the little Stadtholder drilled his soldiers in small bodies of various
shapes, teaching them to turn, advance; retreat; wheel in a variety of
ways, sometimes in considerable masses, sometimes man by man, sending the
foremost suddenly to the rear, or bringing the hindmost ranks to the
front, and began to attempt all this in narrow fields as well as in wide
ones, and when the enemy was in sight, men stood aghast at his want of
reverence, or laughed at him as a pedant. But there came a day when they
did not laugh, neither friends nor enemies. Meantime the two cousins,
who directed all the military operations in the provinces, understood
each other thoroughly and proceeded to perfect their new system, to be
adopted at a later period by all civilized nations.

The regular army of the Netherlands was small in number at that moment--
not more than twenty thousand foot with two thousand horse--but it was
well disciplined, well equipped, and, what was of great importance,
regularly paid. Old campaigners complained that in the halcyon days of
paper enrolments, a captain could earn more out of his company than a
colonel now received for his whole regiment. The days when a thousand
men were paid for, with a couple of hundred in the field, were passing
away for the United Provinces and existed only for Italians and
Spaniards. While, therefore, mutiny on an organised and extensive scale
seemed almost the normal condition of the unpaid legions of Philip, the
little army of Maurice was becoming the model for Europe to imitate.

The United Provinces were as yet very far from being masters of their own
territory. Many of their most important cities still held for the king.
In Brabant, such towns as Breda with its many dependencies and
Gertruydenberg; on the Waal, the strong and wealthy Nymegen which Martin
Schenk had perished in attempting to surprise; on the Yssel, the thriving
city of Zutphen, whose fort had been surrendered by the traitor York, and