Marlborough (45 page)

Marlborough then ordered his dragoons to dismount and join the assault, and, though somewhat hampered by their big boots and long swords, they went on up the charnel slopes, with the horse, still mounted, closing up behind them. We cannot tell whether, as chaplain Sandby suggests, it was ‘their brave example’ that animated the infantry, or simply the fact that serried ranks of steady mounted men gave no opportunity for any faint-hearted foot soldiers to scuttle back into the ruins of Berg, that so buttressed the attack that the infantry tried yet again. It was now about seven o’clock: Marlborough’s men had suffered very heavily, and there was no apparent progress. Then came a report that some of the attackers, edging away to their right, had found that the trench and
gabion line connecting hill and town was not effectively held, and that du Bordet’s men were not firing from the loopholes in the old curtain wall round the town, whence musketry might have made any breakthrough impossible. Marlborough sent an officer to confirm this, and Prince Louis seems to have discovered the lapse at much the same time. His three fine battalions of Imperial grenadiers, all moustaches, matchboxes and mitre caps, were still under his hand in the valley of the Kaibach, and he immediately shoved them into the gap. D’Arco at once counterattacked with some dragoons, whom he had husbanded on the reverse slope, but the grenadiers, coming on briskly to the rattle of their side-drums, brushed them aside.

On the hill Count Maffei, d’Arco’s deputy, could not make out the colours and field-signs worn by the advancing troops: the French and their allies generally wore a white ribbon or paper in their hats, and the Imperialists a sprig of greenery. By the time he had realised that they were not reinforcements coming up from the town it was too late: the position was fatally compromised. De la Colonie’s men struggled back over the crest in good order but eventually broke. He discovered that the drummer assigned to look after his horse had decamped with the beast. Hit in the jaw, he eventually jettisoned his long riding boots and ‘richly laced coat’, by now greasy with blood and brains, and scorched by the powder burns of close-range musketry, to swim the Danube to safety. He was in good company: d’Arco also swam for his life, and the pontoon bridge collapsed under the weight of fugitives. Marlborough quickly ordered Brigadier Ferguson, apparently the senior unwounded officer on the hill, to ‘keep the foot to their colours’ to secure the place, while he unleashed the horse in pursuit, ensuring that d’Arco paid the heavy price of losing a battle with a river at his back.

The battle was shockingly costly, with almost 5,500 Allied casualties and at least 8,000 French and Bavarian, many of them drowned in the Danube. About one-third of the attacking infantry were hit: 1st Foot Guards lost twelve officers and 217 men, the two battalions of Orkney’s Regiment (whom we last saw as Dumbarton’s, holding the Bussex Rhine half a lifetime ago) thirty officers and 418 men, and Ingoldsby’s (later the Royal Welch Fusiliers) sixteen officers and 228 men. Poor Chaplain Noyes of Orkney’s reported ruefully that ‘We carried the place, but at a cost very dear, the enemy being obstinate … we are not yet recovered out of the confusion the death of our friends has put us in.’ He thought a good deal of the damage had been done by ‘friendly fire’. ‘They were in such great numbers combined in the attack,’ he wrote, ‘that sometimes
the hindest firing at random (as on such occasions there is always some confusion) shot those that were before them.’ Lieutenant General Lumley told him that ‘the Hollanders had not a general officer at present in a condition to lead them’.
⁵¹

The toll of officers was certainly high, and bore eloquent testimony to their courage in leading successive assaults. That resolute Dutchman Johan van Goor was dead, hit in the head at the first assault. He had been acting as Dutch quartermaster general, and Marlborough particularly mourned his loss, for he ‘helped me in a great many things, which I am now forced to do myself, till I can find some other officer I can rely on for it’. He now lies in the great church at Nordlingen, with a dignified memorial tablet on the wall. Goor’s countryman Major General Beinheim was dead too, and so was the Imperialist major general the Prince of Wolfenbüttel. Prince Louis had been wounded in the foot. Although this was not apparently as serious as the wound suffered by his comrade Count Styrum, shot through the body, it would eventually fester and kill him. Both the Prince of Hesse and Count Horn, who commanded the Württemberg contingent, were also wounded.

On 3 July Marlborough told Sarah that ‘We have ruined the best of the Elector’s foot,’ though the ‘English foot has suffered a good deal’ in the process. He assured her that all her personal friends were well, apart from Major General Wood and Brigadier General Meredith, both wounded but predicted (correctly) to recover.
⁵²
Private Deane thought that his opponents

made a brave defence and bold resistance against us as brave and loyal hearted gentlemen soldiers ought to for their prince and country … both English and Dutch behaved themselves to admiration and the foreigners, give them their due, did stand like a wall and acted as became brave gentlemen and as duty combines a soldier at such a juncture, and several general officers they lost in this action and abundance of old experienced sentinels. A glorious action it was to be sure for this vigorous and bold attack held near 3 hours but with God’s assistance we driving them out of their works and possessing ourselves of them. Our horse likewise pursued and killed abundance of them driving several hundreds of them into the River Danube …
⁵³

Chaplain Noyes reported that ‘our horse and dragoons hacked them down at a miserable rate … but far the greatest part fell into the hands of the [Imperial] hussars who gave no quarter’.
⁵⁴

The Allies seized d’Arco’s camp that day, with fifteen pieces of cannon (the exuberant Private Deane reported thirty-one guns and a mortar) and abundant baggage and ammunition: the accidental explosion of an underground powder magazine ‘did some mischief to a squadron of Dutch dragoons’. On 4 July the garrison of Donauwörth, ordered by the Elector to escape, first firing the town and destroying the bridge, ‘durst not stay to execute their design’, but left the bridge damaged but still usable, and a rich store of food, powder and ‘three great guns’.
⁵⁵
The Danish contingent under the Duke of Württemberg, twenty-one squadrons and seven battalions, arrived in camp on 5 July, counterbalancing the losses incurred in the storm.

Of Marlborough’s admirers, Winston S. Churchill glosses quite quickly over the Schellenberg, possibly because it reminded him too much of what his own generation had so recently lived through. David Chandler, in contrast, suggests that the weakening of the crucial link between town and Schellenberg ‘had been Marlborough’s intention’.
⁵⁶
The truth is more complex. At the tactical level the attack on the Schellenberg was necessarily unsubtle. Marlborough did not have the time for a more elaborate plan, and all contemporary accounts emphasise that the discovery of the weak spot was fortuitous, although the Allied reaction was swift and decisive. The battle was, then, no tactical masterpiece: it was won by the sheer courage of the Allied infantry.

However, at what we would now call the operational level, the linking of battles and engagements to form a coherent campaign, the Schellenberg was indeed a masterpiece, and, however dark its hue, it could not have been painted had Marlborough not hustled on to attack before Max Emmanuel had arrived. Sharp offensive action, not for the last time, was the key to his success. As Marlborough pointed out in the many letters he wrote to strengthen his political hand after the action, it was ‘a very severe blow’ for Max Emmanuel, who had lost some of his finest infantry. The fact that the Elector could not check the Allied foot with his best men in the defences of the Schellenberg cast a long shadow. Donauwörth, taken with so little damage, provided a valuable forward base for the next leg of the campaign. Max Emmanuel could not now prevent the Allies from entering what Marlborough called ‘the heart of Bavaria’. Finally, it is very often true that the first major clash of a campaign establishes the pattern of what is to come, and so it was with the Schellenberg.

Marlborough told Heinsius that he would ‘press the Elector’ in the hope that he would ‘make an accommodation’. Indeed, on 14 July Max Emmanuel agreed that in return for 600,000 crowns a year he would supply the Allies with 12,000 men. But just before signing the definitive treaty, he heard that Tallard was on his way from the Rhine to join him with some 35,000 men, and at once reneged on the deal as being inconsistent with his principles. On 23 July Marlborough told Sarah that he must provoke the Elector into fighting or making peace.

If he does not his whole country is in our power, for we have it behind us, and he may be sure that if he does not make peace, we will destroy it before we leave. You will, I hope, believe that my nature suffers, when I see so many fine places burnt, or that must be burnt, if the Elector will not hinder it.
⁵⁷

A week later he added:

We sent this morning 3,000 horse to his chief city of Munich, with orders to burn and destroy all the country about it. This is so uneasy to my nature that nothing but an absolute necessity could have obliged me to consent to it, for these poor people suffer only for their master’s ambition, there having been no war in this country for above 60 years. Their towns and villages are so clean that you would be pleased with them.
⁵⁸

Oddly enough, de la Colonie, who could see the smoke of burning villages from the Electoral palace in Munich, did not believe that the destruction was deliberate. ‘I do not say that a few houses were not burnt,’ he wrote, ‘but the enemy generals did not have the deliberate intention of ordering this; it was the work of marauders in the army who, angry at finding the houses of peasants abandoned and without effects, set fire to some of them.’
⁵⁹
That was certainly not how Sergeant Wilson remembered his orders. He thought that the army was allowed ‘free plunder’ in Bavaria, and confirmed that horse were sent out ‘to burn and plunder the Elector of Bavaria’s country, even to the very gates of Munich’.
⁶⁰
Mrs Davies, still convincingly disguised as a soldier, admitted that:

we miserably plundered the poor inhabitants of the Electorate; I had left the hospital in time enough to contribute to their misery, and to have a share in the plunder. We spared nothing, 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. I filled two bed-ticks [quilt covers], after having thrown out the feathers, with bell-metal, men’s and women’s clothes, some velvets, and about a hundred Dutch caps, which I had plundered from a shop; all which I sold by the lump to a Jew, who followed the army to purchase our pillage, for four pistoles … I got several pieces of plate, as spoons, mugs, cups etc, all which the same conscionable merchant had at his own price.
⁶¹

Chaplain Josias Sandby maintained that the duke ordered the burning to stop, and in any event ‘spared the woods, which are stately and numerous in this country. Consisting entirely of tall fir trees and pinastres.’ However, another officer recalled how: ‘we burnt and plundered almost all the villages right and left, which are indeed very frequent and very fine in this country. In this last march in particular we entirely burnt a mighty pretty village with a noble church and cloister.’
⁶²
Prince Louis, thinking perhaps of his own prosperous villages, found the whole business deeply distasteful, declaring that he wished to fight like a general, not like a hussar.

The Elector, though, would neither fight nor treat, and now Marlborough, so confident after the Schellenberg, was feeling the balance of the campaign tilt against him. He had taken Neuberg and Rain, but his lack of heavy guns at first precluded more serious sieges, and so Munich was invulnerable. He soon knew that Tallard was on his way from the Rhine, with 35,000 men and a huge convoy of provisions, planning to link up first with Marsin’s French contingent, entrenched at Augsburg, and then with the Elector, on the move with the remnants of his own army: indeed, on 6 August Tallard joined Marsin at Biberbach on the River Lech near Augsburg. Marlborough had already sent thirty squadrons to help Eugène, who hoped that he might be able both to hold Villeroi in the Lines of Stollhofen and perhaps to block Tallard too. He discovered that he could not do both, left a strong detachment to pin Villeroi to the Lines, and then took the bulk of his army back towards Marlborough’s, reaching Höchstädt on the Danube at the end of the first week of August.

Marlborough and Eugène were close enough to support one another
by 7 August, and now had a good chance of bringing on the battle they both desired by tempting their opponents to try an attack on either army before they were fully joined. To give themselves another major crossing over the Danube in case the Franco-Bavarians compromised that at Donauwörth, the Allied generals agreed that Prince Louis would turn eastwards to begin the siege of Ingolstadt with 15,000 men, an operation covered from the enemy by the two Allied armies. Several reliable historians argue (as did Mérode-Westerloo at the time) that this was largely a device to get ‘the cautious and obstructive Margrave out of the way during the series of bold operations about to commence’, and Louis went to his grave three years later believing that the Ingolstadt ploy was really a shabby trick designed to keep him away from the decisive battle.
⁶³

However, Marlborough assured Heinsius that the siege made perfect sense. The Elector had abandoned Bavaria to join forces with the French, leaving only a few troops in Munich and Augsburg, ‘So that Prince Louis will have it in his power during the siege of Ingolstadt to do whatever he pleases with his horse in the country of Bavaria.’ Marlborough would reinforce Eugène, and join him with the whole of his army the second he heard that the French had crossed the Danube. The Franco-Bavarians would ‘not be able to hinder us from going on with the siege’, and if they offered an opportunity for battle he would certainly take it, ‘our troops being full of courage and desiring nothing more’.
⁶⁴
There is no trace of subterfuge here. Prince Louis was a steady and experienced commander who would press the siege of Ingolstadt to its conclusion. Eugène, in any case the senior Imperialist officer in the theatre, was much better suited to a period of swift manoeuvre.