On the 2nd April the Polder Ravelin was carried by storm.  It was a most bloody action.  Never were a few square feet of earth more recklessly assailed, more resolutely maintained.  The garrison did not surrender the place, but they all laid down their lives in its defence.  Scarcely an individual of them all escaped, and the foe, who paid dearly with heaps of dead and wounded for his prize, confessed that such serious work as this had scarce been known before in any part of that great slaughter-house, Flanders.

A few days later, Colonel Bievry, provisional commandant, was desperately wounded in a sortie, and was carried off to Zeeland.  The States-General now appointed Jacques van der Meer, Baron of Berendrecht, to the post of honour and of danger.  A noble of Flanders, always devoted to the republican cause; an experienced middle-aged officer, vigilant, energetic, nervous; a slight wiry man, with a wizened little face, large bright eyes, a meagre yellow beard, and thin sandy hair flowing down upon his well-starched ruff, the new governor soon showed himself inferior to none of his predecessors in audacity and alertness.  It is difficult to imagine a more irritating position in many respects than that of commander in such an extraordinary leaguer.  It was not a formal siege.  Famine, which ever impends over an invested place, and sickens the soul with its nameless horrors, was not the great enemy to contend against here.  Nor was there the hideous alternative between starving through obstinate resistance or massacre on submission, which had been the lot of so many Dutch garrisons in the earlier stages of the war.  Retreat by sea was ever open to the Ostend garrison, and there was always an ample supply of the best provisions and of all munitions of war.  But they had been unceasingly exposed to two tremendous enemies.  During each winter and spring the ocean often smote their bastions and bulwarks in an hour of wrath till they fell together like children’s toys, and it was always at work, night and day, steadily lapping at the fragile foundations on which all their structures stood.  Nor was it easy to give the requisite attention to the devouring sea, because all the materials that could be accumulated seemed necessary to repair the hourly damages inflicted by their other restless foe.

Thus the day seemed to draw gradually but inexorably nearer when the place would be, not captured, but consumed.  There was nothing for it, so long as the States were determined to hold the spot, but to meet the besieger at every point, above or below the earth, and sell every inch of that little morsel of space at the highest price that brave men could impose.

So Berendrecht, as vigilant and devoted as even Peter Gieselles had ever been, now succeeded to the care of the Polders and the Porcupines, and the Hell’s Mouths; and all the other forts, whose quaint designations had served, as usually is the case among soldiers, to amuse the honest patriots in the midst of their toils and danger.  On the 18th April, the enemy assailed the great western Ravelin, and after a sanguinary hand-to-hand action, in which great numbers of officers and soldiers were lost on both sides, he carried the fort; the Spaniards, Italians, Germans, and Walloons vieing with each other in deeds of extraordinary daring, and overcoming at last the resistance of the garrison.