In modern days, the number of old generals who have gained great battles is large, far larger than the number of young generals of the highest class.  The French claim to be the first of military peoples, and though no other nation has been so badly beaten in battles, or so completely crushed in campaigns, there is a general disposition to admit their claim; and many of their best commanders were old men.  Bertrand du Gueselin performed his best deeds against the English after he was fifty, and he was upward of sixty years when the commandant of Randon laid the keys of his fortress on his body, surrendering, not to the living, but to the dead.  Turenne was ever great, but it is admitted that his three last campaigns, begun when he was sixty-two, were his greatest performances.  Conde’s victory at Rocroi was a most brilliant deed, he being then but twenty-two; but it does not so strikingly illustrate his genius as do those operations by which, at fifty-four, he baffled Montecuculi, and prevented him from profiting from the fall of Turenne.  Said Conde to one of his officers, “How much I wish that I could have conversed only two hours with the ghost of Monsieur de Turenne, so as to be able to follow the scope of his ideas!” In these days, generals can have as much ghostly talk as they please, but the privilege would not seem to be much used, or it is not useful, for they do nothing that is of consequence sufficient to be attributed to supernatural power.  Luxembourg was sixty-two when he defeated Prince Waldeck at Fleurus; and at sixty-four and sixty-five he defeated William III. at Steinkirk and Landen.  Vendome was fifty-one when he defeated Eugene at Cassano; and at fifty-six he won the eventful Battle of Villaviciosa, to which the Spanish Bourbons owe their throne.  Villars, who fought the terrible Battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugene, was then fifty-six years old; and he had more than once baffled those commanders.  At sixty he defeated Eugene, and by his successes enabled France to conclude honorably a most disastrous war.  The Comte de Saxe was in his forty-ninth year when he gained the Battle of Fontenoy;[C] and later he won other successes.  Rochambeau was in his fifty-seventh year when he acted with Washington at Yorktown, in a campaign that established our existence as a nation.

The Spanish army of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the date of the Battle of Rocroi, stood very high.  Several of its best generals were old men.  Gonsalvo de Cordova, “the Great Captain,” who may be considered the father of the famous Spanish infantry, was fifty when he completed his Italian conquests; and nine years later he was again called to the head of the Spaniards in Italy, but the King of Aragon’s jealousy prevented him from going to that country.  Alva was about sixty when he went to the Netherlands, on his awful mission; and it must be allowed that he was as great in the field as he was detestably cruel.  At seventy-four