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With the blind fury of the Berserkers of old the Swedes cleared the ditches, stormed the breastworks, and drove the foe in a panic before them. The Duke's arm was broken by a bullet. He hardly knew it. With his regiment he rode down the crew of one of the enemy's batteries and swept on. In the midst of it all a cry resounded over the plain that made the runaways halt and turn back. "Pappenheim!
He was not conscious of fear, although he knew that his life was not worth a second's purchase, but he felt a wild exhilaration, a magnificent sense of defiance of the most powerful element that can be turned loose on this planet; his nostrils quivered with delight; his soul at certain moments, when his practical faculty was uncalled upon, felt as if high in the roaring space with the Berserkers of the storm.
The Anglo-Saxon is a pirate, a land robber and a sea robber. Underneath his thin coating of culture, he is what he was in Morgan's time, in Drake's time, in William's time, in Alfred's time. The blood and the tradition of Hengist and Horsa are in his veins. In battle he is subject to the blood-lusts of the Berserkers of old. Plunder and booty fascinate him immeasurably.
On the father's seventieth birthday therefore, with the joint help of the 'Berserkers, will the wooden fence be pulled down, and the genius of the new place, represented by the graceful figure of Gabriele, will deliver over to him the purchase-deed, which is made out in his name. How happy he will be! Oh, it makes us all happy to think of it!
At one time the Rebels had mined eleven acres in the neighborhood of Bull Bun; at another, there were regiments of giants on their way from Texas, who, first paralyzing our batteries by a yell, would rush unscathed upon the guns, and rip up the unresisting artillerymen with bowie-knives three feet long, made for that precise service, and the only weapon to which these Berserkers would condescend; again, for the fiftieth time, France and England had definitely agreed upon a forcible intervention; finally, in order to sap the growing confidence of the people in President Lincoln, one of his family was accused of communicating our plans to the Rebels, and this at a time when the favorite charge against his administration was the having no plan at all.
"Come," cried Erling cheerfully, as he drew his sword, "the odds are not so great as we had expected. I suppose that King Harald must have thought us poor-looking warriors, or perchance he has sent ten berserkers against us. Anyhow I am content. Only one thing do I regret, and that is, that, among the other foolish acts I have been guilty of at this time, I left my good battle-axe behind me.
Even in that moment of victory a feeling of respect for the courage and boldness of this man touched the heart of Erling, who, with the swiftness of thought, put in force his favourite practice he turned the edge of the axe, and the broad side of it fell on the steel headpiece with tremendous force, causing the berserk of Hadeland to stretch himself on the green sward beside Glumm the Gruff; thus ending the famous battle of the "Berserkers and the Bold", in regard to which Thikskul the scald writes:
Now Thorfinn, some time previously, had taken a leading part in passing a law, the object of which was that all berserkers should be outlawed. These berserkers were roving bands of pirates, brave fighters, but respecting no man's property; on the contrary, their chief object was to lay violent hands on women and goods to which they had no title.
When the giantess had alighted, Odin ordered four Berserkers of mighty strength to hold the wolf, but he struggled so angrily that they had to throw him on the ground before they could control him. Then Hyrroken went to the prow of the ship and with one mighty effort sent it far into the sea, the rollers underneath bursting into flame, and the whole earth trembling with the shock.
The natives, driven to bay and dispossessed of their lands, fought too, not in armour, but, like the Berserkers of old, in their shirts, with the addition at most of a rude leather helmet, more often only with their hair matted into a sort of cap on their foreheads in the fashion known as the "gibbe," that "rascally gibbe" to which Spenser and other Elizabethan writers object so strongly.
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