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In the early days of March he sat down before Tours with his siege-engines, petraries, mangonels, and towers, and daily battered at the walls, with intent to reduce it before the war was really afloat. The city of Saint Martin was doomed; no help from Anjou could save it, for none could come that way.
The gates were closed, and not a man was to be seen on the battlements. "What a pity," remarked Cleon, "that we brought no siege-engines with us! We might have battered down the wall, and marched in at once, there is none to oppose us." So readily did this holiday general fall into the trap which Brasidas, with a just estimate of his capacity, had set for him.
Through it at times cut a sharp accession of sound, as if violence heightened at intervals, and steadily over it pulsated the throb of tireless siege-engines. It was the groan of the City of Delight in mortal anguish. "This," he said in a soft voice touching his breast, "or that," motioning toward the dying city. "Choose. And by midnight!"
Into the passage from the court, left open by the frightened servants, swept the prolonged outcry of perishing Jerusalem. Over it all thundered the boom of the siege-engines shaking the earth. The slaves slipped down upon their knees and began to groan together.
The Carthaginians had not recovered from the terror caused by their arrival when they perceived the siege-engines sent by the Tyrian towns coming straight towards them like monsters and like buildings with their masts, arms, ropes, articulations, capitals and carapaces, sixty carroballistas, eighty onagers, thirty scorpions, fifty tollenos, twelve rams, and three gigantic catapults which hurled pieces of rock of the weight of fifteen talents.
From every side floated odors of naked, sweaty flesh, and of strange stews boiling in the pots; the hammers of the carpenters echoed loudly as they worked upon the siege-engines which would soon be hurling stones and darts against the walls.
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