A French army of 20,000 men besieged and captured the Allied-controlled fortifications after an 18-day siege, with the 2,000-strong Dutch-Imperial garrison under Major-General Frederik Sirtema van Grovestins capitulating on 19 October.

[4] Having taken advantage of the overstretched Allied lines of communications by crushing a Dutch-Imperial detachment at Denain in July 1712, the French Marshal Villars' army captured the forts of Marchiennes, Douai and Le Quesnoy over the next three months.

[5] Villars and Louis XIV decided to conduct a siege instead of a blockade, to spare their troops the discomfort and because cutting off the water-logged town would be too difficult.

[9] Villars was aware of the heavy casualties caused by assaults only lightly supported by artillery fire and without preparatory sapping, but judged the increased speed worth it against the protestations of his engineers.

[11] Villars' victory nullified the Duke of Marlborough's conquest of Bouchain a year earlier and concluded the Anglo-Dutch portion of the war in the Treaty of Utrecht on terms that kept the fortified zone constructed by Vauban in northern France under French control[citation needed].