Page:British campaigns in Flanders, 1690-1794; being extracts from "A history of the British army," (IA britishcampaigns00fort).pdf/147

 whole force was drawn up between Oisy and the Scheldt within striking distance of Arras, Cambrai, and Bouchain.

So vanished the ne plus ultra of Villars, a warning to all generals who put their sole trust in fortified lines.

Marlborough halted for the next day to give his troops rest and to allow the stragglers to come in. Fully half the men of the infantry had fallen out, and there were many who did not rejoin the army until the third day. Villars on his side moved forward and offered Marlborough battle under the walls of Cambrai; but the Duke would not accept it, though the Dutch deputies, perverse and treacherous to the last, tried hard to persuade him. Had the deputies marched in the ranks of the infantry with muskets on their shoulders and a kit of fifty pounds' weight on their backs, they would have been less eager for the fray. Marlborough's own design, long matured in his own mind, was the capture of Bouchain, and his only fear was lest Villars should cross the Scheldt before him and prevent it. The deputies, however, who had been so anxious to hurry the army into an engagement under every possible disadvantage, shrank from the peril of a siege carried on by an inferior under the eyes of a superior force. But Marlborough, even if he had not been able to adduce Lille as a precedent, was determined to have his own way, and carried his point. At noon on the

7th of August he marched down almost within cannon-shot of Cambrai, ready to fall on Villars should he attempt to pass the Scheldt, halted until his pontoon-bridges had been laid a few miles further down the stream, and then gradually withdrawing his troops threw the whole of them across the river unmolested.

It is hardly credible that a vast number of foolish civilians, Dutch, Austrian, and even English, blamed