The Aztec Treasure-House 31 – Janvier · Verses Across
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Aztec Treasure-House 31The Fall of the Citadel
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Literature · Historical Fiction
The Aztec Treasure-House 31
The Fall of the Citadel
JanvierEnglish
Tizoc, I was glad to see, had his men well under his command, as was shown by the orderly manner in which they waited, despite their eager impatience to be off, until he gave the command to march. And hard marching we found it, as we floundered about that rough, rocky place, tripping and stumbling, and now and then hearing a crash in the darkness as one of our men went down. But, somehow or other, we certainly managed to get over the ground very rapidly; and all the while the sounds of the fight that was raging hotly struck with a constantly increasing clearness upon our ears.
The whole width of the town lay between our camp and the foot of the rugged path that led down from the promontory; but when we were fairly in the streets, and no longer had rough rocks to stumble over in the darkness, we went forward at a very slashing pace. And we were further helped now by the fact that day was breaking, so that we could see clearly where we were going; and we had also within us that feeling of cheer and encouragement that ever is given to man by the return of the sun. In but a few minutes more, in that tropical region, a flood of daylight would be about us; and Tizoc's hope was that when the horror of darkness, ever appalling to barbarians, should be lifted, and when our coming should afford a firm centre to rally around, our army might regain the courage and steadiness which it had lost in the terror and bewilderment of a night surprise.
But he quickly found that this hope was doomed to disappointment. Only a little beyond the gate of the Citadel we came upon a flying body of Tlahuicos--though no pursuers were in sight beyond them--and these were so completely demoralized that they took our company for a detachment of the enemy, and with wild cries fled away from us down a side street and so disappeared. "What do you think of your friends now?" Rayburn asked Young, grimly. But Young's only answer was to curse the vanished Tlahuicos for cowards.
A moment later the whole street in front of us was filled with a howling mob of our men, and these came surging towards us with the evident intention of seeking safety in the Citadel. Tizoc saw at a glance the hopelessness of trying to rally a rout like this until the terrified creatures, fleeing like sheep from a pack of wolves, had been given rest for a while in some safe place where their courage might return to them. Being once within the Citadel they would be for a time wholly out of danger; for even should the enemy try to set scaling-ladders in place, and so break in upon us there, it would be an easy matter for a few determined men to hold the walls until some sort of order had been restored among our broken forces. Tizoc therefore promptly wheeled our little force aside into an open space, and so made a way for the struggling crowd to sweep past us. We noted, as the stream of terror-stricken men flowed by, that their officers were not with them; from which Tizoc drew the hopeful augury that the officers, being all trained soldiers, had drawn together into a rear-guard that sought to cover this wild retreat. And presently we found that Tizoc was right in his inference, for soon the crowd began very perceptibly to grow thinner, and the sound of loud cries and the rattle and clashing of arms rang out above the tumult, and then there came around a turn in the street, a little beyond where we had halted, a compact body of men who were falling back slowly, and who were laying about them most valiantly with their swords. Our party gave a yell, by way of putting fresh heart into these gallant fellows, and Tizoc quickly disposed our company in such a manner that the retreating force fell back through our midst; and then we promptly closed in, and so took the fighting to ourselves.
I cannot tell very clearly how our retreat to the Citadel was managed, nor even of my own part in it; for fighting is but rough, wild work, which defies all attempts at scientific accuracy in describing it--and for the reason, I fancy, that it engenders a wholly unscientific frame of mind. Reduced to its lowest terms, fighting is mere barbarity; a most illogical method of settling some disputed question by brute force instead of by the refined reasoning processes of the intelligent human mind; and by the anger that it inevitably begets, the habit of accurate observation, out of which alone can come accurate description, is hopelessly confused. Therefore I can say only that foot by foot we yielded the ground to the enemy that pressed upon us; that wild shouts rang out--in which I myself joined, though why I should have shouted I am sure I do not know--together with the sharp rattle of clashing swords; and that through the roar of this outburst of fierce sounds there ran an undertone of groans and sobs from the poor wretches who had fallen wounded to the ground. The one thing that I remember clearly is a set-to with swords that I had with a big fellow, just as we had come close to the Citadel, that ended in a way (that would have surprised him mightily had he lived long enough to comprehend it) by my finishing him by means of a stop-thrust followed by a beautiful draw-cut that was a famous stroke with my old sabre-master at Leipsic. And I well remember thinking, at the moment that I made this stroke--and so saved my life by it, for the fellow was pressing me very closely--how happy it would have made the old Rittmeister could he have seen me deliver it.
As we made a rush for the gate of the Citadel, that we might get inside this place of safety and drop the grating before the enemy could follow us, we were surprised by finding many of our own men lying dead about the entrance; and what was far worse for us, we found that unskilled hands had been at work with the machinery whereby the gate was lowered and by their bungling had managed to start it downward in such a way that it had jammed in the grooves. What actually had happened there, as we knew afterwards, was that the first of the cowardly wretches who had entered the Citadel had tried to drop the gate in the faces of their companions and so secure their own safety; whence a fight among themselves had sprung up, in course of which many of them very deservedly were slain, and, most unhappily for us, their frantic efforts to lower the gate had resulted in thus disabling it.
We had a moment of breathing space before the enemy came up with us, and in this time Rayburn and Young and I had a grip of each other's hands, in which, without any words over it, we said good-bye to each other; for we neither of us for one moment doubted that our last hour had come. Tizoc stood a little distance from us, as steady and as gallant in his bearing as ever I saw a man; but that he also counted surely upon dying there was shown by the glance of grave friendliness that he gave us, and by his making the gesture that among his people is significant of farewell. Then we ranged ourselves across the gate-way, holding our swords in hand firmly, and Rayburn, who had caught up a javelin, stood with it poised above his shoulder in readiness to discharge it as the enemy came on. The sight of his splendid figure towering defiantly in that heroic attitude set my mind to running upon the Homeric legend of the glorious battling of the Greeks before the gates of Troy, and of Hector uplifting the rock; and I was very angry with Young, whose disposition to seize upon the whimsical side of everything was the most irrepressible that ever I came across, when he exclaimed: "I'll bet you five dollars, Rayburn, that when you throw that clothes-prop you don't hit th' man you fire at!"
But Rayburn did hit his man, straight in the heart too, a moment later, as the enemy with a wild yell charged us; and then, with his back set well against the wall, he fell to work most gallantly with his sword.
From the very beginning of it we knew that our fighting was utterly hopeless; for all of our company together did not number fifty men, and we were confronting there a whole army. Up the street, as far as we could see, the troops of the enemy were solidly massed; and for every man whom we struck down twenty were ready to spring forward, fresh and vigorous, to exhaust still further the strength that rapidly was leaving us. That we fought on was due not to our valor but to our desperation; and also--at least such was my own feeling--to a swelling rage that made us long to kill as many as possible of these savages before we ourselves died beneath their blows. Death, we knew, was the best thing that could happen to us; for it would save us from the worse fate, that surely would come to us should we be captured, of being turned over to the priests, that they might torture us before their heathen altars, and in the end tear our still quivering hearts out. And that the wish of our enemies--according to the Aztec custom--was rather to capture us than to kill us was shown by the way in which they fought; for all their effort was to disable us, and so to take us alive; nor did they seem to have any great care, if only this purpose could be accomplished, how many of themselves were slain.
Sometimes in my dreams the wild commotion of that most desperate combat comes back to me. I see again before me the crowd of half-naked men, curving in a semicircle measured by the length of my sword, their faces distorted by the passionate anger that stirred their souls; and I see one fierce face after another lose out of it the look of life, yet not the look of hate, as my sword crunches into the vitals of the body to which it belongs; and I hear the wild din around me, and the yells of rage and of pain, and my feet tread in slippery pools of blood, and my body aches with weariness, and sharp thrills of agony dart through the strained muscles of my right arm--yet still I fight on, and on. And, truly, all this seems more real to me now in my sleep than it did to me then in its reality; for a dull weight of most desolate hopelessness settled down upon me as I fought out to the end that most hopeless battle--so that my spirit shared in the numbness of my body, and I cut and parried and gave men their death-blows with the stolid energy of a mere death-dealing machine.
It had been from the first no more than a question of minutes how long this unequal fight would last; and when I heard a great yell from the enemy, and perceived a flood of soldiers swirling inward through the gate-way just beyond the fellows whom I was dealing with, I knew that Tizoc's men had been beaten down or slain, and that the end was very near at hand. As I glanced across the shoulders of the man whom I just then put forever on the list of the non-combatants, I saw what seemed to be an eddy in the midst of the crowd that was rushing into the Citadel; and in the thick of the tightly knotted group that thus choked the narrow way I saw Tizoc still laying about him with his sword. He was a very ghastly object, for a cut on his head had loosened a piece of his scalp, that hung down over his forehead and waved and trembled there like a draggled plume; his face was bathed in blood from this horrid wound, and his armor of cotton cloth was soaked with the blood that had run down upon it from the cut in his head, and also from a wound in his neck. In the moment that I had free sight of him he made as fine a sword-stroke as ever I saw, wherewith he fairly severed from its body the head of one of his assailants; and at the very same instant, while that head still was spinning in the air, a man directly behind him forced back the pressing crowd by main strength and so gained a free space in which to swing his sword. I shouted to Tizoc to warn him of the danger, and he half turned to ward against it; but before he could turn wholly around the blow had fallen, splitting his whole head open from the crown to the very chin. And in the midst of the fierce yell of triumph that went up as this cowardly stroke was delivered there passed from earth the soul of as brave and as true a man as earth has ever known.
A dizziness came over me as I saw Tizoc fall, and saw in the same moment the wild rush forward of the enemy over his dead body into the Citadel; and so I suppose that what with this dizziness and my great weariness I must have dropped my guard. I faintly remember hearing a shout of warning from Young, who was close beside me, which shout mingled with the shrieks of those inside the Citadel whom the enemy everywhere were cutting down, and the great roar of victory that went up from all the army, both within and without the Citadel, rising tempestuously in mighty waves of sound: and then a crash like that of a thunder-bolt burst directly upon my head, and a sickening pain shot through me, and I seemed to be falling through untold depths into vast gloomy chasms (so that I thought I was dropping once more into the hollow darkness of the cañon), and there was a very dreadful surging and roaring and ringing in my ears; and then all this horror of evil sounds grew fainter, and I felt myself slipping quickly into the awful stillness and blackness that I surely thought must be the entrance-way to death. And with this thought a numb sort of gladness came over me, for in death there was promise of restfulness and peace.
