Then there were other horrors; cold from insufficient fuel, pestilences of various sorts such as always attend a siege, and, worse of all for the beleaguered, hunger.  Week by week as the summer aged, the food grew less and less, till at length there was nothing.  The weeds that grew in the street, the refuse of tanneries, the last ounce of offal, the mice and the cats, all had been devoured.  On the lofty steeple of St. Bavon for days and days had floated a black flag to tell the Prince of Orange in Leyden that below it was despair as black.  The last attempt at succour had been made.  Batenburg had been defeated and slain, together with the Seigneurs of Clotingen and Carloo, and five or six hundred men.  Now there was no more hope.

Desperate expedients were suggested:  That the women, children, aged and sick should be left in the city, while the able-bodied men cut a way through the battalions of their besiegers.  On these non-combatants it was hoped that the Spaniard would have mercy—­as though the Spaniard could have mercy, he who afterwards dragged the wounded and the ailing to the door of the hospital and there slaughtered them in cold blood; aye, and here and elsewhere, did other things too dreadful to write down.  Says the old chronicler, “But this being understood by the women, they assembled all together, making the most pitiful cries and lamentations that could be heard, the which would have moved a heart of flint, so as it was not possible to abandon them.”

Next another plan was formed:  that all the females and helpless should be set in the centre of a square of the fighting men, to march out and give battle to the foe till everyone was slain.  Then the Spaniards hearing this and growing afraid of what these desperate men might do, fell back on guile.  If they would surrender, the citizens of Haarlem were told, and pay two hundred and forty thousand florins, no punishment should be inflicted.  So, having neither food nor hope, they listened to the voice of the tempter and surrendered, they who had fought until their garrison of four thousand was reduced to eighteen hundred men.

It was noon and past on the fatal twelfth of July.  The gates were open, the Spaniards, those who were left alive of them, Don Frederic at their head, with drums beating, banners flying, and swords sharpened for murder, were marching into the city of Haarlem.  In a deep niche between two great brick piers of the cathedral were gathered four people whom we know.  War and famine had left them all alive, yet they had borne their share of both.  In every enterprise, however desperate, Foy and Martin had marched, or stood, or watched side by side, and well did the Spaniards know the weight of the great sword Silence and the red-headed giant who wielded it.  Mother Martha, too, had not been idle.  Throughout the siege she had served as the lieutenant of the widow Hasselaer, who with a band of three hundred women fought day and night alongside of their husbands and brothers.  Even Elsa, who although she was too delicate and by nature timid and unfitted to go out to battle, had done her part, for she laboured at the digging of mines and the building of walls till her soft hands were rough and scarred.