s,
indefatigable--infectious over hundreds of thousands of men. The
Emperor's general was repaying, and with a vengeance, the slight the
French King had put upon the fiery little Abbe of Savoy. Brilliant and
famous as a leader himself, and beyond all measure daring and intrepid,
and enabled to cope with almost the best of those famous men of war who
commanded the armies of the French King, Eugene had a weapon, the equal
of which could not be found in France, since the cannon-shot of Sasbach
laid low the noble Turenne, and could hurl Marlborough at the heads
of the French host, and crush them as with a rock, under which all the
gathered strength of their strongest captains must go down.

The English Duke took little part in that vast siege of Lille, which
the Imperial Generalissimo pursued with all his force and vigor, further
than to cover the besieging lines from the Duke of Burgundy's army,
between which and the Imperialists our Duke lay. Once, when Prince
Eugene was wounded, our Duke took his Highness's place in the trenches;
but the siege was with the Imperialists, not with us. A division under
Webb and Rantzau was detached into Artois and Picardy upon the most
painful and odious service that Mr. Esmond ever saw in the course of his
military life. The wretched towns of the defenceless provinces, whose
young men had been drafted away into the French armies, which year after
year the insatiable war devoured, were left at our mercy; and our orders
were to show them none. We found places garrisoned by invalids,
and children and women; poor as they were, and as the costs of this
miserable war had made them, our commission was to rob these almost
starving wretches--to tear the food out of their granaries, and strip
them of their rags. 'Twas an expedition of rapine and murder we were
sent on: our soldiers did deeds such as an honest man must blush to
remember. We brought back money and provisions in quantity to the Duke's
camp; there had been no one to resist us, and yet who dares to tell with
what murder and violence, with what brutal cruelty, outrage, insult,
that ignoble booty had been ravished from the innocent and miserable
victims of the war?

Meanwhile, gallantly as the operations before Lille had been conducted,
the Allies had made but little progress, and 'twas said when we returned
to the Duke of Marlborough's camp, that the siege would never be brought
to a satisfactory end, and that the Prince of Savoy would b