The hereditary Prince settled down in the little town of Alkmaar of famous memory and waited. He waited a week, but nothing happened except that the troops of the allies, badly provisioned by their commissary departments, began to steal and plunder among the Dutch farmers. And when another week had passed it had become manifestly clear that the Prince and his army could not count upon the smallest support from the Batavians. By that time, too, the French army had been greatly strengthened. Commanded by the French Jacobin Brune, who loved a fight as well as he did brandy, the defences of the republic were speedily put into excellent shape. Krayenhoff, our friend of the revolution of Amsterdam, now a very capable brigadier general of engineers, inundated the country around Amsterdam, while the English, under their slow and ponderous commander Yorke, were still debating as to the best ways and means of attack. When finally the allies went over to that attack they found themselves with the sea behind them, with sand dunes and impassable swamps on both sides, and with a strong French and a smaller Batavian army in front of them. And when they tried to drive this army out of its position they were badly defeated in a number of small fights; and a month after they had marched from Helder to Alkmaar they marched back from Alkmaar to Helder, shipped their enormous number of sick and wounded on board the fleet, and departed, cursing a country where even the drinking water had to be transported across the North Sea, where it always rained, and where, even if it did not rain, the water sprang from the soil and turned camps and hospitals and trenches into uninhabitable puddles. [Illustration: DUTCH TROOPS RUSHING TO THE DEFENCE OF THE COAST] The Batavian army was proud of itself and was praised by others. The men had stood the test of the war much better than people had dared to hope. But what good, apart from a little glory, had all their bravery done them? On land they had beaten the English, but in far-away Asia the British fleet had taken one Dutch colony after the other, until of the large colonial empire there remained but the little island of Decima, in Japan. Upon a strip of territory of a few hundred square feet the old red, white, and blue flag of Holland continued to fly. Everywhere else it had been hauled down. XV CONSTITUTION NO. III On the 9th of November, 1799, Citizen Bonaparte, the successful commander-in-chief of the armies of the Directorate of France, decided that his employers had done enough talking and that the time had come to send them about their business. The Jacobin rabble in the street protested. Citizen Bonaparte put up two cannon. The rabble jeered at his toy guns. Citizen Bonaparte fired. The rabble fled whence it came. The next day the legislative body was summarily dismissed. The French Revolution was over.