"As for the rest of the troops," said Alexander, "they are stationed where they have nothing to subsist upon, save salt water and the dykes, and if the Lord does not grant a miracle, succour, even if sent by your Majesty, will arrive too late." He assured his master, that he could not go on more than five or six days longer, that he had been feeding his soldiers for a long time from hand to mouth, and that it would soon be impossible for him to keep his troops together.

If he did not disband them they would run away.
His pictures were most dismal, his supplications for money very moving but he never alluded to himself.

All his anxiety, all his tenderness, were for his soldiers.

"They must have food," he said: "'Tis impossible to sustain them any longer by driblets, as I have done for a long time.
Yet how can I do it without money?
And I have none at all, nor do I see where to get a single florin." But these revelations were made only to his master's most secret ear.

His letters, deciphered after three centuries, alone make manifest the almost desperate condition in which the apparently triumphant general was placed, and the facility with which his antagonists, had they been well guided and faithful to themselves, might have driven him into the sea.
But to those adversaries he maintained an attitude of serene and smiling triumph.