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Updated: May 23, 2025
Twenty or thirty targets, as many claymores, with dirks, and plaids, and guns, both match-lock and fire-lock, and long-bows, and cross-bows, and Lochaber axes, and coats of plate armour, and steel bonnets, and headpieces, and the more ancient haborgeons, or shirts of reticulated mail, with hood and sleeves corresponding to it, all hung in confusion about the walls, and would have formed a month's amusement to a member of a modern antiquarian society.
Compared with modern warfare, which is unabated scientific extermination, mediæval warfare was often of the nature of a mild adventure. The size of the opposing forces was very small even compared with the scanty population. The chief weapons were lances, swords, long-bows, and cross-bows, but protective armour was worn.
"Well, well, you must learn to shoot, that's all," said Paul, "and you may, perchance, turn out better with the sling. That weapon did great execution, as no doubt you know, in the hands of King David." "But where are we to get long-bows and cross-bows and slings?" asked Oliver eagerly.
Of the Moslem army the greater number wore mail, some carrying lances and scimitars of Damascus steel, others being armed with light long-bows. Their horses were Arabian or Barbary steeds, such as Roderic had seen on the walls of the secret chamber.
Around the walls were hung breastplates and buff-coats, morions, shields, and two-handed swords; but they were half hidden by fishing-nets, fowling-nets, dogs' collars, saddles and bridles, housings, cross-bows, long-bows, quivers, baldricks, horns, spears, guns, and every other implement then used in the sports of the river or the field. The floor was in an equal state of disorder.
Day in, day out, mangonel, trebuchet and balista whirred and crashed from keep and tower and curtain-wall, while from every loophole and crenelle long-bows twanged and arrows flew; yet with each succeeding dawn the besiegers' fence-works crept nearer, closing in upon the city until, within close bowshot of the walls, they set up earthworks and stockades and from these strong barriers plied the defenders with cloth-yard shaft and cross-bow bolt what time their mighty engines advanced, perriers and rams wherewith to batter and breach the city's massy walls.
But, confident in their armour of proof, and in the cover which their situation afforded, the followers of Front-de-Boeuf, and his allies, showed an obstinacy in defence proportioned to the fury of the attack and replied with the discharge of their large cross-bows, as well as with their long-bows, slings, and other missile weapons, to the close and continued shower of arrows; and, as the assailants were necessarily but indifferently protected, did considerably more damage than they received at their hand.
Each satyr was armed with a huge club of the size of a tree, which he flourished wildly, and on his other arm he bore a shield of vast proportions, like the moon at the full, as she rises over the housetops; while scabbardless two-handed swords hung with brazen chains by their sides, and long-bows and quivers full of arrows were suspended at their backs; their voices as they danced giving forth those hideous sounds which had attracted the Knight and Squire.
All along I found a sprinkling of American infantrymen, in their sweaty and dust-covered khaki suits, lying down and fanning themselves with anything that came handy, and sending rude jests at one another. Old-fashioned Chinese jingals, gaudy Banners, and even Manchu long-bows, were scattered on the ground in enormous confusion.
"It was killed on a trip I made up in the Canadian Northwest, and it was a narrow escape for me, too. It was killed by an arrow from one of those bows there." "An arrow!" exclaimed Rand. "I didn't know that an elk could be killed with an arrow." "An arrow is as deadly as a bullet at short range," replied the colonel. "You have read of the English archers and their famous long-bows, haven't you?"
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