Shooting Stars by Stefan Zweig Read Free Book Online

up the roads behind it and leaves them in a ruinous state for months. Fifty pairs of oxen are harnessed to the convoy of wagons, and the gigantic metal tube lies on their axles with its load evenly distributed, in the same way as the obelisk was brought from Egypt to Rome in the past. Two hundred men constantly support the gun on right and left as it sways with its own weight, while at the same time fifty carters and carpenters are kept at work without a break to change and oil the wooden rollers under it, to reinforce the supports and to build bridges. All involved understand that this huge caravan can make its way forward through the steppes and the mountains only gradually, step by step, as slowly as the oxen trot. The astonished peasants come out of their villages and cross themselves at the sight of the metal monster being brought, like a god of war escorted by its servants and priests,from one land to another. But soon its metal brothers, cast like the first in an original clay mould, are dragged along after it. Once again, human will-power has made the impossible possible. The round black muzzles of twenty or thirty such monsters are already pointing, gaping wide, at Byzantium; heavy artillery has made its first appearance into the history of war, and a duel begins between the 1,000-year-old walls of the emperors of eastern Rome and the new Sultan’s new cannon.
THE ONLY HOPE
    Slowly, laboriously, but irresistibly the mammoth cannon crush and grind the walls of Byzantium, their mouths flashing as they bite into it. At first each can fire only six or seven shots a day, but every day the Sultan brings up more of them, and with each hit another breach, accompanied by clouds of dust and rubble, is made in the stonework. It is true that by night the besieged citizens mend the gaps with increasingly makeshift wooden palisades and stop them up with bales of linen, but they are now not fighting behind the old impregnable walls, which had been hard as iron, and the 8,000 within those walls think with dread of the crucial hour when Mahomet’s 150,000 men will mount their final attack on the already impaired fortifications. It is time, high time, for Europe and Christendom to remember their promise. Throngs of women with their children are on their knees all day in front of the shrines full of relics in the churches, soldiersare on the look-out from the watchtowers day and night to see whether the promised papal and Venetian reinforcement fleet will appear at last in the Sea of Marmara, swarming now with Turkish ships.
    Finally, at three in the morning on 20th April, a signal flare goes up. Sails have been sighted in the distance—not the mighty Christian fleet that Byzantium had dreamt of, but all the same three large Genoese vessels are coming up slowly with the wind behind them. They are followed by a fourth, smaller, Byzantine grain ship that the three larger vessels have placed in their midst for protection. At once the whole of Constantinople gathers enthusiastically by the ramparts on the banks of the Bosporus to greet these reinforcements. But at the same time Mahomet flings himself on his horse and gallops as fast as he can from his crimson tent down to the harbour, where the Turkish fleet lies at anchor, and gives orders for the ships to be prevented at any cost from running into the Golden Horn, the harbour of Byzantium.
    The Turkish fleet numbers 150 ships, although they are smaller vessels, and at once thousands of oars dip splashing into the sea. With grappling hooks, flamethrowers and sling-stones those 150 caravels work their way towards the four galleons, but the four mighty ships, driven on fast by the wind, overtake and pass the Turkish boats spitting out missiles and shouting at the enemy. Majestically, with round sails swelling broadly and ignoring their attackers, the four steer towards the safe harbour of the Golden Horn, where the famous chain stretched across it from Stamboul to Galata is supposed to