Marlborough (69 page)

Goslinga maintains that Marlborough would have preferred to besiege Ypres, but Eugène and the rest of the council of war preferred Tournai. Jinking swiftly to invest Tournai was certainly a tactical masterstroke, achieved by striking camp at tattoo on the evening of 15 June and marching all night. ‘Nay, he had done it so privately,’ wrote an admiring Private Deane, ‘that the inhabitants of the town nor soldiers in the garrison knew nothing of it till next day at 3 o’clock in the morning – and then was discovered by a convoy of bread wagons coming innocently out of town laden with provisions for their army’.
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Even Goslinga admitted that it had gone surprisingly well, and that ‘M de Villars was caught head down in the basket’.
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The move may, however, have made less strategic sense. Marlborough had recently asserted that the French, at their last gasp, should be pressed as hard as possible, and sieges, no matter how successful, were unlikely to cause their collapse. Although the written record is silent on the subject, we may doubt whether a thrust along the Channel coast, sustained by seaborne logistics, would have appealed to either Eugène or the Dutch. One of Marlborough’s most astute biographers argues that the abandonment of an offensive reflected Eugène’s influence, ‘which consistently worked towards a conservative policy and by which,
almost uniquely, Marlborough would allow himself to be guided when it contradicted his own opinion’.
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Perhaps there may be more to it than that. Marlborough’s correspondence consistently reflects astonishment at the blighted state of France, and a conviction that the French could not continue the war. Louis was indeed in dire straits: early in July he told Villars that he could spend two or three thousand louis d’or on the fortification of Béthune and St Venant, though it was ‘a sum difficult to assemble in the present state of affairs’.
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Early in July Marlborough warned Heinsius that he did not expect better terms at the end of the campaign than had been embodied in the rejected preliminaries. He was wholly correct in emphasising that the Spanish clause had proved fatal: ‘Were I in the place of the King of France, I should venture the loss of my country much sooner than be obliged to join my troops for the forcing [of] my grandson.’
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Yet he still expected that the French would agree terms close to those suggested that spring, and on 22 July suggested that: ‘The account of the misery and disturbances in France are such, that if it continues they must be ruined.’
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Perhaps the whole rotten structure was about to tumble down, and a brisk kick at Tournai might just prove the last straw. He had a well-placed agent at Versailles whose reports told of people struggling to tear fragments from a dead horse on the Pont Neuf, crowds of unemployed workmen seeking jobs, aristocrats preparing to leave the country, and the king’s guards sleeping booted and spurred in case of insurrection. ‘Certainly,’ he told Godolphin, ‘the misery of France increases, which must bring us to a peace.’
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There was, alas, to be nothing brisk about the siege of Tournai. It was defended by the marquis de Surville-Hautefort with a garrison of some 7,700 men. Surville lacked the troops to defend the town itself, and on 28 July agreed to give it up after some of his outworks had been taken by storm. Marlborough promptly informed the queen of this success, hoping that it might ‘oblige the enemy to submit to such terms as may conduce to a happy and lasting peace’.
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Surville retired into Tournai’s citadel, which, as Private Deane reported, ‘is an invincible strong place for mines’.
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Richard Kane agreed that it was ‘one of the best fortified places by art that is in the world, there being more works a great deal under ground, than above, which made our approach very difficult’.
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Marlborough took direction of the siege while Eugène commanded the field army, but ‘bloody work at the siege’ meant that some regiments had to be relieved from the trenches and replaced by fresh units. The
defenders’ use of mines lent a particular horror to operations, and Sergeant John Wilson thought that

of all the horrid schemes of war, this bringing of mines and sapping to find out the same was the most dreadful, for it was with great reluctance that even the boldest men in the army then on this service have turned their backs and given way. Nay, even those who had seen death in all its shapes above ground was struck with horror to stand (as he supposed) on the top of a mine in danger of being blown up every minute. And those who went under ground into the saps had a co-equal reluctance, if not more, they being in danger every minute either of being suffocated or buried in the rubbish in the like nature.
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Villars, meanwhile, extended his lines to the Scheldt above Condé, and swung his army up behind them between Douai and Valenciennes. On 8 August Marlborough assured Godolphin that Villars was too weak to cover the lines at La Bassée and to prevent the Allies from moving against Valenciennes if they wished to do so. He watched from a distance the slow unrolling of Allied plans for the invasion of south-east France, spoiled first by its slow development, and then checked fatally by the defeat of the Elector of Hanover’s advance guard at Rummersheim in late August. Perhaps, by any reasonable standards, France might be dead, but her corpse was still twitching to some purpose. Marlborough was convinced that the French would come to terms if only the Allies would moderate their demands, and Spain was still the sticking point. He assured Heinsius that ‘the French ministers have it not in their powers to recall the Duke of Anjou’, and declared that ‘the insisting on the [surrender of] three towns in Spain’ made it impossible for the French to come to terms. ‘I call to God to witness that I think it is not in the power of the King of France … it is in my opinion declaring the continuation of the war.’
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Goslinga thought precisely the same, and warned Marlborough that he could not see how ‘by the terms of this treaty we could enter, without firing a shot, into possession of these fortresses which we could never … take by force of arms in four campaigns’. Marlborough, he complains, could give him no satisfactory answer, and attributes this to the fact that he ‘wished for the war to continue because of resentment at his rejection as Governor of the Low Countries, by ambition and desire for money’.
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As we can now see from Marlborough’s correspondence, the accusation that he was anxious for the war to continue was
patently untrue: he was now heartily sick of it, and longed to live out his days at Blenheim, albeit with the captain generalcy as a souvenir of his great and glorious days. In 1706 the emperor, on behalf of Charles III, had offered to make Marlborough governor of the Spanish Netherlands. Godolphin had assured him that the queen ‘likes the thing very well and leaves it to you to do, as you shall judge best for her service and the common cause’.
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Marlborough quickly recognised that ‘it would create a great jealousy, which might prejudice the common cause’, and turned it down.
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It is hard to see how Goslinga could have read Marlborough more incorrectly.

The citadel of Tournai capitulated at last on 3 September, having cost the Allies over 5,000 killed and wounded. Its garrison was allowed to go to France on parole, to await formal exchange with the Allied garrison of Warneton, taken by Le Blanc, the ‘lively, bold and enterprising’
Intendant
of Ypres. Marlborough at once darted south-east to besiege Mons, moving his siege train by water to Brussels and then down to Mons by road. On 7 September he told Godolphin that although he could not begin serious battering till the train arrived, probably towards the twentieth of the month, he hoped to take the little fort of St Ghislain with the guns he had with him, and complete his lines of circumvallation around Mons. Villars had just managed to reinforce its garrison before the iron fist closed around Mons, but there could be little doubt that, once the heavy guns started gnawing at its walls, Mons would go the same way as Tournai.

Louis had hitherto been reluctant to allow Villars to risk battle, arguing that a lost battle would leave France open to invasion, while a victory could not be exploited. That summer Villars was given heavily-qualified permission to fight, and on 6 September Marlborough’s agent at Versailles warned him that Villars now planned to give battle as soon as Tournai surrendered. Moreover, claimed the agent, Boufflers, who had been at Versailles, had now departed for the frontier with his cuirass and weapons.
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The marquis de Cheldon, captured in an outpost action near Mons, was happy to assure his captors that Villars intended to fight, and Lord Orkney told his brother that ‘we had intelligence of Boufflers being come up to their camp with orders to risk all and venture a battle’.
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On 10 September, in his last letter written before Malplaquet, Marlborough told Sarah that a battle might not be far off.

I have received intelligence that the French were on their march to attack us. We immediately got ourselves ready and marched to a post
some distance from our camp. We came in presence between two and three o’clock yesterday in the afternoon, but as there was several defiles between us, we only cannonaded each other. They have last night entrenched their camp, by which they show plainly that they have changed their mind and will not attack us, so we must take our measures in seeing which way we can be most troublesome to them.
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Marlborough had swept down from the north-west to beleaguer Mons, crossing the little River Haine not far from the town. Villars, in turn, had crossed the headwaters of the Scheldt and marched north-eastwards, with the Sambre away to his right. The town of Bavay was the hub of the local road-system, with Roman roads spreading out from it like the spokes of a wheel. Between the two armies lay a series of big, broad-leaved woods. The most northerly, jutting up towards the Haine, and today dismally curtailed by the post-industrial sprawl of towns like Frameries, Paturages and Boussu (for this was once mining country), was then called Sars Wood, named for the village of Sars-la-Bruyère. Then came the small round copse of Thiery Wood. Finally, Lanière Wood, astride the Roman road from Bavay to Givry, closed the southern front of the battlefield, with a bosky finger poking down towards the Sambre near Hautmont. The woods have changed their size and shape somewhat with the passage of two centuries, and, confusingly, the nomenclature of modern maps bears limited relation to that in contemporary accounts. To any traveller making his way from Mons to Malplaquet, and passing the deserted checkpoint that marks the Franco-Belgian border and the stone obelisk that commemorates the battle, the message is clear. This is close country, made for defence, that denies even the most capable general any room for manoeuvre.

There were three militarily-practicable gaps between the woods: the
trouée de Boussu
north of Sars Wood, then the
trouée de la Louvière
north of Thiery Wood, and the Aulnois gap to its south. The ground was generally flat and often marshy, but there was enough microterrain to make a difference to those who must live and die by it. The road from Mons to Bavay forks just north of Sars, and its eastern extension climbs the gentlest of gradients as it traverses the Aulnois gap towards the village of Malplaquet, then as now a few houses strewn along both sides of the road. The solidly-built farm complex of Bléron stood beside a brook just west of Thiery Wood, and, with it, separated the Louvière from the Aulnois gap as the cutwater of a bridge divides the current.

Neither army could get at the other without passing through one of the gaps, and with alert cavalry on both sides it was impossible to ‘steal a march’ and pass a gap without the enemy being able to react. On 8 September, after jockeying around the Boussu gap, the two armies moved up to either end of the Louvière and Aulnois gaps. Marlborough had to leave forces to invest St Ghislain and Mons, and Lieutenant General Henry Withers, with nineteen battalions and ten squadrons, was still on his way down from Tournai. On the eighth Villars told Louis:

I have the honour to inform your Majesty of the resolution taken to assemble the army and give battle to the enemy … I have the honour to tell your Majesty that I am delighted that M le Maréchal Boufflers is here; if we attack, he will bear witness that it is with good reason; if we do nothing, I will be pleased that such a brave man will bear witness that we could not have done better.
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Early on the ninth Marlborough rode forward to reconnoitre, and saw Villars’ army coming up in four large columns. For a moment it seemed as if he might simply push on through one of the gaps beside Thiery Wood, which would have caused some consternation as Eugène was away covering the Boussu gap, but by midday it was evident that he was entrenching a position including Sars Wood on its left and Lanière Wood on its right.

Marlborough was in no position to attack on the ninth. His army was spread out watching the gaps, and what Orkney called ‘a prodigious dusty rain’ caused much confusion. It was only towards mid-afternoon that he had enough guns available to bombard the French, by which time they had ‘began and cannonaded us pretty briskly, particularly where our English foot were, and killed us a good many men’.
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Surprisingly, the Allied commanders decided not to attack on the tenth either. Neither Withers’ men, who would be freed by the fall of St Ghislain on the tenth, nor four German battalions ordered down from Mons, had yet arrived, but Marlborough and Eugène were already stronger than Villars, and the French position grew more formidable by the minute. Failure to attack on the tenth was indeed a serious mistake. ‘Either the battle should have taken place on the 10th or not at all,’ declares Ivor Burton.
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Marlborough, however, was anxious not to miss the chance of what he hoped would be a decisive contest, and trusted to his own skill and his army’s courage to win it.