Just at this moment Henry Dundas, hearing of Moreau’s advance, and having by chance a few troops unemployed, decided to send a naval armament to Flushing, together with five battalions under Lord Mulgrave, for the defence of the Dutch territories in that quarter. As was his rule in such cases, Dundas kept Mulgrave under his own immediate command, but withal instructed him not to go against any order of the Duke of York,—an arrangement admirably calculated to paralyse the force and to raise discord between the commanders. ◆Aug. 17.◆ Mulgrave, who had started apart from his troops, reached Flushing on the 17th, and finding that none of them had arrived, occupied himself in examining the situation. He was soon satisfied that the French had no further designs for the campaign than to take Sluys and Flushing, as ports from which to ship the harvest of the Austrian Netherlands to France. Meanwhile, the Dutch no sooner heard of his coming than they suspended their operations for the relief of Sluys, in the hope that Mulgrave would do the work for them; and the French, having also full intelligence of everything, increased their force at Sluys to twenty-five thousand men, which made the relief practically impossible. Dundas, meanwhile, wrote with the greatest confidence of the success of that operation, which his own interference had condemned to failure; announcing also that Mulgrave’s force, which had not yet even arrived at Flushing, would be required elsewhere in a month. ◆Aug. 26.◆ At length the five battalions sailed into Flushing on the 26th, nominally thirty-two hundred strong, and actually with the following qualifications for immediate service in the field. The Thirty-first[273] was composed chiefly of recruits, of whom two hundred and forty were unarmed. The Seventy-ninth had but one officer to each company, and but eight rounds of ball-ammunition a man. The Eighty-fourth had twenty rounds a man, but, the regiment having never ceased marching from quarter to quarter ever since it had been raised, the men were wholly untrained. The Eighty-fifth had thirty rounds a man, but half of the soldiers had never had arms in their hands. The Thirty-fourth alone appears to have been fit and ready for work. Fortunately there was no work for them to do, for Sluys surrendered on the very day of their arrival; and Mulgrave, after landing them at Flushing to learn the elements of their business, suggested that at least two of the battalions had better remain there and be made into soldiers, instead of sailing to certain annihilation in the West Indies. To this Dundas agreed, for he purposed to take from the Duke of York ten of Moira’s battalions, and was well content to leave him inferior troops in their place. Meanwhile, as a specimen of utter imbecility, this despatch of Mulgrave’s detachment has few equals even in English military annals. The mere promise of help was sufficient to relax the exertions of the Dutch. The troops were embarked so late as to