The situation was a terrible one, but the people of Rochelle were brave, and had no thought of flinching. They chose the mayor, Guiton, for their commander, and when he accepted the office he laid his dagger on the table, saying: "I will thrust that dagger into the heart of the first man who speaks of giving up the town." He then went to work to defend the place. He strengthened the works, and made soldiers of all the men in the city, and all the boys, too, for that matter. Everybody who could handle a weapon of any kind had to take his place in the ranks. England had promised to send help, and the only question, Guiton thought, was whether or not he could hold out till the help should come; so he laid his plans to resist as long as possible.
The French in great numbers stormed the defences time after time; but the brave Rochellese always drove them back with great loss. It was clear from the first that Guiton would not give way, and that no column, however strong, could force the city gates. But there was an enemy inside the town which was harder to fight than the one outside. There was famine in Rochelle! The cattle were eaten up, and the horses went next. Then everything that could be turned into food was carefully used and made to go as far as it would. Guiton stopped every kind of waste; but day by day the food supply grew smaller, and the people grew weaker from hunger. Starvation was doing its work. Every day the list of deaths grew longer, and when people met in the streets they stared at each other with lean, white, hungry faces, wondering who would be the next to go.
Still these heroic people had no thought of giving up. They were fighting for liberty, and they loved that more than life. The French were daily charging their works, but could not move the stubborn, starving Rochellese.
The winter dragged on slowly. Spring came, and yet no help had come from England. In March the French, thinking that the people must be worn out, hurled their heaviest columns against the lines; but, do what they would, they could not break through anywhere, and had to go back to their works, and wait for famine to conquer a people who could not be conquered by arms.
One morning in May an English fleet was seen outside the mole. The news ran through the town like wildfire. Help was at hand, and the poor starving people were wild with joy. Men ran through the streets shouting and singing songs of thanksgiving. They had borne terrible sufferings, but now help was coming, and they were sure that their heroic endurance would not be thrown away. Thousands of their comrades had fallen fighting, and thousands of their women and children had starved to death; but what was that if, after all, Rochelle was not to lose her liberties?
Alas! their hope was a vain one, and their joy soon turned to sorrow. The English fleet did nothing. It hardly tried to do anything; but after lying within sight of the town for a while it sailed away again and left Rochelle to its fate.
Richelieu was sure that Guiton would surrender now, and so he sent a messenger to say that he would spare the lives of all the people if the town were given up within three days. But the gallant Guiton was not ready even yet to give up the struggle. "Tell Cardinal Richelieu," he said to the messenger, "that we are his very obedient servants;" and that was all the answer he had to make.
When the summer came some food was grown in the city gardens, but this went a very little way among so many people, and the famine had now grown frightful. The people gathered all the shellfish they could find at low tide. They ate the leaves off the trees, and even the grass of the gardens and lawns was used for food. Everything that could in any way help to support life was consumed; everything that could be boiled into the thinnest soup was turned to account; everything that could be chewed for its juice was used to quiet the pains of fierce hunger; but all was not enough. Men, women, and children died by thousands. Every morning when the new guard went to take the place of the old one many of the sentinels were found dead at their posts from starvation.
Still the heroic Guiton kept up the fight, and nobody dared say anything to him about giving up. He still hoped for help from England, and meant to hold out until it should come, cost what it might. In order that the soldiers might have a little more to eat, and live and fight a little longer, he turned all the old people and those who were too weak to fight out of the town. The French would not let these poor wretches pass their lines, but made an attack on them, and drove them back towards Rochelle. But Guiton would not open the city gates to them. He said they would starve to death if he let them into Rochelle, and they might as well die outside as inside the gates.
At last news came that the English had made a treaty with the French, and so there was no longer any hope of help for Rochelle, and truly the place could hold out no longer. The famine was at its worst. Out of about thirty thousand people only five thousand were left alive, and they were starving; of six hundred Englishmen who had stayed to help the Rochellese all were dead but sixty-two. Corpses lay thick in the streets, for the people were too weak, from fasting, even to bury their dead. The end had come. On the 30th of October, 1628, after nearly fifteen months of heroic effort and frightful suffering, Rochelle surrendered.
Richelieu at once sent food into the town, and treated the people very kindly; but he took away all the old rights and privileges of the city. He pulled down all the earth-works used by the defenders of the place, and gave orders that nobody should build even a garden fence anywhere near the town. He made a law that no Protestant who was not already a citizen of Rochelle should go thither to live, and that the "city of refuge" should never again receive any stranger without a permit from the king.
London took a holiday on the 16th of July, 1377. There were processions of merry-makers in the streets, and the windows were crowded with gayly dressed men, women, and children. The great lords, glittering in armor, and mounted upon splendid steel-clad horses, marched through the town. The bishops and clergymen in gorgeous robes made a more solemn, but not less attractive show. The trade-guilds were out in their best clothing, bearing the tools of their trades instead of arms. Clowns in motley, merry-makers of all kinds, great city dignitaries, lords and commons—everybody, in short, made a mad and merry holiday; and at night the houses were illuminated, and great bonfires were lighted in the streets.
All England was wild with joy; but the happiest person in the land was Richard Plantagenet, a boy eleven years of age. Indeed, it was for this boy's sake and in his honor that all this feasting and merry-making went on, for on that day young Richard was crowned King of England; and in those times a king of England was a much more important person than now, because the people had not then learned to govern themselves, and the king had powers which Englishmen would not allow any man to have in our time.
Richard was too young to govern wisely, and so a council was appointed to help him until he should grow up; but in the meantime he was a real king, boy as he was, and it is safe to say that he was the happiest boy in England on that July day, when all London took a holiday in his honor.
But if he had known what this crowning was to lead to, young Richard might have been very glad to change places with any baker's or butcher's boy in London. The boy king had some uncles and cousins who were very great people, and who gave him no little trouble after a while. He had wars on his hands, too, and needed a great deal more money than the people were willing to give him; and so, when he grew older and took the government into his own hands, he found troubles all around him. The Irish people rebelled frequently; the Scotch were hostile; there was trouble with Spain because Richard's uncle wanted to become king of that country, and there was a standing war with France.
But this was not all. In order to carry on these wars the king was obliged to have money; and when he ordered taxes to be collected the common people, led by Wat Tyler, rose in rebellion. They marched into London, seized the Tower, and put to death the treasurer of the kingdom, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and many other persons high in the government. Tyler was so insolent one day that the Lord Mayor of London killed him; but the boy king, who was only sixteen years old, seeing that the rebels were too strong for him, put himself at their head, and marched with them out of the city; and so the king, against whom the rebellion was made, became the leader of the rebels. As soon as matters grew quiet, however, he broke all the promises he had made, and punished the chief rebels very harshly.
Not long after this one of the king's uncles made himself master of the kingdom by force, and it was several years before Richard could put him out of power.
But the greatest of all Richard's troubles were yet to come. His cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, the son of old John of Gaunt, had misbehaved, and Richard had sent him out of England, not to return for ten years. But while Richard was in Ireland putting down a rebellion there, Henry came back to England, raised an army, and was joined by many of the most powerful men in the kingdom. When Richard came back from Ireland Henry made him a prisoner, and not long afterwards the great men made up their minds to set up Henry as the king instead of Richard. They made Richard sign a paper giving up his right to the crown, and then, to make the matter sure, Parliament passed a law that Richard should be king no longer.
Richard was only thirty-three years old when all this was done, but after so many troubles he might well have been glad to give up his kingship, if that had been the end of the matter. But a king who has been set aside is always a dangerous man to have in the kingdom, and it would not do to let Richard go free. He might gather his friends around him and give trouble. So it was decided that the unfortunate man should be shut up in a prison for the rest of his life.
But even this was not the worst of the matter. Richard had a wife—Queen Isabella—whom he loved very dearly, and if the two could have gone away together into some quiet place to live, they might still have been happy in spite of being under guard all the time. But the new king would not have it so. He gave orders that Richard should be shut up closely in a prison, and that Isabella should go back to France, where Richard had married her.
This was a terrible thing for the young man and his younger wife, who might have had a long life of happiness still before them if Richard had never been a king. But Richard had been King of England, and so he had to give up both his freedom and his wife.
In his play of "King Richard the Second" Shakespeare makes a very touching scene of their parting. In the play their farewell takes place in the street, as shown in our picture. Isabella, anxious to see her husband once more before they part forever, waits at a point which she knows he must pass on his way to prison. There they meet and talk together for the last time on earth. The words which Shakespeare puts into their mouths are terribly sad, but very beautiful. You will find the scene at the beginning of Act V. of the play. The picture shows the two at the moment when Richard moves away to his prison, leaving Isabella to mourn for him in a nunnery for the rest of her life.
It is not certainly known what became of Richard after he was taken to prison. It is believed that he was murdered there—perhaps starved to death—but there is a story that he got away and lived in Scotland, dying there in 1419. It is not at all likely that the story is true, however, and the common belief has always been that he died or was killed in Pontefract Castle, where he was imprisoned.
However that may be, Richard's life was a terribly unhappy one, and all his sorrows grew out of the fact that he was a king. If he could have looked forward on that July day when the people were making merry in his honor, and could have known all that was to happen to him, instead of being the happiest boy in England on his coronation day, he would have been the most wretched.
When the British marched up from Savannah and took Charleston, in the spring of 1780, they thought the Revolution was at an end in the Southern States, and it really seemed so. Even the patriots thought it was useless to resist any longer, and so when the British ordered all the people to come together at different places and enrol themselves as British subjects, most of them were ready to do it, simply because they thought they could not help themselves.
Only a few daring men here and there were bold enough to think of refusing, and but for them the British could have set up the royal power again in South Carolina, and then they would have been free to take their whole force against the patriots farther north. The fate of the whole country depended, to a large extent, upon the courage of the few men who would not give up even at such a time, but kept up the fight against all odds. These brave men forced the British to keep an army in the South which they needed farther north.
The credit of beginning this kind of partisan warfare belongs chiefly to two or three plain men, who did it simply because they loved their country more than their ease.
The man who first began it was Justice Gaston—a white-haired patriot who lived on a little stream called Fishing Creek, near Rocky Mount. He was eighty years of age, and might well have thought himself too old to care about war matters; but he was a brave man and a patriot, and the people who lived near him were in the habit of taking his advice and doing as he did.
When the news came that Tarleton had killed a band of patriots under Colonel Buford in cold blood Justice Gaston called his nine sons and many of his nephews around him. Joining hands, these young men promised each other that they never would take the British oath, and never would give up the cause, come what might.
Soon afterwards a British force came to the neighborhood, and all the people were ordered to meet at Rocky Mount to enrol their names and take the oath. One of the British officers went to see Justice Gaston, and tried to persuade him that it was folly to refuse. He knew that if Gaston advised the people to give up, there would be no trouble; but the white-haired patriot told him to his face that he would never take the oath himself or advise anybody else to do so.
As soon as the officer left the old man sent for his friends, and about thirty brave fellows met at his house that night, with their rifles in their hands. They knew there would be a strong force of British and Tories at Rocky Mount the next day, but, in spite of the odds against them, they made up their minds to attack the place, and when the time came they did so. Creeping through the woods, they suddenly came upon the crowd, and after a sharp fight sent the British flying helter-skelter in every direction. This stopped the work of enrolling the people as British subjects, and it did more than that. It showed the patriots through the whole country that they could still give the British a great deal of trouble, and after this affair many of the men who had thought of giving up rubbed up their rifles instead, and formed little bands of fighting men to keep the war going.
Another man who did much to stir up partisan warfare was the Rev. William Martin, an old and pious preacher in the Scotch-Irish settlements. These Scotch-Irish were very religious people, and their preacher was their leader in all things. One Sunday, after the news had come to the settlement that Buford's men had been killed by the British in cold blood, the eloquent old man went into his pulpit and preached about the duty of fighting. In the afternoon he preached again, and even when the service was over he went on in the open air, still preaching to the people how they should fight for their country, until all the men in the settlement were full of fighting spirit. The women told the men to go and do their duty, and that they would take care of the crops.
These little bands of patriots were too small to fight regular battles, or even to hold strong posts. They had to hide in the woods and swamps, and only came out when they saw a chance to strike a blow. Then the blow fell like lightning, and the men who dealt it quickly hid themselves again.
They had signs by which they told each other what they were going to do. A twig bent down, a few stones strung along a path, or any other of a hundred small signs, served to tell every patriot when and where to meet his friends. A man riding about, breaking a twig here and there, or making some other sign of the kind, could call together a large force at a chosen spot within a few hours. The men brought out in this way would fall suddenly upon some stray British force that was off its guard, and utterly destroy it. The British would at once send a strong body of troops to punish the daring patriots, but the redcoat leader would look in vain for anybody to punish. The patriots could scatter and hide as quickly as they could come together.
Finding that they could not destroy these patriot companies, the British and Tories took their revenge on women and children. They burned the houses of the patriots, carried off their crops, and killed their cattle, so as to starve their families; but the women were as brave us the men, and from first to last not one of them ever wished her husband or son to give up the fight.
If the patriots could not conquer the British, they at least kept them in a hornets' nest. If they could not drive them out of South Carolina, they could keep them there, which was nearly as good a thing to do, because every soldier that Cornwallis had to keep in the South would have been sent to some other part of the country to fight the Americans if the Carolinians had let the British alone.
In this way small bands of resolute men kept Cornwallis busy, and held the state for the American cause, until General Greene went south and took command. Greene was one of the greatest of the American generals, and after a long campaign he drove the British out of the state. But if it had not been for the partisans the South would have been lost long before he could be spared to go there; and if the partisans had not kept a British army busy there, it might have gone very hard with the Americans in the rest of the country.
When we rejoice in the freedom of our country we ought not to forget how much we owe the partisans, and especially such men as Justice Gaston and the Rev. William Martin, who first set the partisans at their work. It would have been much easier and pleasanter for them to remain quiet under British rule; and they had nothing to gain for themselves, but everything to lose, by the course they took. Gaston knew that his home would be burned for what he did, and the eloquent old Scotch preacher knew that he would be put into a prison-pen for preaching war sermons to his people; but they were not men to flinch. They cared more for their country than for themselves, and it was precisely that kind of men throughout the land, from New England to Georgia, who won liberty for us by seven years of hard fighting and terrible suffering.
A terrible bit of news was carried from mouth to mouth through the region that is now Alabama at the beginning of September, 1813. The country was at that time in the midst of the second war with Great Britain, and for a long time British agents had been trying to persuade the Creeks—a powerful nation of half-civilized but very warlike Indians who lived in Alabama—to join in the war and destroy the white settlements in the Southwest.
For some time the Creeks hesitated, and it was uncertain what they would do. But during the summer of 1813 they broke out in hostility, and on the 30th of August their great leader, Weatherford, or the Red Eagle, as they called him, stormed Fort Mims, the strongest fort in the Southwest. He took the fort by surprise, with a thousand warriors behind him, and, after five hours of terrible fighting, destroyed it, killing about five hundred men, women, and children.
This was the news that startled the settlers in the region where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers come together. It was certain, after such a massacre as that, that the Indians meant to destroy the settlements, and kill all the white people without mercy.
In order to protect themselves and their families the settlers built rude forts by setting pieces of timber endwise in the ground, and the people hurried to these places for safety. Leaving their homes to be burned, their crops to be destroyed, and their cattle to be killed or carried off by the Indians, the settlers hastily got together what food they could, and took their families into the nearest forts.
One of the smallest of these stockade forts was called Sinquefield. It stood in what is now Clarke County, Alabama, and, as that region was very thinly settled, there were not enough men to make a strong force for the defence of the fort. But the brave farmers and hunters thought they could hold the place, and so they took their families thither as quickly as they could.
Two families, numbering seventeen persons, found it was not easy to go to Sinquefield on the 2d of September, and so, as they were pretty sure that there were no Indians in their neighborhood as yet, they made up their minds to stay one more night at a house a few miles from the fort. That night they were attacked, and all but five of them were killed. Those who got away carried the news of what had happened to the fort, and a party was sent out to bring in the bodies.
The next day all the people in Fort Sinquefield went out to bury their dead friends in a valley at some little distance from the fort, and, strange as it seems, they took no arms with them. Believing that there were no Indians near the place, they left the gates of the fortress open, and went out in a body without their guns.
As a matter of fact there was a large body of Indians not only very near them, but actually looking at them all the time. The celebrated Prophet Francis was in command, and in his sly way he had crept as near the fort as possible to look for a good chance to attack it. Making his men lie down and crawl like snakes, he had reached a point only a few hundred yards from the stockade without alarming the people, and now, while they stood around the graves of their friends without arms to defend themselves with, a host of their savage enemies lay looking at them from the grass and bushes on the hill.
As soon as he saw that the right moment had come, Francis sprang up with a savage war-cry, and at the head of his warriors made a dash at the gates. He had seen that the men outside were unarmed, and his plan was to get to the gates before they could reach them, and thus get all the people of the place at his mercy in an open field and without arms to fight with.
The fort people were quick to see what his purpose was, and the men hurried forward with all their might, hoping to reach the fort before the savages could get there. By running at the top of their speed they did this, and closed the gates in time to keep the Indians out. But, to their horror, they then saw that their wives and children were shut out too. Unable to run so fast as the men had done, the women and children had fallen behind, and now the Indians were between them and the gates!
Seeing that he had missed his chance of getting possession of the fort, Francis turned upon the women and children with savage delight in the thought of butchering these helpless creatures in the sight of their husbands, fathers, and brothers.
It was a moment of terror. There were not half enough white men in the fort to master so large a force of Indians, and if there had been it was easy to see that by the time they could get their rifles and go to the rescue it would be too late.
At that moment the hero of this bit of history came upon the scene. This was a young man named Isaac Haden. He was a notable huntsman, who kept a famous pack of hounds—fierce brutes, thoroughly trained to run down and seize any live thing that their master chose to chase. This young man had been out in search of stray cattle, and just at the moment when matters were at their worst he rode up to the fort, followed by his sixty dogs.
Isaac Haden had a cool head and a very daring spirit. He was in the habit of taking in a situation at a glance, deciding quickly what was to be done, and then doing it at any risk that might be necessary. As soon as he saw how the women and children were placed, he cried out to his dogs, and, at the head of the bellowing pack, charged upon the flank of the Indians. The dogs did their work with a spirit equal to their master's. For each to seize a red warrior and drag him to earth was the work of a moment, and the whole body of savages was soon in confusion. For a time they had all they could do to defend themselves against the unlooked-for assault of the fierce animals, and before they could beat off the dogs the men of the fort came out and joined in the attack, so that the women and children had time to make their way inside the gates, only one of them, a Mrs. Phillips, having been killed.
The men, of course, had to follow the women closely, as they were much too weak in numbers to risk a battle outside. If they had done so the Indians would have overcome them quickly, and then the fort and everybody in it would have been at their mercy, so the settlers hurried into the fort as soon as the women were safe.
But the hero who had saved the people by his quickness and courage was left outside, and not only so, but the savages were between him and the fort. He had charged entirely through the war party, and was now beyond their line, alone, and with no chance of help from any quarter.
His hope of saving himself was very small indeed; but he had saved all those helpless women and little children, and he was a brave enough fellow to die willingly for such a purpose as that if he must. But brave men do not give up easily, and young Haden did not mean to die without a last effort to save himself.
Blowing a loud blast upon his hunting-horn to call his remaining dogs around him, he drew his pistols—one in each hand—and plunged spurs into his horse's flanks. In spite of the numbers against him he broke through the mass of savages, but the gallant horse that bore him fell dead as he cleared the Indian ranks. Haden had fired both his pistols, and had no time to load them again. He was practically unarmed now, and the distance he still had to go before reaching the gates was considerable. His chance of escape seemed smaller than ever, but he quickly sprang from the saddle, and ran with all his might, hotly pursued, and under a terrific fire from the rifles of the savages. The gate was held a little way open for him to pass, and when he entered the fort his nearest pursuers were so close at his heels that there was barely time for the men to shut the gate in their faces.
Strangely enough, the brave young fellow was not hurt in any way. Five bullets had passed through his clothes, but his skin was not broken.
Nearly all the countries in Europe were making war upon France in 1795. The French people had set up a republic, and all the kingdoms round about were trying to make them submit to a king again. This had been going on for several years, and sometimes it looked as though the French would be beaten, in spite of their brave struggles to keep their enemies back and manage their own affairs in their own way.
At one time everything went against the French. Their armies were worn out with fighting, their supply of guns had run short, they had no powder, and their money matters were in so bad a state that it seemed hardly possible for France to hold out any longer. In the meantime England, Austria, Spain, Holland, Piedmont, and Prussia, besides many of the small German states, had joined together to fight France, and their armies were on every side of her.
A country in such a state as that, with so many powerful enemies on every side, might well have given up; but the French are a brave people, and they were fighting for their liberties. Instead of giving up in despair, they set to work with all their might to carry on the war.
The first thing to be done was to raise new armies, and so they called for men, and the men came forward in great numbers from every part of the country. In a little while they had more men to make soldiers of than had ever before been brought together in France. But this was only a beginning. The men were not yet trained soldiers, and even if they had been, they had no guns and no powder; no clothing was to be had, and there was very little food for them to eat. Still the French did not despair.
Knowing that there would not be time enough to train the new men, they put some of their old soldiers in each regiment of new ones, so that the new men might learn from the veterans how to march and how to fight.
In the meantime they had set up armories, and were making guns as fast as they could. Their greatest trouble was about powder. They had chemists who knew how to make it, but they had no nitre to make it of, and did not know at first how to get any. At last one of their chemists said that there was some nitre—from a few ounces to a pound or two—in the earth of every cellar floor; and that if all the nitre in all the cellar floors of France could be collected, it would be enough to make plenty of powder.
But how to get this nitre was a question. The cellar floors must be dug up, the earth must be washed, and the water must be carefully passed through a course of chemical treatment in order to get the nitre, free from earth and from all other things with which it was mixed. It would take many days for a chemist to extract the nitre from the earth of a singly cellar, and then he would get only a pound or two of it at most.
It did not seem likely that much could be done in this way, but all the people were anxious to help, and so the cry went up from every part of the country, "Send us chemists to teach us how, and we will do the work and get the nitre ourselves." This was quickly done. All the chemists were set at work teaching the people how to get a little nitre out of a great deal of earth, and then every family went to work. In a little while the nitre began to come in to the powder-factories. Each family sent its little parcel of the precious salt as a free gift to the country. Some of them were so proud and glad of the chance to help that they dressed their little packages of nitre in ribbons of the national colors, and wrote patriotic words upon them. Each little parcel held only a few ounces, or at most a pound or two, of the white salt; but the parcels came in by tens of thousands, and in a few weeks there were hundreds of tons of nitre at the powder-mills.
As soon as there was powder enough the new armies began to press their enemies, and, during the summer and fall of 1794, they steadily drove them back. When they met their foes in battle they nearly always forced them to give way. They charged upon forts and took them at the point of the bayonet; cities and towns everywhere fell into their hands, and by the time that winter set in they were so used to winning battles that nothing seemed too hard for them to undertake.
But the French soldiers were in a very bad condition to stand the cold of winter. One great army, under General Pichegru, which had driven the English and Dutch far into the Netherlands, was really almost naked. The shoes of the soldiers were worn out, and so they had to wrap their feet in wisps of straw to keep them from freezing. Many of the men had not clothing enough to cover their nakedness, and, for decency's sake, had to plait straw into mats which they wore around their shoulders like blankets. They had no tents to sleep in, but, nearly naked as they were, had to lie down in the snow or on the hard frozen ground, and sleep as well as they could in the bitter winter weather.
There never was an army more in need of a good rest in winter-quarters, and as two great rivers lay in front of them, it seemed impossible to do anything more until spring. The English and Dutch were already safely housed for the winter, feeling perfectly sure that the French could not cross the rivers or march in any direction until the beginning of the next summer.
The French generals, therefore, put their men into the best quarters they could get for them, and the poor, half-naked, barefooted soldiers were glad to think that their work for that year was done.
Day by day the weather grew colder. The ground was frozen hard, and ice began running in the rivers. After a little while the floating ice became so thick that the rivers were choked with it. When Christmas came the stream nearest the French was frozen over, and three days later the ice was so hard that the surface of the river was as firm as the solid ground.
Then came an order from General Pichegru to shoulder arms and march. In the bitterest weather of that terrible winter the barefooted, half-clad French soldiers left their huts, and marched against their foes. Crossing the first river on the ice, they fell upon the surprised Dutch and utterly routed them. About the same time they made a dash at the strong fortified posts along the river, and captured them.
The French were now masters of the large island that lay between the two rivers, for they are really only two branches of one river, and the land between them is an island. But the ice in the farther stream was not yet hard enough to bear the weight of cannon, so Pichegru had to stay where he was for a time. Both sides now watched the weather, the French hoping for still harder frosts, while their enemies prayed for a thaw.
The cold weather continued, and day by day the ice became firmer. On the 8th of January, 1795, Pichegru began to cross, and on the 10th his whole army had passed the stream, while his enemies were rapidly retreating. He pushed forward into the country, sending his columns in different directions to press the enemy at every point. The barefooted, half-naked French soldiers were full of spirit, and in spite of frost and snow and rough frozen roads they marched steadily and rapidly. City after city fell before them, and on the 20th of January they marched into Amsterdam itself, and were complete conquerors.
Hungry and half-frozen as they were, it would not have been strange if these poor soldiers had rushed into the warm houses of the city and helped themselves to food and clothing. But they did nothing of the kind. They stacked their arms in the streets and public squares, and quietly waited in the snow, patiently bearing the bitter cold of the wind for several hours, while the magistrates were getting houses and food and clothing ready for them.
This whole campaign was wonderful, and on almost every day some strange thing happened; but, perhaps, the strangest of all the events in this winter war was that which is shown in the picture. Pichegru, learning that there was a fleet of the enemy's vessels lying at anchor near the island of Texel, sent a column of cavalry, with some cannon, in that direction, to see if anything could be done. The cavalry found the Zuyder Zee hard frozen, and the ships firmly locked in the ice. So they put spurs to their horses, galloped over the frozen surface of the sea, marched up to the ships, and called on them to surrender. It was a new thing in war for ships to be charged by men on horseback; but there the horsemen were, with strong ice under them, and the ships could not sail away from them. The sailors could make a fight, of course, but the cavalry, with their cannon, were too strong for them, and so they surrendered without a battle, and for the first time in history a body of hussars captured a squadron of ships at anchor.
No man ever lived whose name is more honored than that of George Washington, and no man ever deserved his fame more. All the success that ever came to him was won by hard work. He succeeded because he was the kind of man that he was, and not in the least because he had "a good chance" to distinguish himself. He never owed anything to "good luck," nor even to a special education in the business of a soldier. Some men are called great because they have succeeded in doing great things; but he succeeded in doing great things because he was great in himself.
Everybody who knew him, even as a boy, seems to have respected as well as liked him. There was something in his character which made men think well of him. When he was only sixteen years of age Lord Fairfax admired him to such a degree that he appointed him to a post which not many men would have been trusted to fill. He put the boy at the head of a surveying party, and sent him across the mountains to survey the valley of Virginia—a vast region which was then unsettled. So well did Washington perform this difficult and dangerous task that a few years later, when he was only twenty-one years old, the Governor of Virginia picked him out for a more delicate and dangerous piece of work.
The English colonies lay along the Atlantic coast, while the French held Canada. The country west of the Alleghany Mountains, which we now know as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, etc., was claimed by both the French and the English, though only the Indians lived there. The French made friends of the savages, and began building forts at different points in that region, and putting soldiers there to keep the English away. The Governor of Virginia wanted to put a stop to this, and so he resolved to send a messenger into "the Great Woods," as the western country was called, to warn the French off, and to win the friendship of the Indians if possible.
For such a service he needed a man with a cool head, good sense, great courage, and, above all, what boys call "grit;" for whoever should go would have to make his way for many hundreds of miles through a trackless wilderness, over mountains and rivers, and among hostile Indians. Young Washington had already shown what stuff he was made of, and, young as he was, he was regarded as a remarkable man. The governor therefore picked him out as the very best person for the work that was to be done.
It was November when Washington set out, and the weather was very cold and wet. He took four white men and two Indians with him, the white men being hunters who knew how to live in the woods. As the country they had to pass through was a wilderness, they had to carry all their supplies with them on pack-horses. They rode all day through the woods, and when night came slept in little tents by some spring or watercourse. Day after day they marched forward, until at last they reached an Indian village, near the spot where Pittsburgh now stands, and there they halted to make friends with the Indians.
This was not very easy, as the French had already had a good deal to do with the tribes in that region; but Washington persuaded the chief, whose name was Tanacharisson, to go with him to visit the French commander, who was stationed in a fort hundreds of miles away, near Lake Erie.
This march, like the other, was slow and full of hardships; but at last the fort was reached, and Washington delivered his message to the French officer. A day or two later the Frenchman gave him his answer, which was that the western country belonged to the French, and that they had no notion of giving it up.
All the trouble Washington had met in going north was nothing compared with what was before him in going back to Virginia again. The winter was now at its worst, and the weather was terrible. The rivers and creeks were full of floating ice, and the woods were banked high with snow. But Washington was not to be daunted by any kind of difficulty. He set out on his return march, and with the aid of canoes, in which his baggage was carried down a small stream that ran in that direction, he took his party as far as Venango, in the northwestern part of Pennsylvania.
There he found that he could go no farther on horseback. The ground was frozen on top, but soft beneath, and the poor horses broke through the hard crust at every step. There was a French fort at Venango, and Washington might have waited there very comfortably for better weather; but it was his duty to get back to Virginia as soon as possible with the French commander's answer, and so he made up his mind to go on, even at the risk of his life.
Leaving the rest of the party to come when they could with the horses, Washington and a single companion named Gist set out on foot for the long winter march. As they had no pack-horses to carry tents and cooking-vessels and food, they had to leave everything behind except what they could carry on their backs; and as they were obliged to take their rifles, powder-horns, and bullet-pouches, their hunting-knives and hatchets, and a blanket apiece, they were pretty heavily loaded, and could not afford to burden themselves with much else.
Day by day the two brave fellows trudged on through the snow-drifts, sleeping at night as best they could, exposed to the biting cold of the winter, without shelter, except such as the woods afforded. There were other dangers besides cold and hunger. At one time a treacherous Indian, who had offered to act as guide, tried to lead the two white men into a trap. As they suspected his purpose, they refused to do as he wished, and a little later he suddenly turned about and shot at Washington, who was only a few paces distant. Missing his aim, he was quickly overpowered, and Gist wanted to kill him, not merely because he deserved to be put to death for his treachery, but also because, if allowed to go free, he was pretty sure to bring other hostile Indians to attack the lonely travellers during the night.
But Washington would not have him killed. He made him build a camp-fire, and then told him to leave them at once. The Indian did so, and as soon as it was certain that he was out of sight and hearing the two young men set out to make their escape. They knew the Indian would soon come back with others, and that their only chance for life was to push on as fast as they could. The Indians could track them in the snow, but by setting out at once they hoped to get so far ahead that they could not be easily overtaken.
It was already night, and the travellers were weary from their day's march, but they could not afford to stop or rest. All through the night they toiled on. Morning came, and they must have felt it nearly impossible to drag their weary feet farther, but still they made no halt. On and on they went, and it was not till night came again that they thought it safe at last to stop for the rest and sleep they needed so badly. The strain they had undergone must have been fearful. They were already weary and wayworn when they first met the treacherous Indian, and after that they had toiled through the snow for two days and a night without stopping to rest or daring to refresh themselves with sleep.
Just before reaching their journey's end they arrived at the brink of a river which they expected to find frozen over; but they found it full of floating ice instead. Without boat or bridge, there seemed no chance of getting across; but after a while they managed to make a rude raft, and upon this they undertook to push themselves across with long poles.
The current was very strong, the raft was hard to manage, and the great fields of ice forced it out of its course. In trying to push it in the right direction, Washington missed his footing and fell into the icy river. His situation was very dangerous, but by a hard struggle he got upon the floating logs again. Still the current swept them along, and they could not reach either shore of the stream.
At last they managed to leap from the logs, not to the bank, but to a small island in the river. There they were very little better off than on the raft. They were on land, it is true, but there was still no way of getting to shore; and as there was nothing on the island to make a fire with, Washington was forced, drenched as he was with ice-water, to pass the long winter night in the open air, without so much as a tiny blaze or a handful of coals by which to warm himself.
Unfortunately the night proved to be a very cold one, and poor Gist's feet and hands were frozen before morning. Washington got no frost-bites, but his sufferings must have been great.
During the night that part of the stream which lay between the island and the shore that Washington wished to reach froze over, and in the morning the travellers were able to renew their journey. Once across that, the worst of their troubles were over.
Is it any wonder that a young man who did his duty in this way rapidly rose to distinction? He was always in earnest in his work, and always did it with all his might. He never shammed or shirked. He never let his own comfort or his own interest stand in the way when there was a duty to be done. He was a great man before he became a celebrated one, and the wisest men in the country found out the fact.
When the revolution came there were other soldiers older and better known than Washington, but there were men in Congress who had watched his career carefully. They made him, therefore, commander-in-chief of the American armies, knowing that nobody else was so sure to do the very best that could be done for the country. They did not make him a great man by appointing him to the chief command; they appointed him because they knew he was a great man already.
Peter the Great, the emperor who, in a few years, changed Russia from a country of half-savage tribes into a great European nation, was one day visiting one of his officers, and saw in his house a young girl, who attracted his attention by her beauty and her graceful manners. This girl was a prisoner named Martha, and she was living as a sort of servant and housekeeper in the family of the Russian officer. She had been taken prisoner when the town she lived in was captured. Nobody knows, even to this day, exactly who she was, except that she was a poor orphan girl who had been brought up by a village clergyman; but it is generally believed that her father was a Livonian peasant.
Martha's beauty and the brightness of her mind pleased the emperor so much that, after a while, he made up his mind to marry her, in spite of her humble origin. Peter was in the habit of doing pretty much as he pleased, whether his nobles liked it or not; but even he dared not make a captive peasant girl the Empress of Russia. He therefore married her privately, in the presence of a few of his nearest friends, who were charged to keep the secret. Before the marriage took place he had Martha baptized in the Russian Church, and changed her name to Catherine.
Now Peter had a bad habit of losing his temper, and getting so angry that he fell into fits. As he was an absolute monarch and could do whatever he liked, it was very dangerous for anybody to go near him when he was angry. He could have a head chopped off as easily as he could order his breakfast. But he was very fond of Catherine, and she was the only person who was not in the least afraid of him. She soon learned how to manage him, and even in his worst fits she could soothe and quiet the old bear.
Peter was nearly always at war, and in spite of the hardships and dangers of the camp and battle-field Catherine always marched with him at the head of the army. The soldiers wondered at her bravery, and learned to like her more than anybody else. If food was scarce, the roads rough, and the marches long, they remembered, that Catherine was with them, and were ashamed to grumble. If she could stand the hardships and face the dangers, they thought rough soldiers ought not to complain.
Catherine was a wise woman as well as a brave one. She soon learned as much of the art of war as Peter knew, and in every time of doubt or difficulty her advice was asked, and her opinion counted for as much as if she had been one of the generals. After she had thus shown how able a woman she was, and had won the friendship of everybody about her by her good temper and her pleasant ways, Peter publicly announced his marriage, and declared Catherine to be his wife and czarina. But still he did not crown her.
This was in the year 1711, and immediately afterwards Peter marched into the Turkish country at the head of forty thousand men. This army was not nearly large enough to meet the Turks, but Peter had other armies in different places, and had ordered all of them to meet him on the march. For various reasons all these armies failed to join him, and he found himself in a Turkish province with a very small number of troops. The danger was so great that he ordered Catherine and all the other women to go back to a place of safety. But Catherine would not go. She had made up her mind to stay with Peter at the head of the army, and was so obstinate about it that at last Peter gave her leave to remain. Then the wives of the generals, and, finally, of the lower officers, wanted to stay also. She persuaded Peter to let them do so, and the end of it was that the women all stayed with the army.
Everything went against Peter on this march. The weather was very dry. Swarms of locusts were in the country, eating every green thing. There was no food for the horses, and many of them starved to death. It was hard for the Russians to go forward or to go backward, and harder still to stay where they were.
At last the soldiers in front reported that the Turks were coming, and Peter soon saw a great army of two hundred thousand fierce Moslems in front of his little force, which counted up only thirty-eight thousand men. Seeing the odds against him he gave the order to retreat, and the army began its backward march. As it neared the river Pruth a new danger showed itself. The advance-guard brought word that a great force of savage Crim Tartars held the other bank of the river, completely cutting off Peter's retreat.
The state of things seemed hopeless. With two hundred thousand Turks on one side, and a strong force of Crim Tartars holding a river on the other, Peter's little army was completely hemmed in. There was no water in the camp, and when the soldiers went to the river for it, the Tartars on the other shore kept up a fierce fight with them. A great horde of Turkish cavalry tried hard to cut off the supply entirely by pushing themselves between Peter's camp and the river, but the Russians managed to keep them back by hard fighting, and to keep a road open to the river.
Peter knew now that unless help should come to him in some shape, and that very quickly, he must lose not only his army, but his empire also, for if the Turks should take him prisoner, it was certain that his many enemies would soon conquer Russia, and divide the country among themselves. He saw no chance of help coming, but he made up his mind to fight as long as he could. He formed his men in a hollow square, with the women in the middle, and faced his enemies.
The Turks flung themselves in great masses upon his lines, trying to crush the little force of Russians by mere numbers. But Peter's brave men remembered that Catherine was inside their hollow square, and they stood firmly at their posts, driving back the Turks with frightful slaughter. Again and again and again they fell upon his lines in heavy masses, and again and again and again they were driven back, leaving the field black with their dead.
This could not go on forever, of course, and both sides saw what the end must be. As the Turks had many times more men than Peter, it was plain that they would, at last, win by destroying all the Russians.
For three days and nights the terrible slaughter went on. Peter's men beat back the Turks at every charge, but every hour their line grew thinner. At the end of the third day sixteen thousand of their brave comrades lay dead upon the field, and only twenty-two thousand remained to face the enemy.
Towards night on the third day a terrible rumor spread through their camp. A whisper ran along the line that the ammunition was giving out. A few more shots from each soldier's gun, and there would be nothing left to fight with.
Then Peter fell into the sulks. As long as he could fight he had kept up his spirits, but now that all was lost, and his great career seemed near its end, he grew angry, and went to his tent to have one of his savage fits. He gave orders that nobody should come near him, and there was no officer or soldier in all the army who would have dared enter the tent where he lay, in his dangerous mood.
But if Peter had given up in despair, Catherine had not. In spite of Peter's order and his anger, she boldly went into his tent, and asked him to give her leave to put an end to the war by making a treaty of peace with the Turks, if she could. It seemed absurd to talk of such a thing, or to expect the Turks to make peace on any terms when they had so good a chance to conquer Peter, once for all, and to make him their prisoner. Nobody but Catherine, perhaps, would have thought of such a thing; but Catherine was a woman born for great affairs, and she had no thought of giving up any chance there might be to save Peter and the empire.
Her first difficulty was with Peter himself. She could not offer terms of peace to the Turks until Peter gave her leave, and promised to fulfil whatever bargain she might make with them. She managed this part of the matter, and then set to work at the greater task of dealing with the Turks.