Armstrong died in 1742, and was succeeded as colonel of the regiment by Colonel Sir John Mordaunt, K.B. On its return home in 1742 the regiment was quartered in the West of England until the spring of 1744, when it was sent to Fareham to guard prisoners taken in the wars we were then waging with the Spanish and the French. In 1739 a trade dispute with Spain had produced a conflict memorable only for our miserable and costly failure to take Cartagena, a flourishing settlement on the Caribbean Sea, in the part of South America then belonging to Spain, and now the Republic of Columbia. Soon afterwards a great war broke out on the Continent of Europe between France and Spain on the one side and Austria on the other. Various German States joined the Franco-Spanish alliance, while England, Hanover, and Holland sent contingents to the help of Austria. At Dettingen George II. gained a victory over the French in 1743, but two years later his son, the Duke of Cumberland, was defeated at Fontenoy,[73] where the magnificent courage and brilliant local success of the British and Hanoverians were nullified by the apathy, cowardice, or jealousy of the Austrians and the Dutch, who after Cumberland had actually forced his way into the French camp sullenly refused to advance and support his column at the moment when victory was within his grasp. Before the news of this glorious, though disastrous day reached England, the Royal Irish had been warned for service abroad, and formed part of a small column which reached Cumberland in the middle of May. Welcome as this reinforcement was, it did not nearly fill the gaps caused by the slaughter at Fontenoy, where the casualties among the British and Hanoverian infantry amounted to 32 per cent, the former losing 3662, the latter 1410 officers and men. With his weakened force Cumberland could not stand up against the French, and as far as most of the English regiments were concerned, the rest of the campaign of 1745 was spent in entrenching defensive positions, and then, under the pressure of the enemy’s manœuvres, abandoning them, only to repeat the experience farther to the rear, while the French, in greatly superior numbers, gradually reduced the fortified towns of Flanders. Some of these places Marshal Saxe, the French Commander-in-Chief, took by force of arms; others capitulated without resistance, and in August he was able to detach a considerable body of troops to attack Ostend, a vital point in Cumberland’s lines of communication with England. The garrison was hastily reinforced, the last corps to arrive being the Royal Irish, who on the 9th of August embarked at Antwerp on “billanders,” as the boats used for inland navigation were called, and dropping down the Scheldt to Flushing transhipped into sea-going vessels for Ostend. The town was in a wretched condition and quite unfit to stand a siege; the Austrians, to whom it then belonged, had allowed the fortifications to fall into disrepair; the