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The importance of Namur in a military point of view had always been great, and had become greater than ever during the three years which had elapsed since the last siege. New works, the masterpieces of Vauban, had been added to the old defences which had been constructed with the utmost skill of Cohorn.
The French had received intelligence of the design, and taken such precautions, under the conduct of the celebrated engineer Vauban, that the English were exposed to a terrible fire from new erected batteries, as well as from a strong body of troops, and though the ships cannonaded them with great vigour, the soldiers could not maintain any regularity in landing.
Fort Sao Francisco, called "do Penedo," because founded upon and let into a rock, with the double-tiered batteries a la Vauban, carefully whitewashed and subtended by any amount of dead ground, commands the anchorage and the northern road, where strings of carregadores, like driver-ants, fetch and carry provisions to town.
Probably no other Flemish town has seen its defenses so altered and enlarged as Ypres has between the primitive days when the crusading Thierry d'Alsace planted hedges of live thorns to strengthen the towers, and the formation of the great works of Vauban.
Vauban, justly celebrated over all Europe, was regretted in France by all who were not financiers or their supporters. Boisguilbert, whom this event ought to have rendered wise, could not contain himself. One of the objections which had been urged against his theories, was the difficulty of carrying out changes in the midst of a great war.
The product of this tax was nothing like so much as had been imagined in this bureau of Cannibals; and the King did not pay a single farthing more to any one than he had previously done. Thus all the fine relief expected by this tax ended in smoke. The Marechal de Vauban had died of grief at the ill-success of his task and his zeal, as I have related in its place.
"Yes, indeed," said I, "it is a pleasure to find they have so able an advocate; and that your Highness can so well apply to yourself both the assertions in the motto of the great master of fortification, Vauban, 'I destroy, but I defend."
Theoretically he had studied it with all his might, from Caesar, Quintus Curtius, and that favourite modern authority, the learned ecclesiastic, Jean Pave, who was the Vauban of the fifteenth century; and he had likewise obtained greedily all the information he could from Henry himself and his warriors; but all this had convinced him that if war was to be more than a mere raid, conducted by mere spirit and instinct, some actual apprenticeship was necessary.
Then Christmas Day dawned, and there was Vicksburg lifted two hundred feet above the fever swamps, her court-house shining in the morning sun. Vicksburg, the well-nigh impregnable key to America's highway. When old Vick made his plantation on the Walnut Hills, he chose a site for a fortress of the future Confederacy that Vauban would have delighted in.
Vauban wished to abolish all imposts, and to substitute for them two taxes, one upon the land, the other upon trade and industry. His book, in which he put forth these ideas, was full of information and figures, all arranged with the utmost clearness, simplicity, and exactitude. But it had a grand fault.
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