infantry at Bicocca and Pavia destroyed their prestige for ever. Nevertheless they were superb soldiers, and as their good fortune delivered them from a meeting with the English archers, who would certainly have riddled their huge bristling battalion through and through, they became as they deserved the fathers of modern infantry. Let it be noted that they marched in step to the music of fife and drum, that they carried a colour in each company, and that several of the cantons carried a huge horn, whose sound was the signal for all to rally around it. It was not to be expected that the Swiss should long enjoy their monopoly as the infantry of Europe without exciting competition. In the last quarter of the fifteenth century arose the rivals who were to wrest their supremacy from them, namely, the landsknechts of Swabia, or as the contemporary English called them, the lance-knights of Almain, who were the direct forerunners of the modern German infantry. The records that survive of them are very full, and as it was through them that the teaching of the Swiss was carried into England, with results that are visible to this day, a brief study of their history is essential to the right understanding of the history of our own army. The Swabian infantry was called into existence by the imperative necessity for preventing any potentate who might be so fortunate as to enlist the Swiss, from dictating his will to Europe. Swabia being the province next adjoining Switzerland was not unnaturally the first to learn the methods of her neighbour; and though at first all fighting men who imitated the tactics and equipment of the mountaineers were known by the generic name of Swiss, yet the Swabians, as if from the first to point the distinction between them and their rivals, took the name of landsknechts, men of the plain, as opposed to men of the mountains. Maximilian the First, seeing how valuable such a force would be in the eternal contest of the House of Hapsburg against the House of Valois, more particularly since the Swiss were the firm allies of the French, gave them all possible countenance and encouragement; and very soon the landsknechts grew into one of the weightiest factors on the battlefields of Europe. Though mercenaries like the Swiss and the still earlier bands of Brabançons, and as such engaged on all sides and in all countries, they yet cherished not a little national sentiment; and the greatest of all their work was done in the service of the Empire.