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Thus all ideas of a campaign in the south were destroyed; but Marlborough persuaded the Dutch to send 10,000 of the troops in their pay across the Alps to assist Prince Eugene, under the promise that he with the English and Dutch troops would defend Flanders. So the campaign commenced; and on the 19th of May Marlborough joined his army, which lay encamped on the Dyle, on the French frontier.
The first drafts of the British Expeditionary Force landed in France on August 16, 1914. On August 7, 1914, a French brigade from Belfort had crossed the frontier into Alsace and taken the towns of Altkirch and Mülhausen, which, however, they were unable to hold for more than three days. Between August 7 and August 15, 1914, large bodies of German cavalry with infantry supports crossed the Meuse between Liege and the Dutch frontier, acting as a screen for the main advance. The Belgian army, concentrated on the Dyle, scored some successes against the Germans at Haelen, Tirlemont, and Engherzee on the 12th and 13th, but after the fall of Fort Loncin the German advance guards fell back and the main German right under Von Kluck advanced toward Brussels. On the 19th the Belgians began to withdraw to the fortress of Antwerp. Brussels fell to the Germans on the 20th. Von Kluck turned toward the Sambre and Von Bülow advanced along the Meuse to Namur. On the opposite bank (the right) of the Meuse the Saxon army of Von Hausen moved against Namur and Dinant, while farther south the German Crown Prince and the Duke of Württemberg pushed their forces toward the French frontier. Meanwhile, General de Castelnau, commanding the French right, had seized most of the passes of the Vosges, overrun upper Alsace almost to the Rhine, and had reached Saarburg on the Metz-Strassburg railway. On August 20, 1914, the Germans attacked Namur, captured it on the 23d, and demolished the last forts on the 24th. This unexpected event placed the Allies in an extremely critical situation, which led to serious reverses. The British force on the left was in danger of being enveloped in Von Kluck's wheeling movement; the fall of Namur had turned the flank of the Fourth and Fifth French armies; the latter was defeated by Von Bülow at Charleroi on the 22d; the pressure exerted by the armies of the Duke of Württemberg and the crown prince also contributed to render inevitable an immediate retirement of the allied right and center. The French army that had invaded Lorraine a grave strategical blunder had also come to grief. The Bavarians from Metz had broken its left wing on the 20th and driven it back over the frontier. De Castelnau was fighting desperately for Nancy on a long front from Pont-
It is, like Louvain, surrounded by a ruined wall of brick, as formerly all the towns of Flanders were fortified. This was the capital of the Austrian Netherlands, and lately the chief place of the French department of the Dyle: it will, probably, now become, for a part of the year, the residence of its new sovereign, whose sons are at present amongst its inhabitants.
The gallantry of his English troops, and the effect which Blenheim had produced upon the morale of the French, enabled him to hold the ground won, and to obtain several minor successes; one notably at the Dyle, where Villeroi's troops were driven out of lines considered impregnable, but where the pusillanimity and ill will of the Dutch generals prevented any substantial results being obtained; but no important action took place, and the end of 1705 found things in nearly the same state that 1704 had left them.
It is said that Henry the First sitting in a window of his château on the river Dyle one night, saw floating on the dark water the corpse of this young martyr, where the ruffians had thus thrown her, and "the pale radiance from her brow illuminated the whole valley."
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