"You are asking me more, sir," said Lance, with something like a grim smile on his countenance, "than I could tell you in a month, or two months. But I can tell you how the Duke of Marlborough looked in battle, for I belonged to the foot-soldiers, and we were generally standing still for a time, until the cavalry had showed us where we were wanted, and we could see the generals riding over the field. The Duke, you must know, sir, was not so very young when I served under him, but he was still the handsomest man in the British army. They say, when he was a lieutenant, that all the great ladies fell in love with him, and the one he married, I have read in a book, he was much in love with, but a deal more afraid of her than ever he was of the Grand Monarque and all his armies. They say it was a joke in England that the great Duke obeyed his Duchess and trembled at her word. But I dare say he is not the only man who ever ruled men and then let his wife rule him. The Duke was a noble sight at parade, with his splendid chestnut charger, his uniform of red and gold, his chapeau with plumes, and his great periwig. But, to my mind, he was a finer sight when the French artillery-men were ploughing up the ground--the French are monstrous good gunners, Mr. Washington, and hang on to their batteries like the devil--and the musketry screaming around, and that old fox Marshal Villars was hammering us in a dozen places at once. Then the Duke was as calm as a May morning, and was full of jokes with his officers, and whistling to himself a queer kind of a tune with no tune to it. But old Villars never caught him napping, and was caught napping himself once. That was the time we took Bouchain." "Oh yes--about Bouchain." "Well, sir, in the spring of 1711 the great Duke arrived in the Low Countries, and glad enough were all to see him--for not only, we knew, we could lick the French and Bavarians if we were under him, but the army was always paid when the great Duke commanded, and fed and clothed too. I remember, when he came back that time, he brought us forty thousand woollen shirts. The kings and queens thought that we, the common soldiers, did not know what was going on, but we knew the stay-at-homes were trying to ruin the Duke at court, and that he had hardly been treated civilly when he got to England, and that three colonels--Meredith, Macartney, and Heywood--had been cashiered for drinking 'confusion to the enemies of the Duke of Marlborough.' It was while he was away that the allied army--as ours and our allies was called--had got a handsome drubbing at Almanza, in Spain, and I can't say that any of us cried over it; only we thought we might get drubbed ourselves if the Duke didn't come back. So you may be sure, Mr. Washington, that when the news came that the whole army was to rendezvous at Orchies, and the Duke had landed in Holland on his way to us, we felt better.