Chapter Nine

A Murderous Affair – Tournai, the Battle of Malplaquet and Mons, 1709

The French army commander in the Low Countries, Marshal Villars, could not lightly risk a battle in the open in the early summer of 1709; his army was weaker in numbers than that of Marlborough, and the French soldiers were underfed and ill-equipped. Their shaken morale was reviving, the stout and long defence of Lille had demonstrated that, but the recovery was steady, after the arduous campaign of the previous autumn, and the rigours of the harsh winter. The Marshal’s flamboyant personality cheered the troops, as did the way he bullied army contractors into supplying bread and uniforms for his men, but, of necessity, the French commander clung to his lines of defence. Marlborough’s own plans to draw Villars out into the open were in progress, and Robert Parker wrote:

The French had, with great expense and labour, thrown up new lines, from the Lys to the Scharp [Scarpe]; and Villars drew up his army behind them at Pont à Vendin. On the 18th of June [O.S] our generals advanced up to him, and made preparations for attacking him in his lines. Upon which Villars drained all his garrisons near him to give them a warm reception; particularly from Tournai he drew 3,000 of his best troops. This was what our generals wanted.

A note was received by Marlborough, from his confidential informant in Paris, late in June:

I have seen the letters of 29th [May] from Flanders which show that M. de Villars is encamped in a very favourable position, that the morale of the army is good, that Villars has withdrawn all the garrisons from Mons, Tournai and Ypres, and has sent them to join the main army. M. de Villars suspects some of his staff officers of giving the enemy information of his plans.

Marlborough had subtly decoyed Villars, who shifted his troops to the south of Lille, between Douai and La Bassée, and the artillery train of the Allied army began to move to Menin, as if to threaten Ypres or Bethune. No sooner had the French commander weakened the garrison at Tournai to reinforce the apparently threatened sector, than Marlborough struck at that very same town with his now accustomed speed. Marching through the night the Allied soldiers, according to Parker, ‘Found themselves before Tournai, which was invested immediately, and that in such a manner, that it was impossible for Villars to return the troops he had drawn from thence.’

However, the Comte de Merode-Westerloo wrote in critical terms about the opening of the new campaign: ‘Our twin heroes did nothing with their formidable army until 27 June when they invested Tournai – a step they should have taken before besieging Lille had they truly applied the principles of war.’ Despite such criticism the operation was neatly handled, and a plainly wrong-footed Villars learned too late Marlborough’s true intentions. The Duke wrote to the Secretary of State that same day with the details:

Upon repeated advices that the Maréchal de Villars had finished his lines, and the continued rain having not only made the roads very bad, but likewise the approach to his entrenchments along the river very difficult, and part of our heavy cannon being come to Menin, which had given the enemy some jealousy that our design was upon Ypres, whereby they neglected Tournai so far as to send part of the garrison to strengthen their army, it has been thought most advisable to undertake the siege of that last place: in order whereto we sent our heavy baggage yesterday morning to Lille, and at nine in the evening the army decamped. We marched the whole night, and early this morning invested the town on all sides. The garrison is commanded by M. Surville, a Lieutenant-General, who was wounded at the siege of Lille, and has the reputation of a very good officer. We are told it consists only of twelve battalions, whereof several are said to be weak, and of five squadrons of dragoons.

The siege proved to be a severe test for the Allied army, despite the reported weakness of the garrison. Colonel Jean-Martin De La Colonie described the place as ‘One of the strongest and most regularly laid out in the kingdom. M. de Maigrini, the famous engineer, had devoted all his knowledge to the construction of this citadel.’ The French defenders fought with magnificent tenacity, and casualties on both sides were severe. Parker commented:

Prince Eugene undertook to carry on the siege and the Duke to cover him. The Marquis de Surville, who commanded the garrison of Tournai, made heavy complaints at the Court of France, that the best of his troops were drawn from him; however, he made a gallant defence for a month, then surrendered the town, and retired into the citadel.

A flavour of the severe nature of the operations, and the extensive tunnelling and mining that was undertaken, is given in a letter written by Marlborough to the Secretary of State on 12 August:

We are obliged to carry on our attack on the citadel with great caution, to preserve our men from the enemy’s mines of which they have already sprung several with little effect. Our miners have discovered one of their galleries at each attack, but dare not advance to make the proper use of this discovery because of the enemy’s continual fire of small shot under ground. We are preparing to roll bombs into these galleries in order to dislodge them.

Kit Davies remembered that the underground fighting was often carried on with ‘Pickaxes and spades, more dangerous than swords.’ A report in The Tatler, dated 24 August 1709 (O.S) gives further details of the continuous and hazardous pace of the siege operations:

We hear from Tournay, that on the night between the twenty second and twenty third [N.S], they [the Allied soldiers] went on with their works in the enemy’s mines, and levelled the earth which was taken out of them. The next day, at eight in the morning, when the French observed we were relieving our trenches, they sprung a larger mine than any they had tried during the siege which killed only four private centinels. The ensuing night we had three men and two officers killed, as also seven men wounded. Between the twenty fourth and twenty fifth [N.S], we repaired some works which the enemy had ruined. On the next day, some of the enemy’s magazines blew up; and it is thought they were destroyed on purpose by some of their men, who are impatient of the hardships of the present service. A deserter, who came out of the citadel on the twenty seventh [N.S] says the garrison is brought to the utmost necessity; that their bread and water are both very bad; and that they were reduced to eat horse-flesh. The manner of fighting in this siege has discovered a gallantry in our men unknown to former ages; their meeting with adverse parties under ground, where every step is taken with apprehension of being blown up with mines below them, or crushed by the fall of earth above them, and all this acted in darkness, has something in it more terrible than ever is met with in any other part of a soldiers’ duty.

The citadel of Tournai, which had been the work of one of Vauban’s most accomplished pupils, proved to be a very formidable obstacle. Robert Parker went on to describe the severity of the operations:

Our approaches against this citadel were carried on mostly under ground, by sinking pits several fathoms deep, and working from thence, until we came to their casements and mines. These extended a great way from the body of the citadel, and in them our men and the enemy frequently met and fought it out with sword and pistol. We could not prevent them however from springing several mines, which blew up some of our batteries, guns and all, and a great many men.

Donald McBane also wrote with some feeling of the trials of the fighting in the trenches before the forbidding citadel:

They planted a gun directly on a flank through the wall, with one shot they killed forty-eight men, I escaped the shot, but one of the heads of the men that was shot, knocked me down, and all his brains came round my head. I being half-senseless put up my hand to my head, and finding the brains, cried to my neighbour that all my brains were knocked out; he said were your brains out you could not speak.

As usual, Kit Davies was a familiar figure in the entrenchments, and one day she begged the chance to fire one of the siege guns, for a wager, to try and hit a windmill that harboured French sharpshooters:

Major Pettit, before I fired, bid me take care the cannon did not recoil upon me, or break the drums of my ears, which I had forgot to stop (tallow was the usual material for this) I was in too much haste to get the guinea and not minding the caution, I was beat backwards, and had the noise of the cannon a long while in my ears. The officers could not refrain from laughing at seeing me on my backside.

Peter Drake had wisely given up a rather hazardous failed career as a privateer on the high seas and, newly released from gaol and sentence of death in England, he once again sought to enter the French service. He had some business to transact in Tournai, but obviously could not get into the blockaded town; so instead he volunteered for service as a gentleman trooper in the Scots company of the elite Gendarmerie:

The quartermaster took me to his tent, fitted me with the regimentals, which were scarlet, silver laced on the sleeves and pockets, with a carbine and sword-belt laced. Thus I was fixed in the Gens d’Armes, and I had an exceedingly good horse, which cost six hundred livres.

While Drake was arranging his affairs in this way, as soon as the capitulation of Tournai was assured, Marlborough moved swiftly against the smaller, but important, fortress of Mons. The seizure of this place would, among other things, almost complete the expulsion of the French from the Spanish Netherlands. Louis XIV was alert to the danger, and wrote to Marshal Villars urging him to save the place: ‘Should Mons suffer the fate of Tournai, our case is undone. You are by every means in your power to relieve the garrison. The cost is not to be considered.’ With as competent and aggressive a commander as Villars, such an appeal was tantamount to a direct instruction to go out and give battle. The Marshal was not slow to put his army into motion, which began moving forward from its lines of defence on the Sensée river.

Already, on 3 September 1709, Marlborough had sent a strong force of cavalry and infantry under George Hamilton, 1st Earl Orkney, past Mortagne to mask the relatively small fortress at St Ghislain on the Haine river, in order to clear the way to Mons and to provide flank protection for the Allied army as it moved forward. The Duke wrote to Queen Anne that day: ‘The army is marching in hopes we may be able to invest Mons before the enemy can throw in any succours.’ Prince Frederick of Hesse-Cassell moved on 5 September to close up to Mons itself, his troops wading across the Haine river as they did so, in hourly expectation, as Jemmy Campbell of Stair’s Dragoons (previously Hay’s) wrote, of ‘being attacked by the French cavalry.’ The following day it was learned that the French really were preparing to come forward from their defensive lines, this being confirmed by the capture of the extremely talkative Marquis de Cheldon, who plainly saw no harm in divulging the French commanders’ intentions.

Peter Drake remembered that ‘On the eighth of September, Marshal Villars received an account that the Governor of Tournai had caused the chamade, or parley, to be beat; that night the French army marched, in order to post themselves near the woods where this battle was fought.’ Before long the two armies lay only a few miles apart, separated by a dense but irregular belt of woodland formed by the Bois de Bossu, Bois de Sars, and Bois de Lanières. Villars was moving to challenge Marlborough, and save Mons, and he was cleverly using the woodland belt to shield his movements from observation. Villars was soon joined by Marshal Boufflers, who rode to serve in the army as a volunteer: ‘He did not come with any character [formal role] but to receive his commands for the King’s service.’

Marlborough afterwards wrote of this advance by the French army: ‘We were alarmed with the enemy’s marching to attack the Prince of Hesse; upon which the whole army was immediately put in motion.’ The danger was plain: if Villars moved quickly enough, he might catch the Allied advance-guard, on the south side of the Haine river, isolated from the main body of Marlborough’s army as it marched along from the siege-works before Tournai. Strung out along the muddy roads, the Allied troops were hastening forward to invest Mons, although Marlborough had left a substantial corps, under command of Lieutenant-General Henry Withers, to complete mopping-up operations in the captured fortress of Tournai, and to cover the vulnerable trains of the army as they struggled onwards. By 8 September, the Duke was able to achieve a concentration of most of his army to the east of the woodland belt near to Mons. Eugene with the left Wing covered the Bois de Bossu in the north, nearest to St Ghislain, while the Duke moved with the right Wing the six miles southwards, to observe the Gap at Aulnois near to Malplaquet, between the Bois de Sars and the Bois de Lanières. This would guard the intended siege operations against any French movement around the left flank of the Allied army. Preparations were also made to storm St Ghislain if the garrison refused a summons to yield the town.

As Marlborough’s army marched towards Mons, Kit Davies was keen to make the most of her opportunities to obtain booty:

When we left Tournai, and before the investing of Mons, as the army marched towards the French lines, I chose to go with the camp colour-men, who attended by the forlorn hope, march at so great a distance before the army that they are often cut off before any force can come up to their assistance; which, though it makes it the most dangerous post, it is the most profitable, if there is any plunder to be got, as there are but few to share it.

However, she was concerned at the uncharacteristically low spirits of her husband during the march:

He was extremely melancholy, and told me this engagement would most certainly be the last he would ever see: I endeavoured to laugh him out of this notion, but he insisted on it that he would be killed … In our march, so heavy a rain fell, that we were ankle deep, and seeing a little child of one of my husband’s comrades, I took it up lest it should be lost in the deep clay. At night, when in sight of the enemy, our army halted, and lay that night on some fallow ground, on which were many heaps of dung, and he was a happy man who could get one to sleep upon.

Davies went off to help plunder some local cottages and, well provisioned with her spoils, took the child safely back to her father who was, however, found lying ill on the ground with fever. Having little option but to leave the infant to an uncertain fate, she then rejoined her husband and his comrades on the dung-hill:

I went in search of my husband; and after a considerable time, as there was so great a fog I could scarce see a yard in front of me, I met one of our regiment. I asked for my husband, and he showed me him fast asleep, with his head on his comrade’s backside.

The following morning, Monday 9 September 1709, Marlborough and his staff observed Villars’s army closing up to the gap opposite to Malplaquet. With the French commander plainly committing himself in this way, the Duke fell back a short way eastwards, to the hamlet of Aulnois, where the Dutch infantry had halted. In this way he might entice the Marshal through the woods and into the open country near to Mons, where the French would be vulnerable to an attack. The Duke quickly summoned Eugene from the Bois de Bossu, and the Allied army concentrated there at the Gap of Aulnois to face the French. Villars was not so rash, and only advanced to occupy the Gap that evening, but did not venture beyond the trees. Rather strangely, the Marshal then detached his reserve cavalry, under the Chevalier de Luxembourg, to the south to cover the Gap opposite Mauberge, a town that was under no real threat.

In the Allied camp, a council of war was called, and the question was whether an attack the following day, 10 September, was practical. Any delay would enable the French to improve what was already a naturally strong position between the woods, and with only a narrow access to the Gap available, the ability to manoeuvre for a better position was virtually non-existent. However, the terrain was unfamiliar to almost all the assembled generals, and on the right flank in particular, near the Bois de Sars, the many small creeks and ditches there cut up the ground and made it very boggy underfoot. Prince Eugene commented on this in a letter he sent to the Emperor that night: ‘Since we do not know the lie of the land, we dare even less take any risks. The terrain is very uneven, and cut up by many small brooks and ponds swollen by the bad weather.’

The other option was not to attack at all, but simply to take up a defensive position and block Villars in the Gap, while the operations against Mons proceeded. However, the Allied commanders had longed to get the French out of their defences for so long, to fight in the open, that this course of action was apparently hardly considered.

Some time would also have to be expended in getting the Allied artillery into place; the big guns, so essential for the support of any assault, would not arrive until the next day. An added consideration was that Withers’s corps would not get to the field before 11 September. This powerful mixed force of cavalry and infantry were not to be involved in any opening moves in a general action, and could be let loose upon the flank of Villars’s army once battle was in progress. These two factors, the delayed arrival of the guns, and Withers’s march to the battlefield, seem to have been most decisive in the hard decision to delay an attack until the Wednesday.

Colonel De La Colonie, whose brigade was moving forward with the French army as it neared the woodland belt, now found a tedious task suddenly given to him:

He [Villars] broke up his camp on September 7th, and directed his march along the woods of Sart [Sars] and Jean-Sart to a little place called Malplaquet, within easy reach of Mons, so that the enemy had to engage him before beginning the siege. Owing to this march, a piece of work fell to my share as unexpected as it was fatiguing. Nothing had been said to me as to the order of march, and I had gone peaceably to bed; but I hardly got there when I received an order to report myself at midnight at the centre of the first line to take over the command of six hundred men detailed to escort the baggage of the army. I was obliged to pack my things as quickly as possible, and betake myself to the point named where I was given instructions for this embarrassing commission, which I carried out but taking a different route to that of the rest of the army.

The Colonel was plainly quite put out at being given the job to do, and added the rather obvious truth that:

Escort duty over waggons in the presence of the enemy is a troublesome affair. In addition to the confusion that usually reigns among them, care has to be taken to protect them from visits on the part of the enemy, which means continuous watching with fear of surprises; in such cases an officer’s loss of reputation has often depended upon a momentary negligence. Two nights and a day did I spend in this agreeable exercise, and on the evening of the second day [9 September], after having left the baggage train in a place of safety, I rejoined the army, which had just encamped in the plain of Mons.

As Marlborough did not mount an attack on 10 September, the French had ample time to entrench their position, and they put this to good use. De La Colonie remembered:

As soon as we realised that we were not going to be attacked that day the whole of the infantry set to work to entrench themselves in the best way possible, reckoning that the crisis would come on the morrow. The only infantry that were without any cover at all from the enemy’s artillery was the Bavarian brigade [De La Colonie’s own command], who held a portion of the parapet in rear of the Garde Français, whilst in rear of us again was the Maison du Roi, who were equally exposed.

Across the Gap of Aulnois, a line of nine stout earthen redans was constructed by French pioneers, and equipped with artillery to sweep the narrow approaches climbing the gentle boggy incline between the woods. Nearby, Bleiron Farm was barricaded and loop-holed for defence, and turned into a small fortress. In the Bois de Lanières, on the French right, infantry under Comte d’Artagnan constructed breastworks and abatti obstacles, and a large battery was established between the wood and Bleiron Farm, concealed from observation but firing along a dip in the ground across the front of the trees. Over on the left of the French position, the infantry commanded by Comte d’Albergotti and the Marquis de Goesbriand, constructed three lines of breastworks reaching deep into the Bois de Sars, and jutting outwards into the Gap in a curious formation that would become known, notoriously, as ‘the Triangle’. A fourth line of entrenchments were begun in the more open ground to the south of the copses, near to La Folie Farm, but these were not complete in time for the commencement of fighting the following day.

The French cavalry formed up on the open ground of the Plain of Malplaquet, several hundred yards to the south of the Gap. Although apparently in dead ground to the Allies on the far side of the woods, events would prove that the horsemen were not immune from their cannon-shot which, having skimmed the French breastworks, bounced remorselessly on across the plain itself. Villars’s dispositions were good, making the most of a naturally strong position, but all his infantry were committed to holding what was, in fact, a rather narrow frontage across the Gap of Aulnois. Both his flanks, while screened with woods, were now ‘in the air’ and potentially exposed to a turning movement. Any unmarked opposing force, such as that which Withers was hastening forward from Tournai, could fall upon the French flank with potentially devastating consequences once battle was joined. The woods themselves gave the illusion of cover, but they were not particularly dense, and many trees were felled to add to the French defensive works.

During the evening of 10 September 1709, as the toiling soldiers rested from their labours, an informal truce was arranged and, according to Peter Drake: ‘There was kind of cessation for the rest of the evening, and the officers and soldiers of both armies spoke and shook hands with each other; and it was rumoured that there were overtures of peace on the anvil’. This was not so, and the French soon noticed that Allied officers, while apparently engaging in casual conversation, were also taking a close interest in their defensive arrangements, and the informal truce came to an abrupt end. The night before a battle was always a restless one, and the opposing armies stealthily stretched out towards each other in the darkness. Colonel De La Colonie wrote:

The enemy began to construct a battery about half-way up the avenue [the open ground between the woods] and during the night armed it with thirty cannon of large calibre to breach the entrenchments in the wood on our left [Bois de Sars], on which they intended to make their main attack. Thus we awaited them, lying that night in battle formation, whilst our patrols and those of the enemy kept up a constant fire whenever they came across each other.

On the other side off the field, Kit Davies recalled that the small but important French fortress of St Ghislain, sitting squarely on the line of march from Tournai to Mons, had fallen to assault that evening. Her memory of the camp gossip of this action usefully highlights the accepted convention of the time for how a garrison should properly conduct itself:

General Dedem went off with a detachment to throw himself into St Ghislain, which the Duke of Marlborough was assured, the French garrison had abandoned; but the general in his march, receiving certain advice to the contrary, instead of two hundred foot, which he designed to send hither from Genap [Jemappe], drew from thence five hundred, and sustained them with two squadrons. Colonel Haxhusien, who commanded this detachment, sent a drum to summon the garrison, having, as he drew near the town, extended his front, that he might make a greater show of numbers; on a refusal to surrender, he gave the assault that very day; and after a quarter of an hour’s dispute he carried the barricade, and advanced behind a house on the right of the battery; on which the chamade was beat; but as they had not done it soon enough, they were forced to surrender prisoners of war.

The Allied soldiers were roused from their slumbers early the following morning, to take a nip of gin or rum, before falling into line in the mist of the dawn. Facing them on the Plain of Malplaquet, Peter Drake described the scene as the French army awaited the onset of battle:

There happened that morning a fog of the greatest density I ever remember to have seen. This gave the confederate [Allied] army an opportunity to march down pretty close to the wood undiscovered, which greatly saved the effusion of blood. Three quarters after six, the attack on the woods began with great fury, resolution and bravery.

Estimates of timings vary, rather inevitably, among soldiers about to go into battle. On the other side of the field, James Campbell remembered that ‘We attacked the French army who was most strongly entrenched with a wood upon each flank, our cannon began to play about eight o’clock and the musketry a little after.’

The Allied bombardment, in fact, began at 7am, and before long the French gunners were firing in reply. Major Blackader recalled that his own regiment, the Cameronians, ‘Was no farther engaged than by being cannonaded, which was, indeed the most severe that ever our regiment suffered, and by which we had considerable loss, but the soldiers endured it without shrinking, very patiently and with great courage.’ As Marlborough’s heavy batteries hammered the French breastworks, Eugene’s German and Imperial infantry, under command of Count Schulemburg and Count Lottum, moved forward into the Bois de Sars.