Page:British campaigns in Flanders, 1690-1794; being extracts from "A history of the British army," (IA britishcampaigns00fort).pdf/361

 work on the 18th had been held in reserve; but at about six o'clock in the evening Fox's brigade of the British Line was called out to recover Pont-à-Chin which had already been taken and retaken three or four times. The brigade went into this action with fewer than six hundred men, having lost half of its numbers just four days before; but the three gallant regiments, though unsupported, carried the village unhesitatingly with the bayonet, pressed on to the low heights to south of it, swept everything before them,

so far as their front extended, and captured seven cannon. The day ended, after a severe struggle of fifteen hours, in the retreat of the French, with the loss of some six thousand men and seven guns; the fire, both of musketry and artillery, having been the heaviest ever remembered by the oldest soldiers present. Both sides, however, fought for the most part in dispersed formation, and inflicted, comparatively speaking, little damage upon each other. The one exception was Fox's brigade. "Had their order of attack," wrote Calvert, "been adopted by the Allies in general, the day would probably have ended in the ruin of the French." But the losses of the brigade amounted to one hundred and twenty killed, wounded, and missing; and there are few troops that can be trusted, after losing half their numbers on Sunday, to storm a position held by a superior force and lose one-fifth of their remnant on Thursday. Some indeed claim that but for this handful of British soldiers the day would have been lost to the Allies; but whether this be true or not, the 22nd of May should be a great anniversary for the Fourteenth, Thirty-Seventh, and Fifty-Third.

It was directly after this action that the course of