United States or Sweden ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Along these great thoroughfares the French soldiers advanced at a rapid pace; the cavalry clattering furiously in the van, shouting "Ville gaignee, ville gaignee! vive la messe, vive la messe! tue, tue, tue!" The burghers coming to door and window to look for the cause of all this disturbance, were saluted with volleys of musketry.
It was noon, and the deputies went home, as Maude thought, to dinner; but presently all the bells began to ring, and burghers, armed with bows and bills, began to swarm in the streets.
The town was a rich and well-peopled one, and although a wooden stockade furnished its only rampart the serried ranks of citizens behind it gave little hope of an easy conquest. Their taunts indeed stung the king to the quick. As his engineers threw up rough entrenchments for the besieging army the burghers bade him wait till he won the town before he began digging round it.
Also, that the burghers must on no account abandon their positions. He, so the report ran, would personally go to protest against the illegal surrender. The General went, but did not return. Why he went himself, and did not send one of his adjutants with a written protest, seems still very strange to us. He was warned not to go.
The Queen of England would object to having her flag hauled down, and we, the burghers of the Transvaal, object to hauling ours down. What is to be done? We are now small and of little importance, but we are growing, and are preparing the way to take our place among the great nations of the world.
Instantly afterward, half the island of Walcheren renounced the yoke of Alva, Next, Enkbuizen, the key to the Zuyder Zee, the principal arsenal, and one of the first commercial cities in the Netherlands, rose against the Spanish Admiral, and hung out the banner of Orange on its ramparts. The revolution effected here was purely the work of the people of the mariners and burghers of the city.
I do not even know whether there are Polish burghers in our sense of the word. The middle classes in the Polish cities are poorly developed. Consequently, when we reduce our opponents to their proper size, we grow more courageous in our own determination; and I should be very glad if I could encourage those who on their part are adding to the encouragement of the Polish nobles.
I ordered all my men from their positions, and withdrew to the spot where we had encamped the previous night. The burghers were exhausted by hunger and thirst, for they had had nothing to eat except the provisions which they had brought in their saddle-bags from the laager. That evening Andreas Cronje the General's brother joined us with two hundred and fifty men and a Maxim-Nordenfeldt.
An imperial command prohibited the soldiery from moving about the city at night, and the Frauenthor, through which during the day plenty of people and cattle passed in and out had been closed long before. Very few of the worthy burghers who went to bed betimes and rose so early that they rarely had leisure to enjoy the moonlight long passed here at this hour.
Trade and commerce must have prospered, by all accounts, in those days; and the burghers made themselves of importance, for King Andrew II., a man far in advance of his time, summoned them to assist in consultation at the Imperial Parliament.
Word Of The Day