The distinctions given by William were dearly earned, for though the authorities differ as to the actual numbers of the casualties in the XVIIIth, all agree that they were enormous. According to the army chaplain D’Auvergne, who wrote one of the best accounts of William III.’s wars in Flanders, the regiment lost twenty-five officers and two hundred and seventy-one non-commissioned officers and men. Parker and Kane give the same figures, but as both these officers were severely wounded it is probable that the returns had been sent in long before they came back to duty, and that in their books they adopted D’Auvergne’s numbers without investigation. In Stearne’s unpublished journal he states that twenty-six officers (whose names he does not mention) and three hundred and eighty of the other ranks were killed or wounded; and as Stearne was one of the few senior officers left with the regiment on the evening of the 20th of August, he must have had every opportunity of knowing the exact numbers. Two theories have been advanced to explain this discrepancy: the first, that Stearne included in his total all who were wounded, while the other historians took count only of the men who were gravely injured and admitted into the base hospital at Liege; the other is that among his four hundred and six casualties were the officers and men hit in the trenches after the XVIIIth joined the besieging army and before the day of the assault, or in other words that his figures show the regiment’s losses during the whole of the siege. But even taken on the lower, and therefore safer estimate, the percentage of loss is astonishingly high. At the beginning of a campaign a regiment was seldom more than 600 strong; indeed, many historians consider that 500 was the average strength. Since the XVIIIth had taken the field in June it had done much marching and some work in the trenches, so that Hamilton’s ranks cannot have been quite full when he gave the order to storm the breach; but assuming that Hamilton had with him about 600 men, more than 49 per cent, or very nearly half the regiment, were killed or wounded on August 20, 1695. If the strength be taken at 500, the percentage shows that about six men out of every ten were hit; while if Stearne’s casualties are adopted the percentage is 81, more than eight men killed or wounded out of every ten who went into action. As it is impossible to ascertain definitely the strength of the XVIIIth, or to pronounce on the accuracy of the rival chroniclers, it is enough to say that the regiment suffered more heavily than any of the other British corps in Cutts’s column, whose losses, including those of the grenadiers, amounted at the least to thirteen hundred and forty-nine officers and men.[23]