We frequently marched three, sometimes four days, successively, and halted a day. We generally began our march about three in the morning, proceeded about four leagues, or four and a half each day, and reached our [camp] ground about nine [am]. As we marched through the countries of our Allies, commissaries were appointed to furnish us with all manner of necessaries for man and horse; these were brought to the ground before we arrived, and the soldiers had nothing to do, but to pitch their tents, boil their kettles, and lie down to rest. Surely was never a march carried on with more order and regularity, and with less fatigue to both man and horse.

This apparently inexplicable movement by the Duke’s army away from the Low Countries puzzled the French. Such a venture, drastically reducing the strength of the Anglo-Dutch armies in the region, seemed to leave the frontier of Holland wide open to attack. However, the progress of the marching army could not be ignored, as an attack on the Marquis de Bedmar in the Moselle valley would outflank the whole French strategic posture in northern Europe, as would an advance into Alsace. So Marshal Villeroi, the French commander in the Spanish Netherlands, found that he was obliged to march south too, away from the Dutch frontier, trying to keep pace with Marlborough and his bewildering campaign. Parker wrote that ‘This made the Dutch easy, for they were apprehensive that, on the Duke’s marching from them, the French would over-run their whole country.’ On 26 May Marlborough reached Coblenz, at the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle, but, instead of turning to the west to attack Bedmar, his army marched onwards, crossing to the eastern bank of the Rhine, and gaining strength from reinforcements that had been arranged to rendezvous with him there. Villeroi wrote to Louis XIV at the end of May ‘There will be no campaign on the Moselle this year, the English have all gone up into Germany.’

The success of Marlborough’s march, with the flank of his columns potentially exposed to French attack for long periods, depended upon his opponents being kept in doubt as to his intentions. The French could see that the Allied army might well go to the Danube valley, and that the French forces already there, under the command of Marshal Marsin, would as a result be in danger. Marshal Tallard (as he now was) had moved through the Black Forest with reinforcements for Marsin in May, but until, and if, Marlborough began to cross the Swabian Jura hills, using the narrow Geiselingen pass, the French could not be sure that an Allied attack in Alsace would not still take place. Accordingly, for the time being, they had to concentrate their available forces there, and not commit further troops to the Danube.

The conditions for the march of the Allied army deteriorated soon afterwards, as the weather was poor and the roads began to turn to mud in the rain. The Duke’s concern for his soldiers is plainly shown in a letter he sent to Henry St John in London, on 2 June:

I am pursuing my march with the horse towards the rendezvous [with Goor’s Dutch corps] near Philippsburg, but the ill-weather with the badness of the roads for the artillery will keep the foot back for three or four days longer than I expected. We have nothing new from Prince Louis of Baden [the Imperial field commander in Swabia], nor of the march of M. de Villeroi.

Despite the bad weather, Donald McBane remembered the march cheerfully: ‘We set out for Germany and had seven weeks march, but had plenty of good bread and wine, and the people were very kind to us along the Rhine.’ The ability of Marlborough’s quartermasters to pay hard cash for the supplies they needed ensured that they found a ready welcome in the lands through which the Allied army marched. Kit Davies, with Hay’s Dragoons, wrote approvingly of the Duke’s compassion for his soldiers: ‘I cannot help taking notice of the Duke of Marlborough’s great humanity, who seeing some of our foot drop, took them into his own coach.’ At the beginning of June, the Duke wrote to Charles Churchill, his younger brother and General of Infantry, with advice concerning the best road to be taken with the infantry and guns:

I send by this express on purpose to be informed of the condition you are in both as to the troops and the artillery, and to advise you to take your march with the whole directly to Heidelberg, since the route we have taken by Ladenburg [with the cavalry] will be too difficult for you. Pray send back the messenger immediately, and let me know by him where you design to camp each night, and what day you propose to be at Heidelberg, that I may take my measures accordingly.

Meanwhile, news came in of the movements of the French; the camp bulletin, issued from Ladenburg on 4 June, reads:

We have this morning received advice from the Comte de Vehlen, General of the Palatine horse, who commands the forces in the lines of Stollhofen, that M. de Tallard repassed the Rhine on Monday the 2nd inst. at Altenheim, and was marching towards Landau, in order, it is supposed, to join the Maréchal de Villeroi, or to oppose our passage of the Rhine, the bridge which the Governor of Philippsburg is making there giving them a jealousy that we are coming that way.

Tallard, in fact, was returning from his audacious operation to resupply Marsin. Still, the Duke, playing on such French apprehensions, had ordered pontoon bridges to be laid at Philippsburg, as if the intention was really to invade Alsace after all. In this way, the eyes of the French would be kept away from his true intentions for a while; the delay was important to Marlborough, as his army was becoming strung out with the exertions of the march. That same day he wrote to Charles Hedges:

I am halting here [Ladenburg] to-day and to-morrow to give an opportunity to the foot which passes the Main [river] this day to come nearer to us, and to the horse that are here to recover a little their tedious march … I now expect to be in ten days upon the Danube, near the Elector of Bavaria, who, if he finds himself pressed, I am apt to think may offer to make his accommodation [with us].

Adding that it would be useful to have the plenipotentiary power (as Wratislaw had) to negotiate terms with the Elector, Marlborough went on:

I take him to be a very fickle Prince, you will please to know the Queen’s pleasure, whether her Majesty may not think it fit to give me the like powers, that if he should be willing to comply, and come over to us upon reasonable terms, I may conclude a treaty with him, without giving him time to fly off again.

These powers were duly granted to the Duke, although, as it would turn out, he never had the chance to use them to bring about a successful conclusion. The Duke remained concerned at the deteriorating pace of the army’s progress, although the skies began to clear soon afterwards, and he did not forget that his men needed supplies. In a letter dated 8 June, to Charles Churchill, Marlborough shows how the smaller details of campaign life did not escape his keen attention:

By a letter I have seen from Colonel Rowe, he writes that the foot may soon be in want of shoes; that they are to be had at Franckfort at reasonable rates, and that the contractors will send them forward to Nuremberg; therefore I desire you will call the commanding officers together that you may know the number they will want, and thereupon order Colonel Rowe to write to Franckfort that they may be hastened to Nuremberg, where we can send for them or order them to come forward to us.

Nor did he forget the comfort of the marching soldiers as they tramped along, adding to the letter ‘I hope [that with] this warm weather you take care to march as early as to be in your camp before the heat of the day.’ As the army progressed southwards Marlborough was anxious over the growing French concentration in Alsace, where Marshal Villeroi had now joined forces with Tallard, and urged that his Imperial allies take steps to counter the potential threat. He wrote to Sidney Godolphin at this time:

Having received intelligence yesterday that in three or four days the duke of Villeroy, with his army, would join that of the marshal de Tallard about Landau, in order to force the passage of the Rhine, I prevailed with Count Wratislaw to make all the haste he could to prince Louis of Baden’s army, where he will be this night, that he might make him sensible of the great consequences it is to hinder the French from passing that river, while we are acting against the elector of Bavaria. I have also desired him to press, and not to be refused, that either Prince Louis or Prince Eugene go immediately to the Rhine.

The Duke was plainly also aware of the danger of the French and Bavarians being able to deploy superior numbers in the Danube valley. He was by this point growing less concerned at the potential French threat to strike at his marching columns; he was moving his army out of their reach, and his lines of communication and supply were shifting to central Germany. The time for his opponents to attack him on the march was almost over, although he still had to get his troops over the Swabian Jura hills in order to confront the Elector of Bavaria.

At Mundelheim, on 10 June, Marlborough met for the first time the President of the Imperial War Council, 37 year-old Prince Eugene of Savoy. The Prince reviewed the Duke’s cavalry and commented approvingly that ‘He had heard much of the English cavalry and found it to be the best appointed and the finest he had ever seen.’ The two men quickly became close friends and confidantes, but relations with the Imperial field commander, Louis-Guillaume, Margrave of Baden, were less rosy. Baden was brave enough, but was pompous and jealous of the friendship of the Duke and the Prince. Working with him was not an easy matter, particularly as it was suspected that he was in indiscreet correspondence with his old comrade, the renegade Elector of Bavaria. There was also a period of wasteful marching to and fro while the Margrave got his forces, which had been gathering forage and supplies, properly into position, ready to cover Marlborough’s move into the Danube valley.

Meanwhile, the French commanders in Alsace remained in uncertainty. Marlborough could strike at them still, or move to the Danube. On 12 June the French War Minister, Michel de Chamillart, wrote to Tallard: ‘Nobody knows the country better than you, and as Marshal Villeroi is very well informed about it, His Majesty knows no better than to put to you two again, the choice as to what to do.’ It was a key question for the two field commanders, who were asked to submit plans to foil Marlborough’s campaign. However, both men were consumed with doubt, Tallard writing: ‘In view of the superiority of the enemy forces between the Rhine and the Danube, assistance to Bavaria is so difficult as to appear almost an impossibility.’ In this he was right; the Allies could muster at this time more troops in the centre ground than either of the two widely separated French and Bavarian armies. General Legalle was sent to Versailles to explain the problems, but Louis XIV decided that Tallard should, once again, move though the Black Forest and link up with Marshal Marsin, while Villeroi fixed the Imperial forces on the Rhine, and so prevented their use on the Danube.

The armies of Marlborough and Baden at last combined on 22 June, on a day foul with rain and wind. With 60,000 troops, they now outnumbered the armies of Marshal Marsin and the Elector, who had about 40,000 men between them, and were obliged to go into the shelter of an entrenched defensive camp at Dillingen on the north bank of the Danube.

One of the Elector’s regimental commanders was Colonel Jean-Martin De La Colonie. His unit, the Grenadiers Rouge, was composed of French and Italian deserters and other miscreants who were permitted to volunteer for further service rather than face court martial. They were a rather motley bunch, almost a penal battalion, and the Colonel was having a lot of problems with them at this time. He wrote of the measures necessary to instil discipline in them, after a rash of incidents, which aroused the fury of citizens of the town in which they were quartered:

I did my best to suppress their thieving ways and brigandage which obtained with these men and rendered them unbearable. The best of them deserved hanging ten times over, and it was almost impossible to put a stop to the bad habits they had contracted. The burghers of Straubing never ceased to complain of them the whole winter long, and the quarrelling and fighting that went on between the grenadiers themselves took up nearly my entire attention. Finally, after exhausting all the ordinary measures of maintaining discipline, I was compelled to ask for power to flog them at my own discretion, without convening a court-martial. This was granted me, and in order to get clear evidence as to the guilty parties, whom I found it perpetually necessary to chastise in this severe fashion I organised a series of patrols, night and day, in all the streets of the town. In this way I put a stop to a greater portion of the evil under which the citizens suffered.

Although the Grenadiers Rouge were apparently of rather dubious quality, experience would show that they became good campaigners and stout fighters in time.

Marlborough had cast loose his exposed lines of supply and communication along the Rhine, as he passed through the Swabian hills. Despite this, the Duke was continually worried at the state of his marching troops, and the wear and tear on his army. When they got to Bavaria they would have to be in good condition if the Elector and Marsin were to be confronted with any chance of success. He wrote from Sinsein on 18 June to his brother, Charles Churchill:

In my last I desired you not to press your march so as to prejudice your men or horses, for that if you came a day later than the route appoints, it would not be material. Pray acquaint Colonel [Holcroft] Blood that he should spare the contractor’s horses as much as may be, and make use of as many others for the train as the country can afford even one march beyond Gieslingen, after which he can expect no more assistance from the country, but must depend entirely on his own horses.

Marlborough’s thinking is clear. Once past the Gieslingen gap in the Jura hills, the Allied army would be operating in a country no longer lush with supplies and willing assistance, but potentially hostile and swept clean by the Elector’s hungry troops. Another letter to his brother, sent two days later, indicates that the pace of the campaign was quickening, the army moving from line of march to combat readiness and dispositions. The Duke concluded his note: ‘One day’s march on the other side of Gieslingen you just give notice that all the officers must take care of their own baggage from thence [onwards].’ A week or so earlier, Prince Eugene had gone to command the Imperial troops at the Lines of Stollhofen, holding the line of the River Rhine against any new French incursion into southern Germany. If he could achieve this, then the armies of Marsin and the Elector would be firmly isolated in the Danube valley, and exposed to the full fury of the onslaught of Marlborough and Baden. However, on 27 June, Louis XIV’s fresh instructions to his two Marshals for the future of the campaign were received; Villeroi was to fix Eugene on the Rhine while Tallard took his army as reinforcement to the Danube.

At the beginning of July, news came in to the Allied camp at Amerdingen that Eugene had failed in his task to hold the line against the French. Tallard had out-manoeuvred the Prince, and was coming forward through the Black Forest with a fresh army, although the Marshal spent several unproductive days trying to take Villingen, which lay inconveniently on his line of march. Eugene had been given a formidable task, with insufficient strength, even after reinforcement with Danish infantry. He was now in pursuit of Tallard, but with his relative lack of numbers, only some 18,000 troops, the Prince was unable to intercept the Marshal’s progress. At the same time, in the Danube valley, Marlborough was concerned that, even as he moved forward to grapple with the French and Bavarian armies, his own order of battle was still incomplete. The original plan, for the Duke and the Margrave to operate independently, had not been possible due to delays in the arrival of the Danish contingent under the Duke of Württemberg. This left Marlborough with too few troops to operate without the close support of Baden. As it was, three days earlier he had written to Sir Charles Hedges:

We are now within two leagues of the Elector who is retired with his army into his lines between Dillingen and Lavingen; but we shall not be able to press him so as it were to be wished until the Danish horse come up, which will not be, I fear, these five or six days; though if the Duke of Wurttemberg had hastened his march according to the repeated orders I sent, he might have been here by this time.

As the Duke well knew, Count Scholten, commanding the Danish infantry, had, a couple of weeks before, been sent to reinforce Eugene at the lines of Stollhofen, and their cavalry had been engaged in covering this movement. It seems that Marlborough, when it suited him, could engage his memory quite selectively, a common trait among commanding generals. Tallard’s approach, however, inevitably increased the pace of operations on the Danube; with a fresh French army on the scene, if Marlborough did not force the line of the river now, he might never do so.

The Duke’s forward supply depots, established at Nordlingen, would be too far away once the line of the Danube was crossed, and the Allied army was operating deep in Bavaria. So the Duke looked to secure a good place to both bridge the river and establish a forward base. The ideal location appeared to the small town of Donauwörth, where the Wörnitz river met the Danube. The Elector, from the snug security of his entrenched camp at Dillingen, had also seen this possibility, and sent a strong corps, under Comte Jean d’Arco, to hold the town and the heights that dominated the crossing place; a hill known as the Schellenberg. D’Arco had under command veteran French and Bavarian infantry, together with dismounted dragoons, and two batteries of guns. In addition, Bavarian militia and a French battalion garrisoned the town under command of Colonel Du Bordet. Francis Hare remembered that ‘Thirteen thousand of the enemy were encamped upon the Schellenberg and they were busy in fortifying and entrenching themselves.’