The troops under Capizucca and Aquila soon reached the Palisade, and attacked the besiegers, while the garrison, cheered by the unexpected relief, made a vigorous sortie.  There was a brief sharp contest, in which many were killed on both sides; but at last the patriots fell back upon their own entrenchments, and the fort was saved.  Its name was instantly changed to Fort Victory, and the royalists then prepared to charge the fortified camp of the rebels, in the centre of which the dyke-cutting operations were still in progress.  At the same moment, from the opposite end of the bulwark, a cry was heard along the whole line of the dyke.  From Fort Holy Cross, at the Scheldt end, the welcome intelligence was suddenly communicated—­as if by a magnetic impulse—­that Alexander was in the field!

It was true.  Having been up half the night, as usual, keeping watch along his bridge, where he was ever expecting a fatal attack, he had retired for a few hours’ rest in his camp at Beveren.  Aroused at day-break by the roar of the cannon, he had hastily thrown on his armour, mounted his horse, and, at the head of two hundred pikemen, set forth for the scene of action.  Detained on the bridge by a detachment of the Antwerp fleet, which had been ordered to make a diversion in that quarter, he had, after beating off their vessels with his boat-artillery, and charging Count Charles Mansfeld to heed well the brief injunction of old Peter Ernest, made all the haste he could to the Kowenstyn.  Arriving at Fort Holy Cross, he learned from Mondragon how the day was going.  Three thousand rebels, he learned, were established on the dyke, Fort Palisade was tottering, a fleet from both sides was cannonading the Spanish entrenchments, the salt water was flowing across the breach already made.  His seven months’ work, it seemed, had come to nought.  The navigation was already open from the sea to Antwerp, the Lowenstyn was in the rebels’ hands.  But Alexander was not prone to premature despair.  “I arrived,” said he to Philip in a letter written on the same evening, “at the very nick of time.”  A less hopeful person might have thought that he had arrived several hours too late.  Having brought with him every man that could be spared from Beveren and from the bridge, he now ordered Camillo del Monte to transport some additional pieces of artillery from Holy Cross and from Saint James to Fort Saint Georg.  At the same time a sharp cannonade was to be maintained upon the rebel fleet from all the forts.

Mondragon, with a hundred musketeers and pikemen, was sent forward likewise as expeditiously as possible to Saint George.  No one could be more alert.  The battered veteran, hero of some of the most remarkable military adventures that history has ever recorded,’ fought his way on foot, in the midst of the fray, like a young ensign who had his first laurels to win.  And, in truth, the day was not one for cunning manoeuvres, directed, at a distance, by a skillful tactician.