Two months earlier, the Duke of Cumberland had been beaten at Fontenoy by Marshal Saxe. The defeat cost the Pragmatic Allies the initiative in Flanders and put the great cities at risk - Brussels, Bruges, Ghent, all in the line of a French advance. Cumberland faced an impossible split. The Austrians wanted Brussels held. He himself wanted to save Ghent, which contained the larger of the two Allied supply magazines, with food and powder that had not yet been drawn down. He compromised. The main field army would cover Brussels. Four thousand men under an Austrian general would race west to reinforce Ghent. The four thousand had to travel through Aalst. Beyond Aalst they ran into Saxe's screen, a reconnaissance force of two infantry brigades and twenty-four squadrons of cavalry under General du Chayla, parked across the road at Melle.

The Allied advance guard - 650 Royal Scots and about a thousand cavalry under Moltke - reached the unguarded stone bridge over the Gontrode Brook around seven in the evening. They charged across, dispersed a French battalion drawn up west of the bridge, and rushed the artillery park. For perhaps a quarter of an hour the guns were theirs. But the pieces were not configured for action - the limbers were elsewhere, the crews scattered - and the Royals could not turn them on the French. Then the Duc de Laval's battalion came up behind the pontoon wagons and the firefight closed. Two more French battalions under the Marquis de Crillon joined them. The terrain on either side of the causeway was bad for cavalry. The Allied horse could not deploy. The Royals were caught alone on a raised road, the guns useless behind them, the French closing in front.

Moltke decided to break free with the cavalry and ride for Ghent. He took the Hussars, Rich's 4th Dragoons, and some Hanoverian squadrons and ran the gauntlet down the causeway. About half the column was lost, including nearly four hundred Royal Scots - men cut off when a French battalion closed the road behind. Brigadier Thomas Bligh came up next with the 20th Foot, then Handasyde's 16th. With Moltke gone, Bligh inherited the command and about 1,450 infantry and a thousand cavalry. He saw what Moltke had not: that the causeway was a death trap and that the field south of the road, behind the Gontrode Brook with woods to his left and the raised road to his right, gave him a defensible front the French cavalry could not reach. He fell back and formed line. The French grenadiers in the walled priory across the road kept up fire, but the rough ground denied them their cavalry advantage too. Du Chayla counter-attacked with five battalions and a battery and most of his horse. While the infantry traded volleys, the Grassins - light French troops bypassed earlier in the day - came up behind Bligh and took the baggage and supplies and the road back to Aalst.

At about nine in the evening, with daylight thinning and his line of retreat cut, Bligh ordered the withdrawal. The Allied force moved off the causeway through woods and fields to the southeast, staying off the road, abandoning all the baggage. They reached Aalst with considerable loss. The Royal Scots had been gutted. The 23rd Royal Welch Fusiliers and most of Rich's surviving dragoons were now trapped inside the garrison at Ghent itself. Saxe sent Lowendal with fifteen thousand more men to invest the city. The trenches opened, the Dutch governor surrendered, and Ghent fell to the French on 11 July, just two days after Melle. The citadel held until 15 July. Bruges and Oudenarde fell on 19 July. The campaign Cumberland had hoped to slow was now running. The action at Melle - a small engagement, fought by tired men in the gold of a Flemish evening - had decided the season.

Melle is now a quiet town on the southeast outskirts of Ghent, swallowed slowly by suburb and university. The Château de Massemen, the walled complex the Grassins occupied that morning to delay Moltke's advance, still stands a few kilometers west. The Gontrode Brook is mostly culverted under modern roads. From altitude, the line of the old causeway is invisible beneath the E40 motorway and the rail corridor that carries trains from Brussels to Ghent. The battlefield is, as so many old Flemish battlefields are, somebody's wheat field now.