All the King’s Men, page 9
Before one of Marlborough’s staff officers could confirm this, however, Prince Louis of Baden received similar intelligence and at once sent his three battalions of Imperial grenadiers, waiting patiently in the Kaibach Valley, to take advantage. Dr Hare watched them advance:
The Imperialists, finding little opposition, advanced to the enemy’s intrenchments without firing a shot, and throwing their fascines into the ditch, passed over with little loss. The greatest opposition they met with was from the enemy’s horse, which charged them very briskly, but was as bravely repulsed … Upon this the Imperial foot immediately inclined to the left, and took the enemy in flank to favour and facilitate the attack of the English and Dutch.33
De la Colonie saw them coming and assumed they were reinforcements from the town. When he realized his error, it was too late. The grenadiers drew up into a line and fired volley after volley into the flank of the French and Bavarian defenders, causing them to reel back in confusion. As they did so, a charge by dismounted dragoons of Lord John Hay’s Regiment finally breached the main defences, and was quickly supported by mounted troopers of the Queen’s Horse. Assailed from two sides, the defenders broke and fled down the hill, to where a bridge-of-boats offered refuge over the Danube. Hundreds were cut down en route by the ruthless cavalry and dragoon pursuit ordered by Marlborough, who, having climbed the hill, chose to keep his battered infantry in hand.
‘A cruel slaughter was made of them,’ recalled Kit Davies, a woman who for ten years had successfully masqueraded as a male trooper in Hay’s Dragoons, ‘and the bridge over the Danube breaking down, a great number were drowned, or taken prisoners. In the second attack, I received a ball in my hip, which is so lodged between the bones that it can never be extracted. Captain Young who, poor gentleman, was soon after killed, desired me to get off; but, upon my refusal, he ordered two of my comrades to take me up, and they set me at the foot of the tree.’34
Among the few senior Bavarian and French officers to escape were Marshal d’Arco, who gained refuge in the town, and Colonel de la Colonie, whose deliverance was particularly dramatic. Struck in the jaw and temporarily stunned by an Imperialist musket-ball, he rose to conduct a heroic fighting retreat along the top of the hill that only dissolved into headlong flight once his men had crossed the entrenchments on the east flank of the Schellenberg. So he, too, ran for his life through fields of standing corn, stopping for just a moment to ask a tearful soldier’s wife – no longer safe in the rear of the battlefield – to remove his tall, tightly fitting riding boots, before plunging into the Danube. ‘Finally,’ he wrote, ‘after a very long and hard swim, I was lucky enough to reach the other bank, in spite of the strength of the stream.’35
Of the original garrison of 12,000, fewer than 3,000 French and Bavarians rejoined the elector’s main army at Dillingen.36 D’Arco had lost many of the best Bavarian regiments, not to mention 200 tons of gunpowder, 3,000 sacks of flour and the whole of the Bavarian engineer train, including all its pontoon bridges. And now that the Allies had secured both a base and a crossing point on the Danube, Maximilian and Marsin were forced to withdraw south from their outflanked position at Dillingen to Augsburg on the River Lech, leaving only Colonel de la Colonie and a small force to garrison the small town of Rain, 8 miles to the east of Donauwörth on the edge of the Bavarian lowlands. (Rain would fall to the Allies, after a week-long assault, on 16 July.) Now the only town on the Danube that the Franco-Bavarians still possessed was Ingolstadt, 25 miles downstream from Donauwörth.
The close-run victory had been shockingly costly for the Allies too. Their 5,000 casualties – 1,342 killed and 3,699 wounded – included 16 generals and 375 other officers. The worst-hit British units were the 1st Foot Guards (12 officers and 217 men), the two battalions of Orkney’s Regiment* (30 officers and 418 men) and a battalion of Ingoldsby’s Regiment (16 officers and 228 men).37 Only 700 Allied soldiers were killed on the field of battle; the rest died soon after of their wounds, either near the battlefield or on their way to the base hospital at Nördlingen. ‘The moment this action was ended,’ recalled Marlborough’s chaplain, ‘it grew dark, and rained violently. This proved very fatal to the wounded.’38
Medical care for those wounded in battle at this time was basic and often counter-productive. There was no ambulance train and casualties were ferried to hospitals, often miles from the battlefield, in wagons and on stretchers. The ordeal, over rough roads, could be excruciating. Once at the basic hospital, all casualties were bled in the hope that it would ward off fever and help to dry the moisture round the injury. In practice, of course, it simply incurred further blood loss and cost many their lives. Those who survived were given bread, soup and wine to fortify them for the ordeal of surgery.
In common with their civilian counterparts, medical officers had limited scientific knowledge. Although they knew, thanks to William Harvey’s discoveries, that blood was pumped round the body by the heart, many still relied on medieval remedies and so-called ‘miracle cures’. It did not help that a military surgeon was generally of low calibre, and likely to be a man ‘who would have buried his talents and his industry in a situation where obscurity, poverty, and neglect, spread all their horrors before him’.39
They tended to amputate damaged limbs without anaesthetic as quickly as they could, convinced it gave the patients a much better chance of survival (which it often did); and most surgeons understood the importance of cleaning a wound. Spirit vinegar was used as an antiseptic, while burns were treated with an ointment made from one part salt to eight parts onion juice. Charlatans were inevitable, and none was more successful than John Colbatch, whose ‘Vulnerary Powder’* was supposedly a cure for any injury.
Many of those killed at the Schellenberg left widows and children, some of whom were accompanying the army. At the time there was no official scheme to provide for them, though Marlborough had offered relief to dead officers’ sons by arranging commissions for them in their father’s battalion (though the number of ‘orphan’ officers was limited to two per battalion). He had also encouraged officers to subscribe to schemes for the support of widows. Ordinary soldiers, of course, could not afford such schemes; so, after the carnage of the Schellenberg, Marlborough decreed that some of the widows should be added to the ration roll as nurses, and the balance sent home with their passages paid for.40
Marlborough acknowledged the price of victory at the Schellenberg when he wrote to his wife on 3 July: ‘We have ruined the best of the Elector’s foot,’ yet the English infantry had ‘suffered a good deal’ in the process.41
Was it worth it? Private Deane of the 1st Foot Guards thought so, describing it as a ‘glorious action’ in which ‘both English and Dutch behaved themselves to admiration’.42 The Imperial court agreed, rejoicing in a victory that seemed to guarantee Vienna’s safety now that Marlborough had interposed himself between it and the elector’s army. But at least one of Marlborough’s men, a British cavalry lieutenant who had had his horse shot under him during the attack, thought it ‘a considerable advantage purchased at a dear rate’.43
Certainly the battle was not one of Marlborough’s finer tactical victories, for the simple reason that time constraints and the terrain had narrowed his options to an unsubtle frontal assault. His discovery of the enemy’s weak spot, moreover, was lucky in the extreme. His swift and conclusive reaction was not, and is evidence that Marlborough possessed that quality most prized in a military commander: coup d’œil, literally ‘stroke of eye’, or comprehensive glance, the ability to recognize the decisive moment in a fight and to act accordingly. It would be displayed to even greater effect in the next major engagement of the war.
6. Blenheim
Three days after the hard-fought victory at the Schellenberg, Marlborough’s heavy losses were more than compensated for by the arrival of the Danish Contingent of seven infantry battalions and twenty-one squadrons of cavalry. Yet the duke still lacked heavy artillery, and without it knew that he would struggle to take either Augsburg, where the elector had established his new defensive position, or the Bavarian capital of Munich. So instead he opened negotiations with Maximilian in the hope of persuading him to return to his Imperial allegiance. For a time the ploy looked like working, and on 14 July, egged on by his wife, Maximilian agreed to switch sides and provide the Allies with 12,000 troops in return for an annual subsidy of 200,000 crowns. But as he was about to put pen to paper, Maximilian received word that Marshal Tallard was marching to his rescue with 35,000 men, and at once suspended the talks.
On 23 July, in exasperation, Marlborough unleashed his cavalry in the hope that its depredations would force Maximilian either to fight in the open or to make peace. ‘If he does not,’ he told his wife, ‘he may be sure … we will destroy [his country] before we leave. You will, I hope, believe that my nature suffers, when I see so many fine palaces burnt.’1
Three thousand cavalrymen were sent as far as the gates of Munich with orders to burn and pillage. Kit Davies, freshly discharged from hospital, was among them. ‘We spared nothing,’ she recalled, ‘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.’2 The elector, though, would only respond to this provocation by sending out detachments totalling 15,000 men to protect his own far-flung estates. He himself remained inactive at Biberbach, near Augsburg, while no fewer than 400 Bavarian villages were put to the torch. On 6 August he was joined there by Tallard and, with a combined army of 56,000 and more on their way as Maximilian ordered in his detachments, it seemed as if the balance had once more tipped the Franco-Bavarians’ way. Tallard certainly thought so, and at once sought to take the initiative by marching north to the Danube in the hope of cutting Marlborough’s lines of communication.
Fortunately for Marlborough, help was at hand. When Tallard had begun his move through the Black Forest in late June, Eugène set off in pursuit with 17,000 men, leaving the rest of his army to pin Marshal Villeroi to the Lines of Stollhofen. Louis XIV’s reaction, when he heard that Eugène was on the move, was to order Villeroi to follow Tallard. If the marshal had obeyed this order, Marlborough would have been heavily outnumbered in Bavaria, even with Eugène’s reinforcements, and left with no option but to withdraw to the Rhine. The history of the war – and of the British Army’s role in it – might have been very different. But Villeroi did not obey because he was taken in by Eugène’s clever feint to the north while leaving a cavalry screen to shadow Tallard. Assuming that Eugène was returning to Stollhofen with the bulk of his troops, Villeroi decided on his own initiative to remain where he was in case the Allies invaded Alsace. It was a miscalculation that would prove extremely costly for his fellow marshals and his Bavarian ally.
En route to Bavaria, Eugène had written to Marlborough, urging him either to take Munich by storm or to cut the elector’s supply lines. Much to Eugène’s frustration, neither had been accomplished by the time he reached Höchstädt on the north bank of the Danube in the first week in August. Eugène suspected that General Van Goor’s death had much to do with Marlborough’s uncharacteristic hesitation – and he was right. ‘Since [the Schellenberg],’ wrote the duke to his wife, ‘I have hardly had time to sleep, for Lieutenant-General Goor helped me in a great many things, which I am now forced to do myself.’ But just as significant were Prince Louis of Baden’s staunch opposition to any bold move, particularly an assault on Munich, and the fact that Marlborough, weighed down by the strain of his onerous responsibilities and the losses he had already incurred, was suffering from severe migraines.3
On 7 August, Eugène met Marlborough and Prince Louis at Schrobenhausen, south of Donauwörth. Their agreed strategy was for Prince Louis to besiege Ingolstadt with 15,000 men, a move that if successful would provide them with an alternative means of crossing the Danube in case Donauwörth fell to the Franco-Bavarians. Marlborough and Eugène, meanwhile, would cover the siege in case Tallard tried to intervene. One historian, while acknowledging that the plan was Prince Louis’s, has suggested that Marlborough and Eugène ‘plainly felt it worthwhile to have the cautious and obstructive Margrave out of the way during the series of bold operations about to commence’.4 There may be some truth in this. Certainly Marlborough saw the strategic sense of a siege that would, he assured Heinsius, enable Prince Louis ‘to do whatever he pleases with his horse in the country of Bavaria’, while the duke himself would link up with Eugène the moment he heard that the Franco-Bavarians had crossed the Danube. And, he added, if the enemy offered a battle he would certainly take it, ‘our troops being full of courage and desiring nothing more’.5
Late on 10 August, Marlborough received an urgent message from Eugène that he was withdrawing from the plain of Höchstädt to Donauwörth. ‘The enemy have marched,’ wrote the Imperial marshal. ‘It is almost certain that the whole army is crossing the Danube at Lauingen … The plain of Dillingen is crowded with troops. I have held on all day here; but with 18 battalions I dare not risk staying the night … Everything, milord, consists in speed and that you put yourself forthwith in movement to join me tomorrow, without which I fear it will be too late.’6
Marlborough’s response was immediate. That evening, he sent a strong force of Imperial cavalry to support Eugène, while his brother was ordered to follow with 20 battalions of infantry in the early hours of the 11th. Marlborough himself led the rest of the army at daybreak, crossing the Danube at Donauwörth and linking up with Eugène between the River Kessel and the Schellenberg at dusk. His plan was to reoccupy Eugène’s camp at Höchstädt the following day, once the artillery train had arrived. But when he and his staff moved forward to reconnoitre in the morning, escorted by a huge force of cavalry, they discovered that Tallard was already in situ, having captured the fort at Höchstädt the day before. To get a better view of the Franco-Bavarian position, they used ‘spy glasses’ from the church tower in Tapfheim, a village 5 miles to the north-east of Höchstädt . From there they were delighted to see the French and Bavarian quartermasters marking out a camp site in the plain north of Höchstädt, between the villages of Lutzingen and Blenheim – or Blindheim, as the Germans call it – where the ground was flat and dry, and perfect for the deployment of cavalry. ‘Here was a fine plain,’ wrote Lieutenant Parker, ‘without a hedge or ditch, for the cavalry on both sides to show their bravery.’7
They were encouraged, too, by the unusual layout of the enemy front, not that of a single army but of two armies side by side: Tallard’s on the right, Marsin and the elector’s on the left. So instead of the traditional deployment of infantry in the centre and cavalry on both wings, the Franco-Bavarian force was drawn up with a double block of cavalry at its centre, which was, both Marlborough and Eugène knew, an obvious point of weakness if attacked by foot and horse.
For all that, the position was not without merit: on raised ground, its left flank was screened by thick woodland, and its right by the 300-foot-wide Danube. Across its four-mile front ran a boggy tributary of the Danube, the Nebel Stream, which was ‘thought unpassable, as it afterwards was found in several places’.8 While a string of villages – from left to right, Lutzingen, Oberglau and Blenheim – acted as strongpoints in the defensive system.
Marlborough knew, too – thanks to his excellent intelligence service – that the Franco-Bavarians had 60,000 men and 100 cannon to his own combined force of 56,000 men and 60 guns;9 that Marshal Villeroi, aware at last that Eugène had given him the slip, was threatening their lines of communication to the north; and that it was against all conventional military wisdom to attack an enemy superior in numbers. And yet, as he wrote later, ‘we resolved to attack them’ the following day.10
The stakes could not have been higher for Marlborough. He had undertaken the campaign on his own initiative, and without the sanction of either his own Parliament or the Dutch Estates-General. Many of his enemies in both Houses – disgruntled Whigs and displaced Tories alike – felt he had at last overreached himself and were savouring the prospect of his downfall, with one claiming that if Marlborough failed ‘we will break him up as the hounds do a hare’.11 And, quite apart from personal ambition, the duke knew that he had to defeat the Franco-Bavarians in the field if he was to save both Vienna and the Grand Alliance. He knew, too, that with 14 battalions of Bavarian reinforcements converging on Höchstädt, this might be his last chance. It was all or nothing.
That evening, as they bivouacked between the villages of Tapfheim and Münster, within easy striking distance of the unsuspecting Franco-Bavarians, Marlborough and Eugène’s troops were given their battle orders. ‘No body can express the courage and joy which both officers and soldiers showed,’ recalled Marlborough’s chaplain, ‘when they thought they should come to an engagement.’12 Incredibly his opponents were still oblivious of the danger, though French cavalry patrols had been beaten back by British infantry that day when they tried to investigate reports that Marlborough’s pioneers were improving tracks through the woods near Tapfheim. They simply could not conceive that an inferior force would dare to attack them, and as a result had failed to secure the vital narrow gap around the village of Schwenningen, 2 miles north of Blenheim, where the wooded hills and marshy meadows of the Danube came close together. Had they held this gap, they would have reduced the distance they needed to defend to just a mile. Instead, and without firing a shot, Marlborough took possession of Schwenningen during the evening of the 12th, thus giving him access to the plain of Höchstädt and increasing the frontage of his attack to 4 miles. It was a tactical coup that did much to decide the outcome of the battle.
