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The most excited of the Calvinists were preparing to rush forth upon the enemy at Ostrawell. The Prince, after he had gained the ear of the multitude, urged that the battle was now over, that the reformers were entirely cut to pieces, the enemy, retiring, and that a disorderly and ill-armed mob would be unable to retrieve the fortunes of the day. Many were persuaded to abandon the design.
The Egyptian Governor of that town, Rashid Bey, a man of more enterprise and even less military knowledge than is usual in his race, determined to make all attempt to seize the rebel and disperse his following. Taking no precautions, he fell on the 9th of December into an ambush, was attacked unprepared, and was himself, with fourteen hundred men, slaughtered by the ill-armed but valiant Arabs.
Gunpowder revolutionized the art of war. The feudal castle, the armor of the knight and his battle-horse, the prowess of one man against a hundred, and the pride of aristocratic cavalry trampling upon ill-armed militia, were annihilated by the flashes of the cannon. Courage became more a moral than a physical quality. The victory was delivered to the brain of the general.
He is but ill-armed for the unequal strife, having only a Colt's revolver with one chamber empty, and, as a dernier ressort, the single-barrelled pistols in the holsters. Quickly perceiving his disadvantage, he checks up before coming too close, and with his revolver takes aim, and fires at the nearest of his antagonists, who is Roblez.
Severinus, like some old Hebrew prophet, did not shrink from advising hard blows, where hard blows could avail. Mamertinus, the tribune, or officer in command, told him that he had so few soldiers, and those so ill-armed, that he dare not face the enemy.
The Moors, according to their ancient custom, everywhere displayed their innumerable soldiers, without order or arrangement. An admirable cavalry, to the number of a hundred thousand men, composed their principal strength: the rest of their army was made up of a crowd of ill-armed and imperfectly trained foot-soldiers.
But about break of day Judas appeared to those enemies that were at Emmaus, with only three thousand men, and those ill-armed by reason of their poverty; and when he saw the enemy very well and skilfully fortified in their camp he encouraged the Jews and told them that they ought to fight, though it were with their naked bodies, for that God had sometimes of old given such men strength, and that against such as were more in number, and were armed also, out of regard to their great courage.
It was difficult enough for even a strong warrior to force his way through that district with a good company of followers; impossible for a single weak invalid like Granville, attended only by one poor, ill-armed Namaqua. So the savage seemed to say in his ingenious pantomime. If they went on, they'd be killed and eaten up resistlessly. If they stopped they might pull through.
It was the swiftness and splendid daring of their onset that made these ill-armed, untrained clansmen the equals or more than the equals of the regular army that opposed them. In the meantime Cope, with his army of 2,000 foot, reinforced by the fugitive dragoons, some 600 men under Gardiner, were marching from Dunbar.
Vercingetorix from the outset knew that the ill-armed and worse disciplined Gauls could not cope in the open field with Caesar and the Roman legions; he therefore formed a plan of campaign that required great sacrifices on the side of the Gauls, for the sake of the common safety.
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