and rage of the onslaught kept increasing. The duke was killed outright. It would have been a miracle had he not been killed. Those who were raining down blows shouted as they did so, as if it were appropriate, as if just killing were too slight an annihilation, only a half measure. Heat, steam, the smell of blood, dirt and dust and the shouting and yelling merged in a wild, diabolical turmoil. The dying hardly even felt the onset of their death, they died so quickly. They suffocated in droves in their showy iron armour, those threshing flails. What further comment need be made? Each of them would gladly have given a damn, had they still been able to. Fine noblemen drowned in their hundreds; no, they were drownded in the nearby Lake of Sempach; they were drownded because they were pushed into the water like cats and dogs. They overbalanced and fell over one another in their elegant pointed shoes--it was a real shame. The most splendid armour plating could only vouchsafe to its wearer oblivion and the realisation of this frightening presentiment was not contradicted. What did it matter now that at home, in the Aargau or in Swabia, knights owned land and people, had a beautiful wife, servants, maidservants, fruit trees, fields and woods and collected taxes and enjoyed the finest privileges? That only made dying in these pools of water between the pressing down knee of a crazy herdsman and a piece of earth more bitter and more wretched. The warhorses in their uncontrolled flight naturally stamped on their own masters. Many knights, in the abruptness of their desire to dismount, got caught up in the stirrups with their silly but fashionable footwear and were left hanging from them so that they bumped themselves over the grass bleeding from the backs of their heads. Their shocked eyes in the meantime, before they closed for good, saw the sky burn above them like an angry flame. Herdsmen also died, of course, but for every one bare-breasted and bare-armed combatant who died there were always ten armour-plated and wrapped up ones. The battle of Sempach teaches us, in fact, how dreadfully stupid it is to wrap up well. If only those puppets had been able to move, yes, they would have done. Some did manage to do so, so that they were finally able to free themselves from that totally unbearable thing they were carrying on their body. "I am fighting with slaves. How disgusting!" cried a handsome youth with yellowish hair falling down to his shoulders and sank to the ground, hit full in his fair face by a vicious blow, where he, fatally wounded, bit the grass with his half-smashed teeth. A few herdsmen, whose deadly weapons had gone missing from their hands, pulled down like wrestlers in a wrestling ring their opponents from below by the scruff of the neck and head or threw themselves, avoiding counter blows, at the throat of a knight and throttled him, strangling him to death. * * *