m
with stout arms, keen-edged weapons, and an abundance of death-dealing
missiles. The invaders had brought siege artillery with them, and after
the first assault, from which they had hoped to achieve so much, but in
which they were tellingly repulsed, leaving hundreds of their best
soldiers dead in the trenches and upon the open field, they resorted to
their reserved means of offense. Some of their cannon were of such
enormous calibre as to throw stones weighing three hundred pounds. Yet
so clumsy was this primitive artillery, and so awkwardly was it served,
that it often inflicted more destruction on the Turkish gunners
themselves than on the Christians.

The struggle raged fiercely day by day, and the victims were reckoned by
hundreds among the enemy every twenty-four hours. The carnage among the
besiegers was awful. Their close ranks were mowed down by the Knights,
as grass falls before the scythe of the husbandman.

When the Ottoman soldiers came in a body, bearing scaling-ladders
wherewith to reach the top of the rampart of St. Elmo, and while they
were in the most exposed situation, sharp-cornered stones, as heavy as
two men could lift, were launched suddenly upon those ascending the
ladders, forcing them to the ground, and killing them in large numbers.
Boiling pitch was poured upon the upturned faces of the assailants,
blinding and agonizing them. Iron hoops bound with cotton thoroughly
saturated with gum and gunpowder were set on fire, and so thrown as to
encircle the heads of three or four of the enemy, binding them together
in a fiery circle which they could not extinguish, and which burned them
fatally before they reached the ground below. Many other horribly
destructive and fatal devices were adopted by the defenders, which
spread death in all directions among the Turks. When one of the enemy
succeeded in reaching the top of the ramparts, he was instantly met by a
Knight, whose keen battle-axe severed his head from the body, both head
and body tumbling back into the ditch among the assailants. Still, the
indomitable Ottomans renewed their attacks from day to day, hoping to
carry the fort at last by exhausting the physical endurance of the
defenders, though it should cost ten Mussulmans' lives for one
Christian. Each time they marched to the assault, the death-dealing
rocks, the boiling pitch, and the fiery hoops did their terrible work,
in connection with the ordinary weapons of war, in the use of which t