d. It seemed to the country people, and to the inhabitants
of every town and village, that their defenders were going to certain
destruction; that the existence of the commonwealth was hanging by a
thread soon to be snapped asunder. As the forces subsequently marched
from the Sas of Ghent towards the Flemish coast there was no rising of
the people in their favour, and although Maurice had issued distinct
orders that the peasantry were to be dealt with gently and justly, yet
they found neither peasants nor villagers to deal with at all. The whole
population on their line of march had betaken themselves to the woods,
except the village sexton of Jabbeke and his wife, who were too old to
run. Lurking in the thickets and marshes, the peasants fell upon all
stragglers from the army and murdered them without mercy--so difficult is
it in times of civil war to make human brains pervious to the light of
reason. The stadholder and his soldiers came to liberate their brethren
of the same race, and speaking the same language, from abject submission
to a foreign despotism. The Flemings had but to speak a word, to lift a
finger, and all the Netherlands, self-governed, would coalesce into one
independent confederation of States, strong enough to defy all the
despots of Europe. Alas! the benighted victims of superstition hugged
their chains, and preferred the tyranny under which their kindred had
been tortured, burned, and buried alive for half-a-century long, to the
possibility of a single Calvinistic conventicle being opened in any
village of obedient Flanders. So these excellent children of Philip and
the pope, whose language was as unintelligible to them as it was to
Peruvians or Iroquois, lay in wait for the men who spoke their own mother
tongue, and whose veins were filled with their own blood, and murdered
them, as a sacred act of duty. Retaliation followed as a matter of
course, so that the invasion of Flanders, in this early stage of its
progress, seemed not likely to call forth very fraternal feelings between
the two families of Netherlanders.

The army was in the main admirably well supplied, but there was a
deficiency of drink. The water as they advanced became brackish and
intolerably bad, and there was great difficulty in procuring any
substitute. At Male three cows were given for a pot of beer, and more of
that refreshment might have been sold at the same price, had there been
any sellers.

On the 30th June Maurice marc