Page:Henryk Sienkiewicz - Potop - The Deluge (1898 translation by Jeremiah Curtin) - Vol 2.djvu/666

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is written in no book how many battles the armies, the nobles, and the people of the Commonwealth fought with the enemy. They fought in forests, in fields, in villages, in hamlets, in towns; they fought in Prussia, in Mazovia, in Great Poland, in Little Poland, in Russia, in Lithuania, in Jmud; they fought without resting, in the day or the night.

Every clod of earth was drenched in blood. The names of knights, their glorious deeds, their great devotion, perished from the memory; for the chronicler did not write them down, and the lute did not celebrate them. But under the force of these exertions the power of the enemy bent at last. And as when a lordly lion, pierced the moment before with missiles, rises suddenly, and shaking his kingly mane, roars mightily, pale terror pierces straightway the hunters, and their feet turn to flight; so that Commonwealth rose ever more terrible, filled with anger of Jove, ready to meet the whole world. Into the bones of the aggressors there entered weakness and fear; not of plunder were they thinking then, but of this only, — to bear away home from the jaws of the lion sound heads.

New leagues, new legions of Hungarians, Transylvanians, Wallachians, and Cossacks were of no avail. The storm passed once more, it is true, between Brest, Warsaw, and Cracow; but it was broken against Polish breasts, and soon was scattered like empty vapor.

The King of Sweden, being the first to despair of his cause, went home to the Danish war; the traitorous elector, humble before the strong, insolent to the weak, beat with his forehead before the Commonwealth, and fell upon the Swedes; the robber legions of Rakotsy's "slaughterers" fled with all power to their Transylvanian reed-fields, which Pan Lyubomirski ruined with fire and sword.

But it was easier for them to break into the Commonwealth than to escape without punishment; therefore when they were attacked at the passage, the Counts of Transylvania, kneeling before Pototski, Lyubomirski, and Charnyetski, begged for mercy in the dust.