many of their best commanders were old men. Bertrand du
Gueselin performed his best deeds against the English after he was
fifty, and he was upward of sixty years when the commandant of Randon
laid the keys of his fortress on his body, surrendering, not to the
living, but to the dead. Turenne was ever great, but it is admitted that
his three last campaigns, begun when he was sixty-two, were his greatest
performances. Conde's victory at Rocroi was a most brilliant deed, he
being then but twenty-two; but it does not so strikingly illustrate his
genius as do those operations by which, at fifty-four, he baffled
Montecuculi, and prevented him from profiting from the fall of Turenne.
Said Conde to one of his officers, "How much I wish that I could have
conversed only two hours with the ghost of Monsieur de Turenne, so as to
be able to follow the scope of his ideas!" In these days, generals can
have as much ghostly talk as they please, but the privilege would not
seem to be much used, or it is not useful, for they do nothing that is
of consequence sufficient to be attributed to supernatural power.
Luxembourg was sixty-two when he defeated Prince Waldeck at Fleurus; and
at sixty-four and sixty-five he defeated William III. at Steinkirk and
Landen. Vendome was fifty-one when he defeated Eugene at Cassano; and at
fifty-six he won the eventful Battle of Villaviciosa, to which the
Spanish Bourbons owe their throne. Villars, who fought the terrible
Battle of Malplaquet against Marlborough and Eugene, was then fifty-six
years old; and he had more than once baffled those commanders. At sixty
he defeated Eugene, and by his successes enabled France to conclude
honorably a most disastrous war. The Comte de Saxe was in his
forty-ninth year when he gained the Battle of Fontenoy;[C] and later he
won other successes. Rochambeau was in his fifty-seventh year when he
acted with Washington at Yorktown, in a campaign that established our
existence as a nation.

The Spanish army of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, down to the
date of the Battle of Rocroi, stood very high. Several of its best
generals were old men. Gonsalvo de Cordova, "the Great Captain," who may
be considered the father of the famous Spanish infantry, was fifty when
he completed his Italian conquests; and nine years later he was again
called to the head of the Spaniards in Italy, but the King of Aragon's
jealousy prevented him from going to that country. Alva was about s