s. And this
was an advantage which could not fail to tell. Of necessity the besiegers
would always very far outnumber the garrison, so that the final success
of their repeated assaults became daily more and more possible.

Yet on the 2nd June the enemy met not only with another signal defeat,
but also with a most bitter surprise. On that day the mine which he had
been so long and so laboriously constructing beneath the great Polder
Bulwark was sprung with magnificent effect. A breach, forty feet wide,
was made in this last stronghold of the old defences, and the soldiers
leaped into the crater almost before it had ceased to blaze, expecting by
one decisive storm to make themselves masters at last of all the
fortifications, and therefore of the town itself. But as emerging from
the mine, they sprang exulting upon the shattered bulwark, a
transformation more like a sudden change in some holiday pantomime than a
new fact in this three years' most tragic siege presented itself to their
astonished eyes. They had carried the last defence of the old
counterscarp, and behold--a new one, which they had never dreamed of,
bristling before their eyes, with a flanking battery turned directly upon
them. The musketeers and pikemen, protected by their new works, now
thronged towards the assailants; giving them so hearty a welcome that
they reeled back, discomfited, after a brief but severe struggle, from
the spot of their anticipated triumph, leaving their dead and dying in
the breach.

Four days later, Berendrecht, with a picked party of English troops,
stole out for a reconnaissance, not wishing to trust other eyes than his
own in the imminent peril of the place.

The expedition was successful. A few prisoners were taken, and valuable
information was obtained, but these advantages were counterbalanced by a
severe disaster. The vigilant and devoted little governor, before
effecting his entrance into the sally port, was picked off by a
sharpshooter, and died the next day. This seemed the necessary fate of
the commandants of Ostend, where the operations seemed more like a
pitched battle lasting three years than an ordinary siege. Gieselles, Van
Loon, Bievry, and now Berendrecht, had successively fallen at the post of
duty since the beginning of the year. Not one of them was more sincerely
deplored than Berendrecht. His place was supplied by Colonel Uytenhoove,
a stalwart, hirsute, hard-fighting Dutchman, the descendant of an ancient