Saxe opened his eyes. His experienced ear told him that his army, routed and disordered, was flying before an exultant enemy.
The giant whose pastime it was to tear horseshoes in twain with his bare hands and to twist nails into corkscrews with his fingers, staggered to his feet, hoarsely articulating fierce and mandatory ejaculations.
Hastily clothed, the Count de Saxe was placed in a litter and borne out of his pavilion into that chaos of ruin and carnage which invariably accompanies a lost battle. Around him, behind and in front, swarmed his broken battalions and disorganized squadrons; while in pursuit advanced majestically in solid column, the triumphant English.
Saxe demanded his horse and armor.
Clad in iron and supported in the saddle on either hand, this modern Achilles galloped to the front of his army; then, at the head of the Scotch Guards, the Irish Brigade, and French Household troops, Saxe in person, led that series of terrific hand-to-hand onslaughts which drove the English army from the field of battle, and gained the famous victory of Fontenoy.
“Furthermore,” declares this illustrious Generalissimo of Louis XIV;
“It is possible to make war without trusting anything to accident; this is the highest point of skill and perfection within the province of a general.”
“Most men,” writes Vergetius, “imagine that strength and courage are sufficient to secure victory. Such are ignorant that when they exist, stratagem vanquishes strength and skill overcomes courage.”
In his celebrated work, Institutorum Rei Militaris, that source from whence all writers derive their best knowledge of the military methods of the ancients; and by means of which, he strove to revive in his degenerate countrymen that intelligent valor which distinguishes their great ancestors—the famous Roman reiterates this solemn warning: