The first counter-charge of the French was successful, and the allied cavalry, caught in the act of deployment, was thrust back in confusion, as I have said, upon the British infantry who lined the captured earthworks. The great central battery of forty guns which Marlborough had kept all day in the centre of the gap, split to the right and left, and, once clear of its own troops, fired from either side upon the French horse. Shaken, confused, and almost broken by this fire, the French horse were charged by a new body of the allied horse led by Marlborough in person, composed of British and Prussian units. But, just as Marlborough's charge was succeeding, old Boufflers, bringing up the French Household Cavalry from in front of Malplaquet village, charged right home into the flank of Marlborough's mounted troops, bore back their first and second lines, and destroyed the order of their third. Thereupon Eugene, with yet another body of fresh horse (of the Imperial Service), charged in his turn, and the battle of Malplaquet ends in a furious mix-up of mounted men, which gradually separated into two undefeated lines, each retiring from the contest. It will be wondered why a conclusion so curiously impotent was permitted to close the fighting of so famous a field. The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action. Any attempt of the French to advance in force after two o'clock would have led to their certain disaster, for the allies were now in possession of their long line of earthworks.[14] On the other hand, the allies could not advance, because the men upon whom they could still count for action were reduced to insufficient numbers. Something like one-third of their vast host had fallen in this most murderous of battles; from an eighth to a sixth were dead. Of the remainder, the great proportion suffered at this hour from an exhaustion that forbade all effective effort. The horse upon either side might indeed have continued charge and counter-charge to no purpose and with no final effect, but the action of the cavalry in the repeated and abortive shocks, of which a list has just been detailed, could lead neither commander to hope for any final result. Boufflers ordered a retreat, screened by his yet unbroken lines of horse. The infantry were withdrawn from the wood of Lanière, which they still held, and from their positions behind the forest of Sars. They were directed in two columns towards Bavai in their rear, and as that orderly and unhurried retreat was accomplished, the cavalry filed in to follow the line, and the French host, leaving the field in the possession of the victors, marched back westward by the two Roman roads in as regular a formation as though they had been advancing to action rather than retreating from an abandoned position. It was not quite three o'clock in the afternoon.