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.

In such an isolation nothing could save Otto and York but the abandonment
during the night of their advanced positions and a retreat upon the points
near the Scheldt from which they had started twenty hours before.

The French forces round Lille were upon one side of them to the south and
west, in number perhaps 20,000. On the other side of them, towards
Courtrai, was the mass of Souham's force which they had hoped to cut off,
nearly 40,000 strong. Between these two great bodies of men, the 20,000 of
Otto and York were in peril of destruction if the French awoke to the
position before the retirement of the second and third columns was decided
on.

It is here worthy