Page:Sienkiewicz - The knights of the cross.djvu/777

 Rh The Germans fought then, according to their military custom, in an immense ring and defended themselves as wild boars do when wolves have surrounded them. The Polish-Lithuanian circle enclosed that ring, as a serpent encloses the body of a bull, and became narrower and narrower. Again arms thrashed, flails thundered, scythes bit, swords cut, spears pierced, and axes hewed. The Germans were cut down as a forest is cut and they died in silence, gloomy, immense, unterrified. Some raising their visors, took farewell of comrades, giving one to another the last kiss before death; some hurled themselves blindly into the seething battle, as if seized by insanity, others struggled as in a dream; in cases they killed each other, one thrusting his misericordia into the throat of another, or one opened his breast to a comrade with the prayer, "Stab!" The rage of the Poles soon broke the great circle into a number of smaller groups, and then again it was easier for single Knights to escape. But in general those separate groups fought with rage and despair. There were few at that stage who knelt down begging for quarter, and when the terrible onset of the Poles dispersed the smaller groups also, even single Knights would not yield themselves alive to the victors. That was for the Order and all Western knighthood, a day of the greatest disaster, but also of the greatest glory. Under the gigantic Arnold von Baden, who was surrounded by country infantry, a rampart of Polish bodies had been piled up, while he, mighty and invincible, stood above it, as stands a boundary pillar on an eminence, at last Zavisha Charny himself came to him; but seeing the knight without a horse, and not wishing to attack him from behind contrary to knightly usage, he sprang off his horse and called to him from a distance.

"Turn thy head, German, and surrender, or meet me."

Arnold turned and recognizing Zavisha by his black armor, and his shield, said in his gloomy soul,—

"Death is present, and my hour has come, for no one can escape that man alive. But if I could conquer him I should win immortal glory, and save my life perhaps."

Then he sprang toward him and they struggled like two tempests on that ground covered with corpses. But Zavisha surpassed all men in strength so tremendously that unfortunate were the parents to whose children it happened to meet him in battle. In fact Arnold's shield, forged in Malborg