to Parma. Alexander was glad to enlist so bold a soldier on his side,
and assisted Schenk in his besieged stronghold. For years afterwards,
his services under the King's banner were most brilliant, and he rose to
the highest military command, while his coffers, meantime, were rapidly
filling with the results of his robberies and 'brandschatzungs.' "'Tis a
most courageous fellow," said Parma, "but rather a desperate highwayman
than a valiant soldier." Martin's couple of lances had expanded into a
corps of free companions, the most truculent, the most obedient, the most
rapacious in Christendom. Never were freebooters more formidable to the
world at large, or more docile to their chief, than were the followers
of General Schenk. Never was a more finished captain of highwaymen.
He was a man who was never sober, yet who never smiled. His habitual
intoxication seemed only to increase both his audacity and his
taciturnity, without disturbing his reason. He was incapable of fear,
of fatigue, of remorse. He could remain for days and nights without
dismounting-eating, drinking, and sleeping in the saddle; so that to this
terrible centaur his horse seemed actually a part of himself. His
soldiers followed him about like hounds, and were treated by him like
hounds. He habitually scourged them, often took with his own hand the
lives of such as displeased him, and had been known to cause individuals
of them to jump from the top of church steeples at his command; yet the
pack were ever stanch to his orders, for they knew that he always led
them where the game was plenty. While serving under Parma he had twice
most brilliantly defeated Hohenlo. At the battle of Hardenberg Heath he
had completely outgeneralled that distinguished chieftain, slaying
fifteen hundred of his soldiers at the expense of only fifty or sixty of
his own. By this triumph he had preserved the important city of
Groningen for Philip, during an additional quarter of a century, and had
been received in that city with rapture. Several startling years of
victory and rapine he had thus run through as a royalist partisan. He