Authors: Richard Holmes
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.’
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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.’
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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.
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.’
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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.
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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.’
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Nicholas Henderson grasps the essentials of the relationship between Eugène and Marlborough: