“ We are told how, at a critical moment in the great battle of Sempach, when the Swiss had failed to break the serried ranks of the Austrian knights, a man of Unterwalden, Arnold von Winkelried by name, came to the rescue. Commending his wife and children to the care of his comrades, he rushed towards the Austrians, gathered a number of their spears together against his breast, and fell pierced through and through, having opened a way into the hostile ranks for his fellow-countrymen, though at the price of his own life. ”

“ Herr Hartmann, too, points out that, even if the knights (on foot) had been ranged in serried ranks, there must have been sufficient space left between them to allow them to move their arms, and therefore that no man, however gigantic he might have been, could have seized hold of more than half a dozen spears at once.
Herr K. Bürkli (Der wahre Winkelried,—die Taktik der alten Urschweizer, Zürich, 1886) has put forth a theory of the battle which is, he allows, opposed to all modern accounts, but entirely agrees, he strongly maintains, with the contemporary authorities. ”

“ This began the lively paper war humorously called "the second war of Sempach," in which the Swiss (with but rare exceptions) maintained the historical character of the feat against various foreigners—Austrians and others.
Most of the arguments against the genuineness of the story have been already more or less directly indicated, (1) There is the total silence of all the old Swiss and Austrian chroniclers until 1538, with the solitary exception of the Zurich chronicle of 1476 (and this while they nearly all describe the battle in more or less detail) . ”