tempt to ascend the Moselle, was awakened from a dream of a march through France, his recent victories had now brought him to the beginning at least of such a march as a sequence of cause and effect. Surely it must have touched him with some troubled thoughts that he might thus meet in battle his mighty nephew; but nothing could be more brief or appropriate to business than the words to his kinsman Godolphin, showing that this other kinsman is close at hand on the war-path. The French talk of taking another detachment from the Rhine, though this "that the Duke of Berwick has brought consists of fifty-three squadrons and fifty-four battalions. He has been obliged to put some of his troops into Lille and Tournai, and is encamped with the rest at Douai." 1

Vendôme had collected and organised the residue of his beaten army, and if Marlborough penetrated into France, might be troublesome in his rear. Marlborough himself, indeed, seemed to have no doubt that the true course was to march right into France, where there was much panic and little military protection outside the fortified towns; but when his partner, Eugene, doubted this, he dropped it as an immediate project. But he was making preparation. On the 23d of July he writes to Godolphin: "We continue still under the great difficulty of getting cannon; for whilst the French continue at Ghent, we can make no use of the Scheldt and Lys, which are the only two rivers that can be of use to us in this country. We have ordered twenty battering pieces to be brought to us from Maastricht, and we have

1 Coxe, iv. 167.

taken measures for sixty more to be brought from Holland. The calculation of the number of draughthorses to draw this artillery amounts to 16,000 horses, by which you will see the difficulties we meet with; but we hope to overcome them. In the meantime we send daily parties into France, which occasion great terror." 1 He was convinced, however,

that the French frontier felt itself secure in the belief of the impossibility of supplying the artillery required for an invasion.

There was now something like an inversion of the local position of the hostile parties, and of the opportunities and the perils peculiar to each. Vendôme, though beaten, was yet at the head of a force that might be formidable towards the Netherlands if Marlborough and his force were absent. But then

these had passed him on the road to France, and they could enter on "the sacred soil" with little opposition. What should the conqueror do? - remain where he was to guard his conquests in the Netherlands ? or take the opportunity to march into undefended France, and, evading the fortified towns, pass inward as far as he could-possibly to unfortified Paris? Marlborough seemed to have dreamed of a march through France when he was stopped on the Moselle by the strong works at Sierck. The march to Paris seemed now borne in on him with greater distinctness and force. The Dutch were dead against it, but them he might shake off if he had the approval -it were still better if he had the fellowship and co-operation-of Eugene.

Eugene was within reach at Brussels, and they

1 Coxe, iv. 165.

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came together on the 24th of July. Marlborough spoke of the march into France as an earnest desire" in consulting his comrade. He tells the result to Godolphin. "He thinks it impossible till we have Lille as a place d'armes and magazine, and then he thinks we may make a very great inroad, but not be able to winter--though we might be helped by the fleet-unless we were masters of some fortified town."1 It soon became a practical argument against the march through France that Berwick had joined Vendôme, and there was thus an army of 100,000 men to follow on the heels of the invaders.

There was now to be a great resuscitation of the war to the grandeur and excitement of four years earlier. The depressing war in Spain, and the affair of Toulon, had given a tone of lethargy to those who remembered the astounding news of the Schellenberg and Blenheim. If France could throw the vast power of her long-treasured warlike resources into the beginning of the war, there was yet enough, if it were thrust to the front without hesitation or remorse, to astonish the world, though it were with a dying effort.

Marlborough was as usual calm and inscrutable. Whether he was to besiege Lille or march past it— masking it, as the phrase is, on his way to Paris-no man who might betray the secret could tell. Fortune had become for a time kind to the French. The Dutch rule had grown offensive to the Flemish citizens. In Ghent and Bruges they courted and obtained deliverance by secretly giving admission to French troops. While accident restored to the French these towns, they had at hand an army of 1 Coxe, iv. 137.

close on 100,000 men. Their enemy must get a vast accession of artillery and other munitions whichever of the great alternatives he took; and two commanders-perhaps the next after Marlborough himself in thoroughly justified repute-had their large force between him and the needed supplies, for they held the great channel or water - passage through the Netherlands.

Marlborough did what no one but a commander not only of vast strategic and general technical capacity, but with unlimited wealth at his command, could do. He organised a new traffic communication by land, and defended it so effectively that all his supplies reached him. The method of the organisation for the carriage of the supplies was characteristic of its author. There was no minute planning for small enterprises-some successful, others not, with a history of petty details of personal peril and adventure. The whole was accomplished by the defying march of an armed convoy in the presence of the enemy. There were 16,000 horses in the train, and it was fifteen miles long. The affair drew notes of admiration from the French military critic Fouquières. As his criticisms have generally been severe on his own countrymen they have been translated into English, and what he says to the present point is: "The Duke of Vendôme had formed a great circle round Lille with his powerful army. He imagined that as the enemies were in the centre of this immense circle they would be unable to accommodate themselves with provisions for such a length of time as the defence of Lille might be continued." He has some excuse for the difficulty in believing that "it

was in the power of the enemy to convey to Lille all that was necessary for the siege and supplies of the army; to conduct there all the artillery and implements essential for such an undertaking; and that those immense burdens should be transported by land over a line of twenty-three leagues under the eyes of an army of 80,000 men lying on the flank of the prodigious convoy, which extended over five leagues of road."1

It did not suffice for the protection of the honour of France at this moment of peril that Berwick and Vendôme, each with a powerful force, were at hand. When it was first seen that Lille might be the critical point there was yet time to throw in reinforcements, and they were brought by the illustrious commander to whom the defence, if there were an attack, was committed the Maréchal Boufflers. While yet in possession of the fortified city, with the armies under Berwick and Vendôme at hand, the French had an open path for reinforcements and supplies from all parts of the interior of France.

There was thus a great army of support, and it was a serious question how, in pursuance of the grand design, it should be treated. In one sense the Court of France had decided the question by orders to Vendôme and Berwick to fight the force accumulated before Lille in regular battle; but Vendôme was too sagacious to obey this order, and fell on his responsibility as commander in face of an enemy. Marlborough, on the other hand, seems to have felt a strong impulse to fight and drive away this hovering force, but on full reflection over the whole he judged

1 Memoirs, i. 375.