For the States did not neglect their favourite little city.  Fleets of transports arrived day after day, week after week, laden with every necessary and even luxury for the use of the garrison.  It was perhaps the cheapest place in all the Netherlands, so great was the abundance.  Capons, bares, partridges, and butcher’s meat were plentiful as blackberries, and good French claret was but two stivers the quart.  Certainly the prospect was not promising of starving the town into a surrender.

But besides all this digging and draining there was an almost daily cannonade.  Her Royal Highness the Infanta was perpetually in camp by the side of her well-beloved Albert, making her appearance there in great state, with eighteen coaches full of ladies of honour, and always manifesting much impatience if she did not hear the guns.

She would frequently touch off a forty-pounder with her own serene fingers in order to encourage the artillerymen, and great was the enthusiasm which such condescension excited.

Assaults, sorties, repulses, ambuscades were also of daily occurrence, and often with very sanguinary results; but it would be almost as idle now to give the details of every encounter that occurred, as to describe the besieging of a snow-fort by schoolboys.

It is impossible not to reflect that a couple of Parrots and a Monitor or two would have terminated the siege in half an hour in favor of either party, and levelled the town or the besiegers’ works as if they had been of pasteboard.

Bucquoy’s dyke was within a thousand yards of the harbour’s entrance, yet the guns on his platform never sank a ship nor killed a man on board, while the archduke’s batteries were even nearer their mark.  Yet it was the most prodigious siege of modern days.  Fifty great guns were in position around the place, and their balls weighed from ten to forty pounds apiece.  It was generally agreed that no such artillery practice had ever occurred before in the world.

For the first six months, and generally throughout the siege, there was fired on an average a thousand of such shots a day.  In the sieges of the American civil war there were sometimes three thousand shots an hour, and from guns compared to which in calibre and power those cannon and demi-cannon were but children’s toys.

Certainly the human arm was of the same length then as now, a pike-thrust was as effective as the stab of the most improved bayonet, and when it came, as it was always the purpose to do, to the close embrace of foemen, the work was done as thoroughly as it could be in this second half of the nineteenth century.

Nevertheless it is impossible not to hope that such progress in science must at last render long wars impossible.  The Dutch war of independence had already lasted nearly forty years.  Had the civil war in America upon the territory of half a continent been waged with the Ostend machinery it might have lasted two centuries.  Something then may have been gained for humanity by giving war such preter-human attributes as to make its demands of gold and blood too exhaustive to become chronic.