When William III. took the field in 1695, he commanded an army of 124,000 men, composed of contingents from England, Holland, Denmark, and many of the German States. The British numbered about 29,000, and as the King employed them on every occasion when desperate courage and bull-dog tenacity were needed, it is clear that, however much he despised the English politicians who intrigued against him with Louis XIV., he appreciated his British soldiers at their true worth. As his object was the recapture of the fortress of Namur, taken by the French three years before, he began a series of manœuvres designed to decoy Marshal de Villeroi, the French Commander-in-Chief, so far into the western half of the theatre of war that the Allies would be able to dash upon Namur and invest it before their intention was discovered. William was so far successful that he was able to surround the fortress on June 23, but not before the French had thrown in strong reinforcements under Marshal de Boufflers, who took command of the garrison of thirteen or fourteen thousand excellent troops. The citadel stands on a rocky height at the end of the tongue of land formed by the junction of the rivers Sambre and Meuse. The town is built on the left bank of the Sambre; and in the fortification of both citadel and town the highest military art had been displayed--first, by the Dutch engineer Cohorn, who planned and built the works; and later, by his French rival Vauban, who had extended and improved them so greatly that Namur was now considered to be impregnable. A hundred and twenty-eight guns and mortars were mounted on its walls, and its arsenals and storehouses were well supplied in every way. On June 28th, William began his trenches, and five days later opened fire upon the town, which after desperate fighting surrendered on July 24, one of the conditions being that the garrison should be allowed to retire into the citadel with full power to take part in its defence. During this, the first phase of the siege, the XVIIIth was part of the covering detachment of 20,000 men with which the Prince de Vaudemont, one of William’s trusted lieutenants, protected the operations of the besiegers so successfully that during several weeks he engrossed the attention of the French Commander-in-Chief’s vastly superior force of 90,000 troops. Before quoting Kane’s interesting account of the way de Vaudemont “sparred for time,” it must be explained that the French were in no hurry to relieve Namur, where they thought de Boufflers could hold his own indefinitely. De Villeroi accordingly marched against de Vaudemont, who had entrenched himself on the river Lys, nine or ten miles south of Ghent; but