The campaign of 1703 in the Low Countries had not been wholly sterile. Bonn had been taken at its beginning, and both Limburg and Guelders fell at its end. Indeed, the grateful Dutch struck a medal with Queen Anne on the obverse and Marlborough on the reverse, with the inscription: ‘Victory without slaughter, by the taking of Bonn, Huy and Limburg.’ There was no irony in this: gaining territory by manoeuvre remained appealing to the Dutch, who rightly dreaded the consequences of a lost battle. Yet in the winter of 1703–04 it seemed to Marlborough that the war would be lost in Germany long before it could be won in Flanders or Brabant, and the defection of Bavaria meant that the balance of strategic geography for once favoured the French.
How so? The easiest route between France and the litter of small states and the few rather bigger ones that constituted the Germany of the early eighteenth century was what Charles de Gaulle was later to call that ‘Fatal Avenue’ in which Marlborough had been campaigning for the past two seasons. It was speckled with fortresses, laced with rivers and canals, and offered limited prospects for war-winning advances by either side. Further south, nature splashed forests and rivers across the landscape to make any advance into or from Germany even more difficult. The Ardennes and the Eifel, the south-eastern pivots of Marlborough’s operations in 1702–03, were inimical to marching armies, and the valley of the Moselle, which creased their eastern edge, was commanded by the fortresses of Trier, Trarbach and Koblenz. Another slab of forested upland rippled southwards from east of Saarbrücken to the borders of Switzerland, pierced by gaps which were to leave bloody thumbprints on the pages of history: Wissembourg, Saverne and Belfort.
The most promising of these, the Saverne gap, led to Strasbourg, a French city since the Treaty of Ryswick, with its bridgehead Kehl, on the other side of the Rhine, now in French hands too. An advance northwards down the Rhine was blocked by the Lines of Stollhofen, running from the Rhine village of that name to Buhl in the Baden uplands, with the mighty fortress of Landau on the left bank of the Rhine behind them. Easterly routes through the Black Forest were bottlenecks, easily corked by a defender. However, a French army which reached the valley of the Neckar would suddenly find room for manoeuvre, especially into the upper Danube, which then led, by way of Ulm, Donauwörth and Ingolstadt, towards the emperor’s capital of Vienna. A jab straight to the pit of the Austrian stomach might, if events in northern Italy turned to the French advantage, be combined with a hook up from Verona and Trento to the Brenner Pass, a classic two-pronged attack which was to be used by Napoleon a century later.
Bavaria was part of a greater Germany largely in a linguistic sense, and with its Roman Catholicism and almost Latin culture, was quite unlike dour Prussia, away in the north with the Baltic on one flank and Russia on another. Elector Max Emmanuel’s change of allegiance had suddenly provided Louis with the stepping-stone he needed to get into Germany without a fight, and offered the possibility of cracking the Grand Alliance by striking at its point of natural cleavage along the Danube valley. Louis had long sought to encourage Turkey, still a major military power in Europe and last repulsed from the gates of Vienna in 1683, in order to divert Hapsburg power to the east. During the Nine Years War the Emperor Leopold was forced to juggle his forces between Italy and the Empire on the one hand, and the east on the other. He was fortunate in that Eugène of Savoy, arguably his most capable commander, demolished a large Turkish army at Zenta in September 1697, bringing the Turks to the conference table and leading to the signing of the Peace of Carlowitz in 1699.
However, if Louis had lost one ally he soon gained another. The Hapsburgs, trying to establish a permanent settlement of Hungary, so much of it recently liberated from the Turks, succeeded in inflaming the population by unwise taxation, and irritating the prickly local nobility. In 1703 the patriot leaders Francis Rákóczi and Alexander Károlyi were in large-scale rebellion against the Hapsburgs, and received gilded but empty promises of support from Louis. The Hapsburgs could not afford to send substantial forces against the Hungarian rebels until after Blenheim, in August 1704, and fighting went on till 1711, first under the Emperor Joseph, who succeeded in 1705 but died unexpectedly in 1711, and then under Charles III. Ultimately it was Hapsburg successes in southern Germany and northern Italy that enabled them to move troops eastwards and crush the rebellion. To Marlborough the rebellion was not simply a smoky clash on a distant frontier: it was a major strategic distraction for a crucial ally. There can be no doubting French diplomatic efforts to keep the rebellion alive: when Rákóczi went to Constantinople in 1716, at the request of the Turks, he travelled there from Paris.
The Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm I of Baden, cousin of Eugène of Savoy, was the Allied commander on the upper Rhine. ‘Prince Louis’ to his British contemporaries and to this author, the margrave was a professional soldier in the emperor’s service; his trademark scarlet coat had led the Turks, whom he beat at Slankamen in 1691, to call him the ‘red king’. The Allies had reinforced him with troops from the Low Countries, enabling him to take Landau in 1702, but he was beaten by Marshal Villars in something of a pyrrhic victory at Friedlingen soon afterwards. In 1703 he advanced into northern Bavaria in an effort to deal with the Franco-Bavarian army under Villars and Max Emmanuel, but he was soon forced back: it was his subordinate Styrum who had been defeated at Höchstädt on the Danube in September 1703. By the end of the campaign the Franco-Bavarians had captured both Ratisbon on the Danube and Augsburg on its tributary the Lech. However, despite its failure in Bavaria, Prince Louis’ army successfully prevented Marshal Tallard from forcing the Lines of Stollhofen, persuading Tallard to operate on the river’s left bank and besiege Landau. Louis remained an important strategic asset for the 1704 campaign, essential, as Marlborough assured Heinsius in June that year, for supporting an Allied advance into Germany. ‘Prince Lewis will do nothing without first consulting me,’ wrote Marlborough, ‘and … he approves of what I have proposed to him; which is that he should act on the Iller, at the same time that I do on the Danube, which must necessitate the enemy to divide their army.’1
Marlborough had begun to shift his weight south-eastwards even before the 1703 campaigning season had ended. When the rest of the army went into winter quarters after the fall of Limburg, he sent the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, with twenty-two battalions and thirty squadrons, to recapture Trier and Trarbach on the Moselle. However, Hesse-Cassel tried to make Tallard raise the siege of Landau, and was badly beaten at Speyerbach. Landau duly fell in November, and the Moselle fortresses remained in French hands. In the spring of 1704 Tallard succeeded in getting a substantial convoy of recruits, muskets, cannon and ammunition from Strasbourg to join the Franco-Bavarian army, feinting to deceive Prince Louis and starting the campaign by putting the French at a notable advantage. This contingent formed part of the Franco-Bavarian army which was to be beaten at the battle of Blenheim.
The only setback to France was the defection of the Duke of Savoy to the Allied cause. Prince Eugène had little time for his kinsman.
Twenty thousand crowns a month from England, twenty thousand more from Holland, four millions for the expenses of the war, a kind of submission amongst all the petty princes of Italy, had more effect than all my eloquence, and converted the Duke of Savoy, for the time being, into the staunchest Austrian in the world. His conduct, which I shall not attempt to justify, reminds me of that formerly pursued by the Dukes of Lorraine, as well as the Dukes of Bavaria. Their geography prevented them from being men of honour.2
This at least meant that the French would be unable to advance from northern Italy into the Empire, but given the way the situation in Bavaria had developed, they would scarcely need to.
In the winter of 1703–04 the emperor’s ambassador in London, Count Wratislaw, repeatedly pressed Marlborough to relieve the pressure on southern Germany. He had already written to Marlborough to that effect in the summer of 1703, and had again proposed an advance southwards at a conference at Düsseldorf in the autumn. We cannot say, therefore, that the strategic concept for 1704 was Marlborough’s, but it was certainly one of the possibilities that he had rolled round his mind before he went to the United Provinces in January that year to discuss strategy. He lamented his departure in a letter to Sarah which juxtaposed the marital and the mundane.
I never go from you my dearest soul, but I am extremely sensible of my own unhappiness, of not having it in my power to live quietly with you, which is the only thing that can contribute to the ending of my days happily.
The tides fell out so that I did not go from Margate roads till 4 o’clock on Sunday in the afternoon. I never in my life saw so fine an evening, so that we had all the hopes imaginable of a good and quiet passage. But by the time we had got 7 or 8 leagues to sea, the wind began to rise so high that … we were forced to take in all our sails, and submit ourselves to be tossed as the wind and sea pleased, which lasted during 7 hours, during which time I was extremely sick …
I should be glad if you would get patterns for 7 or 8 pieces of hangings for my bedchamber, when I am in the field. You know my field bed is blue. If I should not be able to write to the Lord Treasurer this post, you will make my excuse. I am, with all the truth imaginable, heart and soul, yours.3
Before leaving London he had told Wratislaw that:
It is my intention to induce the Estates-General to decide upon a siege of Landau, or a diversion on the Moselle. I should be very glad to march there myself, but as it is difficult to move the Dutch upon an offensive … I should be able to get at the most only 45 battalions and some 60 squadrons for that purpose. Should I take Landau I would supply the Margrave of Baden with as many troops as possible, to enable him to overthrow the Elector of Bavaria.4
No sooner had he reached The Hague than he reported to Godolphin that the deputies were ‘extremely alarmed’ by the news from Germany, and money was so tight that the magazines planned for the coming season had not been filled, and only 60,000 of the 100,000 crowns owed to the Duke of Savoy had been paid. He added that Pierre de Belcastel, a Huguenot in Dutch pay and ‘a good officer and a discreet man’, had proposed sending aid to the Protestant rebels in the Cevennes so as to divert French strength, although in the event the project foundered because neither the Swiss, who would have supplied the mercenaries needed, nor the Duke of Savoy, through whose territory the expedition would pass, would back it.
For the rest of the trip he told Godolphin nothing of real significance, though there was the usual housekeeping: he agreed that it would indeed be hard to give the major’s vacancy in the Blues to anyone but the senior captain. Delayed once again by contrary winds, he told Godolphin that there was no real point in his coming home, as he would have to be on the Continent again so soon, but ‘My desire of being with you and Lady Marlborough is such, that I would come, although I were to stay but one day.’ He was, though, delighted to hear that his daughter Lady Bridgewater had given birth to a son.5 But he was gloomy enough at the possibilities for the coming year to tell Sarah:
For this campaign I see so ill a prospect that I am extremely out of heart. But God’s will be done; and I must for this year be very uneasy, for in all the other campaigns I had an opinion of being able to do something for the common cause; but in this I have no other hopes than that some lucky accident may enable me to do good.6
This is typical of Marlborough. His was not an abstract military brain, but a concrete one: he was always happier dealing with practical problems than with airy conceptions, more confident on the battlefield than in the camp. However, his background as a courtier ensured that only those closest to him ever knew it. In even the darkest hour he was always smiles and politeness, displaying that most attractive of military virtues, grace under pressure.
By early March, however, the design had hardened. First, Marlborough did his best to wreck negotiations between the Elector of Bavaria and the king of Prussia, sending ambassador Stepney to Vienna and thence to Berlin, where he was to ‘second my Lord Raby [ambassador to Berlin] in the assurances he has given the king of the great satisfaction her Majesty takes in the zeal he shows for the public’.7 Cadogan was also in close but rather more light-hearted communication with his old schoolfellow at Berlin, emphasising that plans for the coming year required undivided command. ‘Nobody can better judge than your Lordship,’ he wrote, ‘of the necessity of putting the command into a single hand and the impossibility of doing anything without it. One should think the misfortune of Speyerbach might convince the herring-sellers of the inconveniency which unavoidably attends a distinct right and left wing which is in effect making a great body of men useless at best.’ Cadogan added that some verses had come into his hands: ‘the ballad is mightily liked’, and though ‘these on the ladies are not very new’ he thought that Raby might be amused by them.8 Happily they have not survived. He had a lucky escape on his way home when his packet boat was attacked by a Dunkirk privateer which knocked it about with cannonfire. The mail was thrown overboard, and Cadogan emptied his pockets of letters given him by Cutts and Greffier Fagel. The captain and crew manfully refused to strike their colours even as the privateer closed to board. Cadogan was sure that they would be taken, but at the last moment a wind sprang up, enabling the packet to slip away.
On 7 March Marlborough warned Heinsius that ‘If England and Holland do not assist the Empire by sending an army early to the Moselle the whole Empire must be undone,’ and suggested that he should send his generals to the Meuse to ensure that the army was ready to move in time. He followed up by regretting the death of old Coehoorn, and recommending that it would be no more than justice to give his regiment to one of his sons, for ‘had he died one year sooner, any nation might have been proud of such a subject’.9 There were still major difficulties with the Dutch. Their lieutenant general Johan van Goor, serving under the Margrave of Baden, had fallen out with that gentleman, whom he thought dilatory, and was summoned back to the United Provinces, bringing his men with him. A horrified Wratislaw told Marlborough that this would leave Tallard free to throw ‘a new and large reinforcement into Bavaria’, and begged him to persuade the Dutch to change their orders. Marlborough said that he would do his best, but begged Wratislaw to accompany him to The Hague to put the case to the Dutch leaders in person.
The outlines of alternative plans were discussed at The Hague in April. Both Prince Louis and the Dutch favoured what we might term the small solution, an offensive in the Moselle valley, linked with an attack on Landau. Marlborough and Prince Eugène, however, favoured the big solution, an advance all the way to the Danube. Archdeacon Coxe suggests a secret understanding on the subject between Marlborough and Eugène, but the written record is silent on the subject. As a senior Imperialist officer Eugène would naturally have found the strategy more appealing than the small solution, and we know that he had a high regard for Marlborough, writing: ‘We similarly loved and esteemed each other. He was indeed a great general.’10 However, that is as far as we can legitimately take the argument, and a long message sent by Marlborough to Eugène in February through the medium of the British ambassador in Vienna does not even mention the Danube strategy.
Indeed, Marlborough’s first letters to Godolphin after his return to the Low Countries in April imply that there was no early agreement: the Dutch were unhelpful, and typically, ‘my head aches so extremely that I must leave off writing’. His headache was still bad three days later, and news from Germany, suggesting that Tallard and the Elector had just joined forces at Ulm, was likely to worsen it. ‘I shall use my utmost endeavours to get them all the help I can from hence,’ he wrote, ‘being fully persuaded that we shall be undone if we can’t get the better of them in that country. I am afraid I shall want the Queen’s help in this matter.’11 He already had broad permission from the cabinet to ‘go to the aid of the Emperor’, and had discussed the campaign’s possible development with Godolphin, but it is not until 18 April OS that he confirmed his plan, although he made it clear that it had not been fully agreed at the Hague conference.
My intentions are to march all the English to Koblenz, and to declare here that I intend to command on the Moselle; but when I come there to write to the States, that I think it absolutely necessary for saving the Empire to march with the troops under my command to join those in Germany that are in her Majesty’s and Dutch pay, in order to take measure with Prince Louis for the speedy reducing of the Elector of Bavaria. The army I propose there would consist of upwards of 40,000 men. If I should act in any other manner than what I now tell you, my design would be immediately known to the French, and these people [the Dutch] would never consent to let so many troops go so far from their frontiers; for the preservation of which and their garrisons, I propose to leave 100 battalions and 110 squadrons … What I now write I beg may be known to nobody but her Majesty and the Prince.
He went on to gratefully acknowledge the queen’s kindness in making him colonel of 1st Foot Guards.12 Planning the campaign was exhausting. On 5 May Cadogan told Lord Raby that his work ‘has left me hardly time to eat or sleep’. He emphasised that it was ‘absolutely necessary to hasten putting into execution the project of reducing the Elector of Bavaria before he can receive a greater succour … in order to do it there will be an army left in the Lines of Stollhofen to prevent the French forcing them or passing the Rhine below Philipsburg’.13
Despite his desire to conceal his full intentions from the Dutch, Marlborough was open with Heinsius. On 11 May he wrote from Maastricht to say that he had now met Goor, who must logically have been apprised of the plan, for, helpfully, he had proposed that the twenty Dutch cannon at Koblenz should join the march, and on 21 May Marlborough told Heinsius that he hoped to be at Koblenz on the twenty-fifth and then at Mainz on the twenty-ninth. He was confident that if Villeroi shadowed his march with a strong force to the west, as he expected, ‘they will hardly be able to leave the name of an army behind them’, and that would enable the Dutch to send more troops ‘as might make me succeed against the Elector of Bavaria’.14
A private shadow hung over public endeavour. By the opening of the campaign Marlborough’s relations with Sarah had broken down almost completely, and they were certainly living apart. Although there had already been marked differences of opinion over politics, for John was too much his father’s son to approve of Sarah’s relentless whiggery, the most probable cause of her coldness was her belief that Marlborough was having an affair. Sarah’s biographers suggest that the thirty-year-old Elizabeth Cromwell, wife of Lord Southwell, joint commissioner of the privy seal, was the most probable subject of her ire. It is impossible to say, after this passage of time, whether or not she had cause for it, although the case would fit a diagnosis of menopausal jealousy very closely. On an unspecified date in April, evidently before his departure for the Continent, Marlborough told Sarah:
Your carriage to me of late is so extraordinary, that I do not know how to behave myself. I thought you used me so barbarously that I was resolved never to send or speak, but I love [you] too well to be able to keep in that resolution. Therefore I desire that you will give me leave to come to you tonight, so that I may know in what it is I have thus offended. I am sure really in thought I have not, for I do love you with all the truth imaginable.
Another letter admitted that:
As I know your temper, I am very sensible that what I say signifies nothing. However, I can’t forebear what I said yesterday, which is that I never sent to her [the unspecified ‘mistress’] in my life, and may my happiness in the other world depend upon the truth of this. If there be aught that I could do to let you know my innocency, I should be glad to do it … You say that every hour since I came from St Albans has given you fresh assurances of my hating you, and that you know I have sent to this woman. These two things are so barbarous, for I have not for these many years thought myself so happy by your kindness as for these last five or six days, and if you could at that time think I hated you I am most miserable. And for the last which you say you are sure of, may I and all that is dear to me be cursed if ever I sent to her, or have had anything to do with her, or have endeavoured to have.15
They were at least communicating by the time he reached The Hague, and he begged her to let him know how she would like him to rewrite his will to reflect Blandford’s death: ‘As I hope for happiness in the next world and this, I will follow your directions exactly, and take it as kindly as if you have reprieved me from death.’16 She wrote to him soon afterwards, but ‘you write very much with the spleen, which makes me uneasy’. It was not until 24 April that she at last forgave him.
Your dear letter of the 15th came to me but this minute. My Lord Treasurer’s letter in which it was enclosed, by some mistake was sent to Amsterdam. I would not for anything in my power it had been lost, for it is so very kind, that I would in return lose a thousand lives if I had them to make you happy. Before I set down to write this letter I took yours that you wrote at Harwich out of my strong box, and have burnt it; and if you will give me leave, it will be a great pleasure to me to have it in my power to read this dear letter often, and that it may be found in my strong box when I am dead. I do this minute love you better and with more tenderness than ever I did before. This letter of yours has made me so happy, that from my soul I do wish that we could retire and not be blamed … I have pressed this business of carrying an army into Germany, in order to have left a good name behind me, wishing for nothing else but good success. I shall now add to that, of having a long life that I may be happy in your dear love.17
The great march began at Bedburg, west of Cologne, on 19 May. The weather had been terrible, but one cavalry officer remembered: ‘Notwithstanding the rainy weather that happened at the same time, [the army] made a most glorious appearance.’18 Marlborough started the march with some 19,000 men in English pay, 5,000 Prussian and Hanoverian troops met him at Koblenz on the twenty-sixth, and other streams flowed in to join the torrent as it rolled southwards. Apart from Marlborough and a few senior officers nobody knew the army’s destination. On 11 May he had written to congratulate Henry St John, a protégé of Robert Harley’s, who had just taken over from old Blathwayt as secretary at war, telling him that his army would shortly head for the Moselle, but ‘I may venture to tell you (though I would not have it public as yet) I design to march a great deal higher into Germany.’19 There was a two-day halt at Koblenz, ‘After which,’ says Richard Kane,
to the surprise of all, we crossed the Moselle and Rhine both at this place, and marched through the country of Hesse-Cassel, where we were joined by the Hereditary Prince of that country with a body of Hessians, which completed the Duke’s army to about 40,000. Having passed through Hesse, we marched through the Electorate of Mainz, and so through the Palatinate of the Rhine, till we came to Heidelberg; here we halted four days, nor was it publicly known, till we came here, what the Duke designed.20
The French were as mystified as Captain Kane. Villeroi knew that Marlborough had moved south, and duly shadowed him, but was then ordered by Louis to take station at Offenburg, across the Rhine south-east of Strasbourg, with forty battalions and sixty-eight to seventy squadrons (some of them later sent on to Tallard), and to react as required, blocking Marlborough if he came up the Rhine, turning on him if he entered Alsace, or following him to the Danube. Tallard, with forty battalions and fifty squadrons, was to operate in Bavaria, and Coigny, with a tiny force composed largely of Swiss regiments whose contracts did not oblige them to cross the Rhine, remained in Alsace. Thus while the French were not completely wrong-footed by Marlborough’s march, their response at this stage was wholly reactive, and in the event Villeroi was, through no fault of his own, to be no use on either the Brabant or the German front.
Although some historians detect real tension between Marlborough and Overkirk, left behind to command Dutch troops in front of the Lines of Brabant, it is evident that relations between the two generals were actually very good. Cadogan makes it clear that ‘Monsieur Overkirk’ was the only Dutch general to have backed Marlborough when he wished to penetrate the Lines of Brabant the previous year, suggesting that the real problem was Dutch generals and not field deputies, and that ‘the deputies here … are extremely for it’.21 There was a moment of concern in early May when Cardonnel reported to John Ellis, under-secretary of state, that the French
are getting all the boats they can together at Namur and landing cannon with ammunition and instruments for removing of ground and give out that they design to besiege Huy, though ’tis believed they will hardly attempt it, and that they make these preparations rather to hinder or retard our march into Germany.22
However, Marlborough correctly deduced that if he moved south Villeroi had no choice but to follow, and on 21 May he assured Overkirk that Villeroi had indeed been ordered to take a very strong detachment from Brabant to follow him wherever he went: as this order had been issued by Louis XIV in person, it is an index of the quality of Marlborough’s intelligence. He added in a postscript that this force included thirty-six battalions and forty-five or forty-six squadrons, including the Maison du Roi, Louis’ household troops: these latter were to be sent on to Tallard in Germany. Three days later he told Overkirk that progress was good, and repeated letters assured Overkirk that operations were going according to plan and that there was no chance of Villeroi breaking back to attack the Dutch in Brabant. Marlborough helped confound confusion by ordering a bridge of boats to be thrown across the Rhine at Philipsburg, implying that Landau might really be his objective, and it was not until he crossed the Main on 3 June that this possibility could be ruled out by the French.
We can see, from the correspondence between Louis and his generals, that they were consistently a move behind Marlborough in the game. On 4 May Louis told Villeroi that enemy movements still did not betray ‘their real intentions for the campaign: it seems only, by all the information … that they have no other object but a definite concentration in Flanders and Brabant’. Villeroi replied that ‘Rumour is rife … that they are going to raise a considerable army on the Moselle, and that the Duke of Marlborough will command it.’23 Tallard and Marsin were concerned about establishing the time and place of their rendezvous, and the only hint that all might not be perfect came when Tallard told Chamillart that his planned manoeuvres in Bavaria, so far from the fount of French strength, might prove tricky ‘if things do not turn out as we hope’.24
In contrast, throughout this period Marlborough’s intelligence network was working flat-out. Although part of the responsibility was Cadogan’s, Adam de Cardonnel ran one network through John de Robethon, private secretary to the Elector of Hanover, the future George I. By the time he came to England with his employer Robethon was arguably the most influential of the new king’s advisers, and was not a popular figure in his master’s new realm. However, during Marlborough’s campaigns he was a vital link in an intelligence chain whose length and complexity we can only guess at. Cardonnel gave him accurate appraisals of the state of the French army and the progress of the Allied march. ‘The deserters who come in say that all French battalions are very weak despite the recruits who have joined them,’ said Cardonnel on 19 June, ‘and that sickness is rife amongst the newly-arrived, so that five hundred were buried at Ulm in a single week.’ A week later he said that: ‘The continual rain which has fallen for fifteen days has greatly inconvenienced our infantry and caused [illegible] sickness amongst them … but our cavalry and generally all the other troops in the pay of England and the States are in very good condition.’25
The really valuable information flowed the other way. Cardonnel thanked Robethon for letters, now missing, which accompanied ‘Mons de Chamillart’s Memorial and du Breuil’s examination’. Michel de Chamillart was Louis’ war minister, who owed his rise at least in part to the fact that he was Louis’ billiards partner: ‘a hero at billiard, a zero in the ministry’ is how a waggish Frenchman described him. It is evident from the letter that his memorandum was nothing less than a summary of royal instructions to the army commanders. ‘We find … the utmost designs of the enemy in this memorial,’ wrote Cardonnel, ‘and I hope we shall be able to traverse them.’ A French historian of Napoleon’s era was exasperated when he described the leaks. ‘We must conclude from this significant paper,’ he lamented, ‘that the feeble Chamillart, occupying the post of Louvois without having either his vigour or his talent, had let himself be robbed of the secret of the campaign plan. Nothing is beyond the reach of the power of gold, and it looks as though Marlborough, although blamed for avarice, knew how to spend money to some point.’26 Although Cardonnel’s letter is as tantalising for what it fails to say as for what it does, the key piece of information seems to have been that French commanders were encouraged to attack the Allies in detail, but not to fight them united. Marlborough was to fail in one of his aims, that of wholly crushing the Bavarians before French reinforcements arrived, but the fact that he knew that the French would only offer battle if the Allies were disunited was of untold value.
The ramifications of the Robethon connection were to spread more widely. First, Marlborough was on warm terms with the Hanoverian court, and enjoyed a good personal relationship with the Elector’s son George, who fought under his command at Oudenarde. These relationships played a significant part in Marlborough’s helping to ensure the Hanoverian succession on the death of Anne, and the Elector was suitably grateful. Second, Winston S. Churchill’s great biography of his ancestor dwelt on the vital importance of this strategic intelligence. It is not too much to argue that it was his gleanings as a historian, as well as his experience as first lord of the admiralty in 1914–15, that encouraged him as prime minister to take the German code ULTRA so seriously, and to insist on seeing original material, not simply summaries.27
The march to the Danube was some 250 miles long, and for the most part was conducted through friendly territory. Contracts had been placed for the supply of food, forage and boots along the army’s line of march, and Marlborough was scrupulous in assuring local rulers that English gold would pave his way. For example, on 26 May he wrote to the Elector of Mainz, head of the ‘circle’ of the Rhine, one of the Empire’s loose subdivisions.
Monseigneur,
Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and their High Mightinesses the Estates General having resolved … to send an army corps under my orders from the Low Countries, and seeing myself obliged to pass through the Electoral Circle of the Upper Rhine, I beg your Electoral Highness that he will be pleased to give free passage to the above-mentioned troops, and to ensure that supplies can be found on the march, for prompt payment. It would be a great advantage for the troops, and at the same time a solace for the countryside by preventing disorders and foraging, if the forage could be provided with several horses and carts to help the artillery on the road: to which effect officers can be sent in advance to organise things.
He promised that in return for this help, his army would observe ‘a very exact discipline’.28
For most of the route the horse, with Marlborough himself, followed a different route from the infantry under General Charles Churchill, the duke’s brother and ‘general of the foot’, so as to reduce the drain on local resources. Captain Robert Parker tells how it was for those men in long red coats and white spatterdashes, stepping out in rank and file in the close and comradely world of the marching regiments of foot.
We frequently marched three, sometimes four days successively, and then 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 [camping] ground about nine. As we marched through the country 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 never was a march carried out with more order and regularity and with less fatigue to both man and horse.29
Sometimes a soldier’s view of life reflects his rank, and Sergeant John Wilson was less favourably impressed by the comfort of the march. As the army trudged on from Mainz,
there falling such a flood of rain by which there came such a torrent of water from the mountains that the roads were rendered so bad that there was no possibility of moving the train [of artillery] … the roads were so bad and the ground so boggy … that not one piece of cannon could be moved. Upon which there was orders for the country to bring in straw for the men and another day’s forage for the horses. And next day fifty men without arms were ordered to go before a mile or two to prepare the way. As the said 50 men of each regiment having repaired the roads, the train was ordered to march gradually after them. Which they did but with a great deal of trouble, they being obliged to put double horses, if not more, to each piece of cannon.30
Good generals share sergeants’ concerns, and Marlborough too was worried about the weather. On 24 May OS he told Godolphin that the state of the roads meant that the ‘cannon and artillery’ were now six days behind him, and the Luneburg, Danish and Hessian troops were spread out ‘in several quarters’, but he hoped to push on to meet Eugène, leaving his brother Charles to bring on the English while the Duke of Württemberg, commander of the Danish contingent, further back still, brought his own men forward.
Even now, with the campaign still far short of any resolution, there was no refuge from administration. The promotion of Dutch generals in Portugal might cause unhappiness in Holland, warned Marlborough. Making Brigadier Harvey a major general might be gratifying to that officer but would not be wise ‘when we have colonels in the service elder officers than he is’. Lord Derby, however, should be made a major general, but with the same seniority date as Major General Withers. There were delicate feelings to be salved.
For want of officers on the march I have been obliged to make Colonel [Archibald] Row a brigadier. He is the eldest colonel we have here, and a very diligent officer, but this will give a just occasion for Colonel Shrimpton of the Guards to desire the like commission, he being an elder colonel than Row, so that I desire they may be dated of the same day …
There was at least some good news: he was happy to hear that Godolphin’s son had just been made cofferer of the household, and that Lady Henrietta had given him a son.31
Captain John Blackader, of what was officially Fergusson’s Regiment but was already widely known, by that title by which it would leave its enduring mark on history, as the Cameronians, had already identified that: ‘This is like to be a campaign of great fatigue and trouble.’ His diary constantly dwells on the unhappy plight of a devout man in a less than devout army.
Armies which used to be full of men of great and noble souls, are now turned to a parcel of mercenary, fawning, lewd, dissipated creatures; the dregs and scum of mankind: And those who will not fawn and crouch, are made the butt of malice, and oppressed by the joint conspiracy of wicked men.32
I am not sure that John Blackader would have approved of Mrs Christian Davies, who had joined the army to look for her husband, who had enlisted when in drink. By ‘having been long conversant in the camp, she had lost that softness which heightens the beauty of the fair, and contracted a masculine air and behaviour’. She made a convincing enough dragoon, though she ‘narrowly escaped being discovered’ when a surgeon investigated a gunshot wound to her hip. She remembered that the army advanced by
long and tiresome marches, which greatly harassed our foot … I cannot help taking notice in this place, though it breaks in upon my narrative, of the Duke of Marlborough’s great humanity, who seeing some of our foot drop, through the fatigue of the march, took them into his own coach.33
John Marshall Deane, a ‘private sentinel’ in 1st Foot Guards, and thus close to the bottom of the logistic pile, agreed about the weather.
One thing observable, it hath rained 32 days together more or less and miserable marches we have had for deep and dirty roads and through tedious woods and wildernesses and over cast high rock and mountains, that it may easily be judged what our little army endured … And to help, everything grew to be at an excessive dear rate that there was scarce a living for a soldier and the nearer came every day to the Grand Army the dearer every thing was.34
However, the army held up well. Desertion was low, and, despite the bad weather, the army left fewer than 1,000 sick on its line of march.
The careful work of the medical historian Eric Gruber von Arni shows that Marlborough took a great deal of care over the provision for his sick and wounded. A convoy of boats with medical equipment moved up the Rhine and established a transit hospital at Kassel, and then went on up the River Main via Frankfurt to Wertheim, whence it moved by road to establish another transit hospital at Heidenheim. On 22 June Marlborough, ahead with his cavalry, wrote to Charles Churchill, who was with the infantry on the rutted roads behind him.
I received yesterday yours of the 20th at Blockingen, and having informed myself of the proper place of sending your sick men, I am assured they will be best at Heidenheim, which is not far from you, and therefore desire you will forthwith send them thither in carts with an able surgeon and a mate or two to look after them, and such commission and non-commission officers as you shall think fit, giving them at the same time money for their subsistence.
When he closed the letter ‘I long to have you with me, being your loving brother,’ he was writing in as much of a professional as a personal sense, for he was increasingly anxious, with hostile territory ahead, to get the army closed up.35
On 10 June, at Mundelsheim, sixty miles north-west of Ulm, Marlborough met the Prince Eugène for the first time, and they quickly established that rapport that sometimes unites men who are different in almost all save a driving sense of purpose. Marlborough was tall, handsome and beautifully turned out. He had been a ladies’ man in his youth, and was married to a very powerful woman. Eugène was ugly, plainly dressed and had no apparent interest in women: indeed, in his youth there had been rumours that he charged with the lightest of cavalry. Once the cares of office were off his back he seems to have settled down happily enough in some sort of relationship with Countess Eleanora Bethkány, but he believed that there was no point in talking politics to women, for ‘They do not have the necessary stability as men, easily become careless, allow their friendship to dictate what they say and therefore you cannot depend on their discretion.’36 We cannot be sure what Marlborough would have made of this, except perhaps to smile thinly, change the subject, and offer his guest another glass of tokay.
Marlborough was famously soft: Lord Ailesbury complained that he was so kind-hearted that he could not bear to chide a servant or a corporal. His courts-martial often recommended to his mercy men who had broken the letter of the law. For instance, a court-martial felt that Private John Muddey of Captain Alexander Ruthven’s company of 1st Foot Guards had not really intended to desert:
He went from his post without leave, with intent only to visit an acquaintance in Major General Murray’s Regiment, but was stopped in the way, and his officer affirming that he is a weak and silly man, and this his first fault.37
Muddey was recommended to the duke’s mercy, which was unfailingly exercised in these cases. Eugène, in contrast, believed that such generosity weakened discipline. In one instance Marlborough interceded with him for a soldier who had been condemned to death. ‘If your Grace has not executed more men than I have done,’ said Eugène, ‘I will consent to the pardon of this fellow.’ It transpired that, for all his generosity, Marlborough had actually hanged more men. ‘There, my Lord, you see the benefit of example,’ argued Eugène. ‘You pardon many, and therefore have to execute many; I never pardon one, therefore few dare offend, and of course but few suffer.’38 Nicholas Henderson grasps the essentials of the relationship between Eugène and Marlborough:
The two men were indispensable to each other … Not that they were rivals. Their collaboration was constant and selfless. Utterly different in personality and temperament though they were, the two men combined so exquisitely that they were described as ‘like two bodies with but a single soul’. On one occasion, at the zenith of their association, a medal was struck likening them to Castor and Pollux.39
On 11 June Marlborough and Eugène rode out together on the march towards Heppach, and Marlborough had arranged for the British cavalry, nineteen squadrons strong, to be drawn up by their way. As Winston S. Churchill put it, the men and horses were in perfect condition, ‘a little travel stained, rather fine-drawn, but all that soldiers should be’.40 ‘My Lord,’ said Eugène, ‘I never saw better horses, better clothes, finer belts and accoutrements; but money, which you don’t want in England, will buy clothes and fine horses, but it can’t buy this lively air I see in every one of these troopers’ faces.’ ‘Sir,’ said Marlborough, ‘that must be attributed to their heartiness for the public cause and the particular pleasure and satisfaction they have in seeing your Highness.’41 If this could be overheard by a nearby chaplain it must have been intended for public consumption, but it was none the worse for that.
Three days later Marlborough and Eugène met Prince Louis at the Inn of the Golden Fleece at Gross Heppach, not far from Stuttgart. They agreed that Prince Louis should remain with Marlborough, with the two generals commanding on alternate days, while Eugène made for the Rhine to hold the Lines of Stollhofen. This was not a question, as some have suggested, of Louis being anxious to move a firebrand out of the way, because Marlborough had told the Prince of Hesse, some days before the meeting, that Eugène’s mission had already been fixed in Vienna: ‘He is going to command on the Rhine, where his presence is deemed necessary.’42 It was not an arrangement of Prince Louis’ making. Eugène was senior to him in the Imperialist army; Eugène had already told Marlborough something of ‘the character of the Prince of Baden, by which I find I must be much more on my guard than if I was with Prince Eugène’, and he assured Marlborough that the emperor would not hesitate to replace Louis if the king did not act with vigour in the common cause.
Marlborough and Louis intended to seek out the Elector, who, Marlborough thought, ‘will either retire over the Danube or march to his strong camp at Dillengen’, and they would act accordingly.43 Marlborough hoped that, just as the Elector had joined the French cause because of self-interest, he might be induced to leave it for the same reason, and felt that if cuffed hard enough, Max Emmanuel would negotiate. He then pushed on, through those roads that Sergeant Wilson found so tedious, to Gingen near Ulm, where on 26 July reinforcements now brought his strength to ninety-six battalions, two hundred squadrons and forty-eight guns, 80,000 men by the lowest of reckonings. He was delighted to have got his foot and guns in at last, but told both Godolphin and Sarah, to whom he wrote separate letters on the twenty-ninth, that there were still some Danish horse and foot to arrive, and he feared he could not do anything serious until he had them. He added that he was hoping that Charles Hodges, groom of the robes to Queen Anne, would send him the design for a stable for the Ranger’s Lodge in Windsor Great Park. ‘I should be glad all conveniencies were about it,’ he concluded, on one of the last days of relative peace.44
He could not but be aware that his own future and that of Godolphin’s government teetered in the balance. Thomas Coke wrote to tell him that the squirearchy was pleased to see some stirring in the covert at last: ‘The country gentlemen had long groaned under the weight of four shillings in the pound without hearing of a town taken or any enterprise endeavoured.’ They were now ‘more cheerful in this war’ when expeditions were ‘carried on so secretly that they are in a manner successful even before the French, so famous formerly for good intelligence, can give a guess where the stroke is likely to fall’.45 But failure would be harshly punished: ‘If he fails,’ wrote one critic, ‘we will break him up as hounds upon a hare.’
The stroke was to fall on Donauwörth, which stands at the confluence of the Danube and the Wörnitz, about midway between Ulm to the west and Ingolstadt to the east. The town itself lay on the low ground on the north bank of the Danube, with a single bridge (and an extra pontoon bridge in 1704) connecting it to Nordheim on the southern bank, and the wooded hills of the Donauwörth Forest rolling off to the north. The town and the river crossing that gave the place its significance were dominated from the east by the Schellenberg, rising over a hundred metres above the height of the river. Near its summit was a three-bastioned earthwork, the Sternschanze, built by the Swedes during the Thirty Years War more than half a century before and testifying to the lasting importance of this spot.
That old bruiser Colonel de la Colonie, there with his Bavarian red grenadiers, described the hill as ‘oval in plan, with a gentle slope on the southern side, giving very easy communication with Donauwörth; while on the northern side the country is covered with woods and undergrowth, reaching up close to the old entrenchments’.46 His practised eye noted that the slopes to the north and west, from which the attack would come, were convex, so that attackers were out of sight for most of their climb, only coming into view for the last two hundred paces. Although he would still recognise the place today, he could not but be struck by the fact that the B25 autoroute, the Romantische Strasse, hurtles in between the Schellenberg and the town it commands, and the northern suburbs of Donauwörth have spread, on either side of the Kaibach brook, north of the town. The Sternschanze is still there, and the whole feature, despite the passage of time, well deserves the caption ‘a tough nut to crack’.
On 1 July NS the Allied army marched north-east to Amerdingen, right across the front of the entrenched position at Dillingen, held by the Elector and his French ally Marshal Ferdinand, comte Marsin. Max Emmanuel declined to budge, but, seeing that if the Allies continued to march eastwards they would cross the Danube and be able to manoeuvre on his right and rear, he sent Jean Baptiste, comte d’Arco, to secure Donauwörth with sixteen Bavarian and five French battalions, nine squadrons of French dragoons and eight heavy guns, some 12,000 men. D’Arco was an experienced veteran of Bavarian and Imperial service, who had been made a Bavarian marshal in 1702 and whose support for Max Emmanuel’s pro-French policy was to bring him the baton of a marshal of France. He left four French battalions in the town and marched the rest of his men up into the Schellenberg where, with the help of local peasants, they began clearing fields of fire, constructing earthworks and palisades, and connecting the hill to the town itself with a line of trenches protected by gabions, large wicker baskets filled with earth.
Historian James Falkner’s soldierly assessment of d’Arco’s quandary is wholly logical. D’Arco had three options. He could take his little all-arms force forward and fight a mobile defence, making the Allies pay dearly for the crossings of the Wörnitz, or fire Donauwörth and its magazines and tear down its bridge, depriving the town of strategic purpose. Holding the Schellenberg made sense only if the Elector sent reinforcements and the Allies formed up in the accepted manner before launching a formal attack. This was the option d’Arco selected, and he was not unreasonable in doing so. With every day that passed the Schellenberg would grow stronger, and the Allies would be unlikely to attack it if Max Emmanuel slipped his army along the Danube behind it.
Marlborough’s spies and scouts told him what was happening on the Schellenberg, and de la Colonie complained that a corporal in the Electoral Prince of Bavaria’s Regiment deserted with full details of defensive preparations. While we must be careful not to make more of the tension between Prince Louis and Marlborough than the evidence warrants, the two men certainly approached war in different ways. Louis tended to be a formalised and reflective commander, and moreover, he had formerly campaigned alongside Max Emmanuel and, as a fellow German prince, was on good personal terms with him regardless of the present political climate. Marlborough, in contrast, needed a quick decision and had no time for niceties. He explained to Godolphin that the Schellenberg
is a hill that commands the town of Donauwörth which passage on the Danube would be very advantageous for us, for I would make a magazine for our army there. If we had the cannon ready we could not fail of taking it. Prince Louis assures me that we shall have 20 pieces of battery here in 4 days, which I am afraid is impossible.47
On 1 July Marlborough sent forward Cadogan and Goor, his quartermaster generals, to look at the ground, and he speedily concluded that that he had neither room nor time for manoeuvre. A finger of high wooded ground, then called the Boshberg, pointed southwards from the larger forest to the north, making it impossible to move round the Schellenberg so as to outflank it from the east, while the Kaibach and Wörnitz, with the old defences of the town, made attack from the west impossible. The place had to be carried quickly, because the Elector’s quartermasters were already laying out camping grounds south of the Danube in preparation for the arrival of the main army, and this reduced Marlborough’s options to the frontal assault which Prince Louis advised most strongly against. He decided to attack on the following day, when it was his turn to command the army, but meanwhile ordered Cadogan to lay out encampments on the Wörnitz west of the town to persuade d’Arco that he proposed to do things by the stately book.
Marlborough threw away the book. He set off at three o’clock on the morning of 2 July with 6,000 foot, made up, as he tells us of 130 men, including ten grenadiers, selected from each Allied battalion, thirty squadrons of horse and dragoons, and three full battalions of Louis’ Imperial grenadiers, two German and one Austrian. Eighty men of 1st Foot Guards under Lord Peterborough’s eldest boy John, Lord Mordaunt, had volunteered to furnish the ‘forlorn hope’ which would lead the assault. Marching along ‘very difficult’ roads they reached the Wörnitz at Ebermorgen at about 1 p.m., and threw pontoons across to support the single existing bridge, but were not all over till three. Behind the stormers came 12,000 Allied infantry in two echelons, under Major General Henry Withers and Count Horn. The cavalry and dragoons, under Lieutenant Generals Lumley and Hompesch, who had marched early with Marlborough, spent part of their time preparing fascines, big bundles of green wood, which were to be used to help fill in entrenchments. The mounted troops then reassembled to form a fourth echelon after the stormers and their two waves of infantry supports. Whatever the theory of the matter, chaplain Josias Sandby, watching from Berg, distinctly saw six lines in all, ‘four of foot and two of horse’, probably the forlorn hope, the main body of stormers, two lines of infantry supports, dragoons and then horse.
D’Arco heard of Marlborough’s march as early as 9 a.m., and spent the day working furiously on the defences of the Schellenberg, although he evidently did not expect an assault that day. He wrote to the Elector asking for support, was told that Marlborough had come so close on a personal reconnaissance that he had been fired upon, and then went for dinner with Colonel du Bordet, commanding the troops in the town. His meal was interrupted when he was told that the Allied advance guard was in the suburb of Berg, which the Bavarian pickets had fired to delay the advance. Telling du Bordet to take special care of the trench and gabion link with the Schellenberg, d’Arco spurred off for the hill.
The attackers formed up on the line of the Kaibach, in dead ground where d’Arco’s guns could not hit them, while their own artillery, Colonel Holcroft Blood commanding, was dragged into battery on Berg hill. Although it was hard for the Allied gunners to hit the defences on the crest, many of the rounds which just cleared this feature ploughed into the infantry drawn up in support behind it. De la Colonie said that the first salvo killed ‘the Comte de la Bastide and the lieutenant of my company, to whom I was speaking, and twelve grenadiers, knocked over like ninepins; my coat was covered with the blood and brains of these gentlemen … the enemy’s battery … raked us through and through’. He lost eighty men without firing a shot.48 He was able to take his revenge soon enough. Led by Lieutenant General van Goor in person, the Allied infantry stepped off at about six o’clock, and though they had perhaps four hundred yards to cover they were not visible from the hill for the first two hundred, and de la Colonie remembered, in the quirky way that men recall little things at such times, that he saw their colours breasting the rise first. Coming up the same slope, Sergeant Wilson recalled: ‘The front rank had orders for every man to sling his firelock and take a fascine in his arms, in order to break the enemy’s shot in advancing. After which we advanced with all the courage and vigour in life.’49
The French and Bavarian musketry, delayed so long, was deadly when it came. The defenders had also stockpiled wagonloads of hand grenades, and bowled these underarm downhill, where they burst in the packed ranks of the attackers. As de la Colonie acknowledged, ‘The English infantry attacked with all the fury in the world; they showed a terrible determination right up to our parapet, but they met there, to repulse them, at least as much fury and determination as they themselves brought.’50 The first assault was driven back, and Bavarian grenadiers scampered out of their defences to hurry the broken attackers back down the hill, but were themselves checked by the disciplined fire of the next attacking echelon. The second assault fared no better than the first. This time, as de la Colonie saw, the Allied generals had dismounted and were leading their men forward on foot, but despite hand-to-hand fighting of extraordinary ferocity – de la Colonie witnessed men tearing each other’s eyes out with their fingernails – d’Arco’s line held, leaving Allied dead piled so high that they topped the fascines protecting his trenches.
Marlborough then ordered his dragoons to dismount and join the assault, and, though somewhat hampered by their big boots and long swords, they went on up the charnel slopes, with the horse, still mounted, closing up behind them. We cannot tell whether, as chaplain Sandby suggests, it was ‘their brave example’ that animated the infantry, or simply the fact that serried ranks of steady mounted men gave no opportunity for any faint-hearted foot soldiers to scuttle back into the ruins of Berg, that so buttressed the attack that the infantry tried yet again. It was now about seven o’clock: Marlborough’s men had suffered very heavily, and there was no apparent progress. Then came a report that some of the attackers, edging away to their right, had found that the trench and gabion line connecting hill and town was not effectively held, and that du Bordet’s men were not firing from the loopholes in the old curtain wall round the town, whence musketry might have made any breakthrough impossible. Marlborough sent an officer to confirm this, and Prince Louis seems to have discovered the lapse at much the same time. His three fine battalions of Imperial grenadiers, all moustaches, matchboxes and mitre caps, were still under his hand in the valley of the Kaibach, and he immediately shoved them into the gap. D’Arco at once counterattacked with some dragoons, whom he had husbanded on the reverse slope, but the grenadiers, coming on briskly to the rattle of their side-drums, brushed them aside.
On the hill Count Maffei, d’Arco’s deputy, could not make out the colours and field-signs worn by the advancing troops: the French and their allies generally wore a white ribbon or paper in their hats, and the Imperialists a sprig of greenery. By the time he had realised that they were not reinforcements coming up from the town it was too late: the position was fatally compromised. De la Colonie’s men struggled back over the crest in good order but eventually broke. He discovered that the drummer assigned to look after his horse had decamped with the beast. Hit in the jaw, he eventually jettisoned his long riding boots and ‘richly laced coat’, by now greasy with blood and brains, and scorched by the powder burns of close-range musketry, to swim the Danube to safety. He was in good company: d’Arco also swam for his life, and the pontoon bridge collapsed under the weight of fugitives. Marlborough quickly ordered Brigadier Ferguson, apparently the senior unwounded officer on the hill, to ‘keep the foot to their colours’ to secure the place, while he unleashed the horse in pursuit, ensuring that d’Arco paid the heavy price of losing a battle with a river at his back.
The battle was shockingly costly, with almost 5,500 Allied casualties and at least 8,000 French and Bavarian, many of them drowned in the Danube. About one-third of the attacking infantry were hit: 1st Foot Guards lost twelve officers and 217 men, the two battalions of Orkney’s Regiment (whom we last saw as Dumbarton’s, holding the Bussex Rhine half a lifetime ago) thirty officers and 418 men, and Ingoldsby’s (later the Royal Welch Fusiliers) sixteen officers and 228 men. Poor Chaplain Noyes of Orkney’s reported ruefully that ‘We carried the place, but at a cost very dear, the enemy being obstinate … we are not yet recovered out of the confusion the death of our friends has put us in.’ He thought a good deal of the damage had been done by ‘friendly fire’. ‘They were in such great numbers combined in the attack,’ he wrote, ‘that sometimes the hindest firing at random (as on such occasions there is always some confusion) shot those that were before them.’ Lieutenant General Lumley told him that ‘the Hollanders had not a general officer at present in a condition to lead them’.51
The toll of officers was certainly high, and bore eloquent testimony to their courage in leading successive assaults. That resolute Dutchman Johan van Goor was dead, hit in the head at the first assault. He had been acting as Dutch quartermaster general, and Marlborough particularly mourned his loss, for he ‘helped me in a great many things, which I am now forced to do myself, till I can find some other officer I can rely on for it’. He now lies in the great church at Nordlingen, with a dignified memorial tablet on the wall. Goor’s countryman Major General Beinheim was dead too, and so was the Imperialist major general the Prince of Wolfenbüttel. Prince Louis had been wounded in the foot. Although this was not apparently as serious as the wound suffered by his comrade Count Styrum, shot through the body, it would eventually fester and kill him. Both the Prince of Hesse and Count Horn, who commanded the Württemberg contingent, were also wounded.
On 3 July Marlborough told Sarah that ‘We have ruined the best of the Elector’s foot,’ though the ‘English foot has suffered a good deal’ in the process. He assured her that all her personal friends were well, apart from Major General Wood and Brigadier General Meredith, both wounded but predicted (correctly) to recover.52 Private Deane thought that his opponents
made a brave defence and bold resistance against us as brave and loyal hearted gentlemen soldiers ought to for their prince and country … both English and Dutch behaved themselves to admiration and the foreigners, give them their due, did stand like a wall and acted as became brave gentlemen and as duty combines a soldier at such a juncture, and several general officers they lost in this action and abundance of old experienced sentinels. A glorious action it was to be sure for this vigorous and bold attack held near 3 hours but with God’s assistance we driving them out of their works and possessing ourselves of them. Our horse likewise pursued and killed abundance of them driving several hundreds of them into the River Danube … 53
Chaplain Noyes reported that ‘our horse and dragoons hacked them down at a miserable rate … but far the greatest part fell into the hands of the [Imperial] hussars who gave no quarter’.54
The Allies seized d’Arco’s camp that day, with fifteen pieces of cannon (the exuberant Private Deane reported thirty-one guns and a mortar) and abundant baggage and ammunition: the accidental explosion of an underground powder magazine ‘did some mischief to a squadron of Dutch dragoons’. On 4 July the garrison of Donauwörth, ordered by the Elector to escape, first firing the town and destroying the bridge, ‘durst not stay to execute their design’, but left the bridge damaged but still usable, and a rich store of food, powder and ‘three great guns’.55 The Danish contingent under the Duke of Württemberg, twenty-one squadrons and seven battalions, arrived in camp on 5 July, counterbalancing the losses incurred in the storm.
Of Marlborough’s admirers, Winston S. Churchill glosses quite quickly over the Schellenberg, possibly because it reminded him too much of what his own generation had so recently lived through. David Chandler, in contrast, suggests that the weakening of the crucial link between town and Schellenberg ‘had been Marlborough’s intention’.56 The truth is more complex. At the tactical level the attack on the Schellenberg was necessarily unsubtle. Marlborough did not have the time for a more elaborate plan, and all contemporary accounts emphasise that the discovery of the weak spot was fortuitous, although the Allied reaction was swift and decisive. The battle was, then, no tactical masterpiece: it was won by the sheer courage of the Allied infantry.
However, at what we would now call the operational level, the linking of battles and engagements to form a coherent campaign, the Schellenberg was indeed a masterpiece, and, however dark its hue, it could not have been painted had Marlborough not hustled on to attack before Max Emmanuel had arrived. Sharp offensive action, not for the last time, was the key to his success. As Marlborough pointed out in the many letters he wrote to strengthen his political hand after the action, it was ‘a very severe blow’ for Max Emmanuel, who had lost some of his finest infantry. The fact that the Elector could not check the Allied foot with his best men in the defences of the Schellenberg cast a long shadow. Donauwörth, taken with so little damage, provided a valuable forward base for the next leg of the campaign. Max Emmanuel could not now prevent the Allies from entering what Marlborough called ‘the heart of Bavaria’. Finally, it is very often true that the first major clash of a campaign establishes the pattern of what is to come, and so it was with the Schellenberg.
Marlborough told Heinsius that he would ‘press the Elector’ in the hope that he would ‘make an accommodation’. Indeed, on 14 July Max Emmanuel agreed that in return for 600,000 crowns a year he would supply the Allies with 12,000 men. But just before signing the definitive treaty, he heard that Tallard was on his way from the Rhine to join him with some 35,000 men, and at once reneged on the deal as being inconsistent with his principles. On 23 July Marlborough told Sarah that he must provoke the Elector into fighting or making peace.
If he does not his whole country is in our power, for we have it behind us, and he may be sure that if he does not make peace, we will destroy it before we leave. You will, I hope, believe that my nature suffers, when I see so many fine places burnt, or that must be burnt, if the Elector will not hinder it.57
A week later he added:
We sent this morning 3,000 horse to his chief city of Munich, with orders to burn and destroy all the country about it. This is so uneasy to my nature that nothing but an absolute necessity could have obliged me to consent to it, for these poor people suffer only for their master’s ambition, there having been no war in this country for above 60 years. Their towns and villages are so clean that you would be pleased with them.58
Oddly enough, de la Colonie, who could see the smoke of burning villages from the Electoral palace in Munich, did not believe that the destruction was deliberate. ‘I do not say that a few houses were not burnt,’ he wrote, ‘but the enemy generals did not have the deliberate intention of ordering this; it was the work of marauders in the army who, angry at finding the houses of peasants abandoned and without effects, set fire to some of them.’59 That was certainly not how Sergeant Wilson remembered his orders. He thought that the army was allowed ‘free plunder’ in Bavaria, and confirmed that horse were sent out ‘to burn and plunder the Elector of Bavaria’s country, even to the very gates of Munich’.60 Mrs Davies, still convincingly disguised as a soldier, admitted that:
we miserably plundered the poor inhabitants of the Electorate; I had left the hospital in time enough to contribute to their misery, and to have a share in the plunder. We spared nothing, killing, burning or otherwise destroying whatever we could [not] carry off. The bells of the churches we broke to pieces, that we might bring them away with us. I filled two bed-ticks [quilt covers], after having thrown out the feathers, with bell-metal, men’s and women’s clothes, some velvets, and about a hundred Dutch caps, which I had plundered from a shop; all which I sold by the lump to a Jew, who followed the army to purchase our pillage, for four pistoles … I got several pieces of plate, as spoons, mugs, cups etc, all which the same conscionable merchant had at his own price.61
Chaplain Josias Sandby maintained that the duke ordered the burning to stop, and in any event ‘spared the woods, which are stately and numerous in this country. Consisting entirely of tall fir trees and pinastres.’ However, another officer recalled how: ‘we burnt and plundered almost all the villages right and left, which are indeed very frequent and very fine in this country. In this last march in particular we entirely burnt a mighty pretty village with a noble church and cloister.’62 Prince Louis, thinking perhaps of his own prosperous villages, found the whole business deeply distasteful, declaring that he wished to fight like a general, not like a hussar.
The Elector, though, would neither fight nor treat, and now Marlborough, so confident after the Schellenberg, was feeling the balance of the campaign tilt against him. He had taken Neuberg and Rain, but his lack of heavy guns at first precluded more serious sieges, and so Munich was invulnerable. He soon knew that Tallard was on his way from the Rhine, with 35,000 men and a huge convoy of provisions, planning to link up first with Marsin’s French contingent, entrenched at Augsburg, and then with the Elector, on the move with the remnants of his own army: indeed, on 6 August Tallard joined Marsin at Biberbach on the River Lech near Augsburg. Marlborough had already sent thirty squadrons to help Eugène, who hoped that he might be able both to hold Villeroi in the Lines of Stollhofen and perhaps to block Tallard too. He discovered that he could not do both, left a strong detachment to pin Villeroi to the Lines, and then took the bulk of his army back towards Marlborough’s, reaching Höchstädt on the Danube at the end of the first week of August.
Marlborough and Eugène were close enough to support one another by 7 August, and now had a good chance of bringing on the battle they both desired by tempting their opponents to try an attack on either army before they were fully joined. To give themselves another major crossing over the Danube in case the Franco-Bavarians compromised that at Donauwörth, the Allied generals agreed that Prince Louis would turn eastwards to begin the siege of Ingolstadt with 15,000 men, an operation covered from the enemy by the two Allied armies. Several reliable historians argue (as did Mérode-Westerloo at the time) that this was largely a device to get ‘the cautious and obstructive Margrave out of the way during the series of bold operations about to commence’, and Louis went to his grave three years later believing that the Ingolstadt ploy was really a shabby trick designed to keep him away from the decisive battle.63
However, Marlborough assured Heinsius that the siege made perfect sense. The Elector had abandoned Bavaria to join forces with the French, leaving only a few troops in Munich and Augsburg, ‘So that Prince Louis will have it in his power during the siege of Ingolstadt to do whatever he pleases with his horse in the country of Bavaria.’ Marlborough would reinforce Eugène, and join him with the whole of his army the second he heard that the French had crossed the Danube. The Franco-Bavarians would ‘not be able to hinder us from going on with the siege’, and if they offered an opportunity for battle he would certainly take it, ‘our troops being full of courage and desiring nothing more’.64 There is no trace of subterfuge here. Prince Louis was a steady and experienced commander who would press the siege of Ingolstadt to its conclusion. Eugène, in any case the senior Imperialist officer in the theatre, was much better suited to a period of swift manoeuvre.
When Marlborough explained his plan to Sarah on 10 August he was clear on its general outline. ‘Prince Louis is marched with thirty squadrons and twenty-four battalions to make the siege of Ingolstadt,’ he wrote, ‘and I have taken measures with Prince Eugène for opposing the Elector and the two marshals.’ He lamented that the postmaster at Brill had just told him that five of his letters had gone astray, and ‘it would be a cruel thing if, instead of your having them, they should go to France’. This missing mail was less of a risk to Allied security than we might suppose, for the tactical situation in Bavaria would have changed long before the French could react to information gleaned from it.65 That same day Marlborough assured Heinsius that he would fight if he could: ‘The French make their boast of having a great superiority, but I am very confident they will not venture a battle; but if we find a fair occasion, we shall be glad to venture it, being persuaded the ill condition of affairs in most parts requires it.’66
On 7 August Eugène, escorted by a single hussar, had ridden south to Marlborough’s camp at Friedberg, between the Lech and the Paar east of Augsburg, to a conference with Marlborough and Louis, and then set off back to his own lines. But on the eighth Marlborough heard that the Franco-Bavarian army had ‘decamped from Biberbach and were marching towards Lavingen, with a design, as ’tis supposed, to pass the Danube’. Eugène spurred back as soon as he heard, and they agreed ‘that he should forthwith be reinforced, and that the whole army should advance nearer the Danube to draw near him if the enemy passed’. He immediately sent Württemberg off with twenty-nine squadrons of horse and ordered ‘my brother Churchill’ to follow with twenty battalions of foot, all making for newly-established pontoon bridges over the Danube at Merxheim.67 Eugène slipped back eastwards along the river, as far as the Kessel rivulet, while Marlborough’s main body headed first for Rain, where it crossed the Lech, and then moved on for Donauwörth. On the eleventh, as these two great columns neared him, marching separately to make the best use of road-space, Eugène edged back still further, some of his troops going as far as the Schellenberg itself. By about six that evening the armies were united on the line of the Kessel, although it would not be until daybreak that Colonel Blood arrived with the artillery after a march of twenty-four miles.
Even as he was manoeuvring for a handhold with Tallard and the Elector, Marlborough was still dealing with the usual flood of administrative, political and personal correspondence. The Earl of Peterborough was assured that Lord Mordaunt deserved to be ‘gratified according to his merit and desire’ after his conduct at the Schellenberg, but nothing could be done for the moment. The Duke of Buckingham, Marlborough warned Godolphin, was sure ‘to be as troublesome next winter as he can’, and Sir John Bland deserved some worthwhile post – he was actually made commissioner for the revenue in Ireland. Godolphin was to be congratulated on his garter, and Sarah on the fact that their grandson William Godolphin had recovered from an illness. On 10 August, with the campaign at last beginning to tilt his way once more, Marlborough congratulated Galway on being appointed to the command in Portugal, and drew his attention to Colonel Richards, who commanded the Portuguese artillery, and deserved Galway’s ‘favour and protection’. He gave Sarah an early hint that the emperor proposed to offer him a title which would not ‘change his name or rank in England’ but would be an honour to him and the queen, as ‘none ever of his nation have had the like’. Yet the pressures of life were taking their toll. ‘My blood is so heated that I have had these last two days a very violent headache,’ he told Sarah. ‘But not having stirred out of my chamber this day, I find myself much easier.’68
The Allies were on the move betimes on 12 August. Marlborough had ordered his regiments to bridge the little Kessel with fascines during the night, and his forces marched westwards parallel with the northern bank of the Danube and halted for the night between the villages of Münster and Tapfheim. Marlborough later admitted that they were ‘intending to advance, and take this camp of Höchstädt … but found the enemy had already possessed themselves of it, whereupon we resolved to attack them’.69 He and Eugène climbed the church tower in Tapfheim to view the ground, and then rode forward to the Hühnersberg hill near Wolperstetten. They saw a wide, flat floodplain stretching north from the Danube, now canalised but then curling up in a great bend east of Höchstädt, to the wooded high ground of the Waldberg and the Obere Hölzer, the former a little over four miles due north of the river. On the plain’s eastern edge a natural defile, a mile across, between woods and river was dominated by the village of Schwenningen.
Just over a third of the way from Schwenningen to Höchstädt the Nebel brook tottered – in such flat land we can scarcely say it ran – from the slopes of the Waldberg to the Danube. A row of tightly-nucleated villages lay along its line, from Blenheim, on a bend in the Danube, through Unterglauheim and Oberglauheim to Schwemmenbach on the edge of the hills. It was rich farming country, with water rarely far below the surface, but in the summer it provided excellent going for cavalry. The Nebel itself, now cribbed in by modern land drainage, was then more boggy, but could be passed by infantry and cavalry on improvised crossings in most places, although guns would have to use bridges or causeways. One French officer recalled it as ‘only a brook two feet wide, which formed a little marsh much dried out because of the great heat, and this deceived our generals who thought it wide’.70 They might not have thought it so had they taken the trouble to look at it.
Spread across the plain behind the Nebel, and packed into its little villages, were the seventy-eight battalions and 143 squadrons of the Franco-Bavarian army, perhaps 54,000 men in all, with Tallard’s wing on the right towards the river and the Elector’s and Marsin’s army on the left, brushing the high ground with its left cuff. We have seen Marlborough and Eugène manoeuvre with the intention of obtaining the battle they were soon to have: what spirit, then, animated the Franco-Bavarian army? If victory has many fathers, defeat is indeed an orphan, and Camille de Tallard anxiously told Chamillart in his two post-combat reports, written as a prisoner of war, that he had certainly not sired the greatest defeat endured by French arms for a generation: others were to blame. His reports contain a good deal of special pleading, but they do help us understand why the French and Bavarians were sitting about in this natural amphitheatre with the sword of Damocles poised above them.
First, poor logistics (‘with no magazine, not even six days’ supplies in any place’) sharply limited their ability to manoeuvre, just as Marlborough had suspected they would. There had been damaging desertions, especially amongst foreign units. An outbreak of glanders, a deadly and contagious horse-sickness among cavalry units from Alsace, some of whom were now at half-strength, meant that Tallard and Marsin were reluctant to exchange cavalry in case the infection spread, and Tallard had been forced to dismount four regiments (twelve squadrons) of dragoons to give their surviving horses to his cavalry. Worse, Tallard professed ‘a total ignorance of the strength of the enemy’. He had no idea that Marlborough and Eugène were fully united and so close. After all, when he had asked if the Höchstädt plain was a safe place to await further reinforcements, ‘everyone assured me yes’.
With two marshals of France, a ruling prince and several ambitious lieutenant generals in the field, command was a mite difficult, and the council of war a mere debating chamber.
This diversity of advice, Sir, which made public what one wished to do, shows us clearly that it is a fine lesson that we should only have one man commanding an army, and that it is a great misfortune to have to deal with a prince of the honour of the Elector of Bavaria, above all when lieutenant generals advised him directly … as did certain of M le Maréchal Marsin’s army.
The Elector, claimed Tallard, had heard from Donauwörth that they faced only Marlborough and a small advance guard who had joined Eugène, and it would therefore be safe to attack.
On 12 August Tallard ordered the comte de Silly to take a strong party of horse forward to the Reichenbach, beyond Schwenningen, ‘in order to take some prisoners, whatever the cost’, and so find out how strong Eugène really was. News of this raid arrived when Marlborough and Eugène were at dinner. They thought it an attack on their pioneers, who were at work levelling a ‘hollow way’ that ran across the army’s route just west of the Kessel, and rode forward to see what was happening, ordering their horse to be ready to assist if required. Silly fell back with four prisoners, but neither they nor his scouts gave any warning of what was about to happen. Indeed, there were later suggestions that the prisoners may even have been ‘plants’, carefully briefed by Cadogan. Tallard himself was worried about the Nebel, and hoped to throw up a battery ‘on the main road that crosses the brook’, and to dam it near its confluence with the Danube so as to deepen it. The Elector, anxious not to damage the corn, which was ready to be harvested, was against all this, but on the following day, Tallard concludes pathetically, ‘those who were against precautions on the previous day sought to make them when there was no more time’.71
Marlborough and Eugène, in contrast, were determined to attack, although, with sixty-six battalions and 160 squadrons, they were slightly inferior in strength, with perhaps 50,800 men.72 They certainly had fewer infantry, but the French were to diminish their advantage in this arm by packing infantry into Blenheim, where their numbers were a source not of strength but of confusion. The Allied numerical advantage in cavalry was especially important in view of the open country, which favoured the mounted arm.
The armies of the age fought in line, although lines tended to be deeper then than they were a generation or two later. The French Ordonnance of 1703 still reflected the old days of pike and musket, and decreed that infantry battalions were to form up five deep, although shallower formations were adopted when strengths fell below their establishment figures. In contrast, Richard Kane reflected the best of British practice when he recommended that a battalion of eight hundred men should be drawn up
three deep, their bayonets fixed on their muzzles, the grenadiers divided on the flanks, the officers ranged in the front; and the colonel, or in his absence the lieutenant colonel (who, I suppose, fights the battalion) on foot, with his sword drawn in his hand, about eight or ten paces in front, opposite the centre, with an expert drum by him. He should appear with a cheerful countenance, never in a hurry, or by any means ruffled, and to deliver his orders with great calmness and presence of mind.
The commanding officer would divide his battalion into four grand divisions, each of four platoons. These in turn would be subdivided to give three ‘firings’, although Kane recommended that the front rank might be kept separate to give a fourth ‘fire in reserve’. The result of methods like this was to have volleys rolling out regularly from distinct parts of the line, with some loaded muskets (the ‘fire in reserve’) on hand for an emergency.73 It was more complex, and certainly required more attention by the officers, than firing by whole ranks (‘rank entire’), but was believed to generate a better rate of fire.
The maintenance of a high volume of fire was essential to British infantry tactics in the eighteenth century. In his masterly work Fit for Service (1981) J.A. Houlding argued that this ‘illustrates the fact that a sound appreciation of the supremacy of firepower over all other forms of combat had been a lesson well learnt by the end of Marlborough’s campaigns, and had been taken to heart in the army’.74 What was really different between Marlborough’s battalions at Blenheim and King William’s foot ten years before was this ‘most formidable and destructive fire’ produced by platoon firings. Marlborough took the strongest personal interest in it, and a drill-book of 1708, which enshrined the system in use in his army, was called The Duke of Marlborough’s New Exercise of Firelocks and Bayonets.
There are good practical reasons to doubt just how long a battalion could maintain its platoon firing in the smoke and din of battle with the enemy’s musketry and canister shot winnowing its ranks.75 Some forty years later an experienced infantry officer wrote of the British foot at Dettingen:
They were under no command by way of Hyde Park firing, but with the whole three ranks made a running fire of their own accord, at the same time with great judgement and skill, stooping as low as they could, making almost every ball take place … The French fired in the same manner, I mean without waiting for words of command, and Lord Stair did often say he had seen many a battle, and never saw the infantry engage in any other manner.76
John Dalrymple, 2nd Earl of Stair, fought at Blenheim, and his testimony cannot be brushed aside easily. Even the best infantry could not sustain proper platoon firing for very long, but the impact of no more than half a dozen crisply delivered volleys would break opposing infantry if their morale and training were not up to the strain. Contemporaries were right to warn of the very unpleasant consequences of getting in the way of a French volley fired ‘by rank entire’, but the deep deployment of French battalions, the wide spacing between their ranks, and, so often, the recent arrival of new recruits, meant that a close-packed British battalion, its men standing shoulder to shoulder and its three ranks ‘locked up’ one against the other, maintained cohesion better and generated a significantly higher volume of fire than its opponents. In combat the effect of success is cumulative: the side firing fastest and most accurately boosts its own cohesion and confidence, accelerating into a virtuous spiral as its opponents spin round their own vicious circle, losing more men, firing more slowly, and eventually breaking.
The achievement of Marlborough’s foot resonated down the ages, and a British officer writing in 1743 told how: ‘Our people imitated their predecessors in the late war gloriously, marching in close order, and still kept advancing; for when the smoke blew off a little, instead of being among their living we found the dead in heaps by us: and the second fire turned them to the right about, and upon a long trot.’77 Platoon firing was the business of Marlburian infantry, and one can almost see them now in the cornfields bordering the Danube, three ranks locked solid, silken colours catching the sun, with the first warning ruffle from the colonel’s drummer picked up by drummers along the line, and then those drawling voices, from Cork and Canterbury and Cumberland: ‘First firing, make ready. Present. Fire!’ Men were already beginning to speak of the canine courage of the British foot, cold resolution coupled with extraordinary ferocity, an impression heightened by their practice of barking out three sharp hurrahs before pressing in with bayonet and butt to take advantage of the damage done by their fire. Many opponents did not care to await their arrival.
If Marlborough believed that firepower was the essence of infantry, he argued that shock action was the soul of cavalry, and trained his horse to eschew squibbing off pistols or carbines before impact, but to charge home at the sort of ‘good round trot’ that Cromwell’s Ironsides had delivered. This was considerably slower than charges would be a century later, when they were delivered ‘at the utmost speed of the slowest horse’. Marlborough’s method, however, ensured a high degree of control, and at Blenheim Captain Parker and Marshal Tallard both watched, one with elation and the other with growing gloom, the flower of the Maison du Roi being seen off by British horse.
Cannon, such a nuisance on the line of march, were generally too cumbersome to move easily about the battlefield. They were usually sited where they could do most damage in the early stages, grouped in small batteries in the battle line. Knowing commanders might clump some of their guns on a suitable piece of high ground: a well-sited sixteen-gun Bavarian battery at Lutzingen helped prop up the Franco-Bavarian left flank at Blenheim. Roundshot, an iron cannonball which spread death and destruction by bounding through the enemy’s ranks, was the most common projectile, and there was widespread agreement that no cannon, whatever its calibre, could usefully be employed at a target more than a thousand yards away. Although there were by now a few howitzers about, which fired explosive shells, their primitive fuses and the unreliable casting of their shells meant that they were often rather patchy in their effect. Gunners who lobbed their shells over friendly units would tend to receive forcefully expressed suggestions that they should do something more harmful to the foe and less dangerous to their friends.
In contrast, canister, multiple shot loaded in box, bag or tin, or strapped to a wooden plug the size of the bore, was a real killer. Its range was limited, perhaps three hundred yards at the most, but it could do terrible damage to packed formations at this distance. Canister was the most effective projectile for ‘regimental pieces’, light guns which kept pace with the infantry, fired from the intervals between battalions and, in their noisy and destructive way, foreshadowed the use of machine-guns two centuries on.
If armies fought in line, they moved in column. The easiest way of deploying from the latter to the former was simply to march onto the field with units destined for the right of the line at the head of the column, to order a right wheel at some suitable point, and then, when the whole army had completed the wheel, to halt it, and order it to turn left into line: this was essentially what the French did at Ramillies. If this was the simplest method of deploying it was easily the least satisfactory, for it required sufficient space to form the whole army up in column of route, a suitable approach on one flank of the field, and time to complete the whole manoeuvre without interference.
We do not use the expression ‘give battle’ for nothing, for an army in column could usually move faster than an opponent in line. The surest way of avoiding contact with an enemy wheeling into line with all the martial glory of drum ruffles, officers shouting beautifully articulated orders and earnest but profane sergeants urging men to step very, very short on the inner flank, was to march off apace, leaving a few dragoons to hold suitable defiles on the line of withdrawal. It was far better, if the terrain and one’s training permitted it, to enter the field in a number of parallel columns. These could still deploy into line by wheeling, but for the best-trained there were more complex procedures available, like the deployment en tiroir as units down the column slid out of it to one side or the other, like drawers being pulled out of a chest.
Moving from column into line was always a delicate business, especially if there was a natural obstacle in the way, and the problem for the Allies at Blenheim was that they would reach the Nebel in column and then deploy only after they had crossed it, at their most vulnerable at the very moment that they entered a plateau filled with foes. What Marlborough’s reconnaissance on 12 August had almost certainly revealed was that along much of Tallard’s front the Nebel was invisible from his campsites. Tallard was certainly right to tell Chamillart that pushing a battery forward to cover the main crossing would have been a good idea, and just as correct to admit that his main line of defence, between Blenheim and the Nebel, was too far back from the obstacle. On the Allied right Eugène was not as fortunate, and this simple piece of geography helped make the battle on his flank a good deal harder than it was for Marlborough on the left, and helps explain why, in essence, there was to be a fixing battle on the Allied right and a striking battle on the left.
The soldiers of the Allied army rose without beat of drum just after midnight on 13 August and, leaving their tents standing, moved out through the Schwenningen defile into the plain, fanning out into eight columns as they did so, with the brigade which had held Schwenningen overnight forming a ninth. Forty squadrons of cavalry screened the advance. Robert Parker recalled that the march started ‘by break of day’, and at about 6 a.m., well after first light, Marlborough held a brief conference with his generals near Schwenningen, and paid particular attention to the advice of Major General Dubislaw von Natzmer, a Prussian cavalry officer who had been with Count Styrum’s force when it was beaten at Höchstädt the previous year, and who knew the ground. Eugène’s wing, meanwhile, marched on, along the edge of the forest bordering the plain, while Marlborough’s approached the Nebel.
The comte de Mérode-Westerloo, in command of the right wing of Tallard’s second line, did not much like the Franco-Bavarian position. He thought that with its left on Lutzingen and its right on the Danube it was far too wide: by pushing the whole line forward, so that the left was on the woods,
we could have held a far more compact position, with our right still on the Danube … and our centre more concentrated. There we could have drawn up three if not four lines of infantry, one behind the other, with our ninety-four guns to the fore, and three or four lines of cavalry to support them in the rear.78
However, on the night of the twelfth – thirteenth, Mérode-Westerloo ‘sat down to a good hot plate of soup in Blenheim with my generals and colonels’ and retired to his camp bed, which had been set up in a barn on the edge of the village, for a good night’s sleep.
He was awakened by his head groom at six in the morning.
The fellow, Lefranc, shook me awake and blurted out that the enemy were there. Thinking to mock him, I asked ‘Where? There?’ and he at once replied, ‘Yes – there – there!’ flinging wide as he spoke the door of the barn and drawing my bed-curtains. The door opened straight onto the fine, sunlit plain beyond – and the whole area appeared to be covered by enemy squadrons. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief, and then coolly remarked that the foe must at least give me time to take my morning cup of chocolate.
He rode out as soon as he could, accompanied by his two aides de camp and sixteen spare chargers, and went to the camp, where he found everyone asleep, ‘although the enemy was so close that their standards and colours could easily be counted. They were already pushing back our pickets, but nobody seemed worried about it.’ He got his regiments mounted as quickly as he could, and soon Tallard galloped by, congratulating him on being so beforehand, and ordered him to get the two cannon salvoes fired to recall the foragers. An aide duly galloped to a nearby battery, ‘got himself recognised and obeyed by the gunners, and we soon heard the 24-pounders fire two salvoes’. Across the whole of the Franco-Bavarian camp drums beat up the générale, an insistent flurry that their opponents recognised, infantry formed up in rank and file, troopers mounted, and gunners and their teams hauled their pieces forward. Tallard, prescient as ever, had just penned a note to Louis XIV saying that he thought the Allies were falling back on Nordlingen. Why else would they be about so early in the morning?
Chaplain Sandby heard how ‘the enemy beat to arms, and fired the signal for the foragers to come in’. He then saw the French and Bavarians
set fire to the villages of Berghausen, Weilheim and Unterglauheim, and to two mills and some other houses near the [mouth of the Nebel] rivulet. They likewise brought forth their cannon, and planted several batteries along the hill which formed their position.79
Tallard posted thirty-six battalions and his twelve squadrons of dismounted dragoons between the Danube and the plain north of Blenheim, and sent two battalions up to his left to support Marsin’s fourteen battalions around Oberglauheim. From there twelve more battalions took the line off towards Lutzingen, held by d’Arco and five Bavarian battalions, with another eleven French battalions continuing the line up to the hills on the extreme left. Tallard’s own sixty-four squadrons of cavalry were reinforced by sixteen slipped down by Marsin, and the remaining sixty-seven squadrons formed up between Oberglauheim and Lutzingen. At about ten o’clock the Elector and the two marshals met in Blenheim to discuss their plan. Marsin and the Elector resolved to hold as far forward as they could, on the Nebel itself, while Tallard determined to let the Allies cross and then to break them on the west bank. Tallard admitted that the lie of the land was unfortunate: ‘The village [Blenheim] was too far from the brook to defend the passage, and too close for us to deploy [all the infantry] in front of it and leave the village behind.’ However, he posted two brigades of cavalry with orders ‘to move quickly to the brook and charge the enemy before they were formed up’.80
The Franco-Bavarian plan was cobbled together at the last moment, but Marlborough’s was the result of careful thought and wholehearted agreement. Eugène’s wing would pin Marsin and the Elector to their positions, preventing them from helping Tallard. With the Franco-Bavarian left held in check, Marlborough would be free to defeat Tallard, making best use of his greater numbers of cavalry on ground ideal for their use. However, this meant that there could be no advance until Eugène was ready, and he had a good way to go, across the grain of the country, with numerous streams and ditches that made life especially difficult for his gunners, making extemporised bridges for their pieces.
By ten o’clock Marlborough’s infantry, under the overall command of
his brother Charles, was formed up east of the Nebel facing Blenheim and Unterglauheim. On his extreme left Salamander Cutts, with twenty battalions, faced Blenheim itself, with Major General Wood behind him with fifteen squadrons. Churchill’s infantry were interleaved with the Prince of Hesse’s horse, with a line of infantry in front, then two lines of cavalry, and then a second line of infantry. This would allow the first line of infantry to cross the Nebel ‘and to march as far in advance on the other side as could conveniently be done, and then to form and cover the passage of the horse, leaving intervals in the line of infantry large enough for the horse to pass over and take their post in front’. When the French guns had opened fire at about eight o’clock, Marlborough ordered Blood to reply, and ‘visited each battery, and stood by to observe the range of the guns and the effect of their fire’.81
The French guns could not engage the full line of the Nebel without being brought well forward of their cavalry, and the high corn obstructed the view on both sides, so they did less damage to Churchill’s infantry than we might expect. Mérode-Westerloo recorded that cavalry out in the open certainly suffered from artillery fire. ‘I was riding past Forsac’s regiment,’ he wrote, ‘when a shot carried away the head of my horse and killed two troopers.’ One roundshot hit the ground at the feet of Marlborough’s grey charger, covering horse and rider with dust, but he continued to visit his own gunners, and suggested that the infantry should lie down to avoid the fire and take some cover from what Mérode-Westerloo called ‘the brightest imaginable sun’. It was a Sunday, and chaplains conducted service under this desultory bombardment: Robert Parker heard that Marlborough took communion and then mounted, saying: ‘This day I conquer or die.’
Marlborough knew that Eugène would have to ‘fetch a compass’ to get into position, but towards midday he grew impatient and sent off Cadogan to find out what was happening. At about 12.30 one of Eugène’s aides de camp arrived to announce that all was ready: Marlborough ordered his brother to cross the Nebel, and sent word to Cutts to attack Blenheim. Pioneers had already done a good deal of work on the Nebel, piling fascines into it, making temporary bridges with wood from ruined houses, and even using some tin pontoons, and the infantry began to cross, forming up, as they had been told, on the far bank, but with enough space between themselves and the water for the cavalry to cross, form up and then move through the infantry.
On the left, Lord Cutts’ attack on Blenheim was in the gallant but unsubtle tradition of the famous Salamander, fighting his last battle. Brigadier Rowe, commanding the leading brigade, had told his men not to fire until he had struck the French palisade with his sword, and they stoutly took him at his word. He went down, mortally wounded, and his brigade was thrown back. Ferguson’s brigade did no better against the dismounted dragoons holding improvised barricades on the southern edge of the village: Private Deane recalled ‘trees, planks, coffers, chests, carts, wagons and palisades’. 1st Foot Guards lost its commanding officer, and the attack was repulsed here too, though only after ‘our men fought in and through the fire and pursued others through it, and many on both sides were burnt to death. At length the enemy making all the force they could upon us forced us to retreat and to quit the village.’82
As Cutts’ first wave fell back, Lieutenant General von Zurlauben, a Swiss professional and one of the few French generals to earn Tallard’s approval that day (‘He did marvels, both as an officer and a brave man’), led three squadrons of elite Gens d’Armes, part of the French Household Troops, into the flank of Rowe’s brigade, doing considerable damage before being checked by the Hessians of Wilkes’s brigade, now safely across the Nebel and coming on in good order. Although the attack on Blenheim had failed, it persuaded Lieutenant General the marquis de Clérembault, responsible for its defence, to summon more troops from the open country to its north. Tallard complained bitterly that Clérembault eventually denuded the whole of his centre of infantry and then, when the rot set in, ‘preferred to get drowned rather than to remain at his post’. By 2 p.m. Cutts’ attack on Blenheim was called off for the moment, but Tallard’s right had become fatally unbalanced by its defence.
Further north, Churchill’s leading infantry scrambled across the Nebel as ordered, and by the time Zurlauben led his Gens d’Armes forward as planned, there were already five squadrons of British cavalry on the west bank under Colonel Francis Palmes. The Gens d’Armes halted to fire their carbines and were, predictably, roughly handled. Palmes charged them frontally, and ordered his two flanking squadrons to come in at an angle and take them in the flanks: the gallant Zurlauben was mortally wounded. The defeat of this prestigious element of the Maison du Roi infuriated Tallard: ‘The officers of the gendarmerie are very brave fellows, but the gendarmerie did nothing useful,’ he told Chamillart. It also enabled the Elector to engage in a little coalition-bashing, never a useful commodity at a time like this. ‘What, the gentlemen of France fleeing?’ he said. ‘Go, tell them that I am here in person. Rally them and lead them to the charge.’83
Palmes’s men were soon driven back by a countercharge, but, as the exasperated Tallard observed, they were not broken, and as more Allied squadrons crossed the Nebel the battle slithered out of Tallard’s control. He later confessed that ‘misfortune … came upon us because we did not drive back the enemy in our first charges’.84 An anonymous French officer affirmed that: ‘The general officers were no help to the marshal; they let the enemy pass the marsh and a little brook which was in front of our camp without defending it, and the enemy was across it in three lines before anyone charged.’85 The line of the Nebel was lost and the French cavalry, their charges described by Tallard as ‘useless’, were beaten, partly by the disciplined action of the Allied horse, and partly by the steady volleys of the supporting infantry. Mérode-Westerloo grimly recalled one of his charges being broken by fire at thirty paces, after which there was ‘a definite but unauthorised movement to the rear’.
The French infantry which might have supported the charges, as Churchill’s foot did their own horse, had started the day too far back, and too much of it had now been drawn into Blenheim by that anxious officer the marquis de Clérembault. ‘We had too many battalions on our right,’ wrote another officer, ‘and lacked them in our centre.’ Tallard galloped north to ask Marsin for help, but the French and Bavarians on his left, barely holding their own against determined attacks by Eugène, had nothing to spare, and so ‘he did not think himself in a state to give me any’.
The baron de Montigny-Languet said that the battle was not simply lost because of French mistakes. Hitherto French armies had been ‘everywhere victorious’, but now they had encountered a new and enterprising foe: ‘Nothing was better conducted than the enemy’s march. They were superior to us, and apart from their lines which were equal to us in their three attacks, were in column five or six lines deep to support them.’ In short, the French and Bavarians were facing an enemy who understood combined arms battle, and it had been madness to offer battle at all: ‘It would have been better to have kept the intact forces of the empire together, to have dug in and risked nothing.’ Quite how such an option might have been sustained logistically, however, he does not begin to say.86
In contrast, Adam de Cardonnel thought that Marlborough threw himself heart and soul into the battle because he knew he had so much to win from a decisive action.
The Duke of Marlborough exposed himself in every place, from one attack to another, beyond what is thought advisable in a general, but he saw the good effect of his doing so, and no doubt knew the necessity of a battle better than any of us, for I believe had the opinion of the majority of us prevailed, we should not have been for us under our circumstances, in short orders were never better given, or better executed.87
Marlborough was also well served by his generals in an inverse proportion to the way that Tallard was let down by his. John Wilson called Marlborough and Eugène ‘such wise and experienced generals’, a telling tribute from a sergeant to his commander-in-chief.
Communicating in person, or by gallopers and by runners, the latter wearing jockey caps and carrying staves denoting their function, Marlborough spent the day riding along his front as the demands of the battle changed: chaplain Noyes saw how ‘he exposed his person the whole day in a most uncommon manner’. In early afternoon the Dutch infantry were already in trouble at Oberglauheim, whose defending Irish infantry fought for King Louis with more courage than some of his own subjects, when Marsin launched a well-handled cavalry counterattack. Marlborough was on hand to send forward fresh infantry and to ask Eugène for help. No sooner demanded than delivered: up trotted Count Fugger with a brigade of Imperial cuirassiers, and the threat melted away. Soon afterwards, when he felt the battle had reached its point of balance, Marlborough sent his aide Lord Tonbridge to tell Eugène that he expected to break the French, but needed Eugène to continue to hold Marsin and the Elector in play. As always, men noticed his grace under pressure. When Lord Orkney hurtled in at last to tell him that the day was his, ‘he took my Lord Orkney by the hand, and said “George, thou art a happy man and a messenger of good tidings. Praised, therefore, be Almighty God.”’88 Orkney, an experienced professional, admitted that the victory was ‘entirely owing to my Lord Duke, for, I declare, had it been my opinion, I had been against it, considering the ground where they were encamped and the strength of their army’.89
Before Marlborough was in a position to thank God, however, his infantry had first to deal with Blenheim, set on fire by its defenders who, as Mérode-Westerloo wrote, ‘were grilled amongst the continually collapsing roofs and beams of the blazing houses, and thus were burnt alive amidst the ashes of this smaller Troy of their own making’.90 Tallard, seeing that the battle for his left and centre was lost, ‘wanted to go back to the village and make a last effort, in order to fall back with the infantry: I was followed by a regiment of Hessian dragoons [in fact Bothmar’s Regiment], who surrounded me, the officer having recognised my Order of the Saint-Esprit’. As Tallard was led to the rear, at about 5.30, much of the huge garrison of Blenheim stood fast among the blazing houses, but:
M de Clérembault, lieutenant general, who commanded the 27 battalions which were in the village on our right and the 12 squadrons of dragoons, did not think of withdrawing with this body; he went and drowned himself in the Danube at four in the afternoon, two hours before the end of the battle, having lost his head.91
Clérembault, dead and in no position to defend himself, was soon to become the French bête noire. He had certainly committed a major mistake in packing infantry into Blenheim, but once the battle in the centre was lost his course of action was less than clear. There was then a large bend in the Danube, tipped by the village of Sonderheim, south-west of Blenheim, and the direction of the Allied attack meant that the main Höchstädt road, which might once have enabled the garrison to escape, was already in hostile hands. The suggestion that Clérembault could have formed his men into a huge square and marched them off to safety is absurd: the ground simply did not allow it. Yet again the French found themselves fighting with a river to their back, and yet again they paid the price. Clérembault was wrong to ride for his life and leave his men to their fate: even Tallard had hoped to do something for his still-undefeated whitecoats.
Many officers and men of the broken right wing tried to cross the Danube. There was a single bridge of boats but, says Robert Parker, ‘The bridge (as frequently happens in such cases) broke under the crowd that rushed upon it, and down they went.’92 Many tried to swim their horses or strike out on their own, but the microterrain told against them. Sonderheim is on the outer sweep of a great bend, and the river there, scoured by the current, was far deeper than it was at the far bank. French fugitives, already tired and hot after a day’s fighting, entered the Danube well out of their depth. They may have been encouraged to risk it by the sight of a few fortunate comrades scrambling up through the reeds on the far side. Some, shocked by the chill of the river’s water, would have died quickly; others would have been dragged down by sodden uniforms or brained by the hooves of flailing horses.
Lieutenant General the marquis de Clérembault cannot have died well in the muddy waters of the Danube; worse, he perished shamed by the courage of better men, most of them with no title or lineage to their name. Nine battalions of newly raised infantry held together well on the open ground north-west of the village, coolly forming square on order and firing steadily till they were overwhelmed. Lord Orkney admiringly wrote that they stood ‘in battalion square and in the best order I ever saw, till they were cut to pieces almost in rank and file’.93 Chaplain Sandby, riding over the field next day, saw the youngsters lying in their ranks as if on parade, apparently asleep, but all were dead.
The best that can be said for the defence of Blenheim is that it forced Marlborough to mask it with part of his infantry, and helped prevent him from rolling up the left wing of the Franco-Bavarian line, which was able to draw off largely intact at the end of the day. The village was surrounded by about seven o’clock, and Churchill’s infantry closed for the kill. Colonel de la Silvère tried to extract the regiments of Artois and Provence, but could not break the circle round the village, and there was sustained and heavy fighting as the French fought hard, street by street and house by house, for the village. Tallard, a prisoner in Marlborough’s coach, sent the duke a message saying that he would order his men to retire to save further bloodshed, but Marlborough, who had nothing to gain from permitting the escape of the beleaguered garrison, replied: ‘Inform Monsieur de Tallard that in the position which he is now in, he has no command.’ Eventually Brigadier the marquis de Blanzac asked for terms, but Orkney told him that there were none but to surrender at discretion.
The scenes that followed are not pleasant for a historian with an enduring regard for an army which, in its long history, has scaled the heights as well as plumbed the depths. An ensign of the Régiment du Roi cut a British officer across the arm when he reached out to take his colour, and the Régiment de Navarre, one of the best of the old French line, proud ‘Navarre sans peur’ to its officers and men, burnt its colours rather than give them up. Officers wept unashamedly in the smoking village, many repeating: ‘What will the king say? What will the king say?’
The king would hear that he had lost over 34,000 men, including about 14,000 prisoners, the latter such a millstone round the necks of their captors that Cardonnel was soon complaining to Ellis, ‘We know not how to dispose of them … if we could get well rid of these gents I hope we might soon make an end of the campaign on this side, for the enemy will hardly make another stand.’94 Soon afterwards Mrs Davies testified to the abject misery of the captives, most stripped to their shirts and some even ‘naked as from the womb’. There were also about a hundred guns, 129 infantry colours and 110 cavalry standards, and a whole mass of impedimenta, not to mention ten general officers. So many senior officers had been taken that normal arrangements for exchanging them on a rank-for-rank basis broke down altogether. Marshal Tallard remained in gentlemanly confinement in Nottingham for the next eight years. He lived in Newdigate House in Castlegate, showed his captors how to make lace and proper bread, cultivated celery, hitherto not eaten in England, and, so the Whigs complained, organised shipments of champagne and burgundy for deserving anti-war Tories. When he returned to Versailles, Tallard was well received, though he never commanded again, and remembered the plain of Höchstädt as much for the staggering scale of his defeat as for the fact that his youngest boy, serving on his staff, had been pistolled by one of Bothmar’s dragoons.
The Allies had lost 14,000 killed and wounded, 9,000 of them in Marlborough’s wing. The Dutch had lost almost the same as the British (2,200 to 2,234), and the Danes, who carried Lutzingen at the day’s end, a dreadful 2,400. It was a victory which did not simply change the balance of the war in Germany at a single bloody stroke, but gave Marlborough and his men a cachet which they would retain until the very end of the conflict. The campaign had begun for Marlborough in political and military uncertainty and marital discord. That evening he borrowed a scrap of paper from an aide (it had begun life as a tavern bill, and then done duty for some logistic calculations) and wrote, neither to his queen, nor to his old friend Heinsius, but to the dearest woman in the world. Scarcely was its ink dry than the dashing Colonel Dan Parke galloped off with one of the most famous scribblings in British military history.
I have not time to say more, but beg you will give my duty to the Queen and let her know her army has had a glorious victory. M Tallard and two other generals are in my coach and I am following the rest. The bearer, my aide de camp Colonel Parke, will give her an account of what has passed. I shall do it in a day or two by another more at large.95