To make an army a thorough mowing-machine, it then seemed necessary that it should be disciplined into complete mechanical obedience.  To secure this, prompt payment of wages and inexorable punishment of delinquencies were indispensable.  Long arrearages were now converting Farnese’s veterans into systematic marauders; for unpaid soldiers in every age and country have usually degenerated into highwaymen, and it is an impossibility for a sovereign, with the strictest intentions, to persist in starving his soldiers and in killing them for feeding themselves.  In Maurice’s little army, on the contrary, there were no back-wages and no thieving.  At the siege of Delfzyl Maurice hung two of his soldiers for stealing, the one a hat and the other a poniard, from the townsfolk, after the place had capitulated.  At the siege of Hulst he ordered another to be shot, before the whole camp, for robbing a woman.

This seems sufficiently harsh, but war is not a pastime nor a very humane occupation.  The result was, that robbery disappeared, and it is better for all that enlisted men should be soldiers rather than thieves.  To secure the ends which alone can justify war—­and if the Netherlanders engaged in defending national existence and human freedom against foreign tyranny were not justifiable then a just war has never been waged—­a disciplined army is vastly more humane in its operations than a band of brigands.  Swift and condign punishments by the law-martial, for even trifling offences, is the best means of discipline yet devised.

To bring to utmost perfection the machinery already in existence, to encourage invention, to ponder the past with a practical application to the present, to court fatigue, to scorn pleasure, to concentrate the energies on the work in hand, to cultivate quickness of eye and calmness of nerve in the midst of danger, to accelerate movements, to economise blood even at the expense of time, to strive after ubiquity and omniscience in the details of person and place, these were the characteristics of Maurice, and they have been the prominent traits of all commanders who have stamped themselves upon their age.  Although his method of war-making differed as far as possible from that quality in common, of the Bearnese, yet the two had one personal insensibility to fear.  But in the case of Henry, to confront danger for its own sake was in itself a pleasure, while the calmer spirit of Maurice did not so much seek the joys of the combat as refuse to desist from scientific combinations in the interests of his personal safety.  Very frequently, in the course of his early campaigns, the prince was formally and urgently requested by the States-General not to expose his life so recklessly, and before he had passed his twenty-fifth year he had received wounds which, but for fortunate circumstances, would have proved mortal, because he was unwilling to leave special operations on which much was depending to other eyes than his own.  The details of his campaigns are,