Early in the year it became evident that Louis intended to make a great effort to regain the ground he had lost in Flanders, for he assembled a hundred thousand men behind his frontier fortresses, and placed them under the command of his grandson the Duke of Burgundy, with de Vendôme as his military tutor and adviser. As Marlborough had but eighty thousand troops at his immediate disposal, he arranged that Eugene, the Prince of Savoy, who was in charge of the allied forces on the Rhine, should support him whenever he wanted help. This help was soon required, for the French took the initiative, and at the end of May advanced to the forest of Soignies. While Marlborough concentrated at Hal, de Vendôme rapidly despatched detachments to Bruges and Ghent, where the civil authorities were in his pay; and when Louis’ soldiers appeared outside the walls, the gates stood open before them. Having thus secured two very important points in the system of waterways connected with the Lys and the Scheldt, de Vendôme next threatened Brussels; and by forcing Marlborough to move to Asche for its protection, gained time to prepare for the attack on Oudenarde, the capture of which would make him master of the greater part of the Scheldt. He proposed to cover the siege operations from Lessines, a place about thirteen miles south-east of Oudenarde, and hoped to establish his main body there before Marlborough had grasped his plan; but the Duke’s secret service agents did not fail him, and when he learned that de Vendôme was to move southwards from his camp at Alost on July 9, he determined to outstrip him by starting from Asche long before dawn on the same day. As the reinforcements from the Rhine had not yet arrived, in point of actual numbers the Allies were considerably weaker than the French; but Eugene, leaving his own troops many marches behind him, had recently joined the English general--and the mere presence of Eugene was in itself worth many thousand men. In a straight line the Allies and the French had about the same distance, twenty miles, to march, but by the roads followed by the Allies the mileage was nearly fifty per cent greater. Almost without a pause, Marlborough’s troops tramped steadily from 2 A.M. till noon, when, with fifteen miles to their credit, they halted till the evening, though Cadogan’s detachment of eight squadrons and as many battalions was allowed only four hours’ rest before starting for Lessines, thirteen miles farther on. Throughout the night the main body pressed forward and reached their destination to find that their exertions had not been thrown away--they had outmarched the French: no enemy was in sight, and Cadogan, who had struggled into Lessines at midnight, had already thrown several pontoon bridges across the river Dender. Not until the Allies had reached their camping ground did the heads of the French columns begin to show on the horizon; and when de Vendôme and