Arrived on the sands he found his reserve of Frisians still halted in their original position, having never received orders to move, and with them the two troops of English horse. A charge of the cavalry, supported by two hundred infantry under Horace Vere, soon swept the Spaniards back into the dunes, and then at last Sir Francis made himself over to the surgeon, while Maurice came forward, cool and unmoved, to save the day. The Spaniards now massed two thousand infantry together for a further advance, while the English officers, weary with fighting and parched with heat and sand, exerted themselves to rally their men. The English were quickly reformed, so quickly that the Spaniards, who had sent forward a party to disperse them, promptly withdrew it at the sight of Horace Vere returning with his two hundred men from the beach. Maurice saw the movement and exclaimed joyfully, "Voyez les Anglais qui tournent à la charge." He at once ordered up the cavalry from the right under Sir Edward Cecil; and meanwhile Horace Vere and his brother officers hastily decided that their only chance was at once to charge the two thousand Spaniards with their handful of men. They rushed desperately down upon them; the Spaniards, worn out by a long march and hard fighting, gave way, and Maurice catching the supreme moment launched Cecil's troopers into the thick of them. A second charge disposed of the Spanish horse; Maurice ordered a general advance, and the battle was won. Three thousand Spaniards were killed outright; six hundred more with all their guns and one hundred and twenty colours were captured. On the side of the States the loss fell almost wholly on the English. Of their captains eight were killed, and but two came out of the field unhurt; of the sixteen hundred men eight hundred were killed and wounded. They with the Frisians had borne the brunt of the action, and Maurice gave them credit for it. So ended the fight of Nieuport,[140] the dying struggle of the once famous Spanish soldier, and the first great day of the new English infantry. [Sidenote: 1601.] [Sidenote: July 9.] Next year the Archduke Albert sought revenge for his defeat by the investment of the one stronghold of the United Provinces in Flanders, the little fortified fishing-town of Ostend. The garrison had made itself so obnoxious to the surrounding country that the States of Flanders petitioned the Archduke to stamp out the pestilent little fortress once for all; and hence it was that in the following years the principal operations grouped themselves around the siege. The Archduke's army consisted of twenty thousand men with fifty siege-guns; the garrison of barely six thousand men, half English and half Dutch, of which fifteen hundred English, all dressed in red cassocks, were a reinforcement just imported from across the sea. Francis Vere was in supreme command, and his brother Horace commanded a regiment under him.