Page:The Hussite wars, by the Count Lützow.djvu/45

 “Many among the people said that God had been with him [Žižka], and that this miracle had occurred: when it was still early, it appeared as if it were eventide; the sun vanished behind a hill, as if it wished to separate [the combatants], and immediately deep darkness descended on the battlefield, so that no man knew how to strike at another. When the enemies saw this, many voices among them said: ‘My lance does not stab them, my sword does not strike them, my gun does not reach them;’ and then they retreated in various directions with much shame and great losses.” In consequence of his victory at Sudoměř the fame of Žižka, who here first proved his military genius and his talent as a tactician, spread widely in Bohemia. The contemporary chroniclers, therefore, devote more attention to Žižka’s first successful skirmish in the Malá Strana at Prague and his victory at Sudoměř than the importance of these engagements, if we consider the number of the combatants, would warrant. We have, indeed, more information concerning these events than we have about more considerable battles at a later period of the war. Among the many writers who have described the skirmish at Sudoměř, Æneas Sylvius deserves mention, as his florid and picturesque, though absolutely unreliable, work did duty as the standard work on the Hussite wars for centuries. He tells us that Žižka ordered the Hussite women to spread out their long veils on the ground, so that the spurs of the attacking dismounted horsemen should be caught in them.

Žižka, though his popularity among the Bohemians had previously already been very great, here for the first time appears as a military leader, in fact as one of the not very numerous great generals known to history. The new system of warfare, which rendered the Hussites invincible for a con-