Again and again in reading Spanish history do we come upon evidences of
this nobility of courage and disinterested patriotism. It was the
Spaniard Pescara who brushed the French army of observation from the
line of the Adda, and marched his own forces and the German troops to
the relief of Pavía. All were unpaid, unclothed, unfed; yet when an
appeal was made to the Spaniards, Hume tells us that they abandoned
their own pay and offered their very shirts and cloaks to satisfy the
Germans, and "the French were beaten before the great battle was
fought." They did precisely the same in the days of Mendizábal.

Again, in the height of Barbarossa's power, when Charles V., hoisting
the crucifix at his masthead, led his crusading Spaniards against
Goletta, and it fell, after a month's desperate siege, without pause or
rest the troops, half dead with heat and thirst, pressed on to Tunis to
liberate twenty thousand Christian captives. It was a splendid
achievement, for the campaign was fought in the fierce heat of an
African summer. Every barrel of biscuit, every butt of water, had to be
brought by sea from Sicily, and as there were no draught animals, the
soldiers themselves dragged their guns and all their provisions. It is,
as we well know, no light task to find six weeks' supply for thirty
thousand men with all our modern advantages; but these Spaniards did it
when already exhausted, half fed, burnt up by the fierce African sun,
and in face of an enemy well supplied with artillery and ammunition.

In the miserable time of Philip II., a garrison of two hundred men held
out for months against a Turkish army of twenty thousand men at
Mers-el-Keber; and the same heroic story is repeated at Malta, when the
enemy, after firing sixteen thousand cannon shots in one month against
the Christian forts, abandoned the siege in despair. Meanwhile the