The Great British Battles. Hilaire Belloc
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The political consequences of this great day were more considerable by far than was even its character of a military success. It was the first great defeat which marked the turn of the tide against Louis XIV. It was the first great victory which stamped upon the conscience of Europe the genius of Marlborough. It wholly destroyed all those plans, of which the last two years had been full, for an advance upon Vienna by the French and Bavarian forces. It utterly cleared the valley of the Danube; it began to throw the Bourbons upon the defensive at last. It crushed the hopes of the Hungarian insurrection. It opened that series of successes which we couple with the names of Marlborough and Eugene, and which were not to be checked until, five years later, the French defence recovered its stubbornness at Malplaquet.
Footnotes:
1. It was this success which to Marlborough’s existing earldom added the high dignity of Duke, by letters patent of December 16, 1702.
2. As the French dispatch goes, 7500 men, every horse, and all the waggons, save 120, which had got into difficulties on the way; Fortescue’s note suggesting that 1500 men only reached the Franco-Bavarians (vol. i. p. 42) is based on Quincy.
3. It is, of course, an error to say, as is too often done in our school histories and the official accounts of our universities, that the French commanders had no idea of a march upon the Danube. A child could have seen that the march upon the Danube was one of the possible plans open to Marlborough, and Villeroy expressly mentions the alternative in his letter of the 30th of May. The whole point of Marlborough’s manœuvres was to leave the enemy in doubt until the very last moment as to which of the three, the Danube, the Moselle, or Alsace, he would strike at; and to be well away upon the road to the former before the French had discovered his final decision.
4. It is worthy of remark that the opportunity for victory which the weak forces under Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria offered at this moment to the superior forces of the allies would have led to an immediate attack of the last upon the first when, two generations later, war had developed into something more sudden and less formal, through the efforts of the Revolution.
Marlborough and the Duke of Baden, with their superior forces, would have attacked Marcin and the Elector had they been their own grandsons. Napoleon, finding himself in such a situation as Marlborough’s a hundred years later, would certainly have fallen on the insufficient forces to his south, for it was known that reinforcements were coming over the Black Forest to save the Franco-Bavarian forces. To break up those forces before reinforcement should come was something which a sudden change of plan could have effected, but not even the genius of Marlborough was prepared, in his generation, for a movement necessitating so great a disturbance of calculations previously made. Donauwörth was his objective, and upon Donauwörth he marched, leaving intact this inferior hostile force which watched his advance from the south.
5. As a fact, the advance along this “isthmus” on to the Schellenberg is slightly downhill, and against artillery of modern range and power the Schellenberg could not be held.
6. Of seventeen officers of the Guards, twelve were hit; of the total British force at least a third fell; more than a third of these, again, were killed.
7. The railway from Ulm to Donauwörth follows the line of this road exactly, and is almost the only modern feature upon the field.
8. Mr. Fortescue (vol. i. p. 436) writes as though this were not the case. He has overlooked Tallard’s letter to the minister of war of the 4th of September.
9. A small body was left at Unterglauheim, but withdrawn as the allies advanced; and outposts lay, of course, upon the line of Marlborough’s advance, and fell back before it.
10. Mr. Fortescue gives the total force of cavalry under Marcin and the Elector at one hundred and eight squadrons and the infantry at forty-six battalions. The French official record gives forty-two battalions (not forty-six) and eighty-three squadrons in the place of one hundred and eight. Mr. Fortescue gives no authority for his larger numbers; and, on the general principle that, in a contested action, each force knows best about its own organisation, I have followed these official records of the French as the most trustworthy.
11. It is essential to note this point. Mr. Fortescue talks of the dragoons “trotting” to “seal up the space between the village and the Danube.” If they trotted it was as men trot in their boots, for they were on foot. The incident sufficiently proves the ravages which disease accompanying an insufficiently provided march had worked in Tallard’s cavalry.
12. Nearly all the English authorities and many of the French authorities speak of the whole twenty-seven battalions out of Tallard’s thirty-six as being in Blenheim from the beginning of the action, and Mr. Fortescue adds the picturesque, but erroneous, touch that “Marlborough” (before the action) “had probably counted every one of the twenty-seven battalions into it” (Blenheim).
This error is due to the fact that at the close of the battle there actually were twenty-seven battalions within the village, but they were not there at the beginning of the action; and Marlborough cannot, therefore, have “counted” them going in. The numbers, as I have said, were first nine battalions, with four regiments of dismounted dragoons; then, a little later, another seven, making sixteen; then, much later, and when the French were hard pressed, yet another eleven, lying as a reserve behind Blenheim, were called into the village by the incompetence of Clérambault who commanded in Blenheim. He should have sent them to help the centre—as will be seen in the sequel.
13. 1st battalion Royal Scots; 1st battalion First Guards; 8th, 20th, 16th, 24th, and 10th Foot; 3rd battalion 23rd Royal Welsh, 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers.
14. From one to three squadrons each of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 17th Dragoon Guards, 5th Royal Irish Dragoons, and a squadron of the Scots Greys.
15. This is the number given by Eugene. Fortescue (p. 436) and most English authorities give fifty-two.
16. The 10th, 21st, 23rd, and 24th.
17. For some reason or other, the exaggeration of this feature—the marshiness of the banks of the Nebel—mars many an English account of the action. The Nebel, of course, was something of an obstacle, slight as it was, and in places the meadows on its bank widen out and are soft even in the dry weather which had as a whole distinguished the three weeks before Blenheim. But the crossing of that obstacle by the cavalry was nothing in the story of the battle. It was what the cavalry did after they crossed that counted.
18. Marlborough was at this moment fifty-four years and two months old.