exhausted and reduced, to pursue them in force. They passed the Honeau at Audrignies and Quevrain, where a brigade of their infantry was posted. In the course of the night they traversed the Ronelle, and gradually re-assembled at a camp between Quesnoy and Valenciennes. This has been justly considered as a masterly retreat, and was applauded by Eugene and Marlborough.

The allied forces, exhausted with fatigue, halted near the field of battle on the plain, stretching from Malplaquet beyond Taisniere. The engagement being so desperate, and little quarter given on either side, not more than 500 prisoners were taken by the allies, except those who were left wounded on the field, and who amounted to about three thousand. Few cannon or colours were captured, and the victory was only manifested by the retreat of the French, and the subsequent investment of Mons.

The respective losses in this desperate engagement have been, as usual, erroneously stated. Villars, with his wonted exaggeration, estimates the number of killed and wounded at 35,000 on the side of the allies. The official accounts, however, return, of infantry alone, 5,544 killed, and 12,706 wounded and missing, making a total of 18,250; and among these 286 officers killed, 762 wounded. But when we take into account the loss of the cavalry, and consider the obstinate resistance of the French behind their intrenchments, we may conclude that the killed and wounded on the side of the confederates did not fall short of 20,000 men.

Of course the French endeavour to extenuate their loss. In one of his letters to the king, Villars limits it to 6,000 men,* and the highest estimate by other French writers gives only 8,137 killed, wounded, and prisoners; but from a comparison of their own authorities, we may reasonably calculate their loss at not less than 14,000 men, exclusive of deserters.

*We quote this passage from the valiant and skilful, but gasconading marshal: "Si Dieu nous fait la grace de perdre encore une pareille bataille, votre majesté peut compter que ses ennemis sont detruits enfin comme me le manda M. de Voisin, ce qui avoit paru une bataille perdue, devint une victoire glorieuse, apres qu'on en ent connu les circonstances; puisque nous ne perdimes pas six mille hommes."-Mem. de Villars.

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By all the accounts, both of themselves and their opponents, the French displayed prodigious gallantry, and Marlborough himself allows that they fought with great spirit, and made a most obstinate resistance. Though we cannot say with Villars, that "the enemy would have been annihilated by such another victory," or with Boufflers, "that the French officers performed such wonders as even surpassed human nature," yet we do not wish to derogate from their valour and intrepidity. Nor ought we, on the other hand, to withhold a candid eulogium of the two confederate generals, and of the brave troops who acted under them, extracted from the letter of a French officer of distinction, written soon after the battle. "The Eugenes and Marlboroughs ought to be well satisfied with us during that day; since, till then, they had not met with resistance worthy of them. They may say with justice, that nothing can stand before them; and, indeed, what shall be able to stem the rapid course of these two heroes, if an army of 100,000 of the best troops, posted between two woods, trebly intrenched, and performing their duty as well as any brave men could do, were not able to stop them one day? Will you not, then, own with me, that they surpass all the heroes of former ages? "*

It must always be borne in mind that the French fought within an intrenched camp, partially covered by thick woods. Had the combat taken place in a fair and open field it would assuredly not have lasted one-half of the time, nor have cost the allies one-fourth of their heavy loss. Entrenchments, if steadily defended, are not to be carried without great sacrifices in killed and wounded. Such an attack resembles storming at a siege, where the loss of the assailants as compared with that of the assailed, is generally estimated as more than three to one. Many of the French officers boasted that, seeing how much the allied forces were reduced, they might have returned in a day or two and have won a battle. Why then did they not return and try?

* Archdeacon Coxe. Memoirs of Marlborough.

ALMANZA.

A. D. 1707. Easter Sunday, April 25.

THIS battle, fought upon Spanish ground, ended in one of the most memorable defeats that a British army has ever sustained in the field. Almanza and Dettingen are, indeed, considered, by an eminent military writer, the only two battles in which an English army has been fairly beaten from its ground by sheer fighting.*

Our native forces in Spain, during the war of the Succession, though always inconsiderable in numbers, had scattered the Spanish troops, who took part with the French, whereever they had met them; and they had beaten the French troops themselves in nearly every encounter. The sieges and short campaigns of the Earl of Peterborough read to this day like a romance of war. But Peterborough, with brilliant valour and wit, and other high qualities, was not the man to carry an extensive, lengthened contest to a successful issue; for he was vainglorious, impatient, much given to intrigue, and wofully wanting in discretion. After shining for a season, like an eccentric meteor, he had disappeared from that country, and had left some noxious exhalations behind him. He had quarrelled with the Austrian Archduke Charles, who was claiming the Spanish succession; he had quarrelled with all the German ministers and generals; and, in fact, with the leading men of all our allies in Spain. His loud talk, his witty sayings, and keen sarcasm, had indisposed the minds of our officers and soldiers, not only towards the foreign commanders, with whose troops they were acting, but also towards Lord Galway, and the other generals, who commanded after his own departure. Peterborough had set them all down as asses-as blunderers-who Lieutenant-Colonel Mitchell. "Fall of Bonaparte."

would be sure to lead the allied army to destruction. When the minds of soldiers are haunted by such a belief, a catastrophe may safely be anticipated. Lord Galway, moreover, though a brave man and stout soldier, bearing on his person the marks of the wounds he had received in fighting our battles, had the disadvantage (with our soldiery) of not being a born Englishman. He was one of the foreign generals brought over to our country by William III., who had raised him to the English peerage for his faithful services in Ireland, and in the Low Countries. He was far advanced in years; but older men than he, with a proper spirit in their troops, have fought good battles. But one of Peterborough's jokes, which ran through the army, was, "That men were great fools to fight at all for two such blockheads as the Austrian Charles and the Bourbon Philip."

In the preceding year (1706), Galway, moving from the Portuguese frontier, with his united army of English and Portuguese, had taken possession of Madrid. But the Bourbon prince, rallying upon the frontier, and receiving great reinforcements from France, turned back upon the Spanish capital, and compelled Galway to evacuate it. The retreat to the frontiers of Portugal must have been conducted with great skill; for, although the French, in far superior force, followed Galway, his army received no damage from them.

It had been resolved, in the preceding winter, that the allies should unite all their forces in the spring of 1707, and march again to Madrid by the way of Aragon. But the Archduke Charles was deterred by intelligence of the great reinforcements that had joined, or were to join, his rival, Philip; and, instead of remaining with the main army, he marched away, with some strong detachments, into Catalonia, in order to defend that province, which seemed really and steadily attached to his cause, against an attack which the French threatened from the side of Roussillon. Charles proposed that Lord Galway, with the English and Dutch troops, and the Marquis Das Minas, with the Portuguese,

* His name was Rouvigny. He descended from a French Protestant family who had been driven from their country by the intolerance of Louis XIV. In 1705, when advancing into Spain with an English and Portuguese army, he had lost a hand at the siege of Badajoz.

should dispose their forces so as to cover the frontiers of Aragon and Valencia, remaining on the defensive till fresh troops and supplies should arrive from England, or from Italy.

But Galway and Das Minas would not act upon the Archduke's plan-very probably they could not, with safety to themselves, adopt it; they were badly supplied in all respects, and the frontier line allotted to them offered little for the subsistence of the troops. Tempted by the easy prey of some of the enemy's magazines, they marched to the frontiers of Castile. Then they turned, and laid siege to the town of Villena, in Valencia. Before they could make a breach in those walls, they were warned of the approach, by forced marches, of the redoubtable nephew of Marlborough, the quick-marching, skilful, and hard-fighting Duke of Berwick.

[Thus, in one of our two signal defeats, the commander of the hostile force was an Englishman, and the son of an English prince, who had afterwards worn the crown as James II.]

Galway and Das Minas raised the siege of Villena, and boldly advanced to meet Berwick. They met on the plain of Almanza, on Easter Sunday, the 24th of April (N. S.), and one of the hardest fought battles of this war was the consequence.

The English, Dutch, and Portuguese, commanded by Galway and Das Minas, were far inferior in number to the French and Spaniards; they were deficient in cavalry, and and what they had was not good; but the English and Dutch infantry kept the battle undecided for six sanguinary hours. According to Berwick's own account, his horse were repeatedly repulsed by those steady columns of foot-charge after charge was ineffectual, and, even when the French and Spaniards seemed victorious on both wings, their centre was cut through and broken, and the main body of their infantry completely beaten. But in the end victory remained with Berwick; Galway and Das Minas were both wounded, 5,000 of their men were killed, and, in the course of that and the following day, nearly all the rest of their little army, to escape starvation, surrendered. The victory of Almanza was, indeed, complete. Without any force to oppose him, and with fresh reinforcements, brought up by the Duke of Orleans, Berwick