angle, right in among the trees. Schulemberg's command felt the advantage
of the pressure being exercised on the other side. The French weakened
before it, and in the neighbourhood of eleven o'clock a great part of the
forest of Sars was already filled with the allies, who were beating back
the French in individual combats from tree to tree. Close on noon the
battle upon this side stood much as the sketch map upon the opposite page
shows, and was as good as won, for it seemed to need only a continuation
of this victorious effort to clear the whole wood at last and to turn the
French line.
This is undoubtedly the form which the battle would have taken--a complete
victory for the allied forces by their right turning the French
left--and the destruction of the French army would have followed, had not
the allied left been getting into grave difficulty at the other end of the
field of battle.
[Illustration: Sketch Map showing the peril the French centre ran towards
noon of being turned on its left.]
The plan of the allied generals, it will be remembered, was that the left
of their army under the Prince of Orange should attack the wood of Laniere
about half an hour after the right had begun to effect an entrance into
the opposing forest of Sars. When that half hour had elapsed, that is,
about half-past nine, the Prince of Orange, without receiving special
orders, it is true, but acting rightly enough upon his general orders,
advanced against the French right. Tullibardine with his Scottish brigade
took the worst of the fighting on the extreme left against the extreme of
the French right, and was the first to get engaged among the trees. The
great mass of the force advanced up the opening between the coppice called
the wood of Tiry and the main wood, with the object of carrying the
entrenchments which ran from the corner of the wood in front of Malplaquet
and covered this edge of the open gap. The nine foremost battalions were
led by the Prince of Orange in person; his courage and their tenacity,
though fatal to the issue of the fight, form perhaps the finest part of
our story. As they came near the French earthworks, a French battery right
upon their flank at the edge of the wood opened upon them, enfilading
whole ranks and doing, in the shortest time, terrible execution. The young
leader managed to reach the earthworks. The breastwork was forced, but
Boufflers brought up men from his left, that is, from the centre of the
gap, drove the Dutch back, and checked, at the height of its success, this
determined assault. Had not the wood of Tiry been there to separate the
main part of the Prince of Orange's command from its right, reinforcements
might have reached him and have saved the disaster. As it was, the wood of
Tiry had cut the advance into two streams, and neither could help the
other. The Dutch troops and the Highlanders rallied; the Prince of Orange
charged again with a personal bravery that made him conspicuous before the
whole field, and should make him famous in history, but the task was more
than men could accomplish. The best brigade at the disposal of the French,
that of Navarre, was brought up to meet this second onslaught, broke it,
and the French leapt from the earthworks to pursue the flight of their
assailants. Many of Orange's colours were taken in that rout, and the guns
of his advanced battery fell into French hands. Beyond the wood of Tiry
the extreme right of the Dutch charge had suffered no better fate. It had
carried the central entrenchment of the French, only to be beaten back as
the main body between the wood of Tiry and the wood of Laniere opened.
At this moment, then, after eleven o'clock, which was coincident with the
success of Lottum and Schulemberg in the forest of Sars, upon the right,
the allied left had been hopelessly beaten back from the entrenchments in
the gap, and from the edge of the wood of Laniere.
Marlborough was hurriedly summoned away from his personal command of
Lottum's victorious troops, and begged to do what he could for the broken
regiments of Orange. He galloped back over the battlefield, a mile or so
of open fields, and was appalled to see the havoc. Of the great force that
had advanced an hour and a half before against Boufflers and the French
right, fully a third was struck, and 2000 or more lay dead upon the
stubble and the coarse heath of that upland. The scattered corpses strewn
over half a mile of flight from the French entrenchments, almost back to
their original position, largely showed the severity of the blow. It was
impossible to attempt another attack upon the French right with any hope
of success.
Marlborough, trusting that the forest of Sars would soon be finally
cleared, determined upon a change of plan. He ordered the advance upon the
centre of the position of Lord Orkney's fifteen battalions, reinforced
that advance by drafts of men from the shattered Dutch left, and prepared
with some deliberation to charge the line of earthworks which ran across
the open and the nine redans which we have seen were held by the French
allies and mercenaries from Bavaria and Cologne, and await his moment.
That moment came at about one o'clock; at this point in the action the
opposing forces stood somewhat as they are sketched on the map over page.
The pressure upon the French in the wood of Sars, perpetually increasing,
had already caused Villars, who commanded there in person, to beg
Boufflers for aid; but the demand came when Boufflers was fighting his
hardest against the last Dutch attack, and no aid could be sent.
Somewhat reluctantly, Villars had weakened his centre by withdrawing from
it the two Irish regiments, and continued to dispute foot by foot the
forest of Sars. But foot by foot and tree by tree, in a series of
individual engagements, his men were pressed back, and a larger area of
the woodland was held by the troops of Schulemberg and Lottum. Eugene was
wounded, but refused to leave the field. The loss had been appalling upon
either side, but especially severe (as might have been expected) among the
assailants, when, just before one o'clock, the last of the French soldiers
were driven from the wood.
[Illustration: Sketch Map showing Marlborough bringing up troops to the
centre for the final and successful attack upon the entrenchments about
one o'clock.]
All that main defence which the forest of Sars formed upon the French left
flank was lost, but the fight had been so exhausting to the assailants in
the confusion of the underwood, and the difficulty of forming them in the
trees was so great, that the French forces once outside the wood could
rally at leisure and draw up in line to receive any further movement on
the part of their opponents. It was while the French left were thus drawn
up in line behind the wood of Sars, with their redans at the centre
weakened by the withdrawal of the Irish brigade, that Marlborough ordered
the final central attack against those redans. The honour of carrying them
fell to Lord Orkney and his British battalions. His men flooded over the
earthworks at the first rush, breaking the depleted infantry behind them
(for these, after the withdrawal of the Irish, were no more than the men
of Bavaria and Cologne), and held the parapet.
The French earthworks thus carried by the infantry in the centre, the
modern reader might well premise that a complete rout of the French forces
should have followed. But he would make this premise without counting for
the preponderant role that cavalry played in the wars of Marlborough.
Facing the victorious English battalions of Orkney, now in possession of
the redans, stood the mile-long unbroken squadrons of the French horse.
The allied cavalry, passing between gaps in its infantry line, began to
deploy for the charge, but even as they deployed they were charged by the
French mounted men, thrust back, and thrown into confusion. The short
remainder of the battle is no more than a melee of sabres, but the nature
of that melee must be clearly grasped, and the character of the French
cavalry resistance understood, for this it was which determined the issue
of the combat and saved the army of Louis XIV.
A detailed account of the charges and counter-charges of the opposing
horse would be confusing to the reader, and is, as a fact, impossible of
narration, for no contemporary record of it remains in any form which can
be lucidly set forth.
A rough outline of what happened is this:--
The first counter-charge of the French was successful, and the allied
cavalry, caught in the act of deployment, was thrust back in confusion, as
I have said, upon the British infantry who lined the captured earthworks.
The great central battery of forty guns which Marlborough had kept all day
in the centre of the gap, split to the right and left, and, once clear of
its own troops, fired from either side upon the French horse. Shaken,
confused, and almost broken by this fire, the French horse were charged by
a new body of the allied horse led by Marlborough in person, composed of
British and Prussian units. But, just as Marlborough's charge was
succeeding, old Boufflers, bringing up the French Household Cavalry from
in front of Malplaquet village, charged right home into the flank of
Marlborough's mounted troops, bore back their first and second lines, and
destroyed the order of their third.
Thereupon Eugene, with yet another body of fresh horse (of the Imperial
Service), charged in his turn, and the battle of Malplaquet ends in a
furious mix-up of mounted men, which gradually separated into two
undefeated lines, each retiring from the contest.
It will be wondered why a conclusion so curiously impotent was permitted
to close the fighting of so famous a field.
The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed
the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action.
Any attempt of the French to advance in force after two o'clock would have
led to their certain disaster, for the allies were now in possession of
their long line of earthworks.[14]
On the other hand, the allies could not advance, because the men upon whom
they could still count for action were reduced to insufficient numbers.
Something like one-third of their vast host had fallen in this most
murderous of battles; from an eighth to a sixth were dead. Of the
remainder, the great proportion suffered at this hour from an exhaustion
that forbade all effective effort.
The horse upon either side might indeed have continued charge and
counter-charge to no purpose and with no final effect, but the action of
the cavalry in the repeated and abortive shocks, of which a list has just
been detailed, could lead neither commander to hope for any final result.
Boufflers ordered a retreat, screened by his yet unbroken lines of horse.
The infantry were withdrawn from the wood of Laniere, which they still
held, and from their positions behind the forest of Sars. They were
directed in two columns towards Bavai in their rear, and as that orderly
and unhurried retreat was accomplished, the cavalry filed in to follow the
line, and the French host, leaving the field in the possession of the
victors, marched back westward by the two Roman roads in as regular a
formation as though they had been advancing to action rather than
retreating from an abandoned position.
It was not quite three o'clock in the afternoon.
There was no pursuit, and there could be none. The allied army slept upon
the ground it had gained; rested, evacuated its wounded, and restored its
broken ranks through the whole of the morrow, Thursday. It was not until
the Friday that it was able to march back again from the field in which
it had triumphed at so terrible an expense of numbers, guns, and colours,
and with so null a strategic result, and to take up once more the siege of
Mons. Upon the 9th of October Mons capitulated, furnishing the sole fruit
of this most arduous of all the great series of Marlborough's campaigns.
No battle has been contested with more valour or tenacity than the battle
of Malplaquet. The nature of the woodland fighting contributed to the
enormous losses sustained upon either side. The delay during which the
French had been permitted to entrench themselves so thoroughly naturally
threw the great balance of the loss upon the assailants. In no battle,
free, as Malplaquet was free, from all pursuit or a rout, or even the
breaking of any considerable body of troops (save the Dutch troops and
Highlanders on the left in the earlier part of the battle, and the
Bavarians and Cologne men in the redans at the close of it), has the
proportion of the killed and wounded been anything like so high. In none,
perhaps, were casualties so heavy accompanied by so small a proportion of
prisoners.
The action will remain throughout history a standing example of the pitch
of excellence to which those highly trained professional armies of the
eighteenth century, with their savage discipline, their aristocratic
command, their close formations, and their extraordinary reliance upon
human daring, could arrive.
FINIS
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