CONTENTS
The cabbages are coming
Author: Jones Roger (b.1939)
Year: n.a.
Another virtue of dungheaps, not mentioned by Puhvogel, is the gratifying and lenitive warmth they can provide, eg, to frost-numbed feet on a winter's day. In this connection, students of mediaeval history will recall what befell the dwarfish but feisty Breton hero Bertrand du Guesclin at the siege of Melun in 1359. Advancing manfully to the assault, Bertrand was half-way up a scaling ladder when a well-aimed herring-barrel full of stones landed on his head and sent him flying. He finished upside-down in the moat and "thus he tarried awhile with his two feet in the air" until dragged out unconscious and half-drowned. "So stunned was he that he knew not where he was; sooth to say, he seemed more dead than alive. Forth from thence they bore him by main force, and laid him for his comfort within a warm dung-heap, until he came to himself again and stretched his limbs, and asked aloud of those who kept him: 'Lordings, what vile devil hath brought me hither? Is our assault come to naught? We must hasten to the front!'... Lightly rose he then from his dung-heap to join in the assault." (Cuvelier, tr. Coulton)
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