Project Gutenberg's The Black Galley, by Wilhelm Raabe and Michael Wooff

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Title: The Black Galley

Author: Wilhelm Raabe
        Michael Wooff

Translator: Wilhelm Raabe

Release Date: April 13, 2015 [EBook #48701]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BLACK GALLEY ***

Produced by Michael Wooff

The Black Galley

A story by Wilhelm Raabe (1831-1910)

I.
Along the walls of Fort Liefkenhoek.

It was a dark and stormy night in the first days of November of the year 1599 when the Spanish sentry in Fort Liefkenhoek on the Flemish side of the Scheldt sounded the alarm, urgent drumming woke the sleeping garrison and each man there, commander-in-chief and ordinary soldier alike, took up their posts on the fortress's walls.

The waves of the Scheldt were running high and often disgorging flecks of foam in the face of the shivering Southerners over the ramparts. A northeasterly wind whistled sharply down from the "Provinces", and the Spaniards had already known for a long time that it was seldom that anything good came to them from that quarter.

In Fort Lillo as well, on the Brabant side of the river, the sticks of the drums were whirling and the horn was being sounded. One could hear quite clearly over the noise of the storm and the waters tossed by a tempest the sound of far-off cannon fire, which could only be emanating from a battle at sea at the mouth of the Scheldt.

The sea beggars were up to their old tricks again.

What did this race of amphibians care about darkness and storms? Were not nightfall and stormy weather their best allies? When had a sea beggar ever been afraid of a stormy sea and darkness when it came to annihilating the enemy, to outmanoeuvring his deadliest enemies, those who had laid waste to and oppressed his homeland won back from the waves.

The war, however, had taken a terrible turn for the worse.

This coming and going of the belligerents had lasted now for two and thirty years and there was still no foreseeable end to it. The sowing of the dragon's teeth had yielded a generous harvest—men of iron had indeed sprung from the blood-drenched earth and even women had had to forget what kindness and clemency were. There was now a younger generation who, for this very reason, did not long for peace because they had never known what peace was.

And if the violence of the war had worsened on dry land, it was even more horrendous at sea. At least on land prisoners could be exchanged or ransomed—towns, villages and hamlets could spare themselves burning and sacking by buying off would-be attackers. At sea, however, there were no pardons and no ransoms. It was held to be merciful to put enemy prisoners to the sword without further ado or to hang them from a yardarm and not to slowly torture them to death in the cruellest way possible or to nail them to the deck and sink them along with their captured ship.

Commanding officers and ordinary soldiers on the walls of Fort Liefkenhoek listened with rapt attention to the cannon fire and shared their opinions on it. One person would have one view on the parties to the skirmish, someone else another, but, finally, whispered at first, then louder and more surely, the word went from mouth to mouth among the soldiers:

"The black galley, the black galley again!"

Each of them spat out the same message with a tone between anger and uncanny dread:

"The black galley!"

Towards one o'clock in the morning the wind died down and the cannons too fell silent. Twenty minutes later there was a sudden burst of flame in the far, far distance that left the dark water looking blood-red from an equally bloody flash of lightning. The garish illumination flickered over hundreds of bearded and wild faces on the walls of Forts Liefkenhoek and Lillo and, half a second later, the dull thud of a huge explosion succeeded to the lightshow, with which the skirmish appeared to be at an end, in the same way that a tragedy ends with a catastrophe. No more signs of life could be seen or heard to hint at the continuation of the struggle. Although the garrisons of the Spanish fortresses waited patiently, listening out for a long time, they heard no more signs of gunfire.

"Well, and what do you think about all this, Senyor Jeronimo?" the commandant of Fort Liefkenhoek asked one of his captains, a gaunt elderly man with grey hair and a grey beard, covered with scars from head to toe.

The soldier thus addressed, who until then had been leaning on the parapet a little away from his comrades in arms, shrugged his shoulders.

"Don't ask me about it, sir. By God and the Virgin Mary, I gave up racking my brains a long time ago over what this war has in store for us. My armour has become attached to my skin and I'll hold my ground till Judgement Day, but that's as much as I will do."

"You are very brusque, Senyor," said the commander, who was a much younger man than the old warhorse and had only recently arrived in the Netherlands from Castile to take up the post of governor in this fort on the Scheldt.

"Coronel," said Captain Jeronimo, "for many a long year now I have clung to my position on this lump of earth and watched the waves wash over it. You are young, coronel, but your predecessor was also young and a nobleman. He too stood here next to me, in the same place that you yourself are standing now, full of youthful dreams and hopes of victory. Now he lies down there below the waves and the one who was here before him was killed by a bullet near Turnhout—he too dreamed of returning crowned by victory to his castle on the Jarama, back to his young wife—bah! And now I can cast my mind back to the end of the year 1585 when I got back from Madrid—then I too believed in victory and honour in this war. I have ceased to believe in those things and you will as well, mi coronel, if God lets you live."

"You have a morbid imagination, captain! But tell me, you were in Madrid in that ever memorable year?"

"Aye, that I was."

"In that glorious year that the great prince won back Antwerp for us?"

"Yes."

"So you entered the town with Alexander Farnese as a victor? Oh happy man!"

"No," said the old soldier darkly. "I did not figure in the victory procession; I had been entrusted with a different task, a task that made other people in the camp extremely jealous of me. I was the messenger that the brave prince sent to Don Felipe—may God have mercy on his soul—to announce the town's surrender."

"You? You, Captain Jeronimo, were permitted to take such a message to the king? Oh thrice happy man! Please tell us about it as we cannot yet withdraw from manning the walls."

The other officers of the garrison had gradually drawn closer to the captain and the commandant so that now, as attentive listeners, they formed a circle round them.