content_output-080_9 (Q6670): Difference between revisions

"I must observe," says Montluc, "that the troops which I commanded consisted of cross-bow men only; since at that time there were in our nation no soldiers armed with guns. Only three or four days before, six Gascon arquebusiers, deserters, came over from the enemy's camp to our army, and these men I kept with me, as I had the good fortune on that day to be on duty at the gate of the town. One of these men was from the Montluc estates. I wonder, however, that it could have been the will of Providence that this unlucky instrument should have been invented. I myself still bear about me the marks that it has left, which even now cause me to suffer much weakness; and have seen brave and valiant men killed with it in such sad numbers, and it generally happened that they were struck down to the ground by those abominable bullets, which had been discharged by cowardly and base knaves, who would never have dared to have met true soldiers face to face and hand to hand. All this is very clearly one of those artifices which the devil employs to induce us human beings to kill one another."