Audifax remained silent, but scalding tears fell from his eyes. He did not cry though on account of being taken prisoner, but he cried from another heavy disappointment. "Oh Hadumoth!" sighed he again. Yesterday at midnight he had sat together with the young goose-driver, hidden in a corner of the fire-place. "Thou shalt become invulnerable," Hadumoth had said, "for I will give thee a charm against all weapons!" She had boiled a brown snake, and anointed his forehead, shoulders and breast with its fat. "To-morrow evening I shall wait for thee in this same corner, for thou wilt surely come back to me, safe and sound. No metal can do anything, against the fat of a snake." Audifax had squeezed her hands, and had gone out so joyously into battle,--and now!... The fighting was still going on in the plain, and the Suabian combatants not being used to battle, began to get tired already. With an anxious expression Simon Bardo was watching the state of affairs; and with an angry shake of the head, he grumbled to himself: "the best strategy is lost on these Centaurs, who come and go, and shoot at a distance, as if my threefold flanks stood there only to amuse them. It would really be well, if one were to add a chapter to Emperor Leo's book on tactics, treating of the attack of the Huns." He now approached the monks, and dividing them again into two bodies, ordered the men of St. Gall to advance on the right, and those of Reichenau, on the left; then wheeling about, so that the enemy, having the wood at his back, was shut in by a semicircle. "If we do not surround them, they will not let us get at them," cried he, flourishing his broad sword in the air. "So now to the attack!" A wild fire was gleaming in all eyes; and on the point of starting, they all dropt down on their knees; each took up a clod of earth, and threw it over his head that he might be consecrated and blessed by his native earth; and then they rushed on to battle. Those of St. Gall struck up the pious war-song of "_media vita_." Notker the stutterer, once passed through the ravines of the Martistobel, in his native land, when a bridge was just being built over the yawning precipice. The workmen were hanging suspended over the giddy height, and at that sight, the idea rose in his soul, how in our life we are always walking on the edge of the abyss of Death, and so he composed those verses. Now they served as a sort of magic song, which was to protect them, and bring death to their enemies. Solemn, sounded its strains from the lips of the men going into battle: "Though yet we live, by Death we are surrounded, And ever near, his messengers are staying. Whom could we choose, to help us in great danger, But Thee, oh Lord! The judge of all the living! Almighty God!" And from the other wing the monks of the Reichenau were singing: