About nine or ten in the morning of the following day the French army, some forty thousand strong, was seen approaching, led by the youthful Count of Artois. After a reconnoitre two experienced officers advised the young Prince not to attack the Flemings at once, but to worry them with his archers and separate them from the town where their baggage and provisions were. "These people have to eat three, or four times a day--when they start to retreat, fall on them, you will quickly win," they counselled him. This sage advice did not appeal to the impetuous young Count, or to his valiant knights, who were burning with eagerness to avenge the Matin de Bruges. They confidently expected that at the very sight of their host, for the most part mounted knights, the cowardly townsmen would turn and run. Nor did they pay much heed to the shrewdness and skill with which the Flemish leaders had chosen their position. In the marshy ground in front of the Flemish army were many streams and canals, the water concealed by brushwood, while the River Lys and the fortifications of the town protected them against an attack on either flank or in the rear. As the French knights rode forward the first ranks plunged into the hidden canals and streams with which the marsh--since known as the Bloed Meersch, or Bloody Marsh--was intersected. Then, as five centuries later at Waterloo, each succeeding rank pushed in the one before it, the canals became choked with drowning men and struggling horses, and it was not until these obstacles were literally filled with dead bodies that any part of the great French host could approach the Flemish lines. Then the Flemish guildsmen were for a moment hard pressed, but they quickly rallied and the proud French nobles were beaten down beneath their cruel pikes and clubs by hundreds. The Count of Artois himself led the reserves into the mêlée when the day was all but lost and fought his way clear to the great standard of the Lion of Flanders, at the foot of which he fell. Their leader killed, the French sought to flee, but the rout and slaughter lasted through the long summer twilight and far into the night. According to an ancient chronicle, twenty thousand Frenchmen went down to death that day, including seven thousand knights, eleven hundred nobles, seven hundred lords, and sixty-three counts, dukes or princes. As to these statistics they differ in every history, but certain it is that the flower of French chivalry perished in unheard of numbers before the onslaught of the Flemish townsmen, and it is said that in all France there was no great house that did not mourn a father, a brother or a son.