At this critical moment Clerfaye paid a visit to the Duke at Arnheim, and promised that by the 3rd of November a corps of some seven thousand Austrians under General Werneck should arrive to assist in an offensive movement from Nimeguen. At the same time some effort was made to persuade Möllendorf to move to the Rhine about Bonn, and to support Clerfaye’s left. But the British Government had recently, though none too soon, cut off the subsidy to the Prussians; and Möllendorf’s answer was that his orders were to send twenty thousand of his men to South Prussia and fifteen thousand men to Westphalia, so that evidently nothing was to be expected from that quarter. ◆Nov. 1.◆ On the 1st of November the French broke ground before Nimeguen, and on the same day Werneck announced that his corps could not arrive before the 7th. Meanwhile the French erected batteries a little above Nimeguen at Ooi, which, though silenced for a time by the guns of the Allies on the opposite bank, so seriously damaged the bridge of boats that General Walmoden, who was in command, thought it prudent to withdraw the greater part of the garrison to the northern bank. ◆Nov. 4.◆ On the 4th, however, he made a sortie with the troops that remained, including six British battalions, supported by seventeen squadrons of British and Hanoverian cavalry.[283] The British, advancing under a very heavy fire, swept the enemy out of their trenches without drawing a trigger, and the cavalry pursuing the fugitives inflicted on them heavy loss. The casualties of the Allies in this affair were over three hundred killed and wounded; but, though the sortie checked the progress of the French for the time, yet by the 7th they had not only repaired the batteries destroyed by the Allies, but had erected another which brought a cross fire to bear on the bridge of boats. Moreover, a letter arrived from Werneck that his arrival at Nimeguen, which he had fixed for the 7th, would be impossible until the 16th—a message which the Duke rightly interpreted to signify that he would not come at all. ◆Nov. 7.◆