemy. And wherever a Swiss banner floated, there was more than one like
John Wala of Glarus, who, near Gams in Rheinthal, measured himself singly
with thirty horsemen.

The Grisons, also, fought with no less glory. Witness the Malserhaide in
Tyrol, where fifteen thousand men, under Austrian banners, behind strong
intrenchments, were attacked by only eight thousand Grisons. The ramparts
were turned, the intrenchments stormed. Benedict Fontana was first on the
enemy's wall. He had cleared the way. With his left hand holding the wide
wound from which his entrails protruded, he fought with his right and
cried: "Forward, now, fellow-leaguers! let not my fall stop you! It is
but one man the less! To-day you must save your free fatherland and
your free leagues. If you are conquered, you leave your children in
everlasting slavery." So said Fontana and died. The Malserhaide was full
of Austrian dead. Nearly five thousand fell. The Grisons had only two
hundred killed and seven hundred wounded.

When Emperor Maximilian, in the Netherlands, heard of so many battles
lost, he came and reproached his generals, and said to the princes of the
German empire: "Send to me auxiliaries against the Swiss, so bold as
to have attacked the empire. For these rude peasants, in whom there is
neither virtue nor noble blood nor magnanimity, but who are full of
coarseness, pride, perfidy, and hatred of the German nation, have drawn
into their party many hitherto faithful subjects of the empire."

But the princes of the empire delayed to send auxiliaries, and the
Emperor then learned, with increasing horror, that his army sent over the
Engadine mountains to suppress the Grison League had been destroyed in
midsummer by avalanches, famine, and the masses of rock which the
Grisons threw down from the mountains; then that on the woody height of
Bruderholz, not far from Basel, one thousand Swiss had vanquished more
than four thousand of their enemies; that, shortly after, in the same
region near Dornach, six thousand Confederates had obtained a brilliant
victory over fifteen thousand Austrians, killing three thousand men, with
their general, Henry of Furstenberg. Then the Emperor reflected that
within eight months the Swiss had been eight times victorious in eight
battles. And he decided to end a war in which more than twenty thousand
men had already fal