“I have sworn to defend this city”

“I have sworn to defend this city” is the central declaration in Ben’s account of Van der Werf’s resistance during a siege. Faced with a starving population urging surrender, the burgomaster answers their plea with a vow to defend the city, making the phrase an expression of resolve under pressure rather than a promise that the danger will soon pass.

The Vow and Its Meaning

The declaration begins with a claim of personal obligation: Van der Werf says that he has sworn to defend the city. He then renews that commitment, invoking God’s help and declaring that he means to fulfill it. The vow gives his refusal a moral and public force; he presents defense not as a choice he can casually withdraw, but as a duty he has undertaken.

His response also meets the people’s hunger with an offer of personal sacrifice. Ben recounts that Van der Werf tells the crowd they may take his body for food, but that they should expect no surrender while he remains alive. In the story, this offer intensifies the vow: the burgomaster places his own life within the crisis without yielding the city to its besiegers.

The Crisis Behind the Words

Ben situates the declaration in a siege that has lasted for months. The city is surrounded, and enemy forts send fire into it. Food has dwindled until the grass between the paving stones is gone and people have resorted to eating animals ordinarily thought inedible. Then plague spreads, with hundreds dying in the streets.

The vow comes at the crisis’s public turning point. When the people can endure no more, they crowd around Van der Werf in the public square and beg him to surrender. His words answer that collective appeal directly: the population’s exhaustion is acknowledged, but it does not alter his stated commitment to resist.

Ben’s Retelling

The vow reaches the reader through Ben, who recounts it with patriotic excitement to his companions. He emphasizes the besieged city’s suffering and the refusal to give in, then tries to lead a cheer for Van der Werf. Lambert warns him that cheering in the street at midday could attract the police, and when Ben persists, Lambert playfully covers his mouth. The moment shifts from historical crisis to an exuberant exchange among the boys, while showing how the remembered declaration still stirs Ben.

Ben’s account makes the vow memorable by setting the burgomaster’s steadfastness against the people’s desperation. The words do not resolve the siege within this passage; their force lies in the uncompromising duty they express and in the sacrifice Van der Werf is willing to place behind it.