expensive losses of valuable mercenary soldiers. He preferred the steady but more secure slog of siege warfare, in which he (and his successor Frederick Henry) developed a great proficiency. The States Army therefore seldom engaged in open battles during the entire course of the Eighty Years' War, but used its field army strategically as a threatening chess piece on a chess board, often to good effect. The main war was fought with garrisons and besieging forces. The army that really employed the new tactics was that of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, who used them, with some improvements of his own, to great effect in the 1630s. Organisational reforms of William III Following the defeats of the States Army after the French invasion of the Rampjaar, 1672, William III introduced important organisational and logistical reforms in the States Army that enabled it to recover in a remarkably short time, and to drive the French from the country. The most direct threat to the survival of the States Army in the months after the lightning advance of the French into the Dutch heartland was a financial one: the three occupied provinces Gelderland, Overijssel, and Utrecht no longer paid the troops that were on their "repartition," which would soon have resulted in the loss of these regiments. Holland therefore agreed to temporarily take over the financing of these troops, on top of the 58% of the costs of the war that it normally already paid. But on the level of the company a different liquidity crisis threatened to ruin the captains. First of all, many "solicitors-military," afraid they would not be repaid, refused to extend further credit. At the same time the confusion caused by the hasty retreat of the field army behind the Dutch Water Line, combined with the haphazard return of the garrisons of the Dutch fortresses that had so ignominiously capitulated to the French, caused large apparent diminutions of the effective strength of the companies that the captains had to replenish for their own account under the system described above. This threatened to bankrupt many captains, just when they were needed the most. At the behest of William III the government now stepped in to avert this danger which might have resulted in a breakdown of the army. The States of Holland agreed to compensate the captains for the loss of soldiers at a fixed rate, which enabled the captains