THE LONG MARCH

Larry the Cat,
The Elector of Bavaria 

On 18 May 1704 the Duke of Marlborough, accompanied by the English train of artillery and the English troops under the command of his brother General Churchill, rode down into Bedburg, twenty miles north-west of Cologne, where his lay concentrated. 

It was a modest enough starting place for one of the decisive marches of history: a little cluster of gabled houses nestling in a fold amid a desolate sweep of upland, and now engulfed by tents and horse lines, by wagon and artillery parks; the little open space in front of the church and inn a-bustle with men and beasts camp and marched. Two days later, on 20 May 1704, at first light, the army struck sixty battalions of infantry tramping to tap of drum with the battalion carts grinding along behind; forty-six squadrons of cavalry tracing the route in fresh dung; bread; ammunition; wagons; sutlers' carts; guns.

For the Duke himself, this was a moment of relief and release, perhaps of exhilaration. Ever since arriving at The Hague five weeks earlier, he had been suffering from continual headache, always with him a sign of emotional strain; and from which, as he wrote to Godolphin, he did not expect to be free until he was with the army.

Now as the long columns wound through the freshness of a May morning towards the far-off Danube, his frustrations and vexations faded behind him: the Dutch, the Whigs and the Tories, Sarah even. Yet he had measured soberly enough what lay at stake in this enterprise which had now begun; at stake not only for Europe, but also for him personally. If he should fail to save the Empire, he told Count Wratislaw, 'so would he be in England and Holland lost for ever.'²²

THE LONG MARCH

Without word of the enemy, Her Majesty's army marched south-southeast; through black-and-white half-timbered villages where the sound of its passing was caught and amplified by the narrow streets, and the dogs barked, the children jumped and cheered in the gateways, and the old men stared.

In the ranks, the mood was bright with anticipation; there was a cheerful confidence that under a chief like theirs they could beat any Frenchmen out of the field. The quality and morale of his soldiers were basic factors in Marlborough's calculations. 'The troups with me,' he told Sarah, 'are very good, and will doe whatever I will have them.'¹

I carry The Duke himself was in all likelihood riding in his great coach that day, since there was no early prospect of action, and since only ten days earlier he had been complaining that 'not having been on horseback for some time, I am soe weary that I can say noe more'.²

On the 22nd, when the army reached Kuhlseggen, south-west of Cologne, the Duke received reports that part of Villeroi's army had begun to follow him, just as he had calculated; and taking a parallel route about one hundred miles to his westward. But both surprising and disquieting was the size of the detachment Villeroi had made: thirty-six battalions and forty-five squadrons, including the Maison du Roi, the French household cavalry. 

It was an army not so very much smaller than Marlborough's own. Moreover, it was being led by Villeroi himself; another surprise. Marlborough confessed in a letter to Overkirk, the allied commander in the Netherlands: 'I had not thought that they would detach so many troops, nor that M de Villeroi would march in person, as I am informed he has orders to do. . . .'³

What was more, according to Marlborough's source of intelligence (and it must have been a source very high up in the French government machine), Villeroi had been ordered not to halt on the Moselle but to follow him wherever he went. The Duke therefore wrote immediately to Heinsius to point out that if Villeroi was taking 'soe strong a detachment, thay [the French] will hardely be able to leave behind the name of an army', and that since as a consequence the Netherlands no longer stood in danger, the Dutch could and should send him reinforcements. 

'I am sure I need not tel (sic) you that if we should be overpowered by numbers of troupes and consequently beaten you would feel the effects of it.⁴

Two days after this laconic understatement came further disquieting news: in southern Germany Tallard had joined Marsin with 26,000 men. In fact, the report was inaccurate, exaggerating the 10,000 recruits which Tallard had escorted to Marsin three weeks earlier, before himself returning to the Rhine. But what with Villeroi and Tallard, it began to look to the Duke as though he were heading into dangers on a scale he had not foreseen. That same day he communicated his sharpening anxieties to Godolphin:.... if the Dutch doe not consent to the strengthening the troupes I have, we shall be overpowered by numbers.'⁵

At the same time, the Duke feared that the Margrave of Baden and Prince Eugène might be beaten before he could even reach them. He therefore decided to press ahead himself with the cavalry, leaving his infantry and guns to follow at their own pace. Yet it was no use bringing into Eugène's camp an army of blown horses and exhausted men. Henceforward, Marlborough had to hold a balance between the urgent strategic need for haste and the no lesser importance of preserving his army's fighting power. 

Every aspect of the organization of the march bore witness to the Duke's forethought and thoroughness. The army set off each day as soon as possible after first light, so that the day's march was completed by nine o'clock in the morning, before the sun grew hot. The daily distance averaged some twelve to fourteen miles, a comfortable span for men and draught animals alike. Marlborough's soldiers found that their chief seemed to have forgotten nothing. 

In the words of Captain Parker, of Hamilton's regiment;

As we marched through the countries of our Allies, commissaries were appointed to furnish us with all manner of necessaries for man or horse; these were brought to the ground before we arrived, and the soldiers had nothing to do, but pitch their tents, boil their kettles, and lie down to rest. Surely never was such a march-carried on with more order and regularity, and with less fatigue both to man and horse.⁶

To the troops, trudging with shouldered firelock through the sunshine and the dust, the march was therefore just a jolly adventure. They were glad enough to see the back of the Low Countries, dreary and all-too-familiar campaigning country. Here in the Rhineland the fruit trees were in blossom. Moreover, some of the German girls, as the keen-eyed Captain Pope of Schomberg's regiment of horse noted, 'were much handsomer than we expected to find in this country'. 

As the army neared Sinzig, they saw the first vines on the hillsides; and down the valley ahead of them, hazy with distance, the jutting buttresses of rock, castle-crested, which marked the Rhine. Sergeant Millner, of Hamilton's regiment, noted that in camp that day they enjoyed 'plenty of wine and spaw water' for the first time. Next morning, 25 May, they were marching beside the Rhine, as it swirled its way in the opposite direction down into the Netherlands whence they had come.

As Marlborough's soldiers swung along from foot to foot, chatting, joking, swapping rumours, swearing in a manner horrifying to the Presbyterian Scots Colonel Blackader, of the Cameronians, the governments and princes of a Europe at war - even the Great King at Versailles-were eagerly studying the course of their humble footfalls. Already the French plans for an offensive against Vienna had been paralysed by the uncertainty created by Marlborough's march. Nevertheless, the French felt no great anxiety as yet.

After all, Villeroi was marching parallel to Marlborough, only two days or so behind him, while Tallard lay at Landau. If, as expected, Marlborough changed direction at Coblenz up the valley of the Moselle, Villeroi and Tallard would unite on that river and meet him with superior forces. Then, with all the uncertainties removed, Marsin and the Elector of Bavaria, on the Danube, could proceed to dispose of the outnumbered armies of the Habsburg Empire and the Margrave of Baden.

On 25 May the Duke, riding ahead of the infantry and guns, saw the spires of Coblenz, slender and sharp as bodkins, ahead of him; the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein humped on its rock guarding the confluence of the Rhine and the Moselle.

He was in the very heart of the German wine country now, and from his camp at Coblenz he wrote to Godolphin that 'I doe with all my heart wish you and Lady Marl some Moselle that I have this day tasted, for I never drank any like it, but I do not know how to send itt...'⁷

Both the French high command and Marlborough's own army expected him now to turn along the northern bank of the Moselle towards France. But instead the army crossed over the Moselle by the medieval stone bridge, past the old Burg, or castle, and on through Coblenz. The ranks buzzed with surprise and speculation. So it was not to be the Moselle after all.

But where was he taking them? Soon they were back on the shore of the Rhine again, on the south side of Coblenz. Here, where the river was narrower and the current slacker than downstream of the Moselle, Marlborough had had bridges of boats constructed by the local prince-one of the results of his ceremonious correspondence during the winter with the rulers of the German states through whose lands the army was to pass.

While the Duke himself went off to view the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein, the cavalry picked its way over the pitching, snaking surface of the bridges of boats, to be followed two days later by the infantry, guns and wagons. Like a line of busy and laborious scarlet ants, the army climbed the long slope up the cliff under the shadow of Ehrenbreit stein and disappeared southwards.

Louis XIV and his generals had now to think again. An answer soon occurred to them. Marlborough was on his way to invade Alsace, starting with the recapture of Landau. The construction of another bridge of boats across the Rhine at Philippsburg convinced the French that this was his plan. Why else would he wish to cross back again to the west of the Rhine, and at a point so far to the south?

Between Versailles and the French armies the couriers bearing fresh instructions galloped on lathered horses. So Villeroi too went over the Moselle and plodded on to the south, while Tallard, who had been lying at Kehl, crossed to the west bank of the Rhine and marched to defend Landau. And still, the French plan to advance on Vienna remained paralysed by uncertainty.

At Braubach, a day's march beyond Coblenz, Marlborough received the welcome news from Overkirk that the Dutch, as he had requested, had now dispatched after him reinforcements of eight regiments of infantry and twenty squadrons of cavalry, all Danish mercenaries. The Duke was now forced to abandon the Rhine shore for want of a road, and head into the Taunus mountains. While the Taunus presented little problem for the cavalry, it was otherwise for the guns and transport. 

The fine weather had now given way to relentless, saturating summer rain, turning the bottom of the steep valley up from Braubach into a quagmire. The guns and wagons had to be manhandled the entire way to the crest; draught beasts straining while their drivers cursed and cracked their whips; men hauling on the draglines and shouldering the wheels round by main force. The march was not so gay now. 'A very steep hill and a tedious road. Sergeant Millner called it; 'This', opined Colonel Blackader, 'is like to be a campaign of great fatigue and troubles.

To the Duke himself it meant fretting delay, at a time when he was in urgent haste to reach Eugène and the Margrave before they could be overwhelmed. On 2 June he reported to Heinsius from Weinheim:

There have been soe great rains that the artillerie and bread wagons were two hole (sic) days getting up the mountain this side of Coblence called Brouback, soe that I intend . . . to make a halt to give time to the foot and cannon to come nearer to me....⁸

On the same day he wrote to Sarah turning down with the utmost gentleness and tact her renewed suggestion that she should join him: 'Besides, my dear soul, how could I be at any ease? For if we should not have good success I could not put you into any place where you would be safe.'⁹ At Weinheim he was lodged in the castle of Windeck, high on a wooded peak above the town, and he told Sarah in the same letter:

I am now in the house of the Elector Pallatine that has a prospect over the finest country is possible to be seen. I see out of my chamber windoe the Rhyne and the Neiker (Neckar), and his two principel towns of Manhem (Mannheim) and Heidelberg; but cou'd be much better pleased with the prospect of St Albans, which is not very famous for seeing farr.¹⁰

At Ladenburg, in the plain of the Neckar and the Rhine, he halted for three days to give guns and infantry time to close nearer to him; rest the cavalry's horses; and to make far-reaching arrangements for the next phase of the advance. To the Dutch States he General he wrote finally to break the news that he was really bound for the Danube.

To the commanders of various German contingents which had not yet joined him, he sent letters  allotting different rendezvous. To the Duke of Württemberg, commanding the Danish reinforcements dispatched by the Dutch, he wrote instructing him not to follow him directly but strike south-eastwards from Cologne to Frankfurt, where he would send him fresh orders. He added some typical Marlburian advice:

It will be necessary... always to send ahead some officer to warn the countryside of the line of the march, so that forage will be ready in camp on their [the troops] arrival, in order to prevent disorders. . . . I recommend particularly that express orders be given that officers and men alike observe the strictest discipline so that there are no complaints whatsoever.¹¹

Such tactful politeness yielded to the terseness of command when he wrote to his

brother, General Churchill:

I send this by express on purpose to be informed of the conditions you are in both as to troops and the artillery, and to advise you to take your march with the whole directly to Heidelberg, since the route we have taken by Ladenburg will be too difficult for you. Pray send back the messenger immediately, and let me know by him where you design to camp cach night, and what day you propose to be at Heidelberg that I may take my measures accordingly.¹²

The Duke's earlier anxieties that he might be overwhelmed by sheer numbers or that he might arrive too late to save Prince Eugène and the Margrave of Baden seem to have faded by this time. He now expected to join them in eight days. Moreover, his letters exude confidence that the French were submitting helplessly to his initiative. He indeed knew from intelligence reports that Marshals Tallard and Villeroi, fascinated by the apparent threat to Alsace, were converging on Landau; Villeroi from the north-west, Tallard from the south.

On 6 June, the Duke reached Wiesloch, south of Heidelberg, some one hundred and fifty miles from his starting point. Next day he would change direction from south to east, cast for the Danube, and at long last the French would know his true destination. The trickiest part of the whole operation therefore lay ahead of him; a complex calculation of time and space involving several armies. Marlborough had to arrange for his junction with Prince Eugène and the Margrave of Baden while at the same time prevent

ing Tallard or Villeroi, or both together, from coming to the rescue of his designated victim, the army under Marsin and the Elector of Bavaria. 

The Duke wrote to the Margrave of Baden emphasizing that the Margrave must prevent Villeroi (the nearer of the French marshals) from crossing to the cast of the Rhine, for this would directly threaten Marlborough's own communications. On 7 June 1704 the Duke and the cavalry began the last lap of the march, riding eastward out of Wiesloch up on to the broad hogsback which carries the road to Sinzheim and Eppingen. It was another miry puddle of a road, and from his next camp at Eppingen the Duke sent some good advice back to his brother with the infantry and guns: 'We came most of the way up hill, so that you must take care beforehand to ease your artillery horses all you can....'¹³

It was an example of a mind which even in the middle of grand strategic combinations never lost sight of detail; detail which might make all the difference between a successful march and a gruesome hold-up. On the following day, hot sun now instead of rain clouds, he had more good advice for his brother: 'I hope this warm weather you take care to march so early as to be in your camp before the heat of the day.'¹⁴

While Marlborough, the moving centre of the whole war, rode on towards the east, consternation had laid cold fingers on the French marshals and on the Elector of Bavaria. For they knew now that Marlborough was bound for the Danube; they knew that they had been completely gulled; they knew that as a consequence they had diligently marched into exactly the wrong places whence to take prompt countermeasures. 

The Elector of Bavaria in particular saw his role suddenly change from that of executioner to that of victim. Isolated as he was on the Danube, far from Villeroi and Tallard, he perceived all too clearly that he was to be destroyed by Eugène and Marlborough. The Elector and his French colleague, Marsin, therefore dispatched repeated and heart-rending appeals to Versailles for aid and succour. Tallard and Villeroi, stuck on the far side of the Rhine, puzzled away at the problem. 

They well realized that with that broad river as a defensive obstacle, vastly inferior allied forces could hold them off while a catastrophe was arranged and consummated on the Danube. Seeing no solution them selves, they laid the problem in Louis XIV's lap. Earnest discussion, conducted by galloper at several days' delay, now ensued, and lasted a fortnight. Finally, on 23 June Louis decided that Tallard should make a long southward detour, cross the Rhine at Kehl, which was in French hands, traverse the mountains of the Black Forest yet again, and thence march north-eastwards to the Danube. 

Villeroi was to keep watch on the allied forces on the Rhine, but march to join Tallard if these forces

departed. The Sun King's new strategy failed to kindle any warmth of enthusiasm in his two marshals. It was depressingly apparent to them that, while their enemies were now operating in a central position, in easy touch with each other, they themselves were about to be scattered widely over the face of southern Germany. Tallard in particular was unhappy about the size of the force now allotted to him by his royal master, especially in cavalry. 

However, the marshals, though far from keen, obeyed. On 1 July Tallard's army recrossed the Rhine at Kehl and began to sweat its way up through the pines and firs of the Black Forest. But while Louis XIV and his marshals had been corresponding, the Duke had been marching. On 9 June he camped at Mundelsheim, well to the south-east of Stuttgart, and only a few days distant from the armies of his allies near Geislingen. 

It was here, at Mundelsheim, that one of the most famous and influential friendships in European history began, when at about five o'clock on the following evening Prince Eugène of Savoy rode down into Marlborough's camp with Count Wratislaw to concert future

strategy.  Now in this humble Württemberg village nestling amid tiny vineyards steeply

terraced in the local yellow-grey stone, an English duke played host to an Imperial

prince with all the ceremony of the baroque age. 

Military pomp and splendour were followed by a banquet: table magnificent with Marlborough's campaign silver plate; the Duke's silver candlesticks in profusion as the light faded; and the two great person age themselves, one the most famous of living soldiers, the other with a reputation still to

make, exchanging smiling compliments and shrewdly appraising each other from

beneath their wigs. Next morning, Eugène wrote with Marlborough on the day's march to Gross Heppach;  a further opportunity to get to know one another. Each was impressed. Eugène wrote

later of Marlborough:

He is a man of high intelligence, of gallantry, well-disposed, and determined to achieve something, all the more so because he would be discredited in England if he returned there having accomplished nothing. With all these qualities he knows well enough that one does not become a general over-night, and is unassuming about himself.¹⁵

Marlborough for his part reported to Sarah that

Prince Eugène... has in his conversation a great deal of my Ld Shrewsbury [a man Marlborough much liked, and who was known as the 'King of Hearts' because of his pleasant nature], with the advantage of seeming franker.¹⁶

Prince François Eugène of Savoy was in his forty-first year thirteen years younger than Marlborough. He had been born in Paris and brought up at the French court; his mother was the niece of Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIII's chief minister. As a child and youth he suffered from a poor physique and it was for this reason that Louis XIV had forced him to enter the Church rather than become a soldier in the French army as he wished.

His father was twice exiled from France because of court intrigues. It was his mother's grief at such injustice that had inspired in Eugène his bitter hatred of Louis XIV and the French monarchy. When his father died young, Eugène left France swearing that he would never return but sword in hand. He and his brother settled in Vienna, and Eugène joined the Imperial army. He first saw war at the age of twenty, when the Turks were besieging Vienna; and the bare record of his career bespoke his military talent: colonel at twenty, major-general at twenty-one, general of cavalry at twenty-six.

A crushing victory over the Turks at the Battle of Zenta in 1697 first established his European reputation. It was with some pride therefore that when they reached Gross Heppach Marlborough paraded all nineteen squadrons of his English cavalry for Eugène to review. The water meadows between the river and the jumbled roofs of the village were scarlet with more than 2,000 horsemen, After Eugène had ridden slowly along their ranks he expressed himself, according to an eye witness,

very much surprised to find them in so good condition, after so long a march, and told his Grace that he had heard much of the English Cavalry and found it to be the best appointed and the finest he had ever seen. But, says he, Money (which you don't want in England) will buy fine clothes and fine horses, but it cannot buy that lively air which I see in every one of those troopers' faces....¹⁷ 

Marlborough's reply showed that when it came to compliments he was already master of the field: 

That must be attributed to ... the particular pleasure and satisfaction they had in him seeing your Highness.¹⁸

Three days later Louis, Margrave of Baden, rode into Gross Heppach, and there, on the gravel yard before the spreading gable of the Lamb Inn, all three allied commanders finally met: more sweeping off of hats and deep bows; more ceremony; another great feast; a conference which decided urgent questions of command and strategy. Eugène was to go to the Rhine to prevent the French marshals marching to the rescue of the Elector of Bavaria: a role calling for high skill and boldness since his forces would be numerically much inferior. 

Marlborough and the Margrave together were to tackle the Elector of Bavaria. Marlborough would personally have preferred to have had Eugène with him, for the Margrave was an unimaginative plodder, prickly over rank, and not altogether trustworthy. Eugène indeed had privately warned Marlborough about the Margrave: 'He has been very free with me', wrote the Duke to Sarah, 'in giving me the character of the Prince of Baden, by which I find I must be much more on my guard than if I was to act with Prince Eugène.'¹⁹

On 22 June, near Lauensheim, the Duke linked up with the Margrave of Baden's army. It was a day bleak with scudding rain. Marlborough wrote to Sarah:

As I was never more sensible of heat in my life then (sic) I was a fortnight agoe, we now have the other extreamity of cold; for as I am writing I am forced to have fyer in the stove in my chamber. But the poor men, that have not such conveniences, I am afraid will very much suffer from these continnual rains...²⁰

The Marlborough Puzzle 

The principal sovereigns and commanders of Europe,
in the year of Blenheim, with allegorical figures. 

QA Queen Anne

1.  Emperor Leopold I
2.  King of the Romans
3.  King of Spain
4.  King of Portugal
5.  Duke of Marlborough
6.  Prince Eugène
7.  Landgrave of Hesse
8.  Lord Cutts
9.  Tsar of Russia
10.  King of Poland
11.  Johann von Patkul
12.  King of Prussia
13.  Marshal Tallard
14. 'Lamenting Spaniard'
15.  Louis of Baden
16.  Admiral Rooke
17.  General Dopff
18.  General Hompesch
19.  Admiral Leake

On 27 June, after a final struggle against mud and gradient, the English infantry and guns joined Marlborough at Giengen, near Ulm. The Dutch battalions which had been serving in Germany under General Goor ever since the beginning of the previous year also joined, together with other contingents. The march was completed. 

Marlborough had now concentrated one hundred and seventy-seven squadrons and seventy-six battalions, the largest army to take to the field in the present war. They were now in a region of vast open landscapes rolling away into the distance - ideal for marching and fighting.

The Elector of Bavaria lay in a fortified camp only a few miles off near Dillingen, on the Danube. However, Marlborough first had to establish a new line of communications north-eastwards into the friendly states of central Germany, in place of his existing highly vulnerable two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-long supply route from the Netherlands. But to secure this new supply line and at the same time unlock an invasion route across the Danube into the heart of Bavaria, he needed the town of Donauwörth.

Donauwörth was strongly protected by the adjacent hill of the Schellenberg, partly fortified and strongly garrisoned. As the army neared the town, the Margrave of Baden meditated a protracted formal siege, which, since he had failed to provide a siege train, was likely to be even more protracted. On 2 July, however, at three in the morning, the Duke proceeded to march swiftly upon the defenders. 

He bridged the River Wornitz to the west of the town about midday, got his field guns over the river and up the lower slopes of the Schellenberg, and at about six in the evening launched a furious attack on the defenders before they could complete their defences. After two years of war Marlborough at last saw the action for which he had carved. 

The Franco-Bavarian garrison fought stoutly, repelling Marlborough's first assaults with devastating volleys at close range, followed by counter-attacks. But then the English foot guards and other English and Dutch infantry regiments drove the defenders back in the English and Dutch, leaving their perimeter almost undefended further to the west.  By now the main strength of the garrison was locked in struggle with a storm of musketry.

Imperial troops led by the Margrave of Baden now burst through this sector, and took the

defenders in the flank. The English and Dutch advanced again, this time bearing their colours over the enemy parapets; and the defenders gave way in panic flight, many of them to be driven into the Danube by the allied cavalry. Out of 15,000 men in the garrison of the Schellenberg, only some 3,000 escaped. The trophies of victory included thirteen colours, sixteen guns and all the garrison commander's silver plate. 

But the victory had not been cheap, for Marlborough had lost 1,500 killed and 4,000 wounded. The attack on the Schellenberg was the prototype Marlburian battle - the immediate assertion of moral ascendancy by unhesitating attack; the smashing blows on one sector of the enemy line which, kept up despite fearsome casualties, forced the enemy to drain his forces from the sector where finally the victory-winning assault was delivered.

With Donauwörth in his hands, Marlborough had Bavaria wide open before him, for its Elector withdrew his army to Augsburg, well out of his way. As he wrote on 9 July:

I have great reason to hope that every thing will goe well, for I have the great pleasure to find all the officers willing to obaye without knowing any other reasons then that it is my desire, which is very different from what it was in Flandres, where I was oblig'd to have the consent of a Councel of War for every thing I undertooke....²¹

Yet the battle of the Schellenberg was followed by a curious, dragging anti-climax. Instead of marching straight on the Elector of Bavaria's capital of Munich, in order to force him either to give battle or make peace, Marlborough first besieged the minor fortress of Rain, and then spent the rest of July meandering about the country burning towns and villages, in the hope that the Elector would be persuaded by the sufferings of his people to desert the French. As layings-waste went, it was a fairly half-hearted operation.  Marlborough's letters to Sarah reveal why.  'This is so contrary to my nature,' he wrote on 13 July, 

'that nothing but absolute necessity cou'd have oblig'd me to consent

to it, '²²

By the beginning of August even Marlborough's own officers were growing restless at

the indecision and waste of time. Cardonnel wrote home to Matthew Prior on the 7th:

We have made no progress since our success at the Schellenberg, except that it be in burning

country ... our last march was all in fire and smoke. We are and destroying the Elector's

now going to besiege Ingolstadt, and I wish to God it were all over that I might get safe out

of this country. ²³

The Duke had been much handicapped during July by lack of a siege train, which the Margrave of Baden had still failed to supply as promised. Moreover, as the Duke expressed it in his dry fashion:

Our greatest difficulty is that of making our bread follow us, for the troops I have the honour to command cannot subsist without it, and the Germans that are used to starve cannot

advance without us. ²⁴

Yet despite these real problems, it was Prince Eugène's professional judgment that Marlborough's leadership had been wanting since the Schellenberg: They amuse themselves laying siege to Rain and burning a few villages instead, according to my opinion, which I have made known to them clearly enough, of advancing directly and, if they can't attack them, to station themselves half an hour away,

upon enemy being so superior in cavalry in open country...²⁵

It was as if the Duke had run out of ideas - or as if, perhaps, that the carnage among his years, had own troops at the Schellenberg, the very violence of his first battle for fourteen shaken him and drained him of vitality. Certainly, he confessed to Sarah in a letter of 13 July that

 'My blood is so heated that I have had these two last days a very headache....²⁶

Meanwhile, Tallard, who had started from the Rhine on 1 July, joined Marsin and the Elector of Bavaria at Biberach, south of Ulm, on 5 August. Marlborough seemed therefore to have let slip the opportunity which he had arranged with such finesse in the final violent stages of his march to the Danube. The situation was retrieved by Eugène. As soon as he learned that Tallard was on the move through the Black Forest at the beginning of July, he had straight away marched to join the Duke, leaving part of his army behind him on the Rhine to bluff Villeroi into remaining in place. 

The bluff succeeded: Villeroi decided that staying put, and waiting and seeing, constituted the wisest course to pursue. Throughout Eugène's eastwards march from the Rhine, he and the Duke remained in constant touch by messenger. 

On 6 August, only a day after Tallard had joined Marsin and the Elector, Eugène rode over from his army to Marlborough's camp at Schrobenhausen. Next day both generals went out to reconnoitre the surrounding country, for the opposing groups of armies were now only some twenty miles apart. In the evening the Duke, Prince Eugène and the Margrave of Baden conferred. 

It was agreed that the Margrave should go off and besiege Ingolstadt. Two days later he proceeded to do so, taking 20,000 men with him. So large a detachment from the allied army when a battle was imminent was a curious decision. It argued either that Eugène and the Duke had enormous confidence in themselves; or little in the Margrave. Tallard, Marsin and the Elector had been conferring too. They decided that they would advance on Eugène's heavily outnumbered army which now lay at Höchstädt, on the northern bank of the Danube, crush it if they could, and, if not, march eastwards along the Danube towards Donauwörth to threaten Marlborough's communications.

This, according to the rules, would compel him to evacuate the Elector's territory. They did not realize how closely Eugène and Marlborough were in touch; how quickly their armies could unite. At eleven o'clock in the evening of 10 August the Duke, now at Rain, received an urgent signal from Eugène:

Sir: The enemy have marched. It is virtually certain that their whole army has crossed the Danube at Lauingen... the plain of Dillingen is full of them. I have held on here all day, but with only 18 battalions I dare not stay the night. . . . Everything, milord, depends on haste and that you get moving straight away in order to join me tomorrow, otherwise I fear it will be too late. . . . While I have been writing this I have [received] certain news that their whole army has crossed. Therefore there is not a moment to lose....²⁷

The Duke issued immediate orders to march. Only three hours later - a short time indeed to get the orders out to all commanders, and for them then to strike camp and assemble their troops in columns of route - the Duke's brother General Churchill started off to Eugène's assistance with twenty battalions. At three that morning, II August, Marlborough followed with the main body of the army. By eleven in the evening, the last of the long columns had crossed to the north bank of the Danube at Donauwörth or other bridging points and come into camp alongside Eugène's little army. 

Early next day the Duke and Eugène rode forward together with forty squadrons of cavalry to reconnoitre the ground between themselves and the French. At Tapfheim the two commanders climbed the church tower; spread out before them was the whole plain that lay between the Danube to their left and wooded hills to their right, with the position of each village marked by its church. And there, to the westward towards Höchstädt, on a broad treeless swell of higher ground between the villages of Blenheim and Lutzingen, they could see through their telescopes the combined Franco-Bavarian armies about to make camp, 'whereupon', in the Duke's words, 'we resolved to attack them.'

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🧩 The Battle of Blenheim

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