And the successes with which the French began the campaign of 1708 served to give strength to these reports of treason, which were in everybody’s mouth.  Our general allowed the enemy to get between us and Ghent, and declined to attack him, though for eight and forty hours the armies were in presence of each other.  Ghent was taken, and on the same day Monsieur de la Mothe summoned Bruges; and these two great cities fell into the hands of the French without firing a shot.  A few days afterwards La Mothe seized upon the fort of Plashendall:  and it began to be supposed that all Spanish Flanders, as well as Brabant, would fall into the hands of the French troops; when the Prince Eugene arrived from the Mozelle, and then there was no more shilly-shallying.

The Prince of Savoy always signalized his arrival at the army by a great feast (my Lord Duke’s entertainments were both seldom and shabby):  and I remember our general returning from this dinner with the two commanders-in-chief; his honest head a little excited by wine, which was dealt out much more liberally by the Austrian than by the English commander:—­“Now,” says my general, slapping the table, with an oath, “he must fight; and when he is forced to it, d—–­ it, no man in Europe can stand up against Jack Churchill.”  Within a week the battle of Oudenarde was fought, when, hate each other as they might, Esmond’s general and the Commander-in-Chief were forced to admire each other, so splendid was the gallantry of each upon this day.

The brigade commanded by Major-General Webb gave and received about as hard knocks as any that were delivered in that action, in which Mr. Esmond had the fortune to serve at the head of his own company in his regiment, under the command of their own Colonel as Major-General; and it was his good luck to bring the regiment out of action as commander of it, the four senior officers above him being killed in the prodigious slaughter which happened on that day.  I like to think that Jack Haythorn, who sneered at me for being a bastard and a parasite of Webb’s, as he chose to call me, and with whom I had had words, shook hands with me the day before the battle began.  Three days before, poor Brace, our Lieutenant-Colonel, had heard of his elder brother’s death, and was heir to a baronetcy in Norfolk, and four thousand a year.  Fate, that had left him harmless through a dozen campaigns, seized on him just as the world was worth living for, and he went into action knowing, as he said, that the luck was going to turn against him.  The Major had just joined us—­a creature of Lord Marlborough, put in much to the dislike of the other officers, and to be a spy upon us, as it was said.  I know not whether the truth was so, nor who took the tattle of our mess to headquarters, but Webb’s regiment, as its Colonel, was known to be in the Commander-in-Chief’s black books:  “And if he did not dare to break it up at home,” our gallant old chief used to say, “he was determined to destroy it before the enemy;” so that poor Major Proudfoot was put into a post of danger.