Hell let loose indeed! Desperate men fighting for freedom against a tyrant who has never known defeat. The evening Angelus was never rung on that Lord’s Day--the feast of the Holy Redeemer--but at the hour when day first fades into evening Mark van Rycke--superb, undaunted and glowing now with the ardour of victory--leads the final assault on the Kasteel. "Netherlanders! For Liberty!" he cries. A stone has hit his shoulder, there is a huge cut across his face, the sleeve has been torn right out of his doublet, his bare arm and the hand which wields an unconquered sword gleam like metal in the fast gathering twilight. "To the breach!" he calls, and is the first to scramble down the declivity of the moat and on to the heap of masonry which fills the moat here to the top of the bank. An arrow aimed at his head pierces his right arm, a stone hurled from above falls at his feet and raises a cloud of dust which blinds him, a heavy fragment hits him on the head; he stumbles and falls backwards, down to the brink of the moat. "Never mind me," he calls, "for Liberty, Netherlanders! The Kasteel is yours! hold on!" He has managed to hold on for dear life to the rough stones on the declivity, crawling along the top of the bank to escape being trampled on by the pikemen. The latter have a hot time at the breach: the Spanish musketeers, under the Duke of Alva’s own eyes, are firing with remarkable accuracy and extraordinary rapidity, whilst from the ramparts the shower of heavy stones makes deadly havoc: twice the Walloons have given ground--they are led by Laurence van Rycke now--who twice returns to the charge. Mark struggles to his feet: "Hold on, Walloons! the Kasteel is ours," he cries. And while the Walloons continue the desperate fighting at the breach, he gathers together a company of Flemish swordsmen, the pick of his little army, those who have stuck closely to him throughout the past two days, who have fought every minute, who have been decimated, lost their provosts and their captains, but have never once cried "Halt!" and never thought of giving in. A hundred or so of them are all that is left: they carry their sword in their right hand and a pistol in their left. They follow Mark round the walls to where the moat melts into the wide tract of morass which surrounds the north-east side of the Kasteel. The shadow from the high walls falls across the marshy ground, the men move round silently whilst behind them at the breach and on the bridge the noise of musketry and falling masonry drowns every other sound. Now the men halt, and still in silence they strip to their skins; then with their pistols in their right hand and their sword between their teeth they plunge ankle deep into the mud. They are men of Ghent every one of them--men of the Low Countries who know their morasses as mariners know the sea: they know how to keep their foothold in these slimy tracks, where strangers would inevitably be sucked into a hideous grave.