o cut the pea-dyke along the coast which had
originally protected the old harbour. Thus the sea, when the tides were
high and winds boisterous, was free to break in upon the archduke's
works, and would often swallow sausages, men, and cannon far more rapidly
than it was possible to place them there.

Yet still those human ants toiled on, patiently restoring what the
elements so easily destroyed; and still, despite the sea; the cannonade,
and the occasional sorties of the garrison, the danger came nearer and
nearer. Bucquoy on the other side was pursuing the same system, but his
task was immeasurably more difficult. The Gullet, or new eastern
entrance, was a whirlpool at high tide, deep, broad, and swift as a
millrace. Yet along its outer verge he too laid his sausages, protecting
his men at their work as well as he could with gabions, and essayed to
build a dyke of wicker-work upon which he might place a platform for
artillery to prevent the ingress of the republican ships.

And his soldiers were kept steadily at work, exposed all the time to the
guns of the Spanish half-moon from which the besieged never ceased to
cannonade those industrious pioneers. It was a bloody business. Night and
day the men were knee-deep in the trenches delving in mud and sand,
falling every instant into the graves which they were thus digging for
themselves, while ever and anon the sea would rise in its wrath and sweep
them with their works away. Yet the victims were soon replaced by others,
for had not the cardinal-archduke sworn to extract the thorn from the
Belgic lion's paw even if he should be eighteen years about it, and would
military honour permit him to break his vow? It was a piteous sight, even
for the besieged, to see human life so profusely squandered. It is a
terrible reflection, too, that those Spaniards, Walloons, Italians,
confronted death so eagerly, not from motives of honour, religion,
discipline, not inspired by any kind of faith or fanaticism, but because
the men who were employed in this horrible sausage-making and
dyke-building were promised five stivers a day instead of two.

And there was always an ample supply of volunteers for the service so
long as the five stivers were paid.

But despite all Bucquoy's exertions the east harbour remained as free as
ever. The cool, wary Dutch skippers brought in their cargoes as regularly
as if there had been no siege at all. Ostend was rapidly acquiring
greater commercial impor