Guts & Glory--The Vikings by Ben Thompson
Author:Ben Thompson [Thompson, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Nonfiction / Adventure & Adventurers, Juvenile Nonfiction / History / Ancient, Juvenile Nonfiction / History / Europe, Juvenile Nonfiction / History / Exploration & Discovery, Juvenile Nonfiction / Biography & Autobiography / Historical
Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
Published: 2015-06-09T00:00:00+00:00
That night, Count Odo and Bishop Joscelyn ran through the streets of Paris, rallying the citizens to their aid. Teams of Parisian men and women ran to the walls, working from dusk to dawn to repair the damage done by the Vikings during the day, while the exhausted warriors rested and tended to their wounds.
When the Vikings awoke the following morning, not only was the bridge tower as good as new, but the Parisians had added another level to it during the night, making it that much tougher to climb and that much easier to defend.
The none-too-discouraged Vikings attempted a second attack, trying to break through the bridge by setting fire to their own boats and crashing them into the mighty gate that crossed the river, but still the defenses held. As eight-hundred-pound catapult and trebuchet boulders rained overhead, Viking teams carrying a huge iron-plated battering ram tried to force the gates to the tower, but once again the count and his men repulsed them, this time by racing to the breaches in the wall and fighting the Vikings off face-to-face. At one point, a Paris ballista (basically, a truck-sized crossbow) fired a huge arrow into the breach. It impaled seven Vikings in a single shot as they all tried to climb through a small hole in the wall.
Thrown back twice, with heavy casualties, the Vikings decided, “Hey, maybe we should stop running at the arrows and burning oil and just lay siege to the city.” They surrounded Paris, cut off access to the roads, and settled in to starve the population into submission. For two months the Vikings waited, letting supply shortages and disease eat away at the battered defenders. Even worse, nasty flooding in January caused the bridge to fail, breaking open access to the Seine and forcing the Parisian defenders to fall back to the city walls. The Vikings tried one more attack on the city itself but were again thrown back by crossbows, arrows, and civilians pitching everything from rocks to household items down from the walls onto the approaching Danes.
The Vikings maintained the siege for another six months but still could not get the stubborn people of Paris to just open the stupid doors and let them come in and murder everyone. The Vikings tried filling in the moat with straw, dead animals, and lumber, but every night the Parisians threw the junk out of there. The invaders tried digging tunnels underneath the city, hoping to bring down the walls, but that didn’t work, either.
While all this was going on, people from both sides started flocking to Paris to get in on the action. A few Frankish noblemen launched attacks to try to drive the Vikings off, none of which were successful, and while some Vikings (including Sigfried himself) got bored and went home, many more showed up to reinforce their ranks. With the food supply of the city rapidly going away, and terrible living conditions bringing about a host of killer diseases like malaria
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