above 1000 lay wounded and sick in the camp.

Here were several regiments which I saw drawn out to their arms that
could not make up above seventy or eighty men, officers and all, and
those half starved with hunger, almost naked, and in a lamentable
condition. From thence I went into the town, and there things were
still in a worse condition, the houses beaten down, the walls and
works ruined, the garrison, by continual duty, reduced from 4500 men
to less than 800, without clothes, money, or provisions, the brave
governor weak with continual fatigue, and the whole face of things in
a miserable case.

The French generals had just sent them 30,000 crowns for present
supply, which heartened them a little, but had not the truce been made
as it was, they must have surrendered upon what terms the Spaniards
had pleased to make them.

Never were two armies in such fear of one another with so little
cause; the Spaniards afraid of the French whom the plague had
devoured, and the French afraid of the Spaniards whom the siege had
almost ruined.

The grief of this mistake, together with the sense of his master,
the Spaniards, leaving him without supplies to complete the siege of
Casale, so affected the Marquis Spinola, that he died for grief, and
in him fell the last of that rare breed of Low Country soldiers, who
gave the world so great and just a character of the Spanish infantry,
as the best soldiers of the world; a character which we see them so
very much degenerated from since, that they hardly deserve the name of
soldiers.