After an easy victory at Dixmude, which the Governor surrendered without firing a shot, de Villeroi turned towards Brussels, where the wealth of the citizens promised much loot to his soldiers; but here he was again foiled by de Vaudemont, who out-marched him and took up a position which saved the city from capture, though not from a savage and unnecessary bombardment. After his artillery had devastated a large part of Brussels, de Villeroi drew off to await orders from Paris, thus giving the covering detachment the opportunity of joining hands with the main army before Namur, where William was assiduously battering the citadel with a hundred and thirty-six heavy guns and fifty-eight mortars, whose fire towards the end of the siege cost de Boufflers three hundred men a day. On the 10th of August, the XVIIIth and three other British regiments were transferred to the besieging force, to replace corps shattered in the earlier operations, and at once began duty in the trenches. A few days later de Villeroi advanced, hoping to defeat William in a pitched battle, and thus to relieve the garrison which he had so long neglected, but he found the King so well posted and the covering army so heavily reinforced by the besieging troops that he did not venture to attack. While the French Commander-in-Chief was beginning to realise that in leaving de Boufflers so long unrescued he had made an irreparable mistake, William gave orders for a general assault upon the citadel, where the works had been breached in several places. During the night of the 19th, six thousand men from the covering detachment filed into the trenches, where before daybreak they were joined by the greater part of the besiegers. Seven hundred British grenadiers and four regiments—the 17th,[20] the XVIIIth, and Buchan’s and Mackay’s, two corps which have long since disappeared from the Army List,—under the command of General Lord Cutts, were to assault the work called the Terra Nova; while the Bavarians, Hessians, Brandenburgers,[21] and Dutch were to make simultaneous attacks on the other breaches. As the trenches could not hold all the troops poured into them, the XVIIIth and Buchan’s were sent to conceal themselves in the abbey of Salsine, about half a mile from the foot of the Terra Nova breach.
At 10 A.M. on August 20, the explosion of a barrel of gunpowder gave the signal for the attack, and from Cutts’s trenches began to emerge the red coats, to whom the most dangerous duty had, as usual, been entrusted; four sergeants, each followed by fifteen picked men, led the column; the grenadiers were close behind them; the 17th and Mackay’s followed in support, with the XVIIIth and Buchan’s in reserve. It was a desperate enterprise. Between the trenches and the Terra Nova was a stretch of several hundred yards of ground—smooth, coverless, and swept by frontal and cross fire, and before the grenadiers had crossed it they had left behind them a long trail of killed and wounded. Owing to a mistake in the organisation of the attack, the grenadiers and the 17th assailed the breach before the other regiments were at hand to support them, and by the time the XVIIIth came up the assault had been repulsed with heavy loss; many of the officers had been hit, and Cutts, the idol of the troops, was wounded and for the moment incapable of giving orders. Undismayed by the confusion and depression around them, the Irishmen with a yell rushed at the breach. At first they had to scramble over the bodies of those who fell in the first attempt, but half-way up they reached the grenadiers’ high-water mark, and thence struggled upwards over ground covered by no corpses but those of the XVIIIth. From the neighbouring works they were tormented by cross fire, but yet pushed on, to the admiration of their foes who through the clouds of smoke watched them gradually winning their way up the breach, the Colours high in air, despite the carnage among the officers who carried them. Mad with excitement, determined to win at all cost, the regiment by a splendid effort reached the top of the breach, where the Colours were planted to show the King, who from a hill behind the abbey eagerly watched the progress of his British troops, that the Terra Nova was his. But as the men surged forward they found themselves faced by a retrenchment undamaged by the bombardment. The officers, holding their lives as nothing for the honour of their country and their corps, led rush after rush against this retrenchment, but in vain. They could not reach it; guns posted on the flank of the breach mowed down whole ranks; infantry fired into them at close range. All that men could do the XVIIIth had done, but nothing could withstand such a torrent of lead; the second attack failed, and the remnants of the regiment were driven backwards down the breach, and then charged by a counter-attack of horse and foot which the French let loose upon them.
Shaking themselves clear of the enemy, the survivors fell back towards the spot where Cutts, on resuming the command after his wound was dressed, had ordered his broken regiments to reassemble. While the British were retreating they learned that the Bavarians had not fared much better than themselves; badly led, they had missed their proper objective, the breach in a work called the Coehorne, and had attacked the covered way at a spot where the garrison was in great force; and after two hours’ hard fighting they reported that unless help came at once they could not hold their ground. Cutts, who from his love of a “hot fire” had earned for himself the nickname of the Salamander, instantly determined to go to the rescue of the Bavarians, and halting, turned towards the Coehorne and re-formed his column. To the onlookers it seemed impossible that troops fresh from the costly failure at the Terra Nova would face another breach, but Cutts knew what British soldiers could do, and his call for volunteers for a forlorn hope was answered by two hundred men, who headed this fresh attack, followed by Mackay’s, with the XVIIIth and the other regiments behind them in support. The assault was successful; the covered way was seized and held by the British, and all along the line victory smiled upon the Allies, who by five o’clock in the afternoon were lodged solidly within the enemy’s works.
To reward the XVIIIth for the magnificent courage it showed at the Terra Nova the King formally conferred upon it the title of the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland, with the badge of the Lion of Nassau and the motto “Virtutis Namurcensis Præmium.”[22] In the year 1832, the Royal Irish received the somewhat belated official permission to emblazon this motto on their Colours; and it was not until 1910, two hundred and fifteen years after the capture of the fortress, that the regiments who took part in the siege were allowed to add Namur to their battle honours. In these matters our Government does not move with undue haste; it was only in 1882, that the Royal Irish were granted leave to commemorate on their Colours the fact that they had shared in the glories of Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, and Malplaquet, the last of which was won in 1709!
The distinctions given by William were dearly earned, for though the authorities differ as to the actual numbers of the casualties in the XVIIIth, all agree that they were enormous. According to the army chaplain D’Auvergne, who wrote one of the best accounts of William III.’s wars in Flanders, the regiment lost twenty-five officers and two hundred and seventy-one non-commissioned officers and men. Parker and Kane give the same figures, but as both these officers were severely wounded it is probable that the returns had been sent in long before they came back to duty, and that in their books they adopted D’Auvergne’s numbers without investigation. In Stearne’s unpublished journal he states that twenty-six officers (whose names he does not mention) and three hundred and eighty of the other ranks were killed or wounded; and as Stearne was one of the few senior officers left with the regiment on the evening of the 20th of August, he must have had every opportunity of knowing the exact numbers. Two theories have been advanced to explain this discrepancy: the first, that Stearne included in his total all who were wounded, while the other historians took count only of the men who were gravely injured and admitted into the base hospital at Liege; the other is that among his four hundred and six casualties were the officers and men hit in the trenches after the XVIIIth joined the besieging army and before the day of the assault, or in other words that his figures show the regiment’s losses during the whole of the siege. But even taken on the lower, and therefore safer estimate, the percentage of loss is astonishingly high. At the beginning of a campaign a regiment was seldom more than 600 strong; indeed, many historians consider that 500 was the average strength. Since the XVIIIth had taken the field in June it had done much marching and some work in the trenches, so that Hamilton’s ranks cannot have been quite full when he gave the order to storm the breach; but assuming that Hamilton had with him about 600 men, more than 49 per cent, or very nearly half the regiment, were killed or wounded on August 20, 1695. If the strength be taken at 500, the percentage shows that about six men out of every ten were hit; while if Stearne’s casualties are adopted the percentage is 81, more than eight men killed or wounded out of every ten who went into action. As it is impossible to ascertain definitely the strength of the XVIIIth, or to pronounce on the accuracy of the rival chroniclers, it is enough to say that the regiment suffered more heavily than any of the other British corps in Cutts’s column, whose losses, including those of the grenadiers, amounted at the least to thirteen hundred and forty-nine officers and men.[23]
In the XVIIIth Lieutenant-Colonel A. Ormsby; Captains B. Purefoy, H. Pinsent, and N. Carteret; Lieutenants C. Fitzmorris and S. Ramme; Ensigns A. Fettyplace, —— Blunt, H. Baker, and S. Hayter were killed. Captain John Southwell, Ensign B. Lister (or Leycester), and an officer whose name cannot be traced, died of their wounds. Colonel Frederick Hamilton; Captains R. Kane, F. Duroure, H. Seymour, and W. Southwell; Lieutenants L. La Planche, T. Brereton, C. Hybert (or Hibbert), and A. Rolleston; Ensigns T. Gifford, J. Ormsby, and W. Blakeney were wounded.[24]
The result of the assault convinced de Boufflers that he could not resist a renewed attack, and early on the 22nd he made signals of distress to de Villeroi, who finding it impossible to relieve him, retired to Mons, leaving the garrison of Namur to make the best terms it could. De Boufflers accordingly ordered his drummers to beat the Chamade, the recognised signal that a fortress desired to parley with the enemy, and after two or three days’ negotiations surrendered: the troops were to be allowed to return to France, the citadel, artillery, and stores remaining in the hands of the victors. On the 26th, the French, reduced by the two months’ siege to less than five thousand effectives, marched out with all the honours of war—drums beating, Colours flying, and arms in their hands—and after filing through a double line of the allied troops were escorted to Givet, the fortress to which they had safe conduct. With the fall of Namur the campaign of 1695 virtually came to an end, for though there was some marching and counter-marching nothing came of these manœuvres, and the Allies went into winter quarters early in the autumn.
The campaigns of 1696 and 1697 were spent in operations unproductive of any affairs of importance, and the finances of all the combatants were so much exhausted by the strain of this long war that peace was signed at Ryswick in September of the latter year. The British contingent was sent to Ostend to await ships from England to take them home, and on December 10, the XVIIIth sailed on an adventurous voyage, thus described by Stearne.
“The ship I was in, with one more, having got near the Coast of Ireland, there came up with us a Sallee Man of War of about 18 guns, carrying Zealand colours.[25] When the master of our ship saw her bearing down upon us, he called up all the Officers and told us what danger we were in of being made slaves for ever. We thought it a very hard case after getting over so many dangers as we had gone through, upon which we all resolved to die rather than be taken, and having got all our men to arms, we made them lye close under the gunnel, that they might not discover what we were, and called to the other ship, and told them that in case she boarded us, that then they should lay her on board the other side, and that we would do the like in case they boarded them; and our Seamen were to be all ready with ropes to lash us together as soon as they laid us on board. At the same time we were to jump into her, and so take our fate. By the time she came up with us we had got everything ready to put our design in execution, but she fell in the wake of us, we being much the larger ship, and hailed our Master to go on board her, who answered that he would not leave his ship, and so kept on his course. The Sallee Man of War kept us company about an hour, and was once, as we thought, coming up to board us; however, she thought better of it, fell astern, and stood off without firing a shot, being prevented by the wind which blew very fresh, so that they could not put a gun out of their ports.
“This affair had not been long over when we made the Land, but it put our Master in such a fright, that he went quite out of his course, so that the Old Head of Kinsale which was the first land we made, he took to be the Highlands of Dungarvon, which made him stand away to the Southward, instead of directly in to the Shore, untill our Master was quite got out of his knowledge, and night coming on we were obliged to stand out to sea, the wind rising till it blew a storm, insomuch that we were in great danger of foundering at sea in an old rotten ship. Next morning we stood in towards the shore, the wind still continuing very high, and not a soul on board knew where we were, and though we made signals of Distress, yet the wind was so high that no boat dare venture out to our relief, and had it not been for one of our Lieutenants who had been formerly in the West Indies, and who remembered something of the Coast, we should certainly have perished the night following; by his directions we made shift to get into Bantry Bay before night, and very fortunate it was, for that night the wind blew so violent that it was with much difficulty our Ship could ride it out, with all the anchors and cables we had. Next day, being the 24th December, we landed at Bantry, and from there marched to Cork, where the other part of the Regiment landed some days before.”