how he rallied one corps which seemed to be shrinking; “That is not the way to fight, gentlemen.  You must stand close up to them.  Thus, gentlemen, thus.”  “You might have seen him,” an eyewitness wrote, only four days after the battle, “with his sword in his hand, throwing himself upon the enemy.  It is certain that one time, among the rest, he was seen at the head of two English regiments, and that he fought seven with these two in sight of the whole army, driving them before him above a quarter of an hour.  Thanks be to God that preserved him.”  The enemy pressed on him so close that it was with difficulty that he at length made his way over the Gette.  A small body of brave men, who shared his peril to the last, could hardly keep off the pursuers as he crossed the bridge.447

Never, perhaps, was the change which the progress of civilisation has produced in the art of war more strikingly illustrated than on that day.  Ajax beating down the Trojan leader with a rock which two ordinary men could scarcely lift, Horatius defending the bridge against an army, Richard the Lionhearted spurring along the whole Saracen line without finding an enemy to stand his assault, Robert Bruce crushing with one blow the helmet and head of Sir Henry Bohun in sight of the whole array of England and Scotland, such are the heroes of a dark age.  In such an age bodily vigour is the most indispensable qualification of a warrior.  At Landen two poor sickly beings, who, in a rude state of society, would have been regarded as too puny to bear any part in combats, were the souls of two great armies.  In some heathen countries they would have been exposed while infants.  In Christendom they would, six hundred years earlier, have been sent to some quiet cloister.  But their lot had fallen on a time when men had discovered that the strength of the muscles is far inferior in value to the strength of the mind.  It is probable that, among the hundred and twenty thousand soldiers who were marshalled round Neerwinden under all the standards of Western Europe, the two feeblest in body were the hunchbacked dwarf who urged forward the fiery onset of France, and the asthmatic skeleton who covered the slow retreat of England.

The French were victorious; but they had bought their victory dear.  More than ten thousand of the best troops of Lewis had fallen.  Neerwinden was a spectacle at which the oldest soldiers stood aghast.  The streets were piled breast high with corpses.  Among the slain were some great lords and some renowned warriors.  Montchevreuil was there, and the mutilated trunk of the Duke of Uzes, first in order of precedence among the whole aristocracy of France.  Thence too Sarsfield was borne desperately wounded to a pallet from which he never rose again.  The Court of Saint Germains had conferred on him the empty title of Earl of Lucan; but history knows him by the name which is still dear to the most unfortunate of nations.  The region, renowned in history as the battle field,