For a time the allies, which consisted of English, Hanoverian, Dutch and Austrian troops--very few Flemings taking part in this campaign on either side--were in doubt whether Saxe intended to attack Mons, St. Ghislain or Tournai. With his usual rapidity of action, the French leader, when his forces suddenly appeared before Tournai, had that city completely invested before the allies knew where he was. It was early in the month of May, and very rainy, when the allied army started from Brussels and marched through the mud toward the beleaguered city. On the evening of May tenth, eleven days after the siege had begun, they arrived within sight of the quintuple towers of the cathedral and the adjacent belfry. Their position was southeast of the city, on the route to St. Ghislain and Mons, and the towers were therefore sharply outlined against the sunset as the army, standing on rising ground, gazed across the rolling country that was to be the morrow's battlefield. Saxe had made the most of the slowness of the allies' advance by choosing the ground where he would give battle, and strengthening his position with field redoubts, using the little village of Fontenoy as a base. The allies attacked from the direction of the little village of Vezon, while Louis XV watched the battle from a hill near the intersection of the Mons road with that leading from Ramecroix to Antoing. The attack began at two o'clock in the morning, the English advancing in a hollow square, and it was not until after two in the afternoon that Saxe, after bringing every man in his forces into action, had the satisfaction of seeing the great square falter and turn slowly back--halting every hundred yards to beat off its foes. The fiercest unit in the French army was a brigade of Irish volunteers who fought like tigers, the men flinging themselves against the stubborn English square again and again. A learned historian, who has devoted more than eighty pages to a description of the battle, fails to give so clear an idea of its decisive moment as does the poet Thomas Osborne Davis in half as many lines: "Thrice at the huts of Fontenoy the English column failed, And twice the lines of Saint Antoine the Dutch in vain assailed; For town and slope were filled with fort and flanking battery, And well they swept the English ranks and Dutch auxiliary. As vainly through De Barri's wood the British soldiers burst, The French artillery drove them back, diminished and dispersed. The bloody Duke of Cumberland beheld with anxious eye, And ordered up his last reserves, his latest chance to try. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, how fast his generals ride! And mustering came his chosen troops, like clouds at eventide.