d who was often quoted as saying "his soldiers' lives
belonged to God and their bodies to the king," had sacrificed, it, was
ridiculously said, according to the statement of the Spaniards
themselves, five thousand soldiers before the walls of Hulst. It was very
logically deduced therefrom that the capture of a few more towns of a
thousand inhabitants each would cost him his whole army. People told each
other, too, that the conqueror had refused a triumph which the burghers
of Brussels wished to prepare for him on his entrance into the capital,
and that he had administered the very proper rebuke that, if they had
more money than they knew what to do with, they should expend it in aid
of the wounded and of the families of the fallen, rather than in velvets
and satins and triumphal arches. The humanity of the suggestion hardly
tallied with the blood-thirstiness of which he was at the same time so
unjustly accused--although it might well be doubted whether the
commander-in-chief, even if he could witness unflinchingly the
destruction of five thousand soldiers on the battle-field, would dare
to confront a new demonstration of schoolmaster Houwaerts and his
fellow-pedants.

The fact was, however, that the list of casualties in the cardinal's camp
during the six weeks' siege amounted to six hundred, while the losses
within the city were at least as many. There was no attempt to relieve
the place; for the States, as before observed, had been too much cramped
by the strain upon their resources and by the removal of so many veterans
for the expedition against Cadiz to be able to muster any considerable
forces in the field during the whole of this year.

For a vast war in which the four leading powers of the earth were
engaged, the events, to modern eyes, of the campaign of 1596 seem
sufficiently meagre. Meantime, during all this campaigning by land and
sea in the west, there had been great but profitless bloodshed in the
east. With difficulty did the holy Roman Empire withstand the terrible,
ever-renewed assaults of the unholy realm of Ottoman--then in the full
flush of its power--but the two empires still counterbalanced each other,
and contended with each other at the gates of Vienna.

As the fighting became more languid, however, in the western part of
Christendom, the negotiations and intrigues grew only the more active. It
was most desirable for the republic to effect, if possible, a formal
alliance offensive and defensive