During the winter of 1710-11 the French made gigantic efforts to protect their country against the threatened invasion, and threw up fresh lines, which ran from Namur to a point on the English Channel a few miles south of Boulogne, using rivers and canals, swamps, and artificial inundations as barriers against the general whom they feared so greatly. Before Marlborough was ready to open the campaign of 1711, his trusted friend and invaluable colleague, Prince Eugene, was recalled to Austria with a large body of troops, but though left with forces greatly inferior in numbers to those of de Villars, he resolved to carry out the first task he had already set himself, the capture of Bouchain. As this fortress was protected by the new lines, which were far too strong to be carried by force, the Duke determined to decoy Marshal de Villars from the opening in the works at Arleux, where he intended to cross. He advanced and retired; threatened first one part of the lines and then another; issued contradictory orders; pretended to be cast down at the loss of a weak detachment intentionally thrown away as a bait to his adversary; simulated alternately rage, dejection, rashness; and deceived not only the French spies in his camp, but also his own army, who began to fear that their beloved “Corporal John” had lost his judgment. By acting apparently like a madman, but really with the profound skill of a great master of war, he lured de Villars forty miles to the westward of Arleux, and on the morning of August 4, ostentatiously reconnoitred the Marshal’s position, explaining in unusual detail to the generals who accompanied him the part each was to play in the assault which was to be delivered on the morrow: then he returned to camp and issued orders for the coming battle. At tattoo the word was passed to strike tents and fall in at once, and in an hour the troops were in motion. At first they thought they were merely taking up ground for the attack next day, but when hour after hour they plodded steadily eastward, they were fairly puzzled until, just before dawn, the message ran down the column: “The cavalry have reached Arleux and have passed the lines, and the Duke desires that the infantry will step out.” And step out they did! They forgot the fatigue of the fifteen miles they had marched already with heavy muskets on their shoulders and fifty pounds’ weight upon their backs, and without a halt for rest or food trudged manfully over an apparently endless plain. When the sun grew hot the work began to tell, and it became a question of the survival of the fittest. The weaker men dropped exhausted on the ground, first by scores, then by hundreds, and later in the day literally by thousands; but without stopping to help their comrades, those soldiers who still had the strength to keep their places in the ranks set their teeth and staggered on, determined not to be beaten in the race by the French, whose horsemen they could