by Roy Jacobsen
Coligny and William met and devised an intricate plan of action. The Prince was at last able to mobilise his newly created army, the mercenary army. First he rode south, with his head held high and his heart pounding beneath his uniform, because, as mentioned, he hadn’t done this for a while – mobilised an army – then he turned west, but as he was about to cross the border into France he was “struck by a new calamity”, as it is termed in one of his many bombastic biographies: his fellow-in-arms, Coligny, had perished in what was later known as the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and with him was lost, in William’s view, the only key to the liberation of the Netherlands.
Thus once again he was rendered powerless by events he had no control over, but the thought of returning to his idle existence in Dillenburg repelled and embarrassed him. Yet he couldn’t advance deeper into France now that the Calvinists had been defeated, nor, with such a weak army, could he move northwards along the planned route towards the Spanish. But as he lay there languishing in the French–German border areas, reports came in that the towns of Leiden, Alkmaar and Haarlem had risen up against the Spanish. On top of that, the energetic Duke of Alba had for some reason fallen into Philip’s disfavour and been replaced by a pious weakling by the name of Don Luis, who in his eagerness to show initiative had besieged the rebellious towns while also demonstrating indecision by sending William an invitation to negotiate peace terms!
Encouraged by these small glimpses of hope, but mostly by the fact that an army has to be moving so as not to starve to death, William decided to launch an attack of his own, and cautiously they headed for the Dutch plains.
Meanwhile the Spanish continued to burn and ravage and put down one rebellion after the other, except in one town, Leiden, where the population held out with a tenacity no-one thought possible. After no more than a quick glance at the depressing maps constantly placed before him, William realised that it would be there and nowhere else, at Leiden, that the final showdown would take place, one that would decide his future and the future of the Netherlands, and that of the Spanish too, Leiden was the operation’s strategic centre of gravity, as Clausewitz would one day call it.
On his way north William received constant reports about the wretched conditions in the town; the people were eating rats and sparrows, they made bread with ground timber and refuse, drank urine and sewage water when it didn’t rain, and they had been doing this for several months, in those times armies didn’t move quickly, furthermore there were many trials and tribulations to contend with along the way, and it was well into the summer, six whole months after the Spanish had surrounded the town, before the Prince of Orange could ride into position along the dykes outside, only to have his doubts confirmed at once that he didn’t have sufficient forces to break the Spanish siege.
Again William found himself in a quandary. Night after night he paced restlessly along the shore with his second-in-command discussing and rejecting untenable solutions. Once again he was waiting for the decisive strategy. But this time it didn’t come from events he didn’t have any influence over or from his “useless staff” but from an inner light, perhaps lit by the Lord himself, even though William, in order to gain support from the population in the north, had converted to Calvinism, but the truth was the solution had been staring him in the face, had been all around him, only he hadn’t seen it.
At cockcrow the following day he summoned his general staff and held a short briefing which would link his name for all eternity with one of the most curious chapters in European history. The soldiers were to collect all the flat-bottomed boats they could find in the area and drag them up the grassy mounds behind their positions, and three days later – when the job was done – the Prince, with a proud grin, dispensed his orders: the dykes were to be blown up so that the sea could wash in over the fields. By the grace of God – he announced to his open-mouthed officers – the flood waters would reach the town walls and rise, thus allowing them to sail to the gates, through the Spanish lines, which would succumb to the force of the water.
The order was carried out, and later in the day all the officers stood on a mound above the demolished dykes surveying their military gains, the deadly salt water that flooded in over thousands and thousands of acres of cultivated land until it sank to its natural level once again. But Leiden still lay a good way off, on dry land, with the Spanish siege intact. The water rose a few inches before subsiding again in the evening. At the next tide the same thing happened and they all began to realise that William had sacrificed large tracts of fertile Dutch land to no avail.
The Prince went into a deep trance once more, resumed his sullen, uncommunicative Dillenburg attitude and again began to dismiss staff; otherwise he restricted his activity to sitting inside a tent with his hands folded, imploring Our Lord to send a storm and, if possible, a storm surge, which in one concerted effort would force the waters the last kilometre to the town walls. But Our Lord wasn’t listening, presumably because William in his political pragmatism had turned his back on him when he converted, He sent windless days all through the spring, and all through the summer too, it had never been so calm along the North Sea coast, now and then a gentle easterly wafted over the land, it was enough to make you weep, while the townsfolk of Leiden continued to starve and die.
Then William fell ill. He had delirious bouts of fever and lay sweating in the field hospital like a second Job, talking to himself and calling for his eleven-year-old son, whom the Spanish had kidnapped in France and sent to Madrid, where according to rumours they had tortured him to death. Now William could feel his son’s mutilated body beneath the blood-soaked clothes, heard his pleading voice and gazed at the sea, which would not rise but only poison the land, return it to its barren origins, the primeval realm, where neither man nor beast could exist.
The Prince’s second-in-command sat around for several weeks waiting for the physician’s final bulletin to confirm that the commander of the armed forces had breathed his last, so that this idiotic campaign could be called off and a new, more promising one launched.
But in the middle of September William’s health suddenly picked up, to the extreme consternation of his retinue, it was as if he had risen from the dead, with new blood in his veins and a host of new ideas in his head; he was cheerful and friendly, full of vim and vigour, he ate and drank, talked and did not betray the slightest doubt that this crazy venture would soon be crowned with victory. And on the night leading to 2 October, 1574 – exactly one year after the siege had been laid – a violent storm blew up from the west. What was more, it was a full moon and hence a spring tide, and at the sight of a sea so tempestuous that no vessel could stay on an even keel, William, with great conviction, gave the order to man the armada, load the boats to the gunnels with soldiers and weapons and food and water. His men jumped to it, scrambled on board, cast off and held up cloths and bits of tent in the raging wind, or they sailed with bare rigging, and in less than half an hour of sailing at breakneck speed the whole fleet arrived unscathed at the town walls, where large sections of the Spanish positions, weapons and tents were submerged and panic soon broke out. After a short and frenetic clash the enemy signalled sauve qui peut, and William was able to blast open the town gates; those townsfolk who could still stand rushed out and threw themselves around the necks of the soldiers and over the food and drink.
But when that same night a thanksgiving service was held in Leiden’s largest church and the sound of hymn-singing rose like clear water up the tall stone walls to form a quivering veil beneath the vaulted ceiling – and when at that very moment the wind dropped – many of the survivors broke into convulsive sobbing; a procession of unbearable laments wound through the streets, people banged away on drums and pots and pans and wailed and screamed like demented souls.
William asked what on earth this was all about, and an emaciated monk was dragged before him and forced to give an answer. He explained that his faith forbade people to eat their dead, after which he held an elo
quent silence before asking the uncomprehending William whether he believed that he himself would be able to look the Lord in the eye after eating his own children – after perhaps killing them first to spare them further suffering?
There is a famous picture of William, painted at that precise moment as he sits on his Gobelin-clad folding chair, his General’s Seat, staring at this monk with the watery eyes who is uninterested in either the siege or the dearly bought freedom; it is a snapshot or a psychogram of the commander’s final years, a coloured cardiogram that stretches from the time when, ensconced in Dillenburg, he made the great decision – which was actually made for him by his “useless staff” – via the doubt that gnawed at him on his trek northwards when he had to keep his army moving like a shark, so that it wouldn’t become extinct, until the night leading to 2 October, 1574 when he sat on his famous folding chair and talked to a liberated Calvinist monk and realised that this was only the beginning: outside, the fields were under water, the people were starving, emaciated, some of them insane, his country consisted of seventeen states, three languages, two incompatible faiths, so William bad-temperedly swept the monk aside, rose to his feet and went to his quarters to drink himself senseless with his staff, and to plan his next move …Who is it that drives history? Who the hell is it that makes decisions here on earth? Not to mention – what is it that keeps a shark alive?
The William Tell Formula
An old circus artiste from Siebenbürgen wandered around in the Ardennes forests, a knife-thrower, a scrawny sickle-shaped figure who dragged his tattered garb from one village to the next and received alms from people who covered their eyes and ears, it was an act of remorse and penance, and no-one could say for certain if he was a human or a fairy tale or just his own bad reputation. But none of the children in the area suffered any harm at his hands, they could move about freely and without hindrance, the knife-thrower had other matters on his mind.
He had thrown his razor-sharp knives in a succession of legendary circuses and during the Second World War entertained bleeding and mutilated Wehrmacht soldiers in various field hospitals and camps in Russia, Italy and France. But long before this he had devised a “law” which he called “the William Tell Formula”; he had noticed that the most famous of his predecessors, those artistes whom folklore and literature and also the occasional nation-builder had been most fascinated and inspired by, often used their own sons to stand with an apple or a balloon on their head, or with a target attached to their stomach, or lying spread-eagled against a wooden board with the knives quivering between their limbs, but they never used a daughter.
By employing an assistant who was a relative of the knife-thrower, his own flesh and blood, not only was the fear-infused pleasure of the spectator enhanced but also the concentration of the thrower, with the consequence that the risk of an error was actually reduced; and a son is not only far more robust than a daughter, he is also the natural extension of the father, so in a way it is himself the father injures if things go wrong. Whereas no-one has ever been able to accept – or pardon – a father who exposes a daughter to the same danger: she would not enhance his concentration, she would damage it. This is the William Tell Formula.
Now his wife had borne him both a daughter and – a year and a half later – a son, and the knife-thrower’s urge to follow in the steps of greats like William Tell was becoming an obsession; bringing his son into the act would increase the appeal of his already acclaimed performance and also his fame and, not least, his fee, and wasn’t he living in an age that craved groundbreaking, spectacular shows?
At first he was met with outraged protests from his wife, but now at least the idea was out in the open and had been spoken about, also by her, and she had never seen him miss and furthermore she was as vain and money-grabbing as he was, so she gave in. When the boy was six and able to stand stock-still for the few seconds it took the father to concentrate and throw, they began to train together, at first with dummies, soft rubber replicas of the same size, weight and length as the knives. They all reassuringly hit their target just above or below the boy’s outstretched arms, between his open legs or close to his protruding ears. Not once did the knife-thrower miss.
But when the moment came to take the knives from the suitcase he had inherited from his father, who in turn had inherited it from his father, his hands began to tremble. He tried to summon up the great artistic calm, he went through his lengthy preparatory ritual, mumbled his incantatory formulas, said his prayers and steeled his gaze the way he had been taught by his father and grandfather, but all that happened was that he began to adjust the vertical movement of his throwing hand, the surest factor, indeed, the most fundamental element, the nerve centre of a throw: the right arm that follows the pendular movement at an angle of precisely ninety degrees to the horizon, as sure as an amen in a church, such that no matter what goes wrong at the moment of release, with the timing, that is, the knife cannot land too far to the right or left of the vertical line which the arm movement traces over the target; a person with his arms squeezed into his sides, standing to attention, as the son was in this introductory phase of the training, is in other words as safe as a child in the mother’s womb. But it was this very basic factor in the knife-thrower’s lifelong training that failed him. He couldn’t throw. After a gigantic effort of will he did throw, but the knives were so far from the boy’s body that several even missed the green wooden board he was standing against. And this happened again and again, it didn’t get any better, the knives whirled past, too far to the right or too far to the left.
But instead of calling this experience by its rightful name, a defeat, and admitting that he was no William Tell, and reverting to assistants of a somewhat lower sentimental value, the knife-thrower took to brooding about his son’s remarkable ability to disrupt the nerve centre of his life. If only it had been the timing the boy had disrupted, the golden moment when the thrower relaxes the muscles in his wrist and releases the shiny steel from his fingertips, the function, to put it simply, which decides whether the knives land too high or too low, which of course is of vital importance for spread-eagled assistants, not to mention assistants who have an apple or a balloon placed on their heads – a tiny delay in the moment of release will, with something like a 100 per cent certainty, result in the knife finding its way into the assistant’s skull; just as a slightly premature release will send the knife above the apple, or balloon, and spoil the show. A premature release is therefore the most common consequence of nerves. But it is also the reason why a show like this can be perfected by training: first of all you train the vertical arm movement until it is mastered, preferably in your youth. Then, when you practise timing, you start at the top, deliberately releasing the knife too early, and work your way downwards towards the imagined hair roots of an imagined assistant, to the horizontal plane of the throw, until, consciously and without deviation, the knife has lodged itself in the board a centimetre or two above this plane several thousand times; then a good knife-thrower has full control of his nerves and can perform his spectacular act as naturally as ordinary people taking out their bikes when the spring sun prompts them and going for a ride, as he did last year; once you can cycle you can do it forever because this type of movement is not governed by those parts of the brain that are sometimes subject to the ravages of forgetfulness, those parts that manage words and memories and knowledge of mathematics and Catholic saints. But forgetfulness had now afflicted the knife-thrower nonetheless. He couldn’t ride a bike anymore. It wasn’t the secondary variable that failed him, the ability to find the correct moment for release, which throughout a knife-thrower’s life has to be rigorously nurtured and is subject to the same fine-tuning as a delicate guitar string in a musician’s hands, but the very foundation of his work, the balance nerve, if we keep to the bike analogy, it was ruined.
Like almost everybody who finds themselves in a serious existential crisis the knife-thrower took to drink and kept going with tears and fig
hts and prodigality until his wife begged the circus director to threaten him with removing his livelihood unless he came to his senses. But it took time, more threats were necessary, and more fights, and it was only when he had dug himself such a deep hole that the only way was up, that he resumed his training. This is when he discovered the cause of the problem, it was to be found in the subtlest nuances of his feelings for the two children; he loved his son in a different way from his daughter; his concern regarding the boy’s future and career, if one can talk about that, was greater than it was for his daughter. The boy’s naivety and trusting admiration deceived the father, it might have had something to do with seeing himself there somewhere, with sentimental memories of the innocence he had once left in such haste; the son was not only an extension of himself, he was also his previous and next life, his connection with the heavenly powers.
On the other hand, the daughter filled him with confidence – she’ll manage, he thought – she is determined and dogged and, quite frankly, not as innocent as the son, not only that, another man, as strong as myself, will one day take care of her; and all of this was in total contrast to what he had previously believed about having a daughter and a son when he had devised the William Tell Formula.
The knife-thrower didn’t mention any of this to his wife, but now he began to drop hints about including his daughter in the act. This didn’t go down well, either, but once again his wife gave in. And everything went fine with the dummies, both the vertical movement and the moment of release were spot on. But the girl couldn’t stay still. “What do you mean! Of course she’s standing still.” “No, she’s moving.” His wife watched their daughter carefully, and now she too could see the child was moving, swaying from side to side.