enemy were unable to interfere with it in the slightest degree.  During all the march, which lasted until night, we did not lose a hundred stragglers, and carried off all the cannon with the exception of a few pieces.  The enemy passed the night upon the battle-field, in the midst of twenty-five thousand dead, and marched towards Mons the next evening.  They frankly admitted that in men killed and wounded, in general officers and privates, in flags and standards, they had lost more than we.  The battle cost them, in fact, seven lieutenant-generals, five other generals, about eighteen hundred officers killed or wounded, and more than fifteen thousand men killed or rendered unfit for service.  They openly avowed, also, how much they had been surprised by the valour of the majority of our troops, above all of the cavalry, and did not dissimulate that we should have gained the day, had we been better led.

Why the Marechal Villars waited ten days to be attacked in a position so disadvantageous, instead of at once marching upon the enemies and overcoming, as he might at first easily have done, it is difficult to understand.  He threw all the blame upon his wound, although it was well known that the fate of the day was decided long before he was hurt.

Although forced to retire, our men burned with eagerness to engage the enemies again.  Mons had been laid siege to.  Boufflers tried to make the besiegers give up the undertaking.  But his men were without bread and without pay:  the subaltern officers were compelled to eat the regulation bread, the general-officers were reduced to the most miserable shifts, and were like the privates, without pay, oftentimes for seven or eight days running.  There was no meat and no bread for the army.  The common soldiers were reduced to herbs and roots for all sustenance.  Under these circumstances it was found impossible to persevere in trying to save Mons. Nothing but subsistence could be thought of.

The Court had now become so accustomed to defeats that a battle lost as was Malplaquet seemed half a victory.  Boufflers sent a courier to the King with an account of the event, and spoke so favourably of Villars, that all the blame of the defeat fell upon himself.  Villars was everywhere pitied and applauded, although he had lost an important battle:  when it was in his power to beat the enemies in detail, and render them unable to undertake the siege of Mons, or any other siege.  If Boufflers was indignant at this, he was still more indignant at what happened afterwards.  In the first dispatch he sent to the King he promised to send another as soon as possible giving full details, with propositions as to how the vacancies which had occurred in the army might be filled up.  On the very evening he sent off his second dispatch, he received intelligence that the King had already taken his dispositions with respect to these vacancies, without having consulted him upon