retreat was very difficult; for, whenever he attempted to halt even for a moment, they fired heavily at his troops. He was unable to oppose them, and so marched on till nightfall; he did this that they might not observe where he encamped and fire at his troops; and he allowed no fires to be lit in his army. They [the Hungarians] rode round his army, but having nothing to which to tie their horses they had to go to the neighbouring villages, and that at some distance, to be safe from him [Žižka]. Then, having rested as he thought fit, he marched on the next day to a lake near a hill. He here took up a position so that one flank of his army touched the lake, and the other was placed under the hill for the reason that they should overshoot themselves, if they wanted to shoot at his troops. He himself acted thus: he took the fodder-carts, and had them driven up to this height, and he made out of them at the front gate a bastion and another one at the back;[1] and he threw up entrenchments here, and having done this placed his guns on the bastions; and he never allowed them [the Hungarians] to remain on these heights.[2], Thus he remained safely encamped here on that day and the following night. Then on the third day he marched from the lake to another stream which flows in the direction of Narhid,[3] and encamped near this river; and here he greatly feared an attack while his men were crossing the river. During the whole night he ordered the wagons from one bank of the river to the other to be secured by trenches,[4] surrounded them with ditches to enable his soldiers to resist and on the other side of the stream he placed fodder-carts and a sudden attack of cavalry. He gave orders that the ground
- ↑ That is to say, at the two gates of his camp, at the two extremities of the slopes of the hill.
- ↑ Žižka’s fortifications commanded the ridge and the slopes of the hill. The enemies, therefore, could not establish themselves there and disturb him. They could not with any result fire at the hill, as Žižka’s camp was on the opposite side, and they would, therefore, have overshot themselves.
- ↑ According to Professor Tomek’s Jan Žižka this was the river Nitra.
- ↑ As Dr. Toman suggests, this necessarily means that Žižka had ditches dug from the bank of the river at the left end of his lager to the right end.
