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Lefebvre was finally compelled to retreat with his thinned and weary troops. On the 11th, Deroy posted himself with the rearguard on the mountain of Isel. The Capuchin, after reading mass under the open sky to his followers, again attacked him on the 13th. A horrible slaughter ensued. Four hundred Bavarians, who had fallen beneath the clubs of their infuriated antagonists, lay in a confused heap.
In the misty dawn of the 22d of September, 1586, a force of three thousand Spaniards stole silently along to the relief of Zutphen, on the river Isel. Sidney, at the head of five hundred cavalry, rode forward to meet them. In the obscurity the battle was sharp and confused. Seeing his friend Lord Willoughby in special danger, Sidney spurred to the rescue. His horse was shot under him and fell.
A part of the Tyrolese forces remained on Mount Isel, and another part hastened with unbroken courage to other regions, to meet the armies of the enemy and drive them beyond the frontiers of the country.
At the junction of the Isel and the Drau lies the quaint little city of Lienz, with its two castles the square, double-towered one in the town, now transformed into the offices of the municipality, and the huge mediaeval one on a hill outside, now used as a damp restaurant and dismal beer-cellar. I lingered at Lienz for a couple of days, in the ancient hostelry of the Post.
She had a wonderful head and neck, and as he was planning a picture of an early female martyr, he decided to ask her to sit to him. Arrived at her humble home, he was asked to enter, and there he met her father, Isel Larue, a French monarchist who had been exiled from Paris for plotting against the Government. He was handsome with snapping black eyes, a cruel mouth and a droll and humorous tongue.
The battle commenced at six, and continued without intermission till midnight, the Bavarians constantly endeavoring to drive the Tyrolese from their position on Mount Isel, and they, in their turn, to force the enemy back into the town of Innspruck.
"I shall not, unless you two accompany me thither," answered Andreas Hofer, emphatically. "They will finally believe I wish to monopolize all honors, and will charge me with forgetting that Haspinger and Speckbacher, day before yesterday, did a great deal more than myself at the battle of Mount Isel, and that we should never have gained a victory there without them.
At the same time the sharpshooters posted on Mount Isel, in the rear of the French and Bavarians, commenced firing, and mowed down whole ranks of the soldiers. General Bisson turned in dismay toward this new enemy, covered by the thicket, which, rising almost to the summit of Mount Isel, made the Tyrolese invisible, and protected them from the missiles of the soldiers.
And this victory was soon followed by the news of a triumph hardly less glorious than the battle of Aspern. The Tyrolese, those despised peasants, had gained a brilliant victory over the French veterans, and their Bavarian auxiliaries, on the 21st of May, on Mount Isel, near the city of Innspruck.
Drouet d'Erlon, with the main body of the Bavarians, came from the north across the Strub and the Loferpass, and gained forcible possession of the Engpass. Hofer had been persuaded by the priest, Donay, to relinquish the anterior passes into the country and Innsbruck, and to take up a strong position on the fortified mountain of Isel.
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