Killing the chaplain

He saw a young chaplain of the Order stumble from the smoke, his arms cartwheeling and his habit filthy and torn, as if he’d recently burrowed out from the rubble of Castile. His face was bloodied and contorted with the absolute conviction that only extreme fear, and states of religious ecstasy, may confer. In his case perhaps both ingredients were at work for he stopped a hundred feet away, framed by the gaudy Moslem pageant just behind him, and raised his hands aloft to deliver a crazed jeremiad, fragments of which reached Tannhauser’s ears through the din.

“Lost! We are all of us lost! God has turned His face against us! The harvest is over, the summer has ended, and we are not saved! Retreat and make your peace with Christ!”

Such claptrap coming from a priest was worth a fresh battalion of Sipahis to Piyale. The morale of the Spanish soldiery and the peasant militia had been fragile ever since their maestro de campo, Don Melchior De Robles, had been shot in the head on the twelfth. Sure enough the advancing pikemen stopped and wavered in confusion. They stole looks at one another, deaf to the provost sergeant’s roars, and found little comfort in what they saw. They found even less in the bloody duel for the breach or in the ululating horde trampling over the corpses of their comrades just beyond. They shifted about like leaves in a wind and teetered on the verge of rout. Tannhauser scowled and threw down on the raving chaplain and shot him square through the cross spanning his chest. The chaplain’s fingers almost touched his toes as he left the ground and he vanished back into the fog from whence he’d emerged.
-TR, pg. 557-558