The war gradually filtered itself away into the peace of Aix-la- Chapelle. After Val came the siege of Bergen-op-Zoom, where fourteen men of the Royal Artillery were killed; then came winter quarters at Breda; then came preparations for a new campaign in 1748; although peace was in every one's mind, and the plenipotentiaries to conclude it had already met; then came the siege of Maestricht, with its Quixotic ending; and at last came peace itself. A peace which brought profit neither to England nor to France; which could not obliterate the long list on the rolls of each nation which war had entered in the books of death; which, if possible, only made the folly of the contest more apparent; and which, while it ceased the actual roll of cannon, and crossing of bayonets, did not stop the pulsation of hatred in each nation's breast, which was to throb with increasing vigour, until a new and more bitter war should gratify the unsmothered longings of each. A peace which—with the solitary exception of Prussia—seemed to do good, or bring rest to none but unhappy Flanders, the battleground of Europe, the victim in every international contest. But a peace, also, which closed for a time that sterner school of discipline in which the Royal Artillery had now for years been studying; in which there had been officers such as Macbean, Desaguliers, Phillips, and Pattison, learning lessons, which were to bear fruit in yet grimmer warfare, both in Europe and America; and on whose black-boards—blank in this respect, when the war commenced—there had now been indelibly inscribed the words, that "an Army without Artillery is no Army at all!"