After basely employing a spy named Millevoix, under pain of torture and death, to mislead the French commander by false intelligence of the confederates' movements, William advanced with his 100,000 bayonets to prevent him from taking up a position between the then obscure villages of Steinkirke and Enghien, a royal barony of the house of Bourbon. With his usual bad generalship William completely failed, for Luxembourg outflanked him, gained the position, and trusting to the communications of the perfidious (or unfortunate) Millevoix, not anticipating any attack, confined himself to his tent, as he laboured under severe indisposition.
Not expecting an _alerte_, the whole of his numerous and brilliant army lay intrenched among the fertile fields and pastures of the Flemings, whose thick hedges, solid walls, and comfortable houses, were cut down, torn up and overthrown without ceremony to render the position more secure.
The post occupied by the Scottish officers was near the Senne, a slow and sluggish river. The sun had set, and far over the long perspective of the level landscape, that in some parts withdrew to the extreme horizon, shone the red departing flush of the last evening many would behold on earth. In some places the river was reddened by the gleam of the distant fires, whose flickering chain marked out the camp of Luxembourg; the higher eminences were covered by woods and orchards, from which the evening wind came laden with the rich perfume of the summer blossom. Save the hum of the extended camp all was still round Steinkirke, and where the exiled cavaliers were bivouacked there was little more heard than the monotonous ripple of the Senne, as it flowed past its willow shaded banks on its way to the northern sea.
The Scottish exiles were always more merry than usual on the eve of a battle, for it freed many from a life of humiliation and hardship, to which they deemed an honourable death a thousand times preferable. At times an expression of stern joy, of ghastly merriment, at others of deep abstraction pervaded the little group, as they clustered round the fire that blazed in a little alcove formed by an orchard on the river side. There their arms were piled, and they rolled from hand to hand a keg of Hollands, to which they had helped themselves at the devastation of the Flandrian château de Senne. Afar off, above the village spire of Steinkirke, the silver moon rose broadly and resplendently to light the wide and fertile landscape with its glory. The Senne and Tender brightened like two floods of flowing crystal, and the willows that drooped over them seemed the work of magic, as their dewy leaves glittered in the rays of the summer moon.