With Fire and Sword Henryk Sienkiewicz (different e readers .TXT) 📖

continued firing. Much damage was done on both sides, for from both sides the best gunners emulated one another.

From time to time masses of Cossacks and the mob rushed to attack, but did not reach the ramparts. Only the musketry fire became hotter. The enemy, having strong forces, changed the divisions in action, leading some to rest and others to fight. But in the Polish camp there were no men for change; the same persons had to shoot, rush to the defence at any moment under danger of assaults, bury the dead, dig walls, and raise the ramparts for better defence. The besieged slept, or rather dozed, on the ramparts under fire, while balls were flying so thickly that every morning they could be swept from the square. For four days no one removed his clothing. The men got wet in the rain, dry in the sun, were burning in the daytime and chilled at night. During four days not one of them had anything warm in his mouth; they drank gorailka, mixing powder with it for greater strength; they gnawed cakes, and tore with their teeth hard dried meat; and all this in the midst of smoke and fire, the whistling of balls and the thunder of cannon. It was nothing to get struck on the head or body; a soldier tied a nasty bit of cloth around his bloody head and fought on. They were wonderful men⁠—with torn coats, rusty weapons, shattered muskets in their hands, eyes red from sleeplessness; ever on the alert, ever willing day and night, wet weather or dry; always ready for battle.

The soldiers were infatuated with their leader, with danger, with assaults, with wounds and death. A certain heroic exaltation seized their souls; their hearts became haughty, their minds callous. Horror became to them a delight. Different regiments strove for preeminence in enduring hunger, sleeplessness, toil, daring, and fury. This was carried to such a degree that it was difficult to keep the soldiers on the walls; they were breaking out against the enemy as wolves ravenous from hunger against sheep. In all the regiments reigned a kind of wild joy. If a man were to mention surrender, he would be torn to pieces in the twinkle of an eye. “We want to die!” was repeated by every mouth.

Every command of the leader was carried out with lightning rapidity. Once it happened that the prince, in his evening tour of the ramparts, hearing that the fire of the quarter-regiment of Leshchinski was weakening, came to the soldiers, and asked: “Why don’t you fire?”

“Our powder is gone; we have sent to the castle for more.”

“You have it nearer!” said the prince, pointing to the enemy’s trench.

He had scarcely spoken when the whole body sprang from the rampart, rushed to the enemy, and fell like a hurricane on the intrenchment. The Cossacks were clubbed with muskets and stabbed with pikes, four guns were spiked; and after half an hour the soldiers, decimated but victorious, returned with a considerable supply of powder in kegs and hunting-horns.

Day followed day. The Cossack approaches enclosed the Polish rampart with an ever-narrowing ring, and pushed into it like wedges into a tree. The firing was so close that without counting the assaults ten men a day fell in each battalion; the priests were unable to visit them with the sacrament. The besieged sheltered themselves with wagons, tents, skins, and suspended clothing. In the night they buried the dead wherever they happened to lie; but the living fought the more desperately over the graves of their comrades of the day before. Hmelnitski expended the blood of his people unsparingly, but each storm brought him only greater loss. He was astonished himself at the resistance. He counted only on this⁠—that time would weaken the hearts and strength of the besieged. Time did pass, but they showed an increasing contempt for death.

The leaders gave the example to their men. Prince Yeremi slept on bare ground at the rampart, drank gorailka, and ate dried horseflesh, suffering changes of weather and toils beyond his lordly position. Konyetspolski and Sobieski led regiments to the sallies in person; in time of assault they exposed themselves without armor in the thickest rain of bullets. Even leaders who, like Ostrorog, were lacking in military experience, and on whom the soldiers looked with distrust, appeared now, under the hand of Yeremi, to become different men. Old Firlei and Lantskoronski slept also at the ramparts; and Pshiyemski put guns in order during the day, and at night dug under the earth like a mole, putting countermines beneath the mines of the enemy, throwing out approaches, or opening underground roads by which the soldiers came like spirits of death among the sleeping Cossacks.

Finally Hmelnitski determined to try negotiations, with the idea too that in the mean while he might accomplish something by stratagem. On the evening of July 24 the Cossacks began to cry from the trenches to the Poles to stop firing. The Zaporojians declared that the hetman wanted to see old Zatsvilikhovski. After a short consultation the commanders agreed to the proposition, and the old man went out of the camp.

The knights saw from a distance that caps were removed before him in the trenches; for Zatsvilikhovski, during the short period that he was commissioner, succeeded in gaining the goodwill of the wild Zaporojians, and Hmelnitski himself respected him. The firing ceased. The Cossacks with their approaches were close to the ramparts, and the knights went down to them. Both sides were on their guard, but there was nothing unfriendly in those meetings. The nobles had always esteemed the Cossacks more than the common herd, and now, knowing their bravery and endurance in battle, they spoke with them on terms of equality as cavaliers with cavaliers. The Cossacks examined with wonder that impregnable nest of lions which checked all their power and that of the Khan. They began to be friendly, therefore, to talk and