Marlborough (63 page)

Everyone in the Allied army soon knew that they were running a race against time. Lieutenant General Natzmer wrote:

On the march we received the cheerful news that Cadogan had thrown bridges over the Scheldt at Eename, near Oudenarde, without any resistance, and also that the enemy, coming up from Alost, were planning to cross the river at Gavre.

This news filled us with joy and in our eagerness we sought out my Lord Duke to allow us to advance at a faster pace.
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Even the lowly Private Deane could see what was afoot:

we marched by break of day, and by 2 in the afternoon we came to Oudenarde, which was a good five leagues, where we were drawn up on the rampart walls until more of our horse advanced, which they did in brave order about 2 in the afternoon. The front of our army passed that river and as fast as they came over were drawn up, in brigades, in order of battle towards the defiles, as well to sustain Major General Cadogan …
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Eugène was there in person, though his troops were still far behind. ‘Towards 12 o’clock the head of our cavalry of the right wing reached the bridges and crossed by the pontoons at a brisk trot,’ he wrote, ‘but the infantry took longer to move, and it was several hours later that they began to cross.’
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‘It was no longer a march,’ declared Goslinga, ‘but a run.’ As successive units breasted the rise at Eename they could see ‘the dust of the enemy’s march in the air as far as the Scheldt; a certain sign that the enemy was trying to cross it before us and dispute the passage’. As this happened, ‘the power of emulation was so great that we could not keep the troops detached to guard our baggage; more than half of them absconded to join their companies on the march’. Goslinga, overcome by the mood of the moment, gave ten pistoles to some dragoons to help clear the way for him. He remained critical of Marlborough, who ‘appeared visibly exhausted, and did not give any positive order for the encouragement of his troops’.
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However, this was one of those moments when an army, shocked and perhaps a little ashamed to have been outwitted, felt strength bubbling back into its veins, and sensed what was required of it without much need for orders. Marlborough and Eugène remained, for the moment, at Cadogan’s crossing site, ‘the sacred anchor for the whole army’, where they heard the musketry to their right swell from a mutter to a roar.

We cannot be sure quite when Vendôme mounted his horse and rode down to meet Biron, for in the wake of the French defeat the issue soon became politicised. Vendôme argued that it was as early as ten in the morning, and that he could not get Burgundy to move till four in the afternoon: if only the royal prince had moved when he was asked to do so, the French would have enjoyed a famous victory. Saint-Simon, in contrast, suggests that it was not until two o’clock, after Allied cavalry had begun to cross and the window of opportunity was closing fast, that Vendôme was sure what was happening. Eugène certainly thought that
the marshals’ failure to agree on a joint course of action and carry it out promptly was fatal. ‘But for this misunderstanding,’ he admitted, ‘we should perhaps have been defeated; for our cavalry was engaged a full hour before the infantry could join it.’
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In contrast, the French Lieutenant General d’Artaignan (sic) maintained that his own infantry was very slow in getting into action in adequate numbers. ‘As the army came up,’ he wrote, ‘we found the enemy had already moved in such strength that we could not oppose the passage of the river, and the business reduced itself to a general action.’
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The official Allied account reckoned that it was not until five o’clock that there was more infantry than the sixteen battalions that had accompanied Cadogan.

When Vendôme approached Eyne he found that the expected counterattack had not taken place. The Allies facing Biron had grown more and more numerous, and a six-gun battery (sited, had Vendôme but known it, by Marlborough in person) had just come into action behind the village of Schaerken on Cadogan’s left. Lieutenant General the marquis de Puységur, Burgundy’s chief of staff and a noted military theorist, had arrived to lay out a camp, and warned him that the ground to his front was impassable. Marshal the marquis de Matignon, another staff officer, agreed, and told Biron to stay where he was. Vendôme reluctantly agreed that an attack was indeed impossible, and moved off to the right with his own cavalry. This happened at about three o’clock, thought the author of the official Allied account: ‘The French cavalry in the plain before our advance guard began to disappear, taking their ground towards their own right.’ The Allies themselves thought that the Diepenbeek in front of Eyne was indeed an obstacle – ‘marshy, and hardly passable for horse, though very narrow’ – so Puységur’s advice was not as foolish as is sometimes suggested.

Cadogan’s men had indeed spent some time filling part of the brook with fascines before they were ready to advance, and not long after three o’clock, with his Prussian brigade now summoned up from the crossings, Cadogan attacked. Sabine’s brigade, directly opposite the village of Heurne, advanced to the tuck of drum without firing a shot until it was twenty yards from the Swiss, and then began to slam in its platoon volleys. Three of the four battalions in the village surrendered almost at once, and the fourth, making off for Heurne, was caught in the open by Rantzau’s horsemen, curling round the northern end of Cadogan’s line, and cut to bits. The three battalions of the second brigade, probably on the western edge of Heurne, fell back in disorder.

Rantzau then turned his attention to Biron’s twelve squadrons, drawn up across the Ghent road, and charged them too, breaking La Bertoche’s regiment and capturing its colonel, standards and kettledrums. He then assailed the French cavalry drawn up between Royegem and Mullem, but although his initial impact did some damage he was driven off by weight of numbers. ‘Here it was that the Electoral Prince of Hanover distinguished himself,’ said the Allied account, ‘charging with his sword in his hand at the head of a squadron of Bulow’s dragoons. His horse was shot under him, and Colonel Loseke that commanded the squadron was killed, fighting bravely by him.’

As Rantzau’s men wheeled back they found that Natzmer’s twenty squadrons had arrived.

Cadogan himself came to me in great joy at our arrival and my coming up in his support. I crossed the village of Eyne, where the fighting had just ended, and formed up beyond it. Soon afterwards Prince Eugène came and greeted me: ‘I find you pretty far ahead.’ He then rushed forward to examine the enemy’s position for himself. In a little while he returned in great spirits, and exclaimed: ‘We have got to get at them hand over fist.’
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It was easier said than done. Although ‘the troops continued to pass the bridges with great diligence’, the Allies were still desperately short of infantry, and the French army, like some great beast aroused from slumber, was at last beginning to grope forward. Burgundy sent Grimaldi with sixteen squadrons to look at the ground on Cadogan’s left, but his leading squadrons found the terrain very soft, and he reported that it was poor going for cavalry, so infantry should be used instead. This was certainly not a frivolous objection: Captain Robert Parker thought that the whole of this central area of the battlefield, now richly cultivated, was ‘a marshy piece of ground, full of trees and brushwood’. It was only on the western flank that it began to open out to ‘a spacious plain … here he [the enemy] drew up the greater part of his cavalry. At the end of this plain is the village [of] Oycke, which covered their right flank: here he also posted a good body of foot and dragoons.’
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Grimaldi rode back to join Burgundy and his entourage at the windmill in Royegem, from which they enjoyed a good view of the field.

Cadogan had now got his infantry into line from Groenewald towards Schaerken, with Natzmer’s and Rantzau’s horsemen on his right flank. Successive waves of French infantry broke against Cadogan’s line, with
Vendôme, in a fighting fury, half-pike in his hand, urging his men on. At perhaps five o’clock he asked Burgundy to throw the whole of the left wing against the cavalry on Cadogan’s right. Burgundy, advised by his staff that the ground was impracticable, decided not to attack, and the officer who rode down to give Vendôme these gladsome tidings was shot before he could deliver the message. It is hard not to sympathise with Vendôme, but equally easy to recognise that he would have been in a better position to argue his case had he been with Burgundy at the mill and not ‘fighting with a pike, like a private soldier rather than a marshal of France charged with the supreme control of ninety thousand men’.
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It was the crisis of the battle. Before Vendôme realised that Burgundy’s attack would never materialise, the Duke of Argyll, pounding up from the bridges ‘with all possible expedition’ with twenty British battalions, came into line on Cadogan’s left, just in time to withstand Vendôme’s next assault. As the French seemed to be gaining ground, Count Lottum’s men, another twenty battalions, swung into action on Argyll’s left. Although the French took the inn (in fact a house of ill repute) at Schaerken at about 5.30, and were perhaps half a mile from the crossing site, Overkirk’s Dutchmen were now crossing the two stone bridges and two pontoon bridges in Oudenarde itself.

Marlborough and Eugène had ridden forward from Cadogan’s crossing site to what seemed the point of main danger, between Groenewald and the Ghent road, early in the afternoon. Now Marlborough sensed that the balance of the battle had changed. At about six o’clock he placed Eugène in command of the whole of his right flank, and galloped across to the centre of Lottum’s line, where eighteen Hanoverian and Hessian battalions, forming a second line there, at last gave him an uncommitted reserve. He did not want to commit Overkirk and Tilly, with their twenty-four battalions and twelve squadrons, to a defensive battle on his right or centre if he could avoid it. Marlborough had early on posted Lumley’s cavalry to cover his left flank, and Lumley reported that the Boser Couter was still unoccupied by the French. Marlborough accordingly ordered Overkirk and Tilly to make for the Boser Couter in the hope of turning the French right.

Eugène, meanwhile, was under frightful pressure – the French at last carried both Herlegem and Groenewald at about 6.15 – but, typically, did not ask for help. Marlborough, however, sensed that his right was close to collapse, and so ordered Lottum to fall back through the fresh Hanoverian and Hessian battalions and march to Eugène’s assistance. Overkirk and Tilly had now made good progress towards Oycke, and
Marlborough ordered them ‘to press the French as much as they could on that side’.

In the hour that followed Marlborough, who had begun the battle looking worn-out after a dreadful week, rose to the very height of his powers. He was now shuffling brigades as a seasoned gambler riffles through a pack of cards, his gallopers and runners forming the central nervous system of an army which responded quickly to his touch. Eugène thought that the Allies now attained this battle-winning tempo, just as the French failed to, because of the personalities of their commanders. He and Marlborough ‘loved and esteemed one another. Even the Dutch marshal Overkirk, remarkable for his age and services, my old friend and Marlborough’s, obeyed us, and fought to admiration.’
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Grumbkow told his royal master that Marlborough had certainly shaken off his gloom.

My Lord Duke shone in this battle, giving his orders with the greatest sangfroid, and exposing his person to danger like the commonest soldier. Prince Eugène showed much spirit under the heaviest fire, and was with the Prussians, whom he had specially sought out.
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It was Overkirk’s last battle, for he was mortally ill, and commanded from his coach. Marlborough had diverted Overkirk’s two leading infantry brigades as they marched up, and they nudged into the right flank of the French infantry fighting on the Diepenbeek, turning the battle there. Lottum’s men reached Eugène in the very nick of time (‘without [them] I should scarcely have been able to keep my ground’, confessed the prince), and Herlegem and Groenewald were regained, though the battle continued to be desperate on Eugène’s flank.

D’Artaignan reckoned that the firepower of the Allied infantry gave it a decided advantage in the battle of the hedgerows. He thought there had never been a firefight like it, and wrote grimly of ‘the terrible fire that the enemy made whenever we appeared’. Even Eugène thought the fighting exceptionally heavy: ‘It was one sheet of flame.’ With the Dutch and Danish horse in the field Marlborough saw that there was now no need to keep Lumley’s troopers on the left, and so he was ordered round to the right, his squadrons trotting behind the battle line to take station behind Natzmer, facing due north against the uncommitted masses of the French left wing.

Lumley’s timely arrival enabled Eugène to take some of the pressure off his sorely-tried infantry by ordering Natzmer’s Prussian cavalry, intact
and drawn up in very good order, to move through a gap made by shifting two battalions, and charge. Natzmer broke the leading French squadrons, crashed into two infantry battalions and broke them too, but then, weary and over-extended, was counterattacked by the
Maison du Roi.
Natzmer himself, cut about the head, jumped a wide ditch to safety, and his survivors rallied behind Eugène’s infantry. The presence of Lumley’s squadrons deterred the French from exploiting the Prussian repulse. The Allied account paid special tribute to ‘the Prussian Gens d’Armes, [who] distinguished themselves very much, and lost nearly half their numbers in this action’.

By now, though, Overkirk was making his presence felt. He had moved up the road, through Bevere and onto the Boser Couter, in column, and when he reached Oycke he swung eastwards and shook out into line, heading for Royegem. Amongst Overkirk’s subordinates was the young Prince of Orange and Nassau-Dietz, seeing his first battle at the age of nineteen, but leading the attack with the courage that had always been the hallmark of his house. There was little enough the French, preoccupied with the battle to their front, could now do to stop him. D’Artaignan reported ‘our infantry much in disorder … without ammunition against an enemy who had plenty of it’. The
Maison du Roi
closed right up behind his foot soldiers ‘with a courage and firmness worthy of them’, but the infantry itself was played out. As the Dutch began to push eastwards the
Maison du Roi
, again trying to take the weight of the infantry at the close of this awful day, attempted to charge them. Goslinga had earlier galloped across to the Dutch with orders. As the
Maison du Roi
formed up he could see what was coming, and dismounted to fall in with Sturler’s Swiss regiment: ‘after a little compliment I made them of wishing to fight with such brave fellows … Our Swiss were resolved to wait for them with fixed bayonets and not to fire until they were at point-blank range, keeping such a profound silence that I was astonished.’ When the volley rolled out, the
Maison du Roi
was stopped in its tracks: Goslinga saw a drum-horse shot down and the kettledrums it bore, scarcely less of a trophy than cavalry standards or infantry colours, taken. The Swiss then advanced against the French infantry, but now it would not stand.