THE BATTLE OF BLENHEIM
Larry the Cat,
Louis XIV's ambitions of Universal Monarchy
That night the Duke's and Prince Eugène's armies camped side by side some four miles from the enemy, with one flank on the Danube, the other on the woods which swept down the hillsides to the edge of the plain, and their front protected by the Kessel stream.
The Battle of Blenheim, 13 August 1704: John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) and his Staff Surveying the Attack of John Cutts (1661-1707) on the Village of Blenheim c.1713-14 In 1713 Louis Laguerre was commissioned to decorate the walls of the main hall and the two flanking staircases of Marlborough House, the London residence of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough.
The main central hall (Blenheim Saloon) is decorated with the events of the Battle of Blenheim, 1704 The window wall is painted with panels showing military equipment.
It was a night that began with busy preparation: bridges to be built across the Kessel for the armies to advance over in the morning; firearms to be cleaned; swords and bayonets to be sharpened. Then all grew quiet, as men who tomorrow must face maiming or extinction lay down to sleep, if they could. As the night hours went on, the air grew cooler, and a mist began to form and thicken round the orderly rows of tents, a damp smell of earth and growing things, spiced with the tang of woodsmoke from the dying cook fires.
The Duke himself fell on his knees and prayed before lying down on his campaignbed. This was an hour when the most able and the most resolute man could feel himself small and alone. For Marlborough knew too well that tomorrow would decide the entire course of the war; that defeat would bring with it immeasurable catastrophe; and that not only Louis XIV but also powerful political factions in England were hoping to see him fail.
So, in the quiet of the night, as the mist wreathed and billowed, he prayed. Next morning, 13 August 1704, at about two o'clock, before the day had even broken, the bugles summoned the allied armies out of their blankets. The bustle began of preparing for the advance to battle: men and animals to be fed; horses to be harnessed and drought beasts to be put to carts or guns; all the baggage to be packed up so that it could be sent back to Donauwörth for safe keeping; sixty-six battalions and a hundred and sixty squadrons - some 56,000 men and sixty-six cannon - to be organized into columns of route.
Meanwhile, the Duke went to confer with Eugène in his tent. It was only a few weeks since their first meeting, and they had been able to spend little enough time together. Now they had jointly to conduct a great battle. But the six weeks of anxious manœuvre which had led up to this present morning had only served to strengthen the mutual liking, the trust and understanding, which each seemed to have felt at their first meeting.
It was dawn when the armies marched off westwards in eight great columns; a dawn white with mist, chilling to men physiologically at their lowest ebb. The columns converged close together to pass through a defile where the hills tumbled down close to the marshes of the Danube; then spread out again, like a hand about to grasp the enemy. Beyond this defile the Duke halted in order to form a ninth column on the extreme left, of twenty battalions and fifteen squadrons under General Lord Cutts. Then the army moved on again through the mist.
Ahead of the main body rode the Duke and Prince Eugène with 'the grand guard', or advanced force, of twenty squadrons, some 2,500 horsemen; the Duke on his white charger and wearing the silver star of the Garter which he had specially asked Sarah by letter to request Lord Cutts to bring over with him from England. Towards six in the morning, full light now, the mist beginning to thin air in the warmth of the early sun, they reached rising ground near the village of Wolperstetten; and there, less than a mile distant, lay the enemy Marlborough had marched across Europe to find and destroy.
The Duke and Eugène could see Tallard's tents stretching for nearly five miles across a broad swell in the plain. Yet in the enemy camp all remained sunk in repose. The Duke now personally reconnoitred the enemy position at close range. It was immensely strong. The French right wing rested on Blenheim, beside the Danube; a spacious, sprawling village of stone farmhouses separated by patches of orchard and grazing. Each house was a potential strongpoint; the whole village a potential fortress.
From Blenheim to the next village in the French line, Oberglau, a distance of over three miles, stretched a treeless expanse of stubble field sloping down almost imperceptibly from the French tents and up again. Here was an ideal arena to deploy the unwieldy masses of an army, and fight a battle. However, a stream, the Nebel, ran through the shallowest part of the ground, protecting the entire length of the French front. Today the Nebel is diked and dry-banked; a man could jump it. But in 1704 it was twelve feet wide, flowing sluggishly with marsh on both sides of it.
The Nebel was impassable unless bridged; and even then would be a difficult enough obstacle for an army negotiate in the face of the enemy. The village of Oberglau, standing like a bastion on a
slight rise, commanded Tallard's left centre: another potential fortress. From Oberglau the French line swung back to Lutzingen, two miles distant, the anchor of its left flank.
Broken, ditch-seamed ground, woods and thickets, dense brambles, extending for a mile and more in front made this sector difficult to approach and attack. Taken all in all, Tallard's position was so strong that one of Marlborough's senior commanders, Lord Orkney, confessed afterwards that had he been in command, he would never have dared to attack it. The Duke and Eugène had no detailed 'master plan' for the battle. They would fight by eye e and ear and tactical sense, like swordsmen gradually overcoming an opponent in the cut-and-thrust of a brawl.
Their deployment of their armies was itself largely dictated by the ground. Eugène, with the smaller army (eighteen battalions of infantry, seventy, four squadrons of cavalry), was to attack the French left flank, between Oberglau and Lutzingen, a front of less than two miles. Eugène's function was to pin the French opposite him in their place, and prevent them from sending reinforcements elsewhere. The Duke decided to draw up the main strength of his own army opposite the French centre, that three-mile-wide expanse of stubble across the Nebel between Blenheim and Oberglau.
After his engineers had bridged the Nebel in several places, and laid causeways of bundles of straw and brushwood across the marshy ground, seventy-one squadrons of cavalry and twenty-eight battalions of infantry would advance over the stream and form up beyond. Yet the Duke realized that once across, his troops would be exposed to flank attacks from the French in Oberglau and Blenheim.
He was particularly concerned lest the French in Blenheim strike deep in the rear of his centre as it was advancing. So Lord Cutts, with his twenty battalions and fifteen squadrons, was to attack Blenheim while the Prince of Holstein-Beck with ten battalions was to assault Oberglau. It was soon after seven o'clock when the columns of the main body of the army began to come up, 'both officers and soldiers,' according to Dr Hare, the Duke's chaplain, 'advancing cheerfully and showing a firm and glad countenance, and seeming to be confident to themselves of a victorious day'.¹
Now began the long and laborious business of deploying masses of men and horses from long columns into a line of battle. For precise, standard drill movements had not yet been invented. Wheelings had to take place at the halt. Sergeants pushed and jostled their men into line, dressing the ranks with their half-pikes or 'spontons'. Moreover, the armies of the era, although usually divided on the battlefield into a centre and two wings, further suffered from lack of flexibility because the two-battalion brigade was the only formation between regiment (or battalion) and the unwieldy body of the whole army. To Wellington's officers a hundred years later, or to a modern drill sergeant, Marlborough's deployment would have appeared something of a shambles.
Battle of Blenheim 13 August 1704
All the time the Duke and Eugène and their staff were reconnoitring the enemy posi tion, the French camp had remained in tranquil slumber. For the very last thing Tallard was expecting that morning was to be attacked by both allied armies, even though he - or his picquets - had heard the allied bugles and trumpets sounding at two o'clock and again at three; even though his picquets had later observed the allied armies drawn up ready to march from their camp.
For all this had simply served to confirm Tallard and his colleagues in their comfortable delusion that Marlborough and Prince Eugène were about to retreat north-eastwards towards Nördlingen, in order to save their communica tions from his, Tallard's, advance. Tallard in fact wrote a report to this effect to Louis XIV that very morning. Hardly had he sent off the messenger when the Duke's and Eugène's
columns began to appear opposite his camp, on the rising ground beyond the Nebel.
The Comte de Mérode-Westerloo, one of Tallard's generals, recounts how he was sleeping soundly in a barn when his servant roused him and blurted out that the enemy was there. Thinking to mock him, I asked 'Where? There?' and he at once replied, 'Yes - there - .'- flinging wide as he spoke the door of the barn. . . the door opened straight on to the fine, sunlit plain beyond - and the whole area appeared to be covered by enemy squadrons. I rubbed my eyes in disbelief. . . .²
Mérode Westerloo, riding out later through the camp, met Tallard himself at the gallop, but otherwise found 'everyone snug in their tent- although the enemy was already so close that their standards and colours could easily be counted.'³
They did not remain snug in their tent for long. Suddenly two cannon shots boomed out across the peache of the morning; a signal to the French foragers to come in. Now the urgent blare of trumpets and bugles all through the French encampment began a frantic bustling - neither militarily nor psychologically the best prelude to a battle. 'We saw', wrote Sergeant in a motion, their Generals and their Aid de Camps galloping Millner, 'all their camp to and fro to put all things in order.' Marlborough and Eugène had already won their first advantage.
It was only indeed because Prince Eugène had a much longer approach march to make than the Duke, and through difficult terrain, that the French were accorded the grace they needed to scramble through their own deployment. Tallard and his officers, gazing westward into the brilliance of the early morning sun, found the advance of the allied army an oppressive spectacle. 'I could see', wrote Mérode Westerloo, 'the enemy advancing ever closer in nine great columns of cavalry and deployed battalions, filling the whole plain from the Danube to the woods on the horizon.'⁴
Even now, however, there were French officers who, observing Eugène's columns beginning to work their way along the edge of the woods towards the line Oberglau- Lutzingen, declared that these columns were in fact retiring on Nördlingen. About eight o'clock a French battery near Blenheim fired the first shot in the battle- a distant puff of dark smoke, a pause, a bang, and an iron ball flying in a shallow arc over the stubble, to bounce and bound through the deploying troops with horrible momentum. The Duke ordered his chief gunner, Colonel Blood, to establish counter-batteries; and he himself visited the guns to check the fall of shot.
As the morning hours passed, the cannonade grew fiercer. The air grew hazy and acrid with powder smoke, which, fortunately for the allies, was blown by the prevailing breeze into the eyes of the French. But the enemy, with ninety guns to the allies' sixty-six, had the best of the exchange of fire. A French artillery commander recounted: One was excited by the extraordinary effect it (the French fire) produced, every shot cutting through their battalions, some of them raking obliquely; and from the very way in which the enemy was deployed, not a round was wasted.⁵
Yet the French guns could only hinder, not halt, the allied deployment. Opposite the French centre 14,000 infantry and over 5,000 horsemen gradually formed up in four lines stretching three miles across the plain, two of cavalry sandwiched between two of infantry; a novel formation ordered by the Duke. Along the Nebel the Duke's engineers worked away at their bridges and causeways. Nevertheless, except for their guns the French made no attempt to interfere with this operation; Tallard's cavalry remained ranged on the distant skyline, tiny figures like blackfly along the edge of a leaf.
The vast plain of stubble over which the battle was soon to be fought glared yellow in the August sun. Cuirasses and accoutrements winked and flashed as the sun caught them; colours and standards, rich with embroidery, stirred in the breeze. Behind the allied line, smoke towered up into the sky from the villages set ablaze by the French covering parties before they withdrew. Divine service had now been said in every regiment of the Duke's army. With men's souls at peace, it was time to kindle their fighting spirit with martial music. The bands of both sides struck up in turn; the kettledrums beat out their thunder; fanfare answered fanfare; and everything waited for Eugène, far away on the flank.
Meanwhile, according to an eye witness:
His Grace now rode along the lines to observe the posture and the countenance of his men, and found both them and the officers of all nations of all the Allies very cheerful and impatient of coming to a closer engagement with the enemy. And as he was passing in front of the first line a large cannon ball... grazed upon a plow'd land, close by his horse's side, and almost covered him with dust. He never halted his pace for this, but moved on....⁶
Of the allied army's 56,000 men, only 9,000 were English or Scots. Yet it was only because of those 9,000 redcoats and their Captain-General that all the other contingents were there on that German field - Imperialists from Austria; Prussians from the sandy heaths of Brandenburg; Hanoverians whose Electress Sophia might one day be an English queen; Hessians and other German mercenaries; Danes, mercenaries too; the Dutch, whom Marlborough had virtually kidnapped from their government. Now an Englishman who had once served at the courts of Charles II and James II when England was a paid French satellite was about to lead a European army into battle against Louis XIV's super-state.
The Duke's opponent, Marshal Tallard, nevertheless awaited the Duke's and Eugène's attack with confidence, despite the haste with which he had been forced to deploy his army. To defend his five-mile line, Tallard had eighty-four battalions and a hundred and forty-seven squadrons, amounting, since they were well below establishment, to some 60,000 men. Because of shortage of time, he had had no alternative but to make his order of encampment the order of battle; that was, instead of a combined single army (with a centre and two wings), two armies side by side - Tallard's own, and that of Marshal Marsin and the Elector of Bavaria. As a result, the centre of the French line, the wide-open expanse between Blenheim and Oberglau, was defended not by infantry but by the almost unsupported cavalry of Tallard's and Marsin's adjacent wings.
This was to have important consequences. Moreover, Tallard had not posted his squadrons close behind the marshy course of the River Nebel, in order to prevent Marlborough crossing it and redeploying; indeed to prevent Marlborough's engineers even bridging it. He posted them instead more than half a mile back from the Nebel, on the crest of the barely perceptible slope between the stream and the plain where he had pitched his camp. It was Tallard's cunning intention to lure Marlborough forward over the Nebel in strength, then attack him in both flanks from Blenheim and Oberglau.
Marlborough after the battle of Blenheim receiving the Tallard's surrender. Detail from a tapestry woven by De Vos after L. de Hondt. The subject was to be the significant battles of the Spanish Wars of Succession (1701-14); led by the Duke of Marlborough, Britain and the Allies saw victories at Blenheim (1704), Ramillies (1706), Oudenard (1708) and, less decisively, Malplaquet (1709).
The murals were to be 'the only signs of bravura or ornamentation in a house that was otherwise very plain and simple' (John Charlton, Marlborough House, 1978). Laguerre was paid £500 for them. The murals have had a chequered conservation history, and parts have been almost entirely repainted.
Finally, the French cavalry would complete Marlborough's destruction by charging down the slope and driving him into the Nebel marshes. It was an ingenious plan which did credit to Tallard's subtlety of mind, all the more so because of the speed with which he had had to think it up. But in view of the strength of Marlborough's centre, which Tallard could judge for himself as it deployed, it was a risky one if events failed to conform exactly with the scenario.
Tallard was particularly concerned with the Blenheim sector, not only because its garrison was to launch the flank attack against the advance of Marlborough's centre, but also because he had observed Lord Cutts's column marching over the plain up towards it. And Cutts's column was conspicuous with the scarlet coats of the English who had led the ferocious assault on the Schellenberg. If the English were to take Blenheim, Tallard realized, it would knock the hinge out of his entire line.
He would be rolled from right to left; driven away from his communications over the Danube at Höchstädt. Tallard therefore garrisoned Blenheim with no fewer than sixteen battalions of infantry, with eleven more posted in the open nearby. During the morning his troops, working at desperate speed, turned the village into a formidable redoubt, linking the stout farm houses with a perimeter barricade of carts and wagons, barn doors, and even furniture.
Between Oberglau and Lutzingen Marsin's and the Elector of Bavaria's army, whose front was also protected by the Nebel and buttressed by villages on both flanks, was as strongly posted, in Tallard's judgment, as his own. There were other, less tangible, reasons for Tallard's confidence. After all, France was the greatest military power in the world. The French army had forty years of conquest behind it, conquest unmarred by so much as a single major defeat.
But despite the imposing appearance, this was no longer a French army of the quality of the great days of the 1660s and 1670s. The supply system and the discipline had decayed since Louvois's death. Trained manpower was running short in France after so many years of war. Tallard's and Marsin's battalions numbered only three hundred and fifty each as against the five hundred men in Marlborough's and Eugène's battalions, with all the consequent damage to morale and fighting power.
Even more serious was the crippling shortage of good horses of the right breed to replace those killed during Louis XIV's past exercises in glory. To mount their cavalry the French had had to make purchases all over Europe, and of any kind of animal. Moreover, Tallard's and Marsin's horses were currently being decimated by an infectious disease, and twelve squadrons of Tallard's dragoons were forced to fight dismounted.
Nor was Tallard of the same calibre as a leader in a decisive battle as Turenne or Luxembourg. He was a rather gentlemanly dilettante of war. The Comte de Mérode Westerloo describes how Tallard, during the march through the Black Forest, invited him into the castle where he was lodging to share his breakfast chicken:
He was very partial to the fine martial air imparted by receiving from a page a chunk of cold meat or a smoked tongue merely wrapped in a napkin with a hunk of bread.... We were standing before a window devouring chicken and watching the army roll by beneath, when he suddenly emerged from the pensive mood that had gripped him for some time and remarked, 'Unless I am very mistaken, there will be a battle before three weeks are out; if one does take place it will be a very Pharsala [the battle in 48 BC where Caesar's victory over Pompey decided the mastery of the Roman Empire].⁷
Now Tallard stared into the sun at the blue and red masses of Marlborough's army opposite him, and waited for the battle to start which he had prophesied so accurately. A mile away over the Nebel, by the village of Unterglau, the Duke was also waiting for news of Eugène. Somewhere over there to the right, in the hazy distance towards the hills, hidden by folds in the ground, Eugène's army was struggling towards the French left flank. But how far had he got? Had he run into unforeseen trouble? By late morning there was still no news. In his mounting anxiety and impatience Marlborough sent off his Quartermaster-General in person, Colonel Cadogan, to find Eugène and report back.
But, as Cadogan found, Eugène was pushing on his troops as fast as was practicable through extremely difficult terrain. There was nothing for the Duke to do but wait while the cannonballs smashed and mangled their way through his patient ranks as they lay or sat on the shelterless stubble. About midday the army- the Duke and his staff in their midst ate their rations. Then, about half-past twelve, an officer galloped up from the direction of Lutzingen: a bow; a message from Eugène to say that he was deployed and ready to attack at last.
The Duke called for his horse. To Cutts he dispatched an ADC with the order to launch the assault on Blenheim. He instructed his brother, General Churchill, commanding the centre, to begin the advance over the Nebel. Then, Blenheim village being invisible below the skyline from the centre of his line, the Duke galloped over to his left to observe the progress of Cutts's attacks. It was led by a brigade of five battalions of English infantry under the command of Brigadier Rowe, with a Hessian brigade in echelon to the rear. Rowe had ordered that no one was to fire until he struck his sword on the French barricades.
The French defenders too held their fire; Rowe's redcoats marched up to the grey gables of Blenheim in an ominous silence. Then, when they were only thirty paces away, the fences and barricades ahead of them spurted flame and black smoke. Rowe himself fell mortally wounded; his brigade recoiled as the volley struck them. At this moment French cavalry attacked them in the flank. The scarlet ranks began to melt in confusion. The supporting brigade of Hessians came up and poured a volley into the French horsemen. While the French in their turn were recoiling, they were charged and thrown back by English
cavalry.
But now a French counter-charge in much greater strength, swinging wide round Blenheim, threatened the flank of Cutts's entire advance. It was the Duke himself who parried the danger, by ordering five fresh squadrons of English cavalry under General Palmes forward over the Nebel. When Tallard saw Palmes's five squadrons advancing, he launched eight squadrons of the Gendarmerie, one of France's most ancient and renowned cavalry regiments, to throw them back into the stream.
But instead, in one of the most significant episodes of the battle, Palmes's outnumbered troopers, advancing at a steady tror with drawn swords, broke and roud the Gendarmerie like a fist going through a rotten plank. It was a spectacle which profoundly shook Tallard's own confidence, as he was later to admit.
The struggle round Blenheim, visually isolated from the rest of the field by a gende rise in the ground, now became a battle of its own, a furious, swaying scramble and scrum in a billowing fog of powder smoke. To the right of the village more allied cavalry, ordered forward by the Duke, defiled over the narrow crossing points across the Nebel under furious French cannon fire. Beyond the stream they struggled and squelched onwards over boggy ground, charged in front by French cavalry and raked in the flank by fire from Blenheim itself. But under the Duke's personal supervision, the allied bridgehead gradually widened and deepened.
Meanwhile Cutts's infantry brigades, with those ferocious English yells that so chilled the enemy at Schellenberg, attacked the village again and again. Steadily and despite the crumpled heaps of torn flesh and cloth that more and more littered the ground, they fought their way over and through the fences and barricades of carts and doors and furniture, and on in between the farmhouses. Each of these houses - buik of stone, shuttered windows, one roof covering living quarters, byre, barn and wagonshed-was a strongpoint; the open spaces between them raked with crossfire.
But now the commander of the French right wing, the Marquis de Clérambault, an excitable and now over-excited man, lost his head. With the rest of the battlefield out of sight and possibly out of mind over the skyline to his left, he became obsessed with the local struggle for Blenheim. When he saw Cutts's soldiers beginning to fight their way into the village, he ordered the eleven battalions of French infantry near the village to join the garrison: the very mistake Marlborough would have wished him to make. There were now twenty-seven battalions packed into Blenheim. As the Comte de Mérode Westerloo wrote:
The men were so crowded in upon one another that they could not even fire, let alone receive or carry out any orders. Not a single shot of the enemy missed its mark, whilst only those few of our men at the front could return the fire.⁸
Thanks to Clérambault's misjudgment Tallard now had only nine battalions of infantry, all recruits, available to support his cavalry facing Marlborough's centre along the three-mile front between Blenheim and Oberglau. And Tallard was no longer himself near Blenheim to rectify Clérambault's mistake, having ridden over to the other end of his line to see how Marsin and the Elector of Bavaria were faring against Prince Eugène. From that distance not only was Blenheim itself invisible, but the smoke and noise of the fighting there was blotted out by the intervening smoke and noise of the entire line of battle. In any case Tallard was short-sighted, his clear vision limited to twenty paces. The situation at Blenheim, having dropped out of Tallard's sight, seems to have equally dropped out of his mind - just as the situation elsewhere had dropped out of Clérambault's.
The Duke, on the other hand, though himself now back in the centre of his line, kept close touch with Cutts by galloper. When he learned that the French had been driven back into Blenheim, and that it was now packed with enemy troops, he ordered Cutts to cease his attacks, and limit himself to preventing the French from breaking out. Meanwhile, Marlborough's centre had been steadily crossing the Nebel by the bridges or causeways built by his engineers, and redeploying in the sweeping expanse of plain beyond; first the infantry and then, behind their protecting line, the cavalry.
While this delicate operation was going on, Tallard's cavalry still remained on the skyline three quarters of a mile away, content to watch in supine inaction. In the words of one French officer, Marlborough 'was forming up a complete battle array at his leisure in the very centre of our army'.⁹
'We neglected', wrote a French commander at Tallard's own side, double lines forming at the foot of that fatal hill."¹⁰
For at this period of the battle Tallard was down in Blenheim, and in the words of the same French officer, 'by that means, the hill was neglected, he not being able to perceive what passed at the foot 'the
great of it.'¹¹
Around three o'clock in the afternoon the Prince of Holstein-Beck with ten battalions advanced on the right of Marlborough's line towards Oberglau, a cluster of farmhouses round a church on a slight rise in the ground. His task, like that of Cutts at Blenheim, was to pen up its French garrison. But when only two of Hol-stein Beck's battalions had crossed the Nebel, they were counter-attacked by nine French battalions from Oberglau, with Irish émigré regiments in the French service (the 'Wild Geese') in the van. Hol-stein Beck himself was wounded and taken prisoner, and his troops were thrown back towards the stream.
It was the most dangerous moment of the entire action. In Tallard's words, 'I saw onecritical instant when the battle was won....'¹²
The very danger Hol-stein-Beck's attack Oberglau was intended to prevent had now occurred: the right flank of Marlborough's main body lay wide open to the French. Moreover, the French counterstroke equally threatened the junction opposite Oberglau between Marlborough's own army and Eugène's. As the exultant French pressed on towards the gap in the allied line, only an instant decision, and a right decision, could save the allies from disaster.
Once again the Duke was present at the one point in his three-mile line where he was most needed. When he saw Hol-stein-Beck's shattered battalions falling back to the Nebel with the French after them, he galloped up and personally organized a combinedforce of infantry, cavalry and guns to block the French advance. Then he rallied Hol-stein Beck's battalions and led them forward again. Yet the danger was not yet over. The French launched a fresh attack with cavalry from the right of Oberglau, riding in towards the flank of Marlborough's hastily organized defence. The Duke, with no more reserves available, could only send an urgent appeal for help to Prince Eugène.
But Eugène himself was in the thick of a desperate fight all along his line. His Prussian and Danish troops had been repeatedly but vainly attacking the strongly posted enemy ever since the battle began. Nevertheless, in an instantaneous decision that was no less an instantaneous gesture of total comradeship, he ordered Fugger's Imperial Cuirassies on the right of Oberglau to change front and charge the flanks of the French cavalry menacing Marlborough.
The crisis had passed; the Duke brought up more infantry and guns and drove the enemy back; and thereafter the French garrison of Unterglau was left as bottled up and impotent as that of Blenheim.
It was probably during this period of the battle that the Duke halted an officer retreating with his unit and told him with ironic politeness: "You are under a mistake; the enemy lies that way; you have nothing to do but face him and the day is your own.¹³
It was by such personal leadership that the Duke imposed his will on the vast, sprawling confusion of the battle. Time and again the trim figure on the white charger would ride up through the eddying smoke and take direct command; the calm voice with the court drawl contrasting with a visage taut with nervous energy being poured out at full power. The Duke, according to Lord Orkney, 'had been everywhere from one attack to another and ventured his person too-too much'.¹⁴
But his soldiers, black as miners from powder grime, eyes stinging from the smoke, their musket barrels as hot as flatirons from constant firing, found fresh courage in the sight of 'Corporal John', as they nicknamed him. Tallard, on the other hand, was allowing the battle to slip gradually from his grasp. The French army fought on unit by unit, sector by sector, in a struggle without a theme.
It was now almost four o'clock in the afternoon. From one end to the other of the five mile line the firing remained continuous. The afternoon sun glared down on the armies through a stinking shroud of powder smoke. More smoke still reeked into the sky from the villages and mills set ablaze by the French in the morning. Across the undulating plain the masses of men still swayed and struggled, tiring, thirsty, garments foul with sweat; the ground more and more encumbered by dead or maimed men and animals,
by riderless horses wandering with hanging reins.
The crash of cannonfire and the rattle of musketry provided the percussion to shouts and yells, to the screaming or whimpering of those lying tom open, eviscerated, with smashed or splintered bone. Yet beneath the apparent chaos the design of victory was taking shape, moulded by Marlborough's professional intuition out of the plastic material of battle. In that decisive arena in the centre, on the French side of the Nebel, he now had deployed twenty-eight battalions of infantry, some 14,000 men, and seventy-one squadrons of cavalry, over 5,000 horsemen; but Tallard, with so much of his infantry drawn into Blenheim, had only nine battalions of infantry, all recruits, and sixty-four squadrons of cavalry to face him.
Tallard's only remaining hope was to launch his too-long withheld cavalry. The Duke and his troops saw the dark specks close lining the long horizon ahead of them begin to move; grow larger and larger until they became horsemen by the thousand sweeping towards them; with the Marquis d'Humières, commander of the French centre, and brilliant in a magnificent gilt cuirass, riding at their head.
The attack on the French right wing at Blenheim. Detail from Laguerre's al sketch oil
Before this onset the first line of allied cavalry gave way and retired through the intervals in the line of infantry battalions behind them. Now the purpose of Marlborough's unorthodox tactical formation, with cavalry and infantry interlined, became clear. As the French cavalry sought to press home their attack, the volleys crashed in succession up and down the long line of allied infantry, English, German, Dutch; blue coats and red.
Field guns blasted away at close range with 'partridge shot'. As the fresh billows of smoke went drifting up and away, it could be seen that the French cavalry had been brought to a halt in a shambles of fallen horses and riders. A French general observed with dismay what now followed:
... our men were forced to shrink back, and throw themselves on our second line, which,being at some distance, gave the enemy time to gain ground which they maintained by theirnumbers, and their slow and close march.¹⁵
In desperation Tallard sent to Marsin for aid. But Marsin told Tallard's messenger that it was all he could do to hold off Prince Eugène's Prussians and Danes; he had no troops to spare. As the Duke's infantry, cavalry and guns, working in combination, began to press Tallard's almost unsupported cavalry back yard by yard up the slope, Tallard himself galloped down to Blenheim to try to retrieve some of the infantry he had allowed Clérambault to cram into the village. He found them, however, so packed together, so boxed in on three sides by Cutts, that it was impossible to extricate them in time.
It was now clear to Marlborough that the battle was almost won. Only near Oberglau were the French cavalry supported by infantry - the nine battalions of recruits, standing in squares. English guns and Hanoverian infantry smashed open the squares, and allied cavalry cut down every man in his place. At about five o'clock the Duke rode right along the line of battle. He could see that Tallard's cavalry were spent.
He could see that beyond them there was nothing. He gave the order to sound the charge. The soldiers of both armies heard the trumpets calling from squadron to squadron all the way from Oberglau down to Blenheim; a beautiful and terrible sound. Then, in a double line of squadrons three miles long, Marlborough's cavalry moved forward, first at a walk, then at a trot. They came up the hardly perceptible gradient packed knee to knee; a vast flail sweeping over the ground in a cloud of dust
Tallard's cavalry waited for them uneasily at the halt.
Tallard's cavalry waited for them uneasily at the halt.
As they sat their horses waiting, the stubbled earth under them reverberated with the pounding of the 24,000 hoofs which were carrying their enemy towards them with ever greater momentum. Then the allied cavalry was upon them, charging home with the sword. The French fired one wavering volley with their long horse pistols; swung their horses' heads round; and fled, even the Maison du Roi, the French household cavalry. And as they broke, so broke with them Louis XIV's ambitions of
universal monarchy.
Pursued by Marlborough's squadrons, the French cavalry galloped frantically through their own camp and on to Höchstädt, bearing the hapless Tallard away with them. A great French army had dissolved into a panic-stricken swarm of fleeing individuals, many of them even riding their horses straight over the bank of the Danube in their frenzy to escape.
Between Oberglau and Lutzingen, Marsin, threatened in the flank by Tallard's collapse, only escaped destruction himself by retreating in utmost haste away from Höchstädt, towards Mörslingen, followed by Eugène's exhausted but still game troops until the light faded. Somewhere in the press of fugitives round Höchstädt Hessian troopers took prisoner Marshal Tallard himself.
Only the French in Blenheim, now completely encircled, still fought on, as the roofs of the blazing farmhouses collapsed over their heads. Tallard, though now a prisoner, sent a message to Marlborough offering to prevent any further firing by the French in Blenheim, if the Duke 'would let those poor fellows alone and suffer them to retreat'. The Duke's comment on this proposal was frosty:
'I wonder Monsieur de Tallard does not consider, that he has no command where he now is.¹⁶
Two French regiments, Provence and Artois, tried to cut their way out, but failed. Now the allied troops - Cutts's indomitable redcoats among them - fought their way into the heart of the village, round the churchyard and its stone wall. Clérambault himself was not there to see the final tragedy of the gallant troops he had led so incompetently, for, in a fit of desperation, he had ridden straight into the Danube and drowned. Battalion by battalion, the surrounded French began to surrender.
Then General Lord Orkney persuaded the acting French commander in Blenheim, the Marquis de Blanzac, to capitulate. As the sun was going down, 10,000 men marched into captivity, and the Battle of Blenheim was over. But even before the firing had stopped, the Duke, an utterly spent man after seventeen hours in the saddle, had scribbled his first report on the battle. He scribbled it in pencil on the first piece of paper that came to hand, the back of a tavern reckoning; and it was to Sarah that he sent it:
I have not time to say more but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen, and let her know Her army has had a Glorious Victory. Monsieur Tallard and two other Generals are in my Coach and I am following the rest. . . .¹⁷
The note Marlborough wrote to Sarah in the saddle and on the back of a tavern reckoning to give
her news of the victory. It took Colonel Parkes eight days to carry it to Sarah and on to the
Queen.
Next Page (Underway)
🧩 Anna and Sarah
— HOME
— BATTLE OF BLENHEIM
— THE MARLBOROUGH PUZZLE
— SITE MENU — EXCUSABLE EXCULPATIONS
Comments
Post a Comment