Marlborough (64 page)

They made only one general discharge ten paces from us, killing four or five soldiers, and made off like worthless creatures. These fell on the others on the right, who we had just cut off from the remainder of
their army, and became the prey of our cavalry almost without firing a shot … Whole regiments gave up to our men: Béarn, Ruphié and others were of this number.
⁷⁷

The Allied account tells how the collapse of the French right wing now fatally unbalanced the centre, already exhausted by the battle amongst the hedges north of the Diepenbeek. The French,

beaten from right to left, were forced back again into the enclosures in great disorder, so that at last, when it was growing dark, many battalions, and more squadrons, flung themselves out in a desperate manner, some of them piercing through others, were cut to pieces, some were forced back, some passed through unperceived, and others asked to capitulate for their whole regiments.

As it grew dark Marlborough ordered his men to cease fire: it was better to let some of the enemy escape than lose soldiers to ‘friendly’ musketry. Major Blackader, whose regiment had not reached the field till 5 p.m., thought that the advent of darkness ‘saved them [the French], in all probability, from as great a defeat as ever they got’.
⁷⁸
He might have been surprised to hear that Vendôme agreed with him: ‘Had it not been for the onset of the night, which enabled us to retire, our troops would have been encircled.’
⁷⁹
The wily Eugène was determined not to lose any opportunity to capture more Frenchmen:

I sent out drummers in different directions, with orders to beat the retreat after the French manner, and posted my French refugee officers, with directions to shout on all sides – Here Picardy! Here Champagne! Here Piedmont! The French soldiers flocked in, and I made a good harvest of them: we took in all about seven thousand.
⁸⁰

In total, Burgundy and Vendôme lost about 5,000 men killed and wounded in the battle and 9,000 unwounded prisoners, including nearly eight hundred officers, with over a hundred standards and colours and ten pairs of kettledrums. Marlborough, in contrast, lost just under 3,000 killed and wounded. As was usual with the battles of the age, the sheer number of wounded imposed a burden that the medical services could not bear. The Allied army spent the night in the field, ‘where the bed of honour was both hard and cold’, recalled Blackader,
‘but we passed the night as well as the groans of dying men would allow us, being thankful for our own preservation’.
⁸¹
‘The battle being over and the field our own,’ wrote Private Deane,

the next morning … our two battalions [of 1st Foot Guards] by the Duke’s order marched back again to Oudenarde, marching over the same ground where the hottest of the action happened; which was a heart piercing sight for to see. The dead lie in every hole and corner, [and] to hear the cries of the maimed was saddening yet nothing to what was to be expected considering the heat of the service and what vast quantities of ammunition was spent by the enemy in their fierce and continual firing and the extraordinary advantage they had in the ground, that it was as well that we came off as well as we did.
⁸²

Matthew Bishop, an ex-sailor who had joined Webb’s Regiment not long before, had found the victory extraordinary, ‘as they had the advantage of the ground, and likewise were superior in numbers, which are two great articles’. However, even the ever-sanguine Bishop thought that ‘we were not in a capacity to follow them, but continued there in order to bury our dead on the morrow’.
⁸³

There had been an ill-tempered interview between Burgundy and a grubby and furious Vendôme on the Ghent road at about ten o’clock on the night of the battle. Vendôme first accused Burgundy of doing nothing to help, and then suggested that the intact left wing of the army should hold its ground around Huysse and give battle the following day. Burgundy replied that it was too scattered and was now short of ammunition, which, given the intensity of the battle on the Diepenbeek, may indeed have been true. Pausing only for a last insult, Vendôme rode off through the drizzle to Ghent, where he gave vent to his feelings by easing his belly in the road outside his quarters, coarse behaviour even for the age. Matignon was left to bring the army off as well as he could, and was well served by some of his subordinates: Lieutenant General St-Hilaire, commanding the artillery (much of it stuck up near Gavre all day), got most of his guns away, and the marquis de Nangis found the cavalry of the left wing calmly awaiting orders that never came and led it off to safety. However, some of the survivors of Oudenarde, making for the nearest French garrison, were pursued by peasantry who had now come to look upon all soldiers as enemies. Others simply deserted.

Marlborough spent the night on the field with his soldiers, and rode into a rainy Oudenarde the following morning, politely doffing his hat
to acknowledge the salutes of shoals of captured French officers, who pressed in to see the great man. He immediately wrote to Sarah and Godolphin. ‘I have neither spirits nor time to answer your last three letters,’ he told Sarah,

this being to bring the good news of a battle we had yesterday; in which it pleased God to give us at last the advantage. Our foot on both sides having been all engaged has occasioned much blood … I do, and you must, give thanks to God for his goodness in protecting and making me the instrument of so much happiness to the Queen and the nation, if she will please to make use of it. Farewell my dear soul.
⁸⁴

Godolphin’s letter was entrusted to Lord Stair, whose personal knowledge would amplify its single paragraph. Stair, a Scots nobleman, craved a British peerage, and Marlborough hoped (unavailingly, as it happened) that the queen ‘might be pleased to distinguish him at this time’. Marlborough said that he had risked battle because he needed a victory, and ‘nothing else could make the Queen’s business go on well’, although he knew that ‘If I had miscarried I should have been blamed.’ His head ached so badly that he could add no more, and even on the sixteenth complained, ‘My head is so very hot that I am obliged to leave off writing.’
⁸⁵

At four o’clock on the afternoon of 12 July there was a council of war in the citadel, attended by Marlborough, Eugène, Overkirk, Goslinga and his colleague Gueldermalsen, with the two quartermaster generals, Dopff and Cadogan. Captured standards, colours and kettledrums were brought in as they were talking, and Goslinga remembered ‘that good man M. Overkirk, almost moribund, was sitting down fully dressed, in a big armchair at the end of a room surrounded with all these glorious trophies’.
⁸⁶
The generals were for pressing in against the main fortress line on the French frontier, but Goslinga, with the support of Gueldermalsen, favoured blockading the French army in Bruges and Ghent. It was pointed out to him that such long lines of investment would be vulnerable, and that in an area containing so many civilians, French soldiers would be the last to starve. Eugène was decidedly blunt. ‘I proposed the siege of Lille,’ he wrote. ‘The deputies of the Estates-General thought fit to be of a different opinion. Marlborough was with me, and they were obliged to hold their tongues.’
⁸⁷
In his memoirs, however, Goslinga attributed being voted down to the fact that Marlborough ‘did not wish to see an end to the war, in which his two favourite passions, ambition and avarice, were satisfied and nourished’.
⁸⁸

It is, however, clear from Marlborough’s letter to Sarah that he saw Oudenarde as a victory which might help obtain a negotiated peace. He gave special parole to the captured Lieutenant General Biron, specifying that he was to return to France without first visiting the French army, hoping that Louis would be told just how much damage had been done to it before evasive reports arrived. Marlborough gave Biron dinner at Oudenarde before he left, and asked for news of ‘the Prince of Wales’, James II’s son, known to the French as the chevalier de St George, who had been with Burgundy during the battle. The company seemed delighted to hear of the young man’s character and behaviour, proof, suggests Winston S. Churchill, ‘of the latent streak of sentimental Jacobitism that Marlborough and the English army cherished and, oddly enough, felt able to indulge more particularly in their hours of triumph over French supporters of the Jacobite cause’.
⁸⁹
Biron told Saint-Simon that:

He was struck by an almost royal magnificence at Prince Eugène’s quarters and a shameful parsimony at those of the Duke of Marlborough, who ate the more often at the tables of others; a perfect agreement between the two captains for the conduct of affairs, of which the details fell much more on Eugène; the profound respect of all the generals for the two chiefs, but a tacit preference on the whole for Prince Eugène, without the Duke of Marlborough being at all jealous.
⁹⁰

The day after the battle Eugène ‘was sure that Marlborough would make no arrangements but what were excellent’, and went off to see his mother in Brussels. ‘She was glad to see the King humbled who had left her for another woman in her youth, and exiled her in her old age,’ wrote Eugène, who had certainly played his own implacable part in the humbling.
⁹¹

There was always a good chance that the victorious Allies would turn their attention to the powerful fortress of Lille, known, not for nothing, as ‘Vauban’s masterpiece’. The capital of the old county of Flanders, Lille had been taken by Louis after a short siege in 1667 and then fortified by Vauban in 1668–74. Much of the town’s fortifications has now gone, but some of the old gates remain. The Paris Gate, built by Simon Vollant, survives, proudly embellished with the arms of France and Lille,
crowned by an image of that Victory which seemed so elusive in 1708. The citadel, still sitting like a huge starfish on the north-west edge of the city, covered an area of ninety acres (thirty-six hectares), and its six huge bastions, each protected by a ravelin, had wolfed down sixty million bricks. Its broad ditches were fed from the nearby River Deule. Taking the place would weaken France’s administrative grasp on the whole region, significantly reduce the threat from the Dunkirk privateers, many of whom were financed by its merchants, and provide an invaluable bargaining counter for peace negotiations. But not only was Lille formidable in its own right: it was the spider in a web of French fortresses – Ypres, Douai, St-Venant, Tournai and Béthune – and a besieger’s lines of communication, along which heavy guns and ammunition must pass, lay within reach of other French garrisons.

The Duke of Berwick reached Givet on the Meuse the day Oudenarde was fought, and soon learnt of the magnitude of the French defeat. He assembled some 9,000 stragglers who had made off southwards, and, recognising that they were too badly shaken to stand in open field, parcelled them up amongst the garrisons. Leaving his army to concentrate at Douai, he went forward to Lille, and did what he could to prepare it for the attack he thought likely. Marlborough, meanwhile, had sent Lottum with thirty battalions and forty squadrons to break the line of French fortifications between Warneton and Comines, not far from the small fortress of Ypres, whose name would be seared onto British history two centuries later. Lottum arrived before Berwick could reach the lines, and set his infantry on to levelling the ramparts. Amongst the foot was Matthew Bishop.

We slung our firelocks and every man had a shovel in his hand; and when we got to the place appointed, we ran up their works. It was like running up the side of a house. When we got to the top we began to throw [the rampart] down as quickly as possible in order to make way for the army.
⁹²

Penetrating the lines put Lille within Marlborough’s reach, but it did not end his problems. Louis, now conspicuously writing to Burgundy rather than Vendôme, warned that the Allies would probably besiege Lille, but urged him to retain Bruges and Ghent if he could. This would both complicate Marlborough’s logistics and leave the French something from the wreckage of Oudenarde. Another pitched battle, though, was out of the question. Vendôme, for his part, doubted if it could be
done. He warned the king that pessimistic officers ‘have thrown doubt into the spirit of M the Duke of Burgundy … From the brigadier to the soldier, good will is equal to all trials, but amongst the general officers it is not the same.’
⁹³
Marlborough recognised that ‘their possessing of Ghent, will be a great obstruction to the bringing up of heavy cannon and artillery, so that I fear we shall be obliged to retake that place before we can make any progress’.
⁹⁴

His first solution was a daring amphibious enterprise. His army would march to the coast and then follow the Channel as far as the mouth of the Seine, leaving the fortresses on the frontier grinning away at nothing. Major General Thomas Earle, at that moment off the Isle of Wight with eleven embarked battalions, would seize Abbeville as a forward base. The scheme was bound to be too much for the Dutch, and even Eugène, his fingers burnt at Toulon, would not countenance it. The project had foundered by the end of July, when Marlborough was bending every nerve to assembling resources for the siege of Lille.

Just as Cadogan had been the right man to command the advance guard on the sprint to Oudenarde, so now he was the right man to supervise bringing up the battering train which was to concentrate at Brussels, most of the guns coming by water from Antwerp. The eighty siege guns in the Great Convoy required twenty horses apiece and the twenty heavy mortars sixteen, and there were 3,000 four-horse ammunition wagons. ‘I received this afternoon yours of yesterday evening,’ wrote Marlborough on 31 July, ‘and am glad to see you have found means to get the whole number of wagons from the province of Brabant.’ Later the same day he told Cadogan that he had just held a meeting with Eugène and the deputies, and that it was imperative to get the whole train up just as soon as he could. He followed this, the very next day, with a warning that he had heard that some horses bringing guns in from Mechelen had ‘failed by the way’. Cadogan must not on any account yield up any of his spare horses: ‘They must wait with the train to supply any like accidents that may happen.’
⁹⁵