Marlborough (46 page)

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.