“After this the French Fleet made the best of their way to Brest, and the account coming to our Court, orders were sent to the Grand Fleet to sail immediately in quest of them, upon which our Admirals sailed immediately to Brest to try if they could get there before the enemy, but in vain, for they had got in several days before we left Torbay. This affair being over we returned to our port, and in September the Land Forces were put on shore. Our Regiment was landed part at Chatham and part at Southampton, and joyned at Norwich in October. In December we marched to London, and were reviewed in Hide Park by the King; two days after we embarked at Red House, and sailed for Flanders and landed at Ostend in December 1693.”[16] The regiment was now to play a distinguished part in the war with France, which with a breathing space of five short years lasted until 1712. With the exception of the campaign of 1704 in Germany, the fighting in which the XVIIIth was concerned took place chiefly in the country now called Belgium, but then known as Flanders.[17] Its soil was fertile, and cultivated by a large and industrious population. Its numerous cities were celebrated throughout Europe for the wealth of their traders, whose merchandise was carried to the sea over a network of canals and navigable rivers. Every town was walled, and the whole country was studded with fortresses, with many of which the regiment was to become well acquainted in the course of the next twenty years. On the French side of the frontier a chain of forts stretched from Dunkirk to the Meuse, and Louis had further strengthened his border by a great line of field-works, in the hope of making an invasion of France impossible. In a country so highly fortified the war necessarily became one of sieges. Each side tried to breach the other’s line of defences by capturing fortresses. There were ceaseless marches and counter-marches, and gigantic attempts to relieve the besieged strongholds, met by equally strenuous efforts to prevent the relieving forces from fulfilling their mission. Flanders, however, was by no means the only part of Europe affected by the war, for sooner or later the French armies invaded nearly every country unfortunate enough to be within their reach. To describe the whole of Louis’s struggle for supremacy, and to explain the means by which he induced some of the Allies to abandon the coalition and range themselves on his side, would be far outside the scope of a regimental history. It is enough to say that though the conflict raged from the shores of the North Sea to the south of Spain, where a few thousand British soldiers served for several years, it was in Flanders that Marlborough won most of his splendid victories over the French.