constable and
his army came within hail of the place; and D'Andelot, Coligny's brother,
managed with great difficulty to get four hundred and fifty men into it.
On the 10th of August the battle was begun between the two armies. The
constable affected to despise the Duke of Savoy's youth. "I will soon
show him," said he, "a move of an old soldier." The French army, very
inferior in numbers, was for a moment on the point of being surrounded.
The Prince of Conde sent the constable warning. "I was serving in the
field," answered Montmorency, "before the Prince of Conde came into the
world; I have good hopes of still giving him lessons in the art of war
for some years to come." The valor of the constable and his comrades in
arms could not save them from the consequences of their stubborn
recklessness and their numerical inferiority; the battalions of Gascon
infantry closed their ranks, with pikes to the front, and made an heroic
resistance, but all in vain, against repeated charges of the Spanish
cavalry: and the defeat was total. More than three thousand men were
killed; the number of prisoners amounted to double; and the constable,
left upon the field with his thigh shattered by a cannon-ball, fell into
the hands of the Spaniards, as was also the case with the Dukes of
Longueville and Montpensier, La Rochefoucauld, D'Aubigne, &c. . . .
The Duke of Enghien, Viscount de Turenne, and a multitude of others, many
great names amidst a host of obscure, fell in the fight. The Duke of
Nevers and the Prince of Conde, sword in hand, reached La Fere with the
remnants of their army. Coligny remained alone in Saint-Quentin with
those who survived of his little garrison, and a hundred and twenty
arquebusiers whom the Duke of Nevers threw into the place at a loss of
three times as many. Coligny held out for a fortnight longer, behind
walls that were in ruins and were assailed by a victorious army. At
length, on the 27th of August, the enemy entered Saint-Quentin by shoals.
"The admiral, who was still going about the streets with a few men to
make head against them, found himself hemmed in on all sides, and did all
he could to fall into the hands of a Spaniard, preferring rather to await
on the spot the common fate than to incur by flight any shame and
reproach. He who took him prisoner, after having set him to rest a while
at the foot of the ramparts, took him away to their camp, where, as he
entered, he met Captain Alonzo de