He doubted the probability of closing up a harbour, now open to the whole world and protected by the fleets of the first naval power of Europe, with wickerwork, sausages, and bridges upon barrels.  His attention was at once concentrated on the western side, and he was satisfied that only by hard fighting and steady delving could he hope to master the place.  To gain Ostend he would be obliged to devour it piecemeal as he went on.

Whatever else might be said of the new commander-in-chief, it was soon apparent that, although a volunteer and a patrician, he was no milksop.  If he had been accustomed all his life to beds of down, he was as ready now to lie in the trenches, with a cannon for his pillow, as the most ironclad veteran in the ranks.  He seemed to require neither sleep nor food, and his reckless habit of exposing himself to unnecessary danger was the subject of frequent animadversion on the part both of the archdukes and of the Spanish Government.

It was however in his case a wise temerity.  The veterans whom he commanded needed no encouragement to daring deeds, but they required conviction as to the valour and zeal of their new commander, and this was afforded them in overflowing measure.

It is difficult to decide, after such a lapse of years, as to how much of the long series of daily details out of which this famous siege was compounded deserves to be recorded.  It is not probable that for military history many of the incidents have retained vital importance.  The world rang, at the beginning of the operations, with the skill and inventive talent of Targone, Giustiniani, and other Italian engineers, artificers, and pyrotechnists, and there were great expectations conceived of the effects to be produced by their audacious and original devices.  But time wore on.  Pompey’s famous floating battery would not float, his moving monster battery would not move.  With the one; the subtle Italian had intended to close up the Gullet to the States’ fleets.  It was to rest on the bottom at low water at the harbour’s mouth, to rise majestically with the flood, and to be ever ready with a formidable broadside of fifty pounders against all comers.  But the wild waves and tempests of the North Sea soon swept the ponderous toy into space, before it had fired a gun.  The gigantic chariot, on which a moveable fort was constructed, was still more portentous upon paper than the battery.  It was directed against that republican work, defending the Gullet, which was called in derision the Spanish Half-moon.  It was to be drawn by forty horses, and armed with no man knew how many great guns, with a mast a hundred and fifty feet high in the centre of the fort, up and down which played pulleys raising and lowering a drawbridge long enough to span the Gullet.

It was further provided with anchors, which were to be tossed over the parapet of the doomed redoubt, while the assailants, thus grappled to the enemy’s work, were to dash over the bridge after having silenced the opposing fire by means of their own peripatetic battery.