But the men of the fifth column were not machines, and at that hour of the mid-afternoon of Saturday they had come to the limits of physical endurance. It was impossible to ask further efforts of them, or, if those efforts were demanded, to hope for success. In the Arch-Duke's column by far the greater part of the 17,000 or 18,000 men had been awake and working for thirty-six hours. All had been on foot for at least twenty-four; they had been actually marching for seventeen, and had been fighting hard at the end of the effort and after sixteen miles of road. There could be no question of further movement that day: they bivouacked just north of the river, near where the French had been before their retirement, and Kinsky, seeing no combined movement could be made that day, kept his men also bivouacked near the Bridge of Bouvines.[5] Thus it was that when night fell upon that Saturday the left wing of the advance from the Scheldt had failed. And that is why those watching from the head of the successful third column at Mouveaux and Roubaix, under the sunset of that evening, saw no reinforcement coming up the valley of the Marque, caught no sign of their thirty thousand comrades advancing from the south, and despaired of the morrow. SUMMARY OF SITUATION ON THE SOUTH BY THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, MAY 17th. If we take stock of the whole situation, so far as the advance of the five columns from the Scheldt was concerned, when darkness fell upon that Saturday we can appreciate the peril in which the second and third column under Otto and York lay. The position which the plan had assigned to the four columns, second, third, fourth, and fifth, by noon of that Saturday (let alone by nightfall), is that marked upon the map by the middle four of the six oblongs in dotted lines marked B. Of these, the two positions on the _right_ were filled, for the second and third columns had amply accomplished their mission. But the two on the _left_, so far from being filled, were missed by miles of space and hours of time. At mid-day, or a little after, when Kinsky and the Arch-Duke should have been occupying the second and third dotted oblong respectively, neither of them was as yet even across the Marque. Both were far away back at E, E: and these hopeless positions, E, E, right away behind the line of positions across the Courtrai-Lille road which the plan expected them to occupy by Saturday noon, Kinsky and the Arch-Duke pacifically maintained up to and including the night between Saturday and Sunday! [Illustration: THE ELEMENTS OF TOURCOING] It is evident, therefore, that instead of all four columns of nearly _sixty_ thousand men barring the road between Souham and Lille and effecting the isolation of the French "wedge" round Courtrai, a bare, unsupported _twenty_ thousand found themselves that night alone: holding Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lannoy, Mouveaux, and thrust forward isolated in the midst of overwhelmingly superior and rapidly gathering numbers.