All four of the Sky Patrol members gasped as the light blazed out.Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick was more successful. He was at the head of an army of fifty-five thousand men, including ten or twelve thousand English, under Lord George Sackville. As the French had taken Frankfort-on-the-Main, he left the British and Hanoverian troops, amounting to twenty-eight thousand men, to watch the French, under Marshal de Contades, upon the Lippe, and set out to drive back the other divisions of the French, under De Broglie. He found these amounted to thirty-five thousand strong, but he did not hesitate to engage them at Bergen, on the Nidda, near Frankfort. After a hard-fought battle, he was defeated with a loss of two thousand men and five pieces of cannon. De Broglie pushed rapidly after him, formed a junction with Contades, and speedily reduced Cassel, Münster, and Minden. There appeared every prospect of the whole Electorate of Hanover being again overrun by them. The archives were once more sent off to Stade, ready for embarkation. But Ferdinand now displayed the superiority of his generalship. He left five thousand of his troops, with an air of carelessness, in the way of the French, who, unsuspicious of any stratagem, hastened forward to surprise them, when, to their astonishment, they found the whole of Ferdinand's army had been brought up in the night, and were drawn up behind a ridge near Minden.CHAPTER II. THE REIGN OF GEORGE I.Newcastle, who wanted to retain his place in the new Cabinet, was more successful on his own behalf. Pulteney said he had no objection to himself or the Lord Chancellor, but that many changes must be made in order to satisfy the late Opposition, and to give the Cabinet a necessary majority. Pulteney then declared that, for himself, he desired a peerage and a place in the Cabinet, and thus the new Ministry was organised:Wilmington, First Lord of the Treasury; Carteret, Secretary of State; the Marquis of Tweeddale, Secretary for Scotland; Sandys, the motion-maker, Chancellor of the Exchequer; the Prince of Wales was to receive the additional fifty thousand pounds a year; and his two friends, Lord Baltimore and Lord Archibald Hamilton, to have seats at the new Board of Admiralty.As the beaters separated, and widened the circle of their search, the sounds of calls, shouts, voices identifying one another grew fainter.At night? I havent had any experience.