Authors: Iain Gale
Now, as they formed on the field, Steel began to see Marlborough’s grand design unfold. To the right, the the Imperial troops under Prince Eugene – Danish and Prussian infantry and a mixed force of cavalry from Imperial states – moved steadily and slowly across the rough ground towards a far distant village. On the left wing Marlborough had concentrated his English troops along with the Dutch, the Hessians and the Hanoverians.
Across the position insistent drum rolls called the army to order. The pop of muskets being discharged into the air told of weapons being checked and made ready for the coming day. In the pans any trace of damp powder was carefully
scraped out with the tool every soldier carried for just that purpose. There would be no second chances today. Every shot had to count and misfires, an all too common occurrence, would soon be a matter of life or death.
Sword clanking against his thigh and fusil slung over his back, Steel marched along the track at the head of the company, in column, three abreast. At his side walked Hansam and behind them Tom Williams.
At the head of the column, Sir James, with Frampton, who had now replaced Jennings as the Adjutant, turned off towards the left and led the regiment into a field whose dew-laden grass covered their new shoes with a glistening sheen. Behind Steel the company sergeants barked their commands to change direction and gradually the red caterpillar of Farquharson’s Foot moved across the fields to take up its allotted position.
Hansam spoke:
‘What think you of this, Jack? We have a river to our left and a forest to our right.
There remains but one direction in which to move.’
Steel smiled at him. It was, he thought, a good enough place to stand and fight. A wide, level plain which stretched for four, perhaps five miles, from the Danube to the dark, wooded hills of the Swabian mountains. As far as the eye could see it was covered in rich cornfields. Across the middle of the plain ran a little stream, the Nebel, which flowed north to south into the Danube. On either side of it the armies had deployed and it was here, in a patch of dead ground just to the front of this stream, close to where it divided into two, that the regiment came to a halt. Slaughter gave the command:
‘Form line.’
With a swift, if not altogether fluid movement, the red column began to split into smaller sections. Men turned inwards as they had been taught to do on the drill ground and within a few minutes the marching formation was transformed into a line of battle. Steel found his position in the centre of the company, four paces to the front of his men, and looked to his left:
‘I can see, Henry, what His Grace intends for us. He believes that we can carry all once again in a frontal assault. We shall have to prove his confidence.’
Steel looked past Hansam, who was standing to the left of the Grenadiers, next to the two nervous-looking drummer boys. Past them, along the line to his left, Steel could see McInnery and Laurent standing beside the first and second companies of the regiment, laughing and calling unintelligible comments to one another. Beyond them, past numbers three and four companies, towards the centre of the battalion, were the colours: the red silk of the regimental colour and beside it, the azure and white Saltire of Scotland, fluttering proudly above the battalion, held firm in the hands of the two most junior Ensigns. Behind them stood the familiar bulk of Sergeant Macwilliam, his halberd placed firmly on the ground, ready to be used as a quarter-staff should anyone in the ranks consider dropping back as much as a few inches. And mounted behind him, to the front of the pioneers, on his bay gelding, sat Sir James Farquharson. It was hard to tell from a distance of a hundred yards, but to Steel it seemed that his commanding officer’s face wore an expression that was part pride, part sheer terror. Steel poked a finger under his collar and scratched again at his neck. The lice that plagued all of the men, officers and other ranks alike, had been heated by the march and were on the move. Slaughter spoke quietly, smiling:
‘Old trouble, Sir?’
‘Same old trouble, Jacob. I’m damned if I know why, but the little beggars always seem to get more active just as we’re about to go into action. Christ knows if I’ll ever have my clothes to myself again.’
‘Must be your blood, Sir. It’ll be more heated at the present, if you see what I mean. Before a battle that is. You know, Mister Steel, you should talk to Taylor about it. He swears by lavender and almonds, Sir. Rub it on your self, you do. You’ll never see another of the little bleeders again, he says. Don’t you think that after we’ve finished this business and done for the Froggies, that you might not just have a go at letting me get rid of the little bleeders once and for all? Jesus, Sir, I really thought that Miss Louisa might have cured your bad ways. If I might be so bold as to suggest it, it doesn’t do for an officer like yourself to be scratchin’ all the time.’
‘No, Jacob, you may not be so bold and you know as well as I do, Sarn’t, that these vermin are not particular with their attentions. Why the cleanest of men are regularly infested. The late King himself had a dreadful time of it on campaign.’
Williams laughed. That had been Slaughter’s plan and Steel knew it. It was the same with any new blood in the regiment on their first time in action. Laughter was the answer. It released all the tension. That was what to do. Laugh. And talk about other things. About anything other than the imminent prospect of death and mutilation and unthinkable pain.
Trying to ignore the irritating itch, Steel looked still further down the line of men that stretched away to the left in an apparently endless river of red.
‘So, Tom. What d’you think of your first set-piece engagement? D’you see all the regiments. You can tell them from their colours. There’s Lord North’s with its yellow, then the Duke of Marlborough’s own regiment under their cross of
St George. That next, you see, the blue ground, is Ingoldsby’s, mostly Welshmen there, and lastly you have the red duster of Brigadier Rowe’s Yorkshiremen. The whole brigade drawn up for battle and you won’t see better away from the Horse Guards.’
‘It is a magnificent sight, Sir. If I were a Frenchman I should be shaking in my boots.’
Steel lifted his gaze across the plain towards the enemy. He wondered how many Frenchmen were doing just that.
He had been astonished to find, as the mist began to clear, that the tents of the French camp were still pitched. Had they not heard the drums, the trumpet calls, seen the approaching columns? Now, though, the tents and the baggage had been sent to the back and the French and Bavarians stood arrayed before him. It was an impressive sight. Seventy, perhaps eighty battalions and twice that many in squadrons of cavalry with more cannon, he thought, than he had ever seen before on a field of battle. Eighty or ninety guns in all and some that looked like huge siege weapons. It was a strong position too, well chosen. Other commanders would not have dared to contemplate an attack on such a position. But Marlborough was no ordinary commander. And this, he told himself again, was as good a place as any to stand, and perhaps to die.
Steel realized that Hansam was standing behind him:
‘You see, Jack, from the colour of their uniforms, how they have deployed by nationality. French white and grey predominately to their right and Bavarian blue on the left. It is a wise precaution, d’you not think. One perhaps that Marlborough might emulate, given the polyglot nature of our own force.’
‘I do not believe that is in His Grace’s mind at all, Henry. He means to mix us up. Have you not seen that in our own
division General Cutts deploys us in six lines of attack. Four of infantry with two of horse behind. D’you see? He has on purpose interspersed the English and Scots with the foreign troops and mercenaries. Behind the first line of Rowe’s English he has ranged a brigade of Hessians and behind them another English brigade, that of Ferguson. Finally, in the fourth line he places our Hanoverian friends.’
In truth, Steel had been wondering all morning about their deployment. In the column of which Farquharson’s was a part, under Lord Cutts, the cavalry were positioned to the rear, as was generally the rule. But across the remainder of the field, as far as he could tell, Marlborough had deployed with one line of foot, followed by two of horse with another of foot in the rear. It was an unusual formation and he wondered what it meant. In all, thought Steel, we have some 12,000 men, almost a quarter of the army and the better part of the infantry, with us here on the left flank. The centre of the enemy line he could see was filled with cavalry and Marlborough appeared to have matched them. But here, before Blenheim, he realized, it was the infantry who would carry the day. He saw too now, with a hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach, that for the Duke to succeed he would have to send his army on to the plain in full view of the enemy guns before finding some means of traversing the surrounding bogs. One thing was clear. This would be no easy victory.
In front of him the parched grass was already littered with an ugly harvest of corpses from the forward ranks. For over an hour now the French artillery had been pouring in a steady fire. Recently though it had intensified. And still the order to advance did not come. Word was that they were still waiting for the troops under Prince Eugene to reach their allotted places on the right wing.
Slaughter too had been surveying the position:
‘It’s bad ground, Sir. Bad at least for whichever one of us means to attack.’
He tested the ground with his feet.
‘Look, Sir. See that. That’s right boggy ground there.’
He pointed in the direction of their intended advance.
‘And you see the way the ground slopes up? You can’t hardly make it out. But look really carefully and you can see. I tell you. Boggy ground and we’ll be marching uphill an’ all.’
The cover of their earlier position had afforded the regiments the chance to re-form. Now though, even as the shot flew over their heads, they had adopted a looser formation. At the head of the regiment the padre, a small, pale man, with an oversized nose and a mop of lank, black hair, was conducting a drumhead service. The men had created a clearing in their ranks to act as a temporary chapel. The front rank had turned about, while the rear two acted as the nave and chancel. The priest had laid his gold embroidered altar cloth across the top of six drums that had been stacked together, and had given his long gold cross to one of the regimental drummer boys. On top of the topmost drums they had place two tall gold candlesticks, with unlit candles. The padre began to speak, in the flat and uncharismatic voice of the Oxford-educated clergyman, made the more comical by the fact that he had a slight lisp.
‘We are but dust and to dust we shall surely return.’
From behind him Slaughter coughed and muttered.
‘Christ almighty. Do we need you to remind us of that? We’ll all be going there soon enough.’
Steel admonished him.
‘Jacob.’
Hansam shrugged and looked at Steel.
‘I don’t care for all this stuff much myself, do you? The men seem to find it comforting, I suppose.’
‘No, Henry. Can’t say that I do either. Each to his own, though.’
Several of their brother officers were kneeling now at the front of their men, before the improvised altar. Among them Steel could see McInnery, the inveterate gambler, particularly with other men’s money, and beside him the Huguenot, Laurent, who if the truth were known, had a wife in more towns in Flanders and Spain than he might care to remember. Still, if such men felt at ease with their God, then that was no business of his. For a fleeting moment though Steel felt himself strangely caught up in the mystery, as the men began falteringly on the first line of a familiar hymn to intone a psalm. There was after all, still a small part of him that recalled the Sunday services in the little church near his family’s house. The jovial minister, the Reverend McLuskey, and the dreadful choir, mostly conscripted from farm labourers. And most particularly, his mother, young and serene and beautiful, listening so attentively to the sermon in the family pew, beside his snoring father. How very different it all was to the pasty faced, terrified young divine who now stood before them. But that, he realized, was surely more a longing for the past than a desire to believe. Yet he could not deny that he had felt something in the church at Sielenbach, before that gaudy altar, with its grim statue of the dead Christ. Perhaps it was all getting too much for him. Louisa. Jennings. The approaching battle.
He watched the redcoats singing their hearts out in a despair born of imminent death and even as their shrill notes reached to the heavens, the shot began to fall among them.
The first of the cannonballs ripped a bloody hole through the single rank standing facing inward behind the altar. Hurling men and body parts into the improvised nave.
‘and deliver us from evil …’
From their rear within the second brigade of Cutts’ division, a Hessian regiment began to intone a Lutheran psalm, their flat, Teutonic voices carrying forward on the wind. Yet for all their coolness, Steel thought, there was just as much passion in the Germans’ singing as there was in their own lads’ lusty rendition.
The padre’s efforts at conducting his divine ministry were becoming increasingly interrupted now with cries of pain as the cannonballs carried away arms and legs. As Steel watched, a musketeer’s head, its tricorne hat still attached, flew up from the ranks and past the poor man’s face, spattering him with traces of blood and brains. The padre managed to mutter the last few words:
‘
et spiritu sancti
. Amen.’
White as a sheet now, he closed the great black Bible with trembling hands, made the sign of the cross and, leaving his cloth and candles for his temporary altar boys to gather up, quickly began to walk to the rear of the brigade.
Slaughter grunted:
‘And goodbye and amen to you, an’ all.’
‘Now, Jacob. And I thought you were a God-fearing man.’
‘Oh yes, Mister Steel. I do fear our Lord, Sir. But I tell you, I fear his ministers more than the great man himself. I’ve always found that when you’re on a battlefield there’s never anywhere half so dangerous to be as around a man of God. War, you know, Sir. Well, it is the devil’s work, isn’t it?’