saults more discipline was adopted and observed. The forces were
divided so as to attack various points simultaneously, while a heavy
reserve was held well in hand to launch upon the point where any
temporary success disclosed a weakness in the defenses. The enemy had
learned a bitter lesson by experience; that vain, ill-conceived attack
at the opening of the siege having cost them between three and four
thousand of their best soldiers. The bodies of these men who were slain
before the stout walls of St. Elmo lay unburied for days in the trenches
and approaches to the fort, creating a terrible stench, which caused a
fever to break out in the Turkish camp, nearly as fatal to them as the
missiles and battle-axes of the Knights.

During the progress of the siege the Maltese women not only tended the
sick and wounded, but constantly served refreshments to those who could
not leave their posts of duty. They also transported the wounded upon
stretchers to the hospitals, and brought powder, shot, and rocks, to aid
the defenders upon the ramparts. Though many of them were killed and
others wounded while thus engaged, they bravely continued their
important services to the last. One historian says that twice when the
Turkish shot had cut down the red banner of St. John, with its
eight-pointed cross of white, it was a Maltese woman who instantly
rushed to the exposed point and raised it again over the ramparts, where
stout and ready hands once more secured it in position.

It is a notable circumstance that the native population, though so
clearly Arabic in their origin, manners, and customs, have never, so far
as we know, sympathized with the Mohammedans.

Further details of this memorable siege would but weary the reader.
Suffice it to say that the final defeat of the Turks showed them to have
lost, since they had landed in Malta, thirty thousand men killed,
besides hordes of wounded left unfit for future service. Of the Knights
and their auxiliaries, who aggregated, as will be remembered, about nine
thousand fighting men, only six hundred remained capable of bearing
arms! The Maltese militia, so say contemporary writers, proved to be
effective soldiers, numbering about three thousand men at the beginning
of the conflict, but they were nearly all destroyed during the
protracted siege. They were amphibious fighters, sometimes leaping into
the sea, holding their swords in their teeth, and successfully attacking
the Turks from thi