Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/767

 Rh And just as hail falls unsparingly from bronze-colored clouds on to wheat fields, so thickly did merciless blows fall, swords struck, axes struck—they struck without halt, without pity; they sounded like iron plates in a forge; death extinguished lives as a whirlwind puts out tapers; groans were wrested from breasts, eyes were quenched, and the whitened faces of youth sank into endless night.

Upward flew sparks struck out by iron, fragments of lance-handles, shreds of flags, ostrich and peacock plumes. Horsehoofs slipped on bloody armor lying on the ground, and on bodies of horses. Whoso fell wounded was mashed by horseshoes.

But of the foremost Polish knights no one had fallen thus far, and they advanced in a throng and an uproar, shouting the names of their patrons, or the war cry of their families. They went as fire sweeps along a parched steppe, fire which devours grass and bushes. The foremost, Lis of Targovisko seized the comtur of Osterode, Gamrat, who, losing his shield, wound his white mantle around his arm and shielded himself from blows with it. But Lis cut through the mantle and the armor and crushed the German shoulder-blade with a thrust; he pierced the comtur's stomach, and his sword-point gritted against the man's spinal column. The people of Osterode screamed with fear on seeing the death of their leader, but Lis rushed in among them as an eagle among cranes, and when Stashko and Domarat hurried to help him, the three together shelled lives out dreadfully, just as bears shell pods after entering a field in which green peas are growing.

There Pashko killed a brother of the Order, Kune Adelsbach; Kune, when he saw the giant before him, grasping a gory axe on which were blood and matted hair, was terrified in heart and wished to yield himself captive; but to his destruction Pashko did not hear in the din, and rising in his stirrups split the man's head with its steel helmet as one might cut an apple. Immediately afterward he quenched Loch of Mexlenburg and Klingenstein, and the Swabian Helmsdorf of a great countly family, and Limpach of Mayence, and Nachtervits also from Mayence, till at last the Germans began to retreat before him to the left and the right in terror; but he struck at them as at a tottering wall, and every moment it was seen how he rose in his saddle for a blow, then were visible the gleam of his axe and a German helmet going down between horses.