And now the decisive moment was at hand.  The Swiss had kept to the heights while their enemy continued mounted, not venturing to face such a body of cavalry on level ground.  But when they saw them forming as foot-soldiers, they left the hills and marched to the plain below.  Soon the unequal forces confronted each other; the Swiss, as was their custom, falling upon their knees and praying for God’s aid to their cause; the Austrians fastening their helmets and preparing for the fray.  The duke even took the occasion to give the honor of knighthood to several young warriors.

The day was a hot and close one, the season being that of harvest, and the sun pouring down its unclouded and burning rays upon the combatants.  This sultriness was a marked advantage to the lightly-dressed mountaineers as compared with the armor-clad knights, to whom the heat was very oppressive.

The battle was begun by the Swiss, who, on rising from their knees, flung themselves with impetuous valor on the dense line of spears that confronted them.  Their courage and fury were in vain.  Not a man in the Austrian line wavered.  They stood like a rock against which the waves of the Swiss dashed only to be hurled back in death.  The men of Lucerne, in particular, fought with an almost blind rage, seeking to force a path through that steel-pointed forest of spears, and falling rapidly before the triumphant foe.

Numbers of the mountaineers lay dead or wounded.  The line of spears seemed impenetrable.  The Swiss began to waver.  The enemy, seeing this, advanced the flanks of his line so as to form a half-moon shape, with the purpose of enclosing the small body of Swiss within a circle of spears.  It looked for the moment as if the struggle were at an end, the mountaineers foiled and defeated, the fetters again ready to be locked upon the limbs of free Switzerland.

But such was not to be.  There was a man in that small band of patriots who had the courage to accept certain death for his country, one of those rare souls who appear from time to time in the centuries and win undying fame by an act of self-martyrdom.  Arnold of Winkelried was his name, a name which history is not likely soon to forget, for by an impulse of the noblest devotion this brave patriot saved the liberties of his native land.

[Illustration:  STATUE OF ARNOLD WINKELRIED.]

Seeing that there was but one hope for the Swiss, and that death must be the lot of him who gave them that hope, he exclaimed to his comrades, in a voice of thunder,—­

“Faithful and beloved confederates, I will open a passage to freedom and victory!  Protect my wife and children!”

With these words, he rushed from his ranks, flung himself upon the enemy’s steel-pointed line, and seized with his extended arms as many of the hostile spears as he was able to grasp, burying them in his body, and sinking dead to the ground.

His comrades lost not a second in availing themselves of this act of heroic devotion.  Darting forward, they rushed over the body of the martyr to liberty into the breach he had made, forced others of the spears aside, and for the first time since the fray began reached the Austrians with their weapons.