a.

Yet military knowledge has its limitations, when it fails to take into
account the power of enthusiasm. Blind zeal is a force whose
possibilities a general does not always estimate. It is capable of
performing miracles, as Hunyades was to learn. His orders, his threats
of death, had no restraining effect on the minds of the crusaders. They
had come to save Europe from the Turks, and they were not to be stayed
by orders or threats. What though the enemy greatly outnumbered them,
and had cannons and scimitars against their pikes and flails, had they
not God on their side, and should God's army pause to consider numbers
and cannon-balls? They were not to be restrained; attack they would, and
attack they did.

The siege had made great progress. The reinforcement had come barely in
time. The walls were crumbling under the incessant bombardment.
Convinced that he had made a practicable breach, Mahomet, the sultan,
ordered an assault in force. The Turks advanced, full of barbarian
courage, climbed the crumbled walls, and broke, as they supposed, into
the town, only to find new walls frowning before them. The vigorous
garrison had built new defences behind the old ones, and the
disheartened assailants learned that they had done their work in vain.

This repulse greatly discouraged the sultan. He was still more
discouraged when the crusaders, irrepressible in their hot enthusiasm,
broke from the city and made a fierce attack upon his works. Capistrano,
seeing that they were not to be restrained, put himself at their head,
and with a stick in one hand and a crucifix in the other, led them to
the assault. It proved an irresistible one. The Turks could not sustain
themselves against these flail-swinging peasants. One intrenchment after
another fell into their hands, until three had been stormed and taken.
Their success inspired Hunyades. Filled with a new respect for his
peasant allies, and seeing that now or never was the time to strike, he
came to their aid with his cavalry, and fell so suddenly and violently
upon the Turkish rear that the invaders were put to rout.

Onward pushed the crusaders and their allies; backward went the Turks.
The remaining intrenchments were stubbornly defended, but that storm of
iron flails, those pikes and pitchforks, wielded by the zeal of
enthusiasts, were not to be resisted, and in the end all that remained
of the Turkish army broke into panic flight, the sultan himself being
wounded, and