They had not far to go. Nancy was but a short two hours’ march away, and there, before his capital, starving and on the edge of surrender, Lorraine knew that the way was barred by the army of Charles. It had been bitter cold, but there was half a thaw. The ice on the Meurthe (to the right of the road as the long column went northward up the bank) was still continuous, but thin and slushy. The great masses of snow round about were melting. It was somewhat before noon that they saw, drawn up in rank upon slightly rising ground before them, the host of Charles, and in the distance behind it, two miles away, the spires of Nancy. From a wood upon his right to the west, down to the river Meurthe upon the east, Charles had drawn his line, with his guns commanding the road whereby the columns of Lorraine should advance. Fine snow began to fall, and under the veil of that cloud Lorraine detached a mass of the Swiss to follow round secretly by the hollow lane along the woodside. So they came up, unperceived, upon the flank of the Burgundians. But those Burgundians, Charles’s men, stood in rank awaiting the shock upon their front, ignorant of the turning column. They were but five thousand all told, and against them were two men to their one. They knew not that half their enemies had thus been detached secretly to the west. Still they waited, confident in the strength of their position: waiting for the heavy armed knights of Lorraine to charge. Even as they so stood, the Burgundians heard something which no troops will stand--the sound of attack behind their line. It was the custom of the Swiss to sound their horns three times just before they struck, and that loud, unexpected challenge came where none thought soldiers to be--far off and behind them to their right, from the woodside. It was in vain that Charles attempted to convert his line to the right, to face that sudden danger; it was in vain that he called for the guns to be dragged round and faced westward to the wood and the Swiss. All came too late; for all was in confusion, and already his line was dissolving. Upon such a beginning of chaos Lorraine, from the front, charged; and with that the Burgundian troops became a mob, and the action, hardly begun, turned at once into a slaughter. Charles’s cavalry, upon the left, near the river, cut itself out across the water, losing heavily, the horses stamping through the thin ice, and a remnant escaping by that ford. Round the great Duke himself a devoted centre rallied, half of them of his nobility, but it could not stand--it was forced back in the general flood, and all the two miles of ground that afternoon (the snow had ceased, and the sun shone upon the carnage) was filled with a confused mass of massacre and of flight. The Swiss and the Germans and the French lords of the Barrois pressed on into the midst of the broken herd, right up to the walls of the town.