The French position was extremely strong, and Barri wood on the left, Fontenoy in the centre, and St. Antoine on the river on the right were most carefully fortified and entrenched and defended by 260 guns. Here it was, as the attack developed, the story is told of the meeting of the British and French Guards, when the former, saluting with raised hats, called to their opponents, “Gentlemen of the French Guards, fire!” The Highlanders behaved with extraordinary courage in this their first great foreign battle, and one man, who had killed nine Frenchmen, was in the act of cutting down the tenth when a shot carried his sword-arm off. The carnage was extreme, yet the stubborn soldiery would not give way even with the cross fire of musketry and case-shot at short range; and at one moment, when St. Antoine was carried, matters looked serious for Marshal Saxe. But that terrible Irish Brigade, seven battalions strong, were now brought into the fight. The fierce battle-cry of “Remember Limerick and Saxon faith” showed that past evils were not forgotten, and added racial antipathy to natural courage. The broken, wearied troops were too much shaken to meet so fierce a charge of quite fresh men; and hence the Irish counter attack fully succeeded, and the British retired sullenly, beaten. The Allies had lost 21,000 men, killed and wounded, against 8000 of their adversaries; but, outnumbered and exhausted as the British were, they accounted for one-third of the men and one-fourth of the officers of the Irish Brigade. Naturally King George was disturbed by so serious a defeat; and naturally, perhaps, he might have felt and said, in thinking of the Irish at Fontenoy, “Cursed be the laws which deprive me of such subjects!” On the other hand, the exultation felt by the exiled Irish can equally well be understood, as well as the spirit that induced the following lines of the time:-- “The English strove with desperate strength; they rallied, staggered, fled: The green hillside is matted close with dying and with dead. Across the plain, and far away, passed on that hideous wreck, While cavalier and fantassin dash in upon their track. On Fontenoy, on Fontenoy, like eagles in the sun, With bloody plumes the Irish stand--the field is lost and won!” Little occurred after the battle until the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle brought hostilities to a conclusion. Few changes had taken place in the armament of the troops in these days. The hand grenade was still in use, as a picture of a grenadier of the Foot Guards, dated 1745, shows; and officers, up to 1759, carried either the spontoon or a “light fusil” as part of their equipment, with the sash worn over the left shoulder as at present. Non-commissioned officers still carried the halberd.