Page:British campaigns in Flanders, 1690-1794; being extracts from "A history of the British army," (IA britishcampaigns00fort).pdf/121

 of the French, the columns received orders to change direction to the left. After some hours' march eastward they crossed a river, but the men did not know that the bridge lay over the Marque and that it led them towards the battlefield of Bouvines; nor was it until dawn that they saw the gray walls and the four spires of Tournay before them, and discovered that they had invested the city.

Tournay had been fortified by Vauban and was one of the strongest fortresses in France, but its garrison had been weakened by the unsuspecting Villars, and there was little hope for it. The heavy artillery of the Allies, which had been sent to Menin, went down the Lys to Ghent and up the Scheldt to the besieged

city, the trenches were opened on the 7th of July, and after three weeks, despite of the demonstrations of Villars and incessant heavy rain, Tournay was

reduced to surrender. Then followed the siege of the citadel, the most desperate enterprise yet undertaken by the Allied troops, inasmuch as the subterraneous works were more numerous and formidable than those above ground. The operations were, therefore, conducted by mine and countermine, with destructive explosions and confused combats in the darkness, which tried the nerves of the soldiers almost beyond endurance. The men did not object to be shot, but they dreaded to be buried alive by the hundred together through the springing of a single mine. Four*