Pfeiffer’s isolated brigade meanwhile was in ruins: ‘It was about three in the afternoon that our detachment engaged the brigade in that village which, after a very mean defence were all taken prisoner’ was John Deane’s dismissive comment on their performance. Driven out of Eyne, the Swiss troops fell back in disarray across the meadows towards Heurne, but Rantzau’s dragoons cut in at their flank and the infantry dispersed in panic, many being taken captive or cut down; Pfeiffer was among the prisoners. Finding no real opposition the Hanoverian horsemen surged ahead, along the general line of the road to Ghent, and went at full tilt into the ranks of the Royal La Bretache Régiment. They burst through the French troopers, scattering them in disorder and seizing both their standard and the mortally wounded commanding officer, before going on to engage the French cavalry brought forward a little earlier by Vendôme to support Biron’s abortive advance.

Rantzau’s dragoons were badly over-extended and outnumbered by the massed French squadrons, and they had to break contact and hurriedly withdraw towards the shelter of Cadogan’s infantry around Eyne. Their headlong retreat was covered by the Earl of Stair with a party of quartermasters, who were looking for a camping ground for the night, and was unable to resist the temptation to take part in the action. The Electoral Prince of Hanover (who, one day, would be George II of Great Britain) was thrown from his wounded horse in the scramble, and would have been sabred by a French trooper had not the prince’s squadron commander, Colonel Losecke, come to his rescue at the cost of his own life; John Deane, who remembered that it had been a ‘wet morning’, wrote of the Hanoverian exploit:

A noble action it was, and the behaviour of all from the highest to the lowest the same. The royal Prince of Hanover in this action behaved himself with undaunted courage, exposing himself in the thickest of the fire until his horse was shot from under him.

As the afternoon went by, the main body of the Allied army came streaming down the road towards the pontoon bridges. Returning from his reconnaissance to the high ground on the left, Marlborough directed that some of them should take the route through Oudenarde itself, to ease the congestion as troops waited to cross the river. Cadogan’s detachment was still rather exposed, but he was now able to bring forward from the bridges the four battalions of Prussian infantry that had stood guard there since that morning. As they approached the hamlet of Groenewald, the Prussians saw a column of French infantry approaching. These had been sent forward by Burgundy who, affronted at the impudent sally by Rantzau’s squadrons, intended them to turn Cadogan’s vulnerable left flank along the Diepenbeek stream. St Simon, commenting with the eye of the veteran soldier that he was, and appreciating the worth of line versus column when fighting in such close country, wrote that the French battalions:

As soon as they arrived, they threw themselves among the hedges, nearly all in column. The columns that arrived from time to time to the relief of these were as out of breath as the others, and were at once strongly charged by the enemy, who, being extended in lines and in good order, knew well how to profit by our disorder. The confusion was very great, the new-comers had no time to rally; there was a long interval between the platoons engaged and those sent to sustain them.

Evans’s Prussian troops got into line just in time to receive the advancing French, and to drive them back with heavy loss from their devastating and disciplined volleys of musketry; the leading files of French seemed to melt away in the blast. Here, perhaps, was the key to the puzzle surrounding the lamentable lack of success by these fine French troops at this crucial time, when Cadogan was still heavily outnumbered, and the main Allied army not yet in position to help him. The French, coming in on these clumsy columns, simply could not operate effectively in the close country beside the Diepenbeek. The anonymous French dragoon officer wrote that ‘Our infantry advanced, and the ground was disputed two or three hours with a terrible fire, and great obstinacy.’ John Deane, marching with the composite Foot Guards brigade, remembered that ‘the fight was very desperate on both sides.’

As the six French battalions recoiled from contact with the Prussians, Vendôme came upon their disordered ranks. Already fuming with frustration at the delay in eliminating Cadogan’s bridgehead, he ordered the infantry back into the attack on Groenewald, and sent a further six battalions from the right Wing of the army to bolster the effort. Cadogan, alert to the threat to his left, began feeding British and Dutch infantry from the area around Eyne towards the teeming battle, and Groenewald was held, for the time being, as the French were thrown back once again. Vendôme, on the other side of the Marollebeek stream, was now beside himself with frustration and fury, and personally led a further twelve battalions into the fray, having lost both his self-control and his grip on the wider direction of the battle at this early stage.

While all this was going on, John Campbell, the 2nd Duke of Argyll, was leading 20 battalions of British and German infantry into place along the Diepenbeek stream, parallel with the Scheldt at this point, spreading them out westwards past the French right flank towards Oycke and the low, domed hill known as the Boser Couter. At about 5pm, they pressed forward and the French infantry suddenly found their flank turned; they recovered with great gallantry, fresh troops were fed into the brawling battle and Argyll’s troops were in turn driven back across the Diepenbeek. They were soon joined by 20 more German battalions, hot and sweating from their urgent march, led into action by Count Lottum. At one point Burgundy asked the Marquis de Grimaldi to advance with some squadrons of the French right Wing to support Vendôme’s infantry in their battle between Groenewald and the hamlet of Schaerken, but they found the ground marshy and halted prematurely; Vendôme was left without support. Yet Louis XIV’s grandson knew he was wrong, being heard to mutter, half to himself ‘What will M. de Vendôme say when he hears that, instead of charging, I entrenched myself?’

John Deane said of the fighting for Schaerken that ‘Our forces pressing vehemently on them at once gave them such a vigorous attack and furiously rushing into the village, drove them cleanly out.’ It was not quite so simple, as the place changed hands several times and all the buildings were burnt to the ground in the process, together with the luckless wounded who had taken shelter there: ‘The enemy vigorously maintained that village on the left still pressing fresh forces therein that we might not have any suspicion of their stealing off, which supplies did us considerable damage for a great while.’ All this while, the British cavalry, commanded by Henry Lumley, took post to guard the left flank of the Allied army as it fed, battalion by battalion, into the rapidly escalating conflict.

By late afternoon, the entire right Wing of the French army had been drawn into a confused and brawling battle in the meadows, gardens and orchards beside the Scheldt, while the left Wing stood idle, lacking any instructions, on the track leading from Gavre. Vendôme was busy in the firing line shouting orders and thrusting soldiers into position, while Burgundy had neither the experience or the character to grip the situation and fight it properly. As De La Colonie remembered: ‘One hardly knows how the battle began, but it did so about four hours after midday and lasted until night, being resumed more than once. We lost some excellent troops, far more than the enemy.’ At about 6pm, another 18 German battalions deployed to support the hard-pressed battle-line along the Diepenbeek, and Marlborough was able to move Lottum’s troops to reinforce his fragile right flank, where only a few squadrons of Prussian and Hanoverian cavalry had faced the entire French left Wing.

As Marlborough, with Eugene’s skilled assistance, held the right Wing of the French army firmly in place, engaged in such an expensive and entirely unproductive infantry battle, Veldt-Marshal Overkirk moved around Vendôme’s right flank with a powerful corps of Dutch and Danish horse and foot, out onto the empty slopes of the Boser Couter, the approaches to which had been secured by Lumley’s cavalry. On the way, Overkirk paused, at Marlborough’s urgent request, to detach Week’s brigade of Dutch infantry to support the hard-pressed German troops near Brouwaan chateau. Meanwhile, the attention of the French was caught by a second daring cavalry raid on the other flank, when Dublislaw Natzmer’s Prussians scattered two French battalions and captured a battery near the Ghent road, before being driven off with heavy loss.

Some time after 7pm, and in teeming rain, Overkirk’s cavalry and infantry smashed down, in an entirely unexpected attack, behind the French line of battle. At the same time the British and Dutch infantry around Schaerken pressed forward in renewed attack. The French dragoon officer wrote in his letter:

We were obliged to endure the continual fire of the enemy’s foot and cannon, without daring to stir, because we were on the right of the King’s Household [near to the windmill at Royegem], who suffered as much as we. Towards the evening we were fallen upon by a great number of the enemy’s horse, to hinder us from succouring the rest, who were put to rout, and of the seven regiments of dragoons we have lost above half.

Neither Vendôme or Burgundy had sufficient troops in place to meet the massive assault, from either direction, and the right Wing of their army was virtually encircled; they were only saved from total annihilation by the onset of night. Kit Davies’s laconic comment on the affair was ‘Being taken in rear by 18 battalions and some horse, they began to lose courage.’

Now the left Wing of the French army, which had scarcely had a chance to fire a shot all day long, trickled off in the darkness, along the road towards the safety of the Ghent–Bruges canal. As they did so, Vendôme met the young royal Duke and his party at the roadside. The two men had not spoken together all that long, dangerous afternoon, and now the old general urged that their army should stand firm on the high ground around Huyshe, and gather itself to renew the battle in the morning. No-one spoke in support of him and, seeing that it was no use, Vendôme said, at last, ‘Very well gentlemen, I see clearly that you all wish it. So, we must retreat, and you, Monseigneur [to Burgundy] have long desired it.’ There was a long, horrified, pause at the insulting remark, but Burgundy made no reply. At last Puységur broke the silence, asking how the retreat was to be conducted, and the officers began calling for their horses and making off. With the cover of night the broken French army scrambled away northwards, leaving large numbers of dead, wounded and captives on the field. Vendôme’s private secretary, Du Capistron, wrote of the bewilderment and collapse in morale that was evident in the French army, after the turbulent and disastrous day that had been endured:

As to the retreat, the Duc de Vendôme was not for it; but, as he was backed in his opinion by the Comte d’Evreux only, he was obliged to submit. No sooner, therefore, had he given the word, for the army to retreat, but all got on horseback, and with astonishing precipitation, fled to Ghent.

John Blackader remembered that ‘Night put a screen of darkness between us and them’ while the Duc de St Simon, many of whose friends were present at the defeat, wrote of the disorder in the French army that reigned that evening:

Every man was separated from his troop, cavalry infantry and dragoons were mixed higgledy piggledy; not a battalion, not a squadron managed to keep together, all became entangled and embroiled with one another. When night fell, an immense amount of terrain had been lost, and half the army had not yet reached the battle-front. So great was the confusion that the Chevalier de Rozel, Lieutenant-General at the head of one hundred squadrons, received no orders. In the morning he found himself utterly forgotten; he at once commenced his march, but to retreat in full daylight was very difficult. Elsewhere fighting went on at various points.

Meanwhile, on the high ground over which led the road to Ghent, the French dragoon officer remembered that:

We had no other expedient left, than to force our way through the enemy … Some of the enemy’s adjutants summoning us to yield ourselves prisoners of war, we submitted to it, seeing no other way to save our lives. At least forty of our regiments are reduced to a wretched condition, the greatest part of them being killed or taken.

The day after the battle, 12 July, Marlborough, who had spent the night on the field in the rain, was received by Brigadier-General Chanclos in the town square of Oudenarde, which seethed with hundreds of French prisoners. Before conferring with his senior officers on the next moves of the army, the Duke sent the Earl of Stair with a note to Sidney Godolphin in London:

I must acknowledge the goodness of God in the success he was pleased to give us; for I believe Lord Stair will tell you they were in as strong a post as is possible to be found; but you know when I left England I was positively resolved to endeavour by all means a battle, thinking nothing else would make the queen’s business go well. This reason only made me venture a battle yesterday, otherwise I did give them too much advantage; but the good of the queen and my country shall always be preferred by me before any personal concern; for I am very sensible if I had miscarried, I should have been blamed. I hope I have given such a blow to their foot, that they will not be able to fight any more this year. My head aches so terribly that I must say no more.

Marlborough’s words, prophetic in a way, illustrate plainly his own understanding that his whole position, at home and abroad, rested on his continued ability to produce victories, while pointing at the same time to his failing health. Veldt-Marshal Overkirk’s report of the battle, written to Baron Fagel from Oudenarde town itself on the day after the battle, ran:

On Monday last [9 July] we broke up [camp] with the army from Herfelingen, near Enghien. We marched the whole night and the next day, passed the Dender at and above Lessines. Yesterday morning [11 July] we marched again, from Lessines towards Oudenarde where we arrived about noon. We had received intelligence that the enemy broke up on Tuesday, from the neighbourhood of Alost, and were encamped at Gavre, and that they, also, passed the Scheldt, yesterday, at that place. Which, indeed, we found to be true, perceiving, upon our arrival at Oudenarde, the enemy upon a full march, towards Tournai. We laid the bridges over the Scheldt in their sight, and our troops passed the river with an unspeakable speed and courage. About two o’clock, the greatest part of the army had passed, with which the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene formed the right Wing near Brouwaan castle, about half a league from the town, and began to engage the enemy in battle. In the meantime I marched, likewise, with the troops of the States, which composed the left Wing, in order to attack the enemy, which I did, about five o’clock, having been obliged to make a great round to come at them, and God has been pleased so to bless the arms of the High Allies, that we have entirely beaten the enemy, and forced them to retire, in great confusion; some towards Courtrai, and others towards Ghent. We sent out a body of horse and foot this morning, to pursue the runaway enemy, and scatter them yet more, but they were got too far away by the favour of the night.

Overkirk’s statement that he got his troops into position and attacked at five o’clock is not supported by other accounts of the action, most notably that Marlborough was waiting for him to go in well after seven o’clock that evening; the delay in getting the Dutch and Danish corps through the cramped streets of Oudenarde may have cost Marlborough a decisive victory. The same day, the Duke wrote to his wife in London:

I have neither spirits nor time to answer your last three letters; this being to bring the good news of a battle we had yesterday, in which it pleased God to give us at last the advantage. I do, and you must, give thanks to God for His goodness in protecting and making me the instrument of so much happiness to the Queen and nation, if she will please to make use of it.

The Duke was tired after the extraordinary exertions of the previous day, and many operational matters clamoured for his attention. Still, the closing phrase was very unfortunate. Duchess Sarah, engaged in a futile squabble with the Queen over her role and perquisites, promptly showed her the Duke’s letter with its implied criticism of his friend and patron. Anne, who had written to Marlborough ‘I want words to express the joy I have that you are well after your glorious success’, now indignantly asked her Captain-General for an explanation of these words:

You say, after being thankful for being the instrument of so much good to the nation and me, if I would please to make use of it [Author’s italics]. I am sure I will never make an ill-use of so great a blessing, but, according to the best of my understanding, make the best use of it I can, and should be glad to know what is the use you would have me make of it, and then I will tell you my thoughts very freely and sincerely.

Marlborough’s urbane and courteous reply smoothed things over – ‘I was in great haste when I writ it, and my fullness of heart for your service made me use that expression’ – but such unnecessary troubles were very unhelpful, and an irritating distraction at a time when he had begun conducting operations within the very borders of France itself.

Marshal Berwick had hurried ahead of his marching army and reached the Sambre river the day after the battle, with an advanced guard of cavalry, which he promptly sent on to help hold Mons. The rest of his force, as it toiled along the hot roads from the Moselle, was directed to concentrate at Valenciennes. Berwick wrote in some despair at the situation he found, so suddenly changed from the euphoria which had accompanied the seizure of Ghent and Bruges only a week or so earlier:

I went post to Tournai, to have a nearer view of the situation of things. There I found a great number of straggling parties of the army, which were subsisted by M. de Bernières [the commander of the garrison]. Upon a review of them, the whole number at Tournai, Lille and Ypres, amounted to upwards of nine thousand men; the enemy had made as many prisoners. As it would be some days before my infantry could come up, and the frontier was entirely destitute of troops, I divided these parties among the three places. M. de Vendôme, in order to outnumber the enemy, had carried all into the field, scarcely leaving men enough behind to guard the gates. I cannot absolutely blame him for this yet, from the year 1706, it had always been found that the loss of one battle was followed by the loss of all Flanders, for want of garrisons.

Marlborough, of course, saw Berwick’s arrival rather differently, as posing a real threat to the flank and rear of his army as it pressed onwards. The Duke was therefore relieved when Eugene’s troops arrived at Brussels on 15 July 1708; with the rear-areas now more secure, he could move forward into France. Marlborough’s satisfaction at having Eugene’s army covering his back is shown in a letter sent to Count Zinzendorf at this time. ‘The Prince of Savoy has been with us nearly a fortnight. All his troops are on this side of Brussels, where they render us essential service, by keeping the enemy in check, while we are so far in advance.’

The Duke had already sent Count Lottum ahead, late in the evening of 13 July, with 40 cavalry squadrons and 30 infantry battalions, to seize and destroy the unoccupied French lines of defence between Ypres and Warneton. Marlborough’s own headquarters was moved to Helchin the following day, going on to Werwicq two days later. Disregarding an impractical plan put forward by some of the Dutch field deputies to try and blockade Vendôme’s army in northern Flanders and then starve them out, Marlborough moved towards the French border. By 15 July work had begun on levelling the French defensive lines, and several hundred prisoners had been captured in the process. Matthew Bishop, who took part in the operations, wrote afterwards that:

We slung our firelocks and every man had a shovel in his hand, and when we came to the place appointed, we ran up upon their works. It was like running up the side of a house. When we got to the top we began to throw it down as fast as possible in order to make way for the army.

The Duke hoped that such a move, so threatening to the security of the border districts, and before the arrival of Berwick’s main force from the Moselle, might entice Vendôme out to give battle once again. He wrote to Godolphin:

They leave all France open to us, which is what I flatter myself the King of France and his council will never suffer, so that I hope by Thursday [19 July] M. de Vendôme will receive orders from court not to continue in the camp where he is, from whence we are not able to force him.

On 16 July 1708, the Duke sent to his wife a letter, apparently begun some days earlier, with a full report of the battle beside the Scheldt river:

I hope before this you would have had the news by Lord Stair of the good success we had on last Wednesday. I have been obliged ever since to be in perpetual motion, so that I am a good deal out of order. I was in good hopes that the diligence I have made in getting into the French country (for I am now behind their lines), would have obliged them to have abandoned Ghent; but as yet it has not had that effect, but, on the contrary, M. de Vendome declares he will sacrifice a strong garrison rather than abandon that town, which, if he keeps his word, he will give me a great deal of trouble; for till we are masters of Ghent, we can have no cannon [the heavy ordnance could only be brought forward to the Allied army by water, unless enormous effort was used to bring it by road]. The governor of Oudenarde, to whom we sent our prisoners, assures me that the number is above seven thousand, besides seven hundred officers; and we have a great many killed and wounded on both sides. They were forced to leave the greatest part of theirs on the place where they fought. We did take care to send all ours into Oudenarde, after which I ordered that such of the French as were yet alive should be carried into the town. I have no account of what that number might be, but it being a wet night, I believe a great many of them suffered very much. If we had been so happy as to have had two more hours of daylight, I believe we should have made an end to this war. However, I believe the French will be careful not to venture any more this year; but the greatest mischief they can do is, the venturing all for the preserving of Ghent.

The attention of Vendôme and Burgundy, at this crucial time, seemed to centre on presenting their own, quite different, accounts to Versailles of the mishandled battle at Oudenarde. Vendôme’s report, not surprisingly, skimmed over his own indisciplined failure to take a grip on the situation as it unfolded, and concentrated instead on the lack of support from the left Wing of the army: ‘I cannot comprehend how 50 battalions and 130 squadrons could be satisfied with observing us engaged for six hours and merely look on as though watching an opera.’ It is difficult not to feel sympathy with him over this point.

Marlborough’s operations were now, as he had predicted, hampered by the inability to use the waterways of the Scheldt and Lys rivers. The Duke wrote to Godolphin on 23 July 1708 of the difficulties encountered in the preparations for aggressively pushing the campaign forward:

We continue still under the great difficulty of getting cannon, for whilst the French continue at Ghent, we can make no use of the Scheldt and Lys, which are the only two rivers that can be of use to us in this country. We have ordered twenty battering pieces to be brought from Maastricht, and we have taken measures for sixty more to be brought from Holland. The calculation of the number of draught horses, to draw this artillery, amounts to sixteen thousand horses, by which you will see the difficulties we meet with; but we hope to overcome them. In the meantime, we send daily parties into France, which occasions great terror. The duke of Vendome’s army is so frightened, I am very confident if we could draw them out of their entrenchments, even from behind the canal of Ghent and Bruges, we should beat them with half their numbers, especially their foot. This is one of the reasons for their staying where they are.

Then, a very intimate touch, showing again the strain under which Marlborough operated while achieving such significant results on campaign: ‘It looks affected to complain in prosperity, but I have so many vexations, that I am quite tired, and long extremely for a little ease and quiet.’ There was no rest, no pause in the pace of operations. Vendôme’s battered army lay behind the Ghent-Bruges canal, cowed but still dangerous, while Berwick was in the field with the troops brought from the Moselle, and those he had drawn out from the garrisons along the French border to replace the losses at Oudenarde. With all this to contend with, Marlborough drew steadily nearer to Lille, while Eugene watched his back. Unlike the leadership of the French army, the Allied commanders operated in close harmony. The Marquis de Biron, whose attempt to throw back Cadogan’s advanced guard had miscarried so badly, now a prisoner of Marlborough, was struck by the closeness between the Allied commanders: ‘A perfect agreement between the two captains for the conduct of affairs.’

Despite such accord, a dispute had now arisen between the two men, on how best to progress the campaign. Marlborough had already sent his cavalry deeply into northern France, gathering supplies and seizing cattle and horses. Such towns as La Bassée, Lens, St Quentin and Peronne were occupied, briefly, and the suburbs of Arras were raided. Now, despite the obvious low state of the French armies, a plan the Duke put forward to thrust deep into France, even as far as Paris, met with no approval from the usually intrepid Prince Eugene. On 26 July, the disappointment plain in his words, Marlborough was writing once again to Sidney Godolphin in London: ‘I have acquainted Prince Eugene with the earnest desire we have for our marching into France. He thinks it impracticable, until we have Lille for a place d’armes and magazine.’ The Prince’s concerns were far from being trivial. To advance into France while a powerful fortress belt lay undisturbed behind them, and field armies (however cowed) in virtually equal strength threatened flanks and lines of supply and communication, seemed adventurous to the point of rashness. The Allies turned their attention, instead, to Lille, the second city of France, which now lay in the path of their army.