bridge, and was free to bring his
11,000 over, and the two extreme columns, the fourth and the fifth, would
then have joined forces in the mid-afternoon of the Saturday, having
accomplished their object of forcing the Marque and uniting for the common
advance northward in support of Otto and the Duke of York.

Now, had the Arch-Duke Charles' men been machines, this section of the
general plan would yet have failed by half a day to keep its time-table:
and by more than half a day: by all the useful part of a working day. By
the scheme of time upon which the plan was based, the fifth column should
have been across the Marque at dawn; by six, or at latest by seven o'clock
the French should have been compelled to fall back from Sainghin, and the
combined fourth and fifth columns should have been upon their northward
march for Mouveaux. It was not seven o'clock, it was _between three and
four_ o'clock by the time the Arch-Duke was well across the Marque and the
French retired; but still, if the men of this fifth column had been
machines, Kinsky was now free to effect his junction across the Bridge of
Bouvines, and the combined force would have reached the neighbourhood of
Mouveaux and Tourcoing by nightfall, or shortly after dark.

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