Jacques Pastur, chevalier de Saint-Lazare (Waterloo, 12 June 1659[a] – Waterloo, 3 May 1723 [2]) was a Southern Netherlands officer who fought on the Allied side in the Nine Years' War and on the French side in the War of the Spanish Succession and reached the rank of Mestre de camp.

[5][6] Pastur received a commission as a captain to raise a company of Walloon infantry on 8 October 1691 (he was already a former ensign at this time), charged with protecting the Sonian Forest in the service of the Governor-General of the Spanish Netherlands, Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria.

[7] On 4 June 1693, Pastur (by then a major) took a company of marauding Swiss mercenaries in French service, prisoner in the Sonian Forest, after they surrendered without much of a fight.

[9] On 20 June 1695, at the head of a company of Dragoons, he drove a large contingent of French infantry and Hussars from the village of Ixelles with hardly any losses on his side.

But on 27 April 1696, Pastur was wounded in the left arm during an action he took to liberate several Swiss officers in Allied service, who had been captured by the French partisan Henri, who was based in Charleroi, near Tombeek.

We find Pastur as colonel of his own regiment of dragoons at a troop review at Nivelles on 16 October 1702 (so a few months after the start of the War of Spanish Succession).

[15] His regiment was part of the army commanded by Villeroy, that on 26 June 1704 fought a skirmish with seven Dutch squadrons of horse near Tongerlo.

The enemy tried to take him in the flank and the rear in the forest, but Pastur easily evaded this trap, and fought a delaying action, unleashing a murderous fire on the English and Dutch forces pursuing him.

[18] The battle meanwhile continued in the morning of 18 August 1705, as the Allied army under Marlborough and Nassau-Overkirk marched through the Sonian Forest to the vicinity of the Groenendael Priory, in an effort to reach the heights commanding the City of Brussels.

Pastur managed to take many prisoners that day from among the Dutch troops of general Ernst Wilhelm von Salisch, and the English light infantry.

[20] In 1706, he took part with his regiment in the Battle of Ramillies that was lost by the French, which caused a great loss of morale resulting in many desertions.

[22] In later years, he apparently specialized in the type of cavalry raids that were the only recourse left to the Franco-Belgian army, after it had lost the war in the Southern Netherlands.

[20] Quincy relates that Pastur at the head of his dragoons started during the night of 23 to 24 August 1712 from Namur (including part of the garrison of that fortress).

Despite the need to cross several rivers, he arrived on 25 August in the vicinity of Bergen op Zoom where he divided his force into three parts.

In retaliation for the depredations of Grovestins, according to Quincy, Pastur could have burned down Tholen and Steenbergen in their entirety, but it sufficed for him to just put a few houses to the torch, to make his point, and left it to the inhabitants to extinguish the fire.

Prince Eugene sent a detachment of 30 squadrons of cavalry to Leuven to try and cut him off at the pass, but it was in vain as they arrived three hours after Pastur had already passed the city on his way back to Namur, where he arrived on the night of 27 August , with his sixty hostages, and a large amount of war booty, among which a hundred drayhorses.