1701-1717.
MARLBOROUGH’S CAMPAIGNS IN THE WAR OF THE SPANISH SUCCESSION.
Almost before the troops from Flanders had shaken down into their
winter quarters, the anti-military party in England raised the cry
of “No standing army” with such vigour that Parliament insisted on
the disbandment of many regiments; in each of the remainder three
companies were entirely suppressed, and the others cut down to a
strength of two sergeants, two corporals, a drummer, and thirty-four
private soldiers, while officers at the rate of one for every ten men
were allowed to remain with the Colours. In 1701 war again broke out
on the Continent. This war, known as that of the Spanish Succession,
was but a sequel to the conflict ended at Ryswick, and was again
caused by Louis XIV.’s determination to conquer the best part of
Europe. Without waiting for a formal declaration of hostilities,
Louis struck hard and quick; and occupied the fortresses of Ostend,
Nieuport, Oudenarde, Ath, Mons, Charleroi, Namur, and Luxemburg, and
nearly all the strongholds on the Meuse from Namur to Venloo, thus
threatening at once the southern border of Holland and the keys to
its south-eastern frontier, the fortresses of Grave, Nimeguen, and
Fort Schenk. The Allies again took up arms; in June the XVIIIth and
eleven other regiments were sent off to Holland under Marlborough’s
command; and Parliament decided that England should furnish a
contingent of forty thousand men, of whom eighteen thousand were to
be British and the remainder foreigners, taken temporarily into our
pay.
Before the English troops settled down into their winter quarters,
William III. reviewed the infantry, whose uniform was at that time
both comfortable and picturesque. They wore loosely-fitting red
coats, cut long enough to protect the thighs from wet and cold;
waistcoats, visible when the skirts of the coat were buttoned back
to allow the legs free play in marching; breeches with gaiters,
buttoning high above the knee, and shoes. Their head-dress was a
cocked-hat, like that of a Chelsea pensioner, and their hair was
plaited in a pig-tail, which was plastered with powder and tied up
with bows.
At the beginning of 1702, the Allies discovered that though Louis
had echeloned considerable numbers of troops along the Rhine and
the lower Scheldt, his immediate object was to gain possession of
the fortresses of Grave, Nimeguen, and Fort Schenk: and a force of
25,000 men, among whom were the XVIIIth and most of the other British
regiments, was assembled at Cranenburg, a few miles from Nimeguen,
to watch a French army, 60,000 strong, encamped some twenty miles to
the southwards. In the absence of Marlborough, who was detained at
the Hague by diplomatic business, the army on the Meuse was under the
Earl of Athlone, as Ginkell was now called: the French were commanded
nominally by the Duke of Burgundy, but really by de Boufflers, who
accompanied this royal prince as military adviser. The old Marshal
had not forgotten his humiliation at Namur in 1695; and finding out
that Athlone’s intelligence department and system of patrolling were
equally bad, by a sudden swoop so nearly surprised his camp that his
troops had to abandon their camp and baggage and hasten for shelter
to Nimeguen, where their reception was the reverse of cordial. The
Governor was indignant with the Dutch Government for having promoted
Athlone over his head; he was suspected of having sold himself to
the enemy, and either from treachery or from the wish to see his
rival cut to pieces, shut the gates upon him as he approached the
fortress,[26] and refused to take any measures for its defence. The
civilian population, however, had no intention of surrendering; they
broke open the stores, dragged guns to the ramparts, carried up
powder and shot upon their backs, and opened so furious a fire that
the French drew off in disgust.
Marlborough, whose recent appointment as Commander-in-Chief of the
allied forces had created much ill-will among the Dutch generals,
now joined the army, and concentrated 60,000 men, of whom 12,000
were British, in the neighbourhood of Nimeguen. Never was a general
more sorely tried by incompetent and jealous subordinates than
Marlborough in this campaign. He was comparatively an unknown man;
he had never commanded a large army in the field; many of his
colleagues distrusted him, and took every opportunity of thwarting
his plans; and, above all, his footsteps were dogged by two Dutch
civilian officials, styled Field Deputies, who had power to refuse
him leave to employ the troops of Holland in operations of which
they did not approve. Four times, by rapid marches and skilful
strategy, he forced the French into positions where they could only
fight at great disadvantage; and four times was victory snatched
from him by the obstinacy of the Dutch leaders or the timidity of
the Field Deputies. The campaign of 1702, however, was by no means
barren of results, for Marlborough was allowed to recapture various
fortresses on the Meuse. The first place to be invested was Venloo:
the Germans sat down before the south and east of the town; to the
Dutch and the British was allotted the attack on the north and west,
and, after three weeks’ hard work, the British brigade, of which the
XVIIIth formed part, sapped up to the foot of the glacis of Fort
St Michael, a strong outwork of the main fortress. Prince Nassau,
whom Marlborough had deputed to carry on the siege in his absence,
then ordered a lodgment to be made on the top of the glacis as a
preliminary to a future attack on the covered way. The whole of the
XVIIIth moved into the trenches early in the morning: about midday
they were joined by three companies of grenadiers and several hundred
men from the other regiments in the brigade; and in the course of the
afternoon Lord Cutts called the officers together, and, apparently on
his own responsibility, enlarged the orders originally issued. The
British were not to be satisfied with making a lodgment, but if they
found the French “give way with precipitation, they were to jump into
their works and follow them, let the consequence be what it would!
‘These were fine orders from a general,’ remarks Kane grimly, ‘but as
inconsiderate as they were, we as inconsiderately and rashly followed
them.’”
At four o’clock the explosion of a barrel of powder gave the signal
for the assault; the artillery opened a heavy fire, and the British
advanced. After a short resistance, the French ran back to the
covered way, followed by the Royal Irish, who pursued them into a
ravelin, where a captain and sixty men fought gallantly till nearly
all were disabled. The survivors rushed towards a small wooden
bridge, spanning a wet ditch eight or ten feet deep and a hundred
feet in width. The end of this bridge was made of loose planks; and
had the French done their duty when they crossed it, they would have
tossed these planks into the ditch, and thus made a death-trap, into
which the leading British soldiers as they followed them would have
been thrust by their comrades in rear. But in their panic the French
forgot to take this precaution; the XVIIIth got safely across, and
chased the enemy to the foot of the wall of the main fortification.
The men were wild with delight at their success, but the senior
officers realised that the situation was a desperate one: a few
hundred British troops were entangled among the unbreached works of a
fort, whose garrison, though undoubtedly surprised, had suffered but
little in the attack. To retire was out of the question, but to scale
the wall looming high and grim above them appeared impossible, until
the fugitives, whom the soldiers were chasing with their bayonets,
solved the problem by darting to a part of the wall where much grass
grew, and hauling themselves up from tuft to tuft. Where a Frenchman
could climb an Irishman could follow, and after a desperate scramble,
the red-coats began to mount the ramparts, when the enemy, utterly
confounded by the unconventionality of the assault, hastily retired
into the body of the fort, threw down their arms, and begged for
quarter. Their lives were spared, and the booty given to the troops.
This capture cost the British two hundred and ninety-seven killed and
wounded.[27] The casualties among the XVIIIth are not recorded.
Two days later the siege came to an end in a very curious way. To
celebrate a recent victory in another part of Europe, the Allies
paraded all their troops and marched close up to the town to fire a
_feu-de-joie_ into it with shotted guns and muskets. The inhabitants
had suffered much from the bombardment, especially since the cannon
of Fort St Michael had been turned against them, and when they
saw the movement, feared that the walls were going to be stormed
forthwith; some rushed to the Governor to urge him to surrender,
while others flocked to the ramparts with white cloths in their
hands, crying “Mercy, Mercy, Quarter, Quarter.” The Governor asked to
be allowed to capitulate, and, says Parker, “as we had other sieges
to carry on this season, the Prince allowed them honourable terms.”
Nassau next took the fortress of Ruremonde after a nine days’ siege,
and then joined Marlborough’s main army near Liege, an open town
commanded by a citadel and a smaller fort. When the French garrison
heard that the Allies were advancing, they sorrowfully exchanged
their comfortable billets in the houses of the burghers for the
casemates of the forts; and as soon as the enemy had left the town,
the inhabitants sent a deputation to Marlborough to offer him the
city keys in token of submission, and to entreat him to preserve
Liege as far as possible from the horrors of war. Cutts, with ten
British regiments, was ordered to occupy the town, while the rest of
the army began operations against the forts. The siege, which lasted
eighteen days, ran its ordinary course: batteries were thrown up,
trenches were dug, outworks were captured, and when the gunners had
made a practicable breach the assault was delivered. Millner, in his
quaint language, tells us that though the French fought very well,
“the Allies after one Hour’s very hot and sharp Dispute beat the
Enemy from off the Breach, and entered the Fort amongst them
with Sword in Hand, killing all before them; and had killed all
therein, had not the French instantly thrown down their arms, and
earnestly beg’d for Quarter, which our People soon after granted,
being always prone to give Mercy, when Need most requires....
Much of the Honour of this Action may be attributed to Lord
Cutts’ good Conduct, in sending up speedily an assistance of
Twelve Hundred Men from the ten Battalions in the Town, which
suddenly rushed in on the side of the Citadel next to the City,
in the very greatest heat of the action, before the Enemy was
aware thereof, contrary to their Expectation; the which did very
much surprize and daunt the Enemy, and made them quit the Breach
much sooner than could otherwise have been expected.”
Next day the smaller fort surrendered, and thus, on October 23,
1702, Liege was recovered from the French at a cost of about twelve
hundred killed and wounded, of whom nearly half were British.
Though none of the regimental historians mention any casualties in
the XVIIIth, it by no means follows that there were none among the
regiment, for Stearne and Kane, Parker and Millner were all such
confirmed fire-eaters that, as a rule, they appeared to consider it
beneath their dignity to mention any but very heavy losses. The fall
of Liege marked the end of the campaign, and the British contingent
marched back to Holland, where the XVIIIth again went into quarters
at Huesdon, the town where they had spent the winter of 1701-2.
The year 1703 brought no laurels to the British in Flanders. Dutch
incapacity and obstinacy again hampered Marlborough’s movements; he
failed to bring the French to battle, and accomplished little beyond
the retaking of a few small fortresses. At the sieges of two of these
places, Huy and Limberg, the XVIIIth was present. The regiment spent
the first part of the winter at Breda, then reinforced the garrison
of Bergen-op-Zoom, and afterwards returned to Breda, whence it sent
a strong detachment to Maestricht.
But if little of importance happened on the shores of the North
Sea during this campaign, great events took place in the south of
Germany, where the Elector of Bavaria had deserted the coalition and
attached himself to the fortunes of Louis XIV. The Gallo-Bavarians,
as the troops of the new alliance were called, captured several
fortified towns belonging to the Emperor of Austria, and defeated
the Imperialists at the battle of Hochstädt.[28] Encouraged by these
successes, Louis evolved a plan of campaign almost Napoleonic in its
grandeur. Its main object was the capture of Vienna. One army was
to force its way from Italy through the Tyrol to Austria; another
was to march from Strasburg on the Upper Rhine into South Germany,
reinforce the 45,000 Gallo-Bavarians, and join hands with the troops
from Italy; while to harass Austria from the rear a strong detachment
was to be sent to Hungary to help the inhabitants in their chronic
rebellion against the Emperor. In Flanders de Villeroi was to remain
on the defensive, while on the Moselle 10,000 troops stood ready to
reinforce either flank.
On his side Marlborough had also conceived a daring scheme. As a
soldier, he saw clearly that a mere war of sieges would produce no
decisive results; as a politician, he saw equally clearly that the
coalition would go to pieces unless Austria was delivered from
the Gallo-Bavarian peril,--and he decided that the best way of
helping the Emperor was to leave to the Dutch the defence of the Low
Countries, and to carry the war into the heart of Germany. As he
knew that the Dutch would oppose his project to the uttermost, he
took only two or three of his officers into his confidence; he wrung
a reluctant consent from the Dutch Government to the withdrawal of
troops from Holland by pretending that he was about to attack the
French on the Moselle, and for several weeks after he had set his
army in motion the troops had no idea to which part of the Continent
they were heading.
On May 19, 1704, Marlborough began his celebrated march; his force
included 16,000 British troops, among whom were the headquarter
companies of the XVIIIth, joined a few days later by the detachment
from Maestricht. Disregarding the protests of the Dutch and of the
petty princelings whose territories were being threatened by the
French, he pushed resolutely forward, and covering from twelve to
fifteen miles a-day worked up the right bank of the Rhine from
Coblentz.[29] As each of the French generals formed different
theories to account for Marlborough’s unexpected movement, they
failed to combine against him; on the 3rd of June he crossed the
Necker, and then turned south-east towards Donauwörth, a town on
the Danube, which he had decided to make his advanced base for the
invasion of Bavaria.
On the 1st of July the Allies encamped at Amerdingen, and at three
o’clock next morning Marlborough marched upon his objective, fifteen
miles off. He rode with the advance-guard--thirty-five squadrons,
three regiments of Austrian grenadiers, and six thousand Continental
and British infantry, among the latter being a detachment of the
XVIIIth, about a hundred and thirty of all ranks.[30] The main body
of the army followed two hours later. Pushing on with an escort of
cavalry the Duke began his personal reconnaissance about 9 A.M., and
found that the town of Donauwörth lay in a valley on the north, or
left bank of the Danube, and was commanded by a steep and flat-topped
hill. This hill, the Schellenberg, was the key of the position: the
Gallo-Bavarians had connected it with the town by field-works, and
twenty-five hundred horse and ten thousand foot were encamped upon
its summit. During the day Marlborough learned that Louis XIV. had
ordered strong columns from Flanders and the Upper Rhine to move upon
South Germany; and his keen eyes detected on the farther bank of
the river preparations for the immediate reception of a large body
of men. He accordingly decided to attack the hill at once, without
waiting for the whole of his main body to come up: but owing to vile
roads and broken bridges it was not until six o’clock that the troops
were formed for battle at the foot of the slope, about five hundred
yards in length, which led up to the works on the north-west side
of the Schellenberg. The infantry of the advance-guard were drawn
up in four lines, with the cavalry behind them in two lines; eight
battalions were in support, and an equal number were in reserve.
During the day the cavalry had made fascines, with which the enemy’s
ditches were to be filled up, and as soon as these great bundles of
faggots had been distributed among the infantry the advance began.
Under a cross fire of artillery, the columns breasted the hill
without stopping to fire a shot until they were within eighty yards
of the entrenchments, when a sudden outburst of grape and musketry
made havoc among the crowded ranks. For a moment the men recoiled
before this hail of missiles; then recovering themselves, they pushed
on until their leaders reached a hollow road, which in the excitement
of the moment was mistaken for the ditch in front of the works
they were to storm. Before the blunder was discovered the fascines
had been thrown in, and consequently when the heads of the columns
reached the real ditch they had no means of crossing it, and were
exposed to such a hurricane of bullets and hand-grenades that when
the enemy made a furious counter-attack with the bayonet some of the
troops gave way. Three British regiments saved the situation;[31]
they stood like rocks; the partially broken corps rallied on them,
and then after a hard struggle drove back their gallant foes into
their entrenchments.
A French officer who commanded one of the battalions that fought so
stoutly on the 1st of July, 1704, has left a lurid picture of the
combat.
“The English infantry led this attack with the greatest
intrepidity, right up to our parapet, but they were opposed with
a courage at least equal to their own. Rage, fury and desperation
were manifested by both sides, with the more obstinacy as the
assailants and the assailed were perhaps the bravest soldiers
in the world. The little parapet which separated the two forces
became the scene of the bloodiest struggle that could be
conceived.... It would be impossible to describe in words strong
enough the carnage that took place during the first attack,
which lasted a good hour or more. We were all fighting hand to
hand, hurling them back as they clutched at the parapet; men
were slaying, or tearing at the muzzles of guns and the bayonets
which pierced their entrails; crushing under their feet their
own wounded comrades, and even gouging out their opponents’ eyes
with their nails, when the grip was so close that neither could
make use of their weapons. I verily believe that it would have
been quite impossible to find a more terrible representation of
Hell itself than was shown in the savagery of both sides on this
occasion.”[32]
By dint of drawing men from the parts of the defences unthreatened
by the Allies, the Gallo-Bavarians were able to keep the troops on
the north-west of the hill at their full strength: and they repulsed
the next assault so heavily that it was found necessary to bring a
large number of British cavalry into the thick of the fire to support
the shaken, though by no means beaten, infantry. Our enemies were
beginning to congratulate themselves on their success, when the
remainder of Marlborough’s main body came into action against the
west of the hill, where the works had been almost denuded of their
garrisons; they took these works with little loss, repulsed a charge
of cavalry, and then struck the Gallo-Bavarians in flank. About this
time the Allies made another attempt to carry the entrenchment, and
were once more beaten back. So serious did things look that the Scots
Greys were ordered to dismount and attack the works on foot; but
maddened at the thought that cavalrymen were called in to do the work
which foot soldiers had failed to accomplish, the infantry then made
one final, desperate effort, and surged triumphantly over the parapet
from which they had been repulsed so often. Now at length the French
and the Bavarians, exhausted by their magnificent defence, driven
from their works in front and hard pressed in flank, gave way; and
their retreat soon degenerated into a rout, as they rushed towards
the river with all the allied cavalry thundering after them. The
victory was very complete: of the twelve thousand men who had watched
the Allies form for the assault not more than three thousand rejoined
their regiments; the remainder were killed, wounded, captured, or
drowned in the waters of the Danube; and thirteen standards, fifteen
guns, and all the stores at Donauwörth fell into the victors’ hands.
But the success was dearly won, for though the engagement lasted less
than two hours, it cost the Allies more than five thousand officers
and men. The British, as usual, lost very heavily; 33 officers,
among whom was a major-general, were killed, and 83 wounded; 420
“sergeants and sentinels” were killed, and 1001 wounded; in all 1537,
or “probably more than 33 per cent of the number engaged.”[33] To
this total the XVIIIth, out of its detachment of 130 officers and
men, contributed 51, or nearly 40 per cent of its numbers. Captain
M. Leathes, Ensigns J. Pinsent (or Pensant), S. Gilman, and E. Walsh
were wounded; 1 sergeant and 11 men were killed; 3 sergeants and 32
men were wounded.[34]
After the loss of Donauwörth the Gallo-Bavarians fell back upon
Augsburg, where they encamped under the guns of the fortress.
Marlborough was not strong enough to attack them, and had to content
himself with blockading the town while he opened communications with
the Elector of Bavaria, to whom he offered tempting terms to abandon
Louis and place his excellent troops once more at the disposal of
the Allies. The Elector spun out the negotiations until he knew
definitely that Marshal de Tallard was coming from the Rhine to his
help; then he broke them off suddenly, sending word that he would
sooner serve as a private soldier under the King of France than
as a general in the Emperor of Austria’s army. As Marlborough now
learned from Prince Eugene of Savoy, who commanded a detached force
on the Danube, that the French were manœuvring to cut off the allied
army from its base of supplies, he at once turned northward, and
recrossing the Danube joined hands with Eugene near Donauwörth. The
situation had become very serious, for though the immediate pressure
on the Emperor of Austria was removed, and the French had made no
attempt to invade his territories from Italy, it was essential to
bring the Gallo-Bavarians to battle and defeat them before further
reinforcements had increased their strength, already greater than
that of the Allies. It was with much relief, therefore, that on
the morning of the 12th of August Marlborough discovered that the
French and Bavarians had moved down the left, or northern bank of
the Danube, and were then encamped near the village of Hochstädt,
a few miles up stream from his own camping-ground.[35] Their right
flank was protected by the Danube, here an unfordable river, and by
the village of Blenheim, standing two hundred yards from the water’s
edge. The left rested on Lutzingen, a hamlet at the foot of a chain
of broken and thickly wooded hills, which guaranteed it against
a turning movement. Between these villages stretched a plateau,
white with long lines of tents; and along the whole of its eastern
front ran the shallow valley of a tributary of the Danube--the
Nebel, a formidable obstacle, for though the stream in itself was
insignificant the bogs and marshes through which it flowed were
very difficult to cross, and the side of the valley rose so gently
towards the camp that it formed a natural glacis, well suited to
the movements of all arms. Between Blenheim and Lutzingen were two
other villages--Unterglau, on the eastern or far side of the Nebel,
was occupied as an advanced post; Oberglau, on the western or near
side, was part of the main line of defence. To hold this very strong
position, about four miles in length, de Tallard who commanded the
Gallo-Bavarians could dispose of an army from 56,000 to 60,000
strong, and sixty guns.
Though de Tallard had risen to be a Marshal of France, he was by no
means a clever man, and by his mistakes at Blenheim he played into
Marlborough’s hands. He failed completely to fathom his adversary’s
mind: because it was the object of the French to starve the allies
out of South Germany rather than to expel them by force of arms, de
Tallard did not want to fight a battle, and it did not occur to him
that Marlborough, with his inferior force of 52,000 men and 52 guns,
might take the offensive. Again, in the disposition of his troops he
misinterpreted the military axiom of his period, which warned the
chief of an army encamped on ground where it might possibly become
engaged, to place his troops in the order in which they would be
called upon to fight. In drawing up an army the infantry was usually
posted in the centre of the line, with the cavalry on its flanks. To
this normal or “sealed-pattern” formation Tallard blindly adhered;
but by treating his wings as distinct units and not as part of a
great army he produced much confusion; in the centre of the whole
line the cavalry of both wings met, but without unity of command: and
on each side of this mass of 10,000 horsemen were infantry, with more
cavalry on their outer flanks.
As soon as Marlborough had reconnoitred the enemy’s position he
returned to camp, and settled the outline of the plan of the battle
which he intended to force upon the French and Bavarians next day.
As their flanks were unassailable he decided to deliver a frontal
attack along their whole line: Eugene, with the right wing, was to
assail the Elector and Marshal de Marsin, who had made the villages
of Lutzingen and Oberglau their respective headquarters; the Duke
was to carry Blenheim, where de Tallard had established himself, and
break through the enemy’s centre between that village and Oberglau.
The night was spent in marshalling the troops into their places
in the nine columns in which they were to move against the enemy,
and at two o’clock on the morning of August 13, 1704, Marlborough
began to advance. A thick white mist overhung the valley of the
Danube, and though it delayed his march, concealed his movements
so effectually that it was six o’clock before the French vedettes
discovered that the Allies were upon them; and when an hour later
the mist lifted, de Tallard to his astonishment saw a great army
preparing to deploy on the far side of the Nebel, the cavalry in
the centre, the infantry on the flanks. While Eugene was marching
to the ground allotted to him, Marlborough’s troops took up their
appointed places. Opposite Blenheim, on the extreme left, stood a
column under General Cutts, consisting of fourteen British regiments
and several German corps: and on Cutts’s right was the remainder
of the left wing, drawn up in four lines, the first and fourth of
cavalry, the second and third of infantry. The Gallo-Bavarians, as
soon as they had recovered from their surprise, snatched up their
arms and fell in before their tents; and when de Tallard saw a mass
of dull red uniforms at the head of the column threatening Blenheim
he realised that hard fighting was to be expected near the village,
and crowded into it twenty-six regiments of his best infantry, who
were so tightly packed that large numbers of the soldiers did not
fire a shot throughout the battle. The French rapidly put Blenheim
into a state of defence--the walls were loopholed, the garden fences
(or palisades as they were called by the historians of the time)
were strengthened; the entrances were barricaded with carts, gates,
furniture from the houses; while twelve squadrons of cavalry, sent
to hold the two hundred yards of ground between the village and the
Danube, entrenched themselves behind a “laager” of waggons. Between
Blenheim and Oberglau de Tallard drew up his cavalry in two lines,
with a third line in support, composed partly of horsemen, partly
of nine battalions of infantry whose steadiness was doubtful. Some
French writers say that these shaky troops were Piedmontese, taken
prisoners in Italy and forced to join Louis XIV.’s service.[36] In
the centre de Marsin occupied Oberglau with a strong detachment;
behind the hamlet were posted his infantry and that of the Elector,
and in front of Lutzingen stood a strong body of cavalry.
While his troops were marching into their places the French
Commander-in-Chief added to his many mistakes that of abandoning to
the Allies the natural glacis already mentioned, and thus giving them
a foothold on which to re-form after they had crossed the Nebel.
Parker shall tell the story in his own words. While the Allies were
preparing to deploy,
“the Elector, Tallard and Marsin went to the top of the steeple
of Blenheim, from whence they had a fair view of their army: the
Elector and Marsin were for drawing the Army, as close to the
marshy Ground they had in their Front as possible, and not suffer
a man over but on the Points of their Bayonets; but Tallard (a
haughty proud Frenchman) was on a different Opinion, and said,
that would be no more than making a drawn Battle of it: that the
only way to get a compleat Victory would be to draw up their army
at some small Distance from the Morass, and suffer us to come
over, and the more there came over the more they were sure to
kill. Neither the Elector nor Marsin could persuade him out of
this Notion; they both were very much dissatisfied, and dreading
the consequence, left him, and went to their Posts.”[37]
Marlborough had formed for battle long before Eugene was able to do
so, for bad roads, broken ground, and many unexpected difficulties
greatly retarded the march of the right wing towards the left of
the French line. Until Eugene was prepared to attack, Marlborough
could not advance without running the risk of being crushed by
vastly superior forces; and for several hours his horse and foot
were condemned to inactivity while his guns hotly engaged those of
the French, which were brought forward towards the Nebel, and fired
at every target within their range. The XVIIIth, as usual, must
have been well to the front, for Parker mentions that the first
cannon-ball “was aimed at our regiment, but it fell short; the
second killed one man, which was the first blood drawn that day.”
After the Duke had carefully inspected his batteries, he ordered the
chaplains to read prayers at the head of every regiment, and as soon
as the Service was over, to satisfy himself that all was well with
his troops and to steady them under the enemy’s bombardment, he rode
slowly along the whole length of his line, exposing himself with
perfect calmness to the projectiles of the French. His extraordinary
talents, his charm of manner, his unfailing courtesy, his absolute
indifference to danger had already endeared him to the strangely
mixed body of soldiery under his command; and when by a miracle he
escaped all injury from a cannon-ball which struck the ground between
his horse’s legs, a great sigh of relief went up from the hearts of
Britons and Danes, Germans and Dutch.
It was not until twelve o’clock, four hours after the artillery duel
had begun, that an aide-de-camp galloped up to tell Marlborough
that Eugene was ready. Then the signal was given, and Cutts, on the
extreme left of the line, moved forward to the attack of Blenheim.
Under a sharp artillery fire, two of his brigades--one of British,
under Row, the other of Hessians--succeeded in crossing the Nebel
near the village, and halted under cover to re-form their ranks;
then leaving the Hessians in support behind the bank of the stream,
Row’s five regiments advanced to the assault of a position held
by the cream of the French infantry. Until our leading ranks were
within thirty paces of the enemy not a shot was fired on either side.
The British had been ordered to carry Blenheim with the bayonet if
possible, and in no case to burn a cartridge until their General
could actually touch the palisades. The French waited till their
assailants were so close to them that the worst shot could not
fail to bring down his man. Then so tremendous a burst of musketry
fell upon the head of the column that the French expected to see
the red-coats break and flee; but our men rushed forward through
the smoke, cheered on by Row, who succeeded in striking a palisade
with his sword before he fell mortally wounded. The British gave
one volley, and then attempted to storm--some tried to scale the
palisades, others to pull them down, while others again lunged
fiercely through the loopholes at the French marksmen, who fired so
fast and straight that in a few minutes a third of the brigade was
killed or wounded, and the remainder were in retreat, hotly pursued
by a body of cavalry. Now followed some wild fighting. The Hessians
struck in with great gallantry, and recaptured Colours which had
been lost in the _mêlée_; five British squadrons floundered over
the Nebel to the rescue of the infantry, and beat back the French
horsemen; but pursuing with more ardour than judgment, they were
decoyed under the fire of the infantry in Blenheim and suffered
severely. The French followed up their success by bringing up more
batteries to sweep the crossing of the Nebel by which the British
had advanced; but Cutts soon drove away this audacious artillery
and, returning to the charge, delivered a series of desperate but
ineffectual assaults upon the village until Marlborough ordered him
to make no further efforts to storm it, but to fire volleys into it
so continuously that the French would be pinned to their defences,
and therefore unable to reinforce their right centre, which he was
himself attacking. Parker gives a quaint account of this phase of the
battle. After describing a gallant but fruitless assault, he says--
“The rest of the Foot coming up, they renewed the charge; and
those that had been repulsed, having soon rallied, returned
to the charge, and drove the enemy from the skirts of the
village, into the very heart of it. Here they had thrown up
an intrenchment, within which they were pent up in so narrow
a compass, that they had not room to draw up in any manner of
order, or even to make use of their arms. Thereupon we drew up in
great order about 80 paces from them, from which we made several
vain attempts to break in upon them, in which many brave men were
lost to no purpose; and after all, we were obliged to remain
where we first drew up. The enemy also made several attempts
to come out upon us: but as they were necessarily thrown into
confusion in getting over their trenches, so before they could
form into any order for attacking us, we mowed them down with
our platoons in such numbers, that they were always obliged to
retire with great loss; and it was not possible for them to rush
out upon us in a disorderly manner, without running upon the very
points of our Bayonets.”
While this fierce combat was raging at Blenheim, Marlborough had
succeeded, though slowly and with great difficulty, in throwing a
considerable number of troops over the Nebel near Oberglau. In the
morning the French generals had sneered at the Duke for placing
great bodies of infantry between his first and second lines of
horse; in the afternoon they discovered that there was method in the
Englishman’s madness. Foreseeing that the cavalry would arrive on
the far side of the stream with their horses blown and their ranks
broken, he sent a large number of battalions to lead the way, with
orders to push far enough up the enemy’s side of the valley to leave
room for the allied cavalry to re-form behind their fire. The French
horsemen charged down upon the disordered squadrons, but even where
momentarily successful they were forced ultimately to retire by the
musketry of the infantry, and failed to prevent Marlborough’s second
line of cavalry from crossing the Nebel. During this stage of the
battle, eleven battalions of Hanoverians attempted to capture the
village of Oberglau, but were met by a magnificent counter-attack
of the Irish Brigade--the men who after the surrender at Limerick
had joined the army of the King of France. The Irishmen annihilated
two battalions, and smashed through the remainder of the column; but
then dashing on too far, were thrown into confusion by a charge of
cavalry, and finally driven back with great loss by the fire of three
fresh battalions which Marlborough threw against their flank.
On the right, meanwhile, things were not going well for the Allies.
The Elector, disregarding de Tallard’s order to keep the troops
high up on the slope, had moved his infantry right down to the edge
of the broken ground near the Nebel, and thus met Eugene’s men
while they were scattered and exhausted by the difficulties of the
crossing; thrice did the Prince of Savoy make a formidable attack
upon the Bavarians, and thrice was he beaten back. On the left,
however, Cutts was fulfilling his mission admirably, for his rolling
musketry detained within the entrenchments of Blenheim the enormous
mass of infantry, whose presence on other parts of the field might
have turned the scale in favour of the French. But the fate of the
battle was to be decided in the centre, where Marlborough had now
succeeded in placing eight thousand cavalry in two long lines on the
lower slope of the natural glacis which de Tallard had abandoned
so unaccountably to his enemy. To meet this danger, the French
Commander-in-Chief called up the nine battalions which in the morning
he had considered unfit to use in the forefront of the battle, and
posted them level with the first line of his cavalry. The Duke met
this move by bringing to his front a battery and three battalions of
Hanoverians, who engaged the French infantry at short range, and so
greatly shook them that they were unable to withstand a charge of
cavalry which swept them away, leaving a huge gap in de Tallard’s
line. That general now had to pay for the vicious dispositions by
which the cavalry in his centre had been posted without proper
arrangements for combined action. The horsemen of de Marsin’s right
wing played, not for the safety of the whole French army, but for
that of their own commander, and instead of flinging themselves into
the breach and presenting an unbroken front to Marlborough, wheeled
backwards in order to protect the flank of the column to which they
belonged. De Marsin had his hands too full to be able to spare a man
to help de Tallard, and before any of the infantry from Blenheim
could come to the rescue the Duke’s eight thousand troopers were
charging up the slope; for a moment the French cavalry stood, then
seized with a mad panic they wheeled about and galloped furiously for
the river, riding down everything they met in their haste to escape
from the German horsemen, who sabred hundreds of them and drove
hundreds more into the Danube.
De Marsin and the Elector were in no condition to continue the battle
after the rout of Tallard’s wing; they retired in fair order, pursued
by Eugene’s troops. To turn their retreat into a rout Marlborough
called off his Germans from the congenial task of cutting their
enemies to pieces, and sent them to fall upon de Marsin’s flank:
but it was now late in the evening; the Germans overtook not de
Marsin’s column but Eugene’s; in the growing darkness each side
thought the other was the enemy and halted to prepare to fight, and
by the time that the mistake had been discovered and mutual apologies
presented and accepted the Gallo-Bavarians’ right wing had gained so
long a start that further pursuit was hopeless. The battalions in
Blenheim were less fortunate, for the Allies blocked every egress
with cavalry, and called up infantry to storm the village, when the
luckless Frenchmen reluctantly agreed to surrender, and twenty-four
battalions of infantry and four regiments of dragoons laid down
their arms, and filing through a double line of troops were guarded
throughout the night by the British regiments.
History records few defeats more crushing than that of the French
and Bavarians at Blenheim. On the morning of the 13th of August
Tallard commanded about 60,000 troops, of whom not more than 20,000
ever found their way back to the armies of France or of Bavaria. The
carnage in the battle itself was very great, and in the flight large
numbers of the French were drowned in the Danube or murdered by the
peasants, who, with many old scores to settle, showed no mercy to
small parties of disbanded soldiers unable to protect themselves.
Among the 11,000 prisoners was Marshal de Tallard; and many guns and
mortars, 171 standards, 129 pairs of colours, much bullion, hundreds
of pack animals, and the whole of the camp equipage fell into the
hands of the conquerors. The victory, however, cost the Allies about
12,500 officers and men, or roughly twenty-four per cent of the force
with which Marlborough began the battle. The British casualties,
according to Millner’s return,[38] amounted to two thousand three
hundred and twenty-four of all ranks.
As a bounty was granted to those who took part in the battle the
names of the officers present have been preserved. The Colonel,
Frederick Hamilton, was in charge of a brigade, and drew £72. The
regiment was commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel R. Stearne, and the
Major was Richard Kane: the former received £51, and the latter
£90. To each of the Captains--John Moyle, Peter d’Offranville, Jos.
Stroud, F. de la Penotière, N. Hussey, Henry Browne, A. Rolleston,
and W. Vaughan (or Vauclin), £30 was paid. The Captain-Lieutenant,
Thos. Laughlin, and the Lieutenants--George Hall, James Lilly,
Robert Parker, Wm. Leathes, Ben. Smith, Wm. Blakeney, W. Weddall (or
Weddell), Saml. Roberts, and John Harvey, drew £14 a head; while £11
was the sum awarded to each of the Ensigns--John Blakeney, Henry
Walsh, John Cherry, W. Rolleston, Samuel Smith, R. Tripp, Edward
Walsh, and W. Moyle. The Quartermaster, Edm. Arwater, was rated as a
lieutenant, and the Adjutant, W. Blakeney, at £2 less; the Surgeon,
R. Weldon, received £12; his mate, R. Taylor, was considered only
worth £7, 10s.; and as the Chaplain, the Reverend Henry Reynolds,
drew £20, or rather more than the combined bounties of both doctors,
it would seem that in Marlborough’s army the care of the soul was
better paid than that of the body. There were a hundred and sixty-six
casualties in the XVIIIth, or about thirty per cent of those present.
Among the officers Captains H. Browne and A. Rolleston and Ensign
W. Moyle were killed: Captain W. Vaughan (or Vauclin) was mortally
wounded: Major R. Kane, Captains F. de la Penotière and N. Hussey,
Lieutenants W. Weddall (or Weddell), S. Roberts, J. Harvey, B.
Smith, W. Blakeney, and Ensign R. Tripp were wounded. In the other
ranks five sergeants were killed and nine wounded; fifty-two private
soldiers were killed and eighty-seven wounded.[39]
The morning after the battle Marlborough marched a few miles up the
river, and then encamped for four days to rest his weary troops, to
set his hospitals in order, and to dispose of his prisoners, of whom
Millner speaks as “a luggage that retarded our progress.” During
this respite from organised pursuit the French hurried back to the
Rhine, whither they were followed by the Allies, who laid siege to
the fortress of Landau. The XVIIIth was employed in the covering
army, and in the middle of October, a few weeks before the place was
taken, all the British infantry were embarked on river boats and
floated down the Rhine to Nimeguen, where after a ten days’ voyage
they disembarked, so greatly reduced by their losses in the campaign
that for administrative purposes the fourteen regiments were treated
as seven provisional battalions. The troops marched to their winter
quarters to enjoy a well-earned rest and to discipline the recruits
who joined them from home. While the XVIIIth was at Ruremonde, where
it spent several months, Brigadier Frederick Hamilton retired from
the service,[40] and was succeeded as Colonel by Lieutenant-General
R. Ingoldsby, from the 23rd regiment of Foot.
The year 1705 afforded the XVIIIth no opportunities of adding to its
laurels, for as far as the regiment was concerned the campaign was
one of hard marching, great fatigue, and no fighting. Marlborough
had planned an invasion of France, and again entrusting to the
Dutch the defence of the Low Countries led his British contingent
and a large number of their Continental Allies towards the Moselle,
whence he hoped to overrun Lorraine and then carry the war into
the enemy’s country. He expected to be joined by a strong body of
Germans under the Prince of Baden, a general from whose jealousy
and stupidity he had suffered acutely in the operations of 1704;
but after waiting many weeks for reinforcements which never came,
Marlborough determined to return to Flanders, where the enemy had
begun to show alarming signs of activity. Though Marshal de Villars,
one of the best soldiers of France, was watching his movements
closely, Marlborough broke up his camp and slipped away unmolested by
the French, who were nearly double his strength. With the elaborate
politeness of the time, he wrote to de Villars to apologise for
retreating without giving battle. “Do me the justice,” said he,
“to believe that my defeat is entirely owing to the failure of the
Prince of Baden, but that my esteem for you is still greater than my
resentment for his conduct.”[41]
When de Villeroi, who commanded the French in Flanders, heard that
Marlborough was coming back from the Moselle, he hastily retired to
a series of fortified lines stretching from Namur to Antwerp. These
lines the Duke determined to force, and by a series of brilliant
manœuvres and rapid marches succeeded in driving de Villeroi from
them, with much loss to the French and little to the Allies. But to
inflict a decisive blow upon the enemy a great battle was necessary.
Marlborough twice placed the French in situations where they would
have to fight at a disadvantage, and twice the Dutch generals, in
their insane jealousy of the British Commander-in-Chief, forbade the
action by refusing to allow their soldiers to engage. The XVIIIth
appears to have spent much of the campaign in levelling the captured
lines, and when the work was finished, wintered at Worcom, where in
January, 1706, Lieutenant-Colonel Stearne received his brevet of
Colonel.
The opening of the campaign of 1706 found Marlborough more determined
than ever to defeat de Villeroi in a pitched battle; and in order
to draw the French general from his fortified lines on the river
Dyle, he gave him to understand through a secret agent that, as the
Allies realised the Marshal was afraid of them, they were about to
besiege Namur, one of the fortresses of which Louis had repossessed
himself by his vigorous action in 1701. The bait took. Stung by this
insult, de Villeroi quitted the shelter of his fortifications and
marched to Tirlemont, apparently heading for Namur. When Marlborough
heard the welcome news, he pushed south-west from Maestricht, with
an army little inferior in numbers to de Villeroi’s 60,000 troops,
and on the 22nd of May encamped at Coswaren, where he learned that
de Villeroi was moving upon Judoigne. The Duke decided to attack the
French there, and at 1 A.M. on Whitsunday, May 23, 1706, he sent an
advance party under his Quartermaster-General, Cadogan, to select
a camping-ground near the village of Ramillies, which lies on the
eastern edge of the highest table-land in this part of Belgium.[42]
Owing to a heavy mist, it was not until eight o’clock that Cadogan
discovered that there were hostile troops upon the plateau. Two hours
later the sun came out, and revealed to each army the presence of
the other, the French moving eastward across the plateau, the Allies
advancing from the opposite direction.
The main body of Marlborough’s troops had marched two hours after
the Quartermaster-General’s detachment, but the Duke had overtaken
Cadogan early in the day, and began to array his eight columns for
battle. De Villeroi, who had the advantage of a thorough knowledge of
the ground, took up a defensive position, marked on the right by the
village of Taviers, in the centre by Ramillies and Offuz, and on the
left by a hamlet known as Autre-Eglise or Anderkirche. A few hundred
yards to the south of Taviers the river Mehaigne ran from west to
east through bogs and marshes; from Taviers northwards to Ramillies,
a distance of about a mile and a half, the soil was firm and well
suited for cavalry, but along the remainder of the French line,
about a mile and a quarter in length, the Little Geete meandered in
a shallow valley through morasses which opposite Autre-Eglise were
almost impassable. These villages were strongly held by infantry and
artillery, twenty battalions and twenty-four guns being allotted
to the defence of Ramillies alone. On the extreme left, between
Autre-Eglise and Offuz, were infantry supported by cavalry; from
Offuz to Ramillies the line was composed of infantry, while a hundred
and twenty squadrons, “interlaced” with a few battalions, were massed
between that village and Taviers.
Marlborough decided to attack the French right, between Ramillies and
the Mehaigne; and as his reconnaissance showed him that de Villeroi
had concentrated the greater part of his force upon this part of his
line, he determined, by demonstrating against the Marshal’s left,
to induce him to send reinforcements to that flank, and thus weaken
the remainder of his position. An imposing number of battalions
accordingly marched towards the Little Geete, descended into the
valley opposite Autre-Eglise and Offuz, and made ostentatious
preparations for throwing pontoon bridges over the stream. On the
extreme right of the allied infantry were several British regiments,
which the French staff easily identified by their uniforms and their
Colours; and when the Marshal heard that the soldiers whom he so
greatly feared were facing the left of his line, he drew largely
from his right and centre to strengthen the threatened spot. The
Duke had successfully “bluffed” de Villeroi; it now remained for
him to transfer the greater part of the infantry employed in this
demonstration to the points where they were really wanted. On the
eastern side of the valley of the Little Geete are hillocks, high
enough to conceal the ground beyond them from observers on the
plateau; and over these hillocks the leading battalions retired
gradually; disappeared, and once out of the enemy’s sight, hastened
to the centre of the line. The British brought up the rear, but
were ordered to halt at the top, turn about and face the enemy: and
there throughout the battle several regiments remained, not firing a
shot, but by their mere presence immobilising the French left wing,
and effectually preventing it from giving the help urgently needed
elsewhere.
By one o’clock the Duke’s preparations were finished, and after a
preliminary cannonade four Dutch battalions were launched against
Taviers; twelve battalions of the same nationality attacked
Ramillies; while a great body of Dutch cavalry stood waiting to
advance when one or other of these villages had fallen into the
hands of the infantry. The garrison of Taviers fought well, but
owing to the blundering of a French staff officer the reinforcements
sent to its support did not arrive in time to prevent its capture,
and as soon as the Dutch cavalry saw that their left flank could
not be enfiladed from the village they charged the French horse,
crashed through the first line, and then were so roughly handled
by the second that Marlborough had to bring up many squadrons to
their help. But these fresh squadrons did not turn the scale, and
before the Dutchmen could be induced to rally, Marlborough--the
Commander-in-Chief of the allied army, on whose life depended not
only the issue of the battle, but of the whole war--had to plunge
into the thick of the _mêlée_ and exert his personal influence with
the troopers, to all of whom he was well known by sight. But his face
and figure were familiar also to the enemy. Some French dragoons
broke from their ranks to surround him. He was unhorsed, and would
have been killed or captured had not his aide-de-camp mounted him
on his own charger. The Dutch then recovered themselves, and the
timely arrival of twenty more squadrons turned the tide against the
French. While this cavalry fight was in progress, the Danish Horse
and the Dutch Guards forced their way through the marshes on the bank
of the Mehaigne, turned the French right flank, and fell furiously
upon their rear. Encouraged by this good news the main body of Dutch
cavalry returned to the charge, and with a final effort shattered
the enemy in front of them. Thus assailed on three sides, the cavalry
of de Villeroi’s right wing lost heart, left the infantry to shift
for themselves, and galloped madly off the field.
The battalions who defended the village of Ramillies, mindful of
the fate of their comrades at Blenheim, determined to retire before
they were completely hemmed in, but as they “could not get out but
in great disorder our Horse fell in with them and cut most of them
to pieces.”[43] The Duke then ordered the brigades of infantry which
were massed round Ramillies to bring up their left shoulders and
advance against the still unbroken troops at Offuz; but the French
did not await their attack; and a couple of British regiments from
the extreme right worked through the swamps near Autre-Eglise, and
drove the enemy from that hamlet. Though a few of the best French
cavalry regiments fought hard to cover the retreat, the greater part
of de Villeroi’s army was routed and fled in panic, hotly pursued by
Marlborough’s horsemen, among whom the British squadrons were well to
the front.
The French lost in killed, wounded, and prisoners about 11,000 men,
80 standards and colours, 50 guns, and much of the baggage of their
army. The Allies on their side lost between 4000 and 5000 men,
chiefly among the Dutch and the Danes, to whom the honour of this
great victory is mainly due.
There is a curious conflict of evidence as to the part played by
the Royal Irish in this battle. According to Kane and Parker, the
XVIIIth was among the British regiments which, on the extreme right
of the allied line, stood all day on a hill without firing a shot.
Stearne, on the other hand, records in his journal that the regiment
was “greatly mauled” at the attack on the village of Ramillies; and
Millner, at the end of his casualty return (in which the losses of
the different nationalities are not given), mentions that “upwards of
three hundred of our Horse and Dragoon horses were killed or disabled
at the head of the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland.” If Stearne and
Millner are correct, it would appear that the XVIIIth was not only
employed in the attack on Ramillies, but was also in close support of
the mounted troops during some part of the pursuit.[44]
Marlborough’s enemies had blamed him for slackness in not profiting
by his victory at Blenheim; but not even his most virulent political
opponents could impute want of vigour to him after Ramillies.
Although his infantry had paraded before 3 A.M., had marched many
miles and had won a great victory, he gave them no rest till 1 A.M.
on the 24th, when they were allowed to halt for two hours; then they
trudged on “with all the expedition they could without observing any
other order than this, that every regiment kept their men as close
together as they possibly could, and none of them halted above an
hour at a time.”[45] Marlborough drove the French back into their own
country, and within a fortnight of the battle all the great trading
towns had opened their gates to the Allies, while very few fortresses
in Flanders remained in the hands of Louis XIV.’s troops. Over the
walls of Ostend, Dendermonde, and Menin the French flag still flew,
but these towns were attacked and taken in the course of a few weeks.
At the capture of Menin, one of Vauban’s masterpieces of
fortification, the XVIIIth won much glory. In July the Duke detached
20,000 troops to besiege it; and though the garrison of 5000 men
fought admirably and disputed every inch of ground, by the end of
the month most of the guns were dismounted, and the approaches of
the British brigade had reached the foot of the glacis. The next
step was to capture the covered way and counterscarp; and about
eight o’clock on the evening of the 7th of August, nine complete
battalions, of which the XVIIIth was one, delivered the assault. As
Stearne remarks, “this proved warm service,” for, as the Allies were
swarming up the glacis, two mines were sprung upon them; and when the
inevitable confusion was over and the attack was resumed, the French
fired venomously at the crest of the glacis, where the British were
covering the advance of the working parties bringing wool-packs and
fascines with which to throw up entrenchments. The Royal Irish and
Lauder’s, an unnumbered corps since disbanded, appear to have been
at the head of the column, and were so much annoyed by this musketry
that without orders they began to reply to it. The flashes of their
firelocks gave the French a target, and before the officers could
stop the firing the losses in these two regiments had been great.
Stearne, who was in command of the XVIIIth, says that the action
cost him six officers and more than eighty of the other ranks killed
and wounded. Parker, the adjutant of the regiment, mentions that two
captains and five subalterns were killed and eight other officers
wounded, but is silent about the casualties among the sergeants
and private soldiers. Millner agrees with the adjutant about the
officers and with the colonel about the men.[46] Notwithstanding
their losses, the Allies held the crest of the glacis until eight
o’clock next morning, when the working parties had finished the
entrenchments; then fresh batteries began to play upon the walls,
and in a short time the resistance was fairly beaten down and the
garrison surrendered on honourable terms. The siege lasted thirty-one
days, and cost the French eleven hundred officers and men, while
the Allies’ strength was diminished by two thousand six hundred
combatants.
In the spring of 1707, the Allies assembled at Bethlehem, where the
British contingent was joined by the Royal Irish from their winter
quarters at Ghent. Owing to the underhand conduct of the Emperor
of Austria, who for his private ends made a secret treaty with
Louis XIV. for the neutralisation of Italy, the French were able
to withdraw their troops from that country and largely reinforce
the Marshal de Vendôme, who had succeeded de Villeroi in command
of their “army of Flanders.” But de Vendôme had no wish to fight
Marlborough, and a long spell of very bad weather helped him to evade
all the Duke’s efforts to bring him to battle. Stearne in his journal
mentions that “there fell such rain that our men were not able to
draw their legs after them, neither could they keep their arms or
ammunition dry.” On one occasion the Allies were struggling over nine
miles of country, along which the French had just retreated, “but
what with the enemy marching before us, and our Horse which followed
them, and the rain continuing the roads were so deep and miry that
the most part of our infantry were not able to reach the camp that
night, and it was three or four days before the rear came up, and
several of them perished by the way.”[47]
In the hope of raising a rebellion in North Britain, Louis XIV.
attempted early in 1708 to land the Pretender in Scotland, with a
handful of French soldiers to train the partisans who were expected
to flock to the standard of the Stuart Prince. The expedition
sailed long before the campaign opened on the Continent; to meet
it the XVIIIth and nine other regiments were hurriedly shipped off
to Shields, where the transports anchored while their escort of
men-of-war joined in the chase of the enemy’s vessels, which were
driven back to France. As soon as the danger was over the troops
were sent off to Ostend, where they arrived in full time to rejoin
Marlborough’s army.
Early in the year it became evident that Louis intended to make a
great effort to regain the ground he had lost in Flanders, for he
assembled a hundred thousand men behind his frontier fortresses, and
placed them under the command of his grandson the Duke of Burgundy,
with de Vendôme as his military tutor and adviser. As Marlborough had
but eighty thousand troops at his immediate disposal, he arranged
that Eugene, the Prince of Savoy, who was in charge of the allied
forces on the Rhine, should support him whenever he wanted help. This
help was soon required, for the French took the initiative, and at
the end of May advanced to the forest of Soignies. While Marlborough
concentrated at Hal, de Vendôme rapidly despatched detachments to
Bruges and Ghent, where the civil authorities were in his pay; and
when Louis’ soldiers appeared outside the walls, the gates stood
open before them. Having thus secured two very important points in
the system of waterways connected with the Lys and the Scheldt, de
Vendôme next threatened Brussels; and by forcing Marlborough to
move to Asche for its protection, gained time to prepare for the
attack on Oudenarde, the capture of which would make him master of
the greater part of the Scheldt. He proposed to cover the siege
operations from Lessines, a place about thirteen miles south-east
of Oudenarde, and hoped to establish his main body there before
Marlborough had grasped his plan; but the Duke’s secret service
agents did not fail him, and when he learned that de Vendôme was to
move southwards from his camp at Alost on July 9, he determined to
outstrip him by starting from Asche long before dawn on the same
day. As the reinforcements from the Rhine had not yet arrived, in
point of actual numbers the Allies were considerably weaker than
the French; but Eugene, leaving his own troops many marches behind
him, had recently joined the English general--and the mere presence
of Eugene was in itself worth many thousand men. In a straight line
the Allies and the French had about the same distance, twenty miles,
to march, but by the roads followed by the Allies the mileage was
nearly fifty per cent greater. Almost without a pause, Marlborough’s
troops tramped steadily from 2 A.M. till noon, when, with fifteen
miles to their credit, they halted till the evening, though Cadogan’s
detachment of eight squadrons and as many battalions was allowed
only four hours’ rest before starting for Lessines, thirteen miles
farther on. Throughout the night the main body pressed forward and
reached their destination to find that their exertions had not been
thrown away--they had outmarched the French: no enemy was in sight,
and Cadogan, who had struggled into Lessines at midnight, had already
thrown several pontoon bridges across the river Dender. Not until
the Allies had reached their camping ground did the heads of the
French columns begin to show on the horizon; and when de Vendôme and
the Duke of Burgundy realised that Marlborough lay between them and
France, they abandoned all hope of besieging Oudenarde, and fell back
on the Scheldt to secure the safety of Bruges.
Marlborough decided to follow them, and Cadogan with eleven thousand
troops of all arms, including Sabine’s brigade of the 8th, XVIIIth,
23rd, and 37th regiments, quietly left the camp in the small hours of
July 11. The duty of this advance-guard was to make all preparations
for the crossing from the right bank of the Scheldt to the left by
the main body, which was due to arrive at Oudenarde a few hours
after Cadogan. Between 10 and 11 A.M. its cavalry scouts had crossed
the river a few hundred yards below the town, and were riding up
to the thickly enclosed table-land between the principal stream
and its northern affluent, the Norken,[48] when they saw to their
front a number of French troopers scouring the country for forage.
Vendôme had marched down the right bank to Gavre, a few miles below
Oudenarde, and was then in process of crossing the Scheldt. These
foraging parties were part of the French advance-guard, for de
Vendôme, who apparently had taken no steps to watch the movements
of the Allies, was so unconscious of danger that many of his men
had been allowed to disperse. The French Horse, however, quickly
recovered from their surprise at finding Marlborough on their heels,
and drove back our scouts, discovering in the course of the pursuit
that a body of his cavalry was on the plateau near the village of
Eyne, and that some of the bridges over the river near Oudenarde were
in his hands.
As soon as de Vendôme realised the situation he decided to form
along the slopes overlooking the Scheldt; the line was to stretch
from Heurne on his left to Mooregem on his right, and after ordering
a detachment of cavalry and seven battalions to occupy Heurne, he
rode back to report his dispositions to the Duke of Burgundy, whom
he found at breakfast. French writers say that the Prince greatly
disliked any interruption at his meals, and the news that the Allies
were on the same bank of the river as himself was very unwelcome.
There was already great friction between the Prince and his military
“bearleader”; and to vent his spleen upon the Marshal the Duke of
Burgundy peremptorily rejected the veteran’s plan, and insisted on
preparing to give battle, not close to the bank of the Scheldt, where
there was a good chance of crushing Marlborough’s columns as they
came piece-meal into action, but two miles farther back, on the far
side of the Norken, with his left at Asper and his right at Wannegem.
From that moment things began to go wrong with the French. In the
confusion caused by the rejection of the Marshal’s scheme no one
thought of recalling the cavalry and infantry ordered to Heurne: and
these luckless troops marched steadily towards a village which they
believed to be Heurne, though it proved to be the hamlet of Eyne,
well within the reach of Cadogan’s infantry.
While the French generals were laboriously forming their army behind
the Norken, Cadogan was throwing pontoon bridges over the Scheldt,
and anxiously scanning the horizon for the clouds of dust which would
herald the march of the main body of the Allies. But the day was
stifling, the roads narrow and bad; it was not until two o’clock in
the afternoon that the heads of the columns began to reach the river,
and thus set Cadogan free to secure for his chief a good foothold on
the left bank. The first thing to be done was to drive the French
out of Eyne; and a body of Hanoverian cavalry and three brigades of
infantry from the advance-guard were ordered to attack the village.
Sabine’s brigade of British was in front, and as it was led by the
Royal Irish, the XVIIIth was the first regiment under fire at the
battle of Oudenarde. Though the garrison of Eyne were conscious that
they had been stranded in an impossible position, so far in advance
of their main line that they could not hope to be reinforced, they
fought well at first; but when they realised that they were heavily
outnumbered they lost heart: three battalions surrendered: the others
were hustled out of the village at the point of the bayonet, and then
fell into the hands of the Hanoverians, who after cutting them to
pieces charged the detachment of French cavalry posted near Eyne and
chased it into the marshes of the Norken.[49] Cadogan followed up his
success by pushing two Prussian regiments towards Groenewald, thus to
some extent protecting the right flank of the main body as it crossed
the Scheldt.
The French troops who had been powerless to help their comrades
at Eyne became clamorous to avenge them, and the Duke of
Burgundy, seeing how slowly the Allies defiled over the bridges,
determined to take the offensive, and ordered his right and centre
to advance. About five o’clock a formidable mass of infantry
threatened Groenewald, where the Prussians would have fared badly
had they not been reinforced at once by twelve battalions of the
advance-guard, who, as they came into action, prolonged the line to
the left--_i.e._, southwards, towards the hamlet of Schaerken. But
as the French continued to gain ground on this part of the field
twenty battalions from the main body were flung into the fray, and by
continuing to extend to the left as they joined the fighting line,
repulsed a dangerous attempt by the enemy to turn the left of the
Allies at this point.
In the enclosures round Groenewald every hedge and ditch became a
miniature fortress, taken and retaken as the tide of battle ebbed
and flowed; and near the village of Schaerken the Allies could
hardly keep the enemy in check until the Duke reinforced this part
of the line. Then slowly, and with great difficulty, the Dutch and
Hanoverians forced the French back a few hundred yards to Diepenbeck;
but there they met with so stubborn a resistance that they could gain
no further ground. Some writers say that the French infantry had
fallen back to a belt of abattis prepared earlier in the day; be that
as it may, the fact remains that at this point de Vendôme’s infantry
fought magnificently, and brought Marlborough’s foot soldiers to
a standstill. Fortunately the Duke had in hand a reserve of some
twenty battalions and many squadrons, all of whom had so recently
crossed the river that they had not yet come into action; and with
these troops he turned the right of the enemy’s line, drove in the
outer flank of their infantry, and after dispersing a body of de
Vendôme’s cavalry fell upon the right rear of the French army. About
this time, but far too late to influence the issue of the battle,
the Duke of Burgundy ordered his left to move forward; but his foot
soldiers did nothing, and his horsemen were paralysed by the sight
of the British regiments of cavalry, drawn up on the far side of the
swamp across which they were called upon to advance. Thus the combat
resolved itself into a struggle round the villages of Groenewald and
Diepenbeck, and as night fell the flashes of the muskets showed that
the French line, ever growing thinner and narrower, was hour by hour
more closely hemmed in on front and flank and rear by Marlborough’s
infantry. Soon it became too dark to distinguish friend from foe,
and after parties from the right and left wings of the Allies had met
in rear of the French position and fired into each other, Marlborough
ordered his weary troops to break off the battle, to halt where
they stood, and be ready to resume the combat at dawn next day.
But at daybreak there was no enemy to fight. When the French right
flank was turned the Duke of Burgundy again quarrelled fiercely
with de Vendôme. The General tried to keep the army together; the
Prince insisted on an immediate retreat; the troops lost their
discipline, and following the example of Louis XIV.’s grandson, a
mass of runaways--generals and private soldiers, horse, foot and
artillery--streamed off the field. Not all the French broke, however:
by dint of de Vendôme’s personal exertions he rallied enough officers
and men to form the rear-guard, with which he covered the “stampede”
to Ghent.
The French lost about 6000 killed and wounded, and 9000
prisoners;[50] and (according to Millner) we took from them 10 guns,
56 pairs of colours, 52 standards, and 4500 horses. The casualties
among the Allies were about 3000 killed or wounded, more than half
of which were among the Dutch. The British suffered very little,
53 officers and men being killed and 177 wounded. The Royal Irish,
though the first regiment to come in action, were extremely lucky
in losing only a lieutenant and 8 private soldiers killed and 12
wounded.[51]
While Marlborough’s troops were enjoying forty-eight hours’
well-earned rest, an audacious project was forming itself in their
great leader’s brain. He knew that an expedition was being prepared
in England for a descent on the coast of Normandy, and that to meet
it many battalions would be drawn off from the centre of France. The
Duke of Burgundy’s army was reeling under the stroke of Oudenarde,
and would take weeks to recover itself. Why should not the Allies
profit by this favourable combination of circumstances, and leaving
a detachment to watch the garrison of Lille, neglect that great
frontier fortress and carry the war into the very heart of France?
But the scheme was too daring, even for Eugene, who insisted that
Lille must be captured as a preliminary to a serious invasion. So the
Duke made up his mind to reduce Lille, and marching across the French
frontier formed a camp near Commines, levying large contributions
from the neighbouring towns, while he began his preparations for the
siege. A single detail will be enough to show how enormous these
preparations were--the staff had to collect 16,000 horses to drag the
big guns and ammunition over the seventy-five miles of villanous road
between Lille and Brussels, where the heavy ordnance was stored.
The arrival of the Duke of Berwick[52] with large reinforcements from
the Rhine raised the Duke of Burgundy’s strength to at least 100,000
combatants. To meet them Marlborough had only 84,000 troops; but
when after many weeks’ delay his huge convoy started from Brussels,
he manœuvred so brilliantly that the enemy was never able to come
within striking distance of its cumbrous length. It was not until
the 22nd of August that the Allies broke ground before Lille, which
every Frenchman regarded as impregnable, for on its fortification
Vauban had lavished all his skill, 150 guns and mortars frowned
from its works, and Marshal de Boufflers commanded its garrison of
15,000 picked men. The siege was to be carried on by Eugene, while
from Helchin on the Scheldt Marlborough covered the operations with
the field army. Among Eugene’s troops the British were not strongly
represented: “only five regiments were detailed for regular work in
the trenches”[53]--the 16th, 21st, 23rd, 24th, and as hard knocks
were to be expected, it is scarcely necessary to add, the XVIIIth
also. The Duke had hardly finished his lines of circumvallation, or,
in modern language, the works protecting his own front and Eugene’s
rear, when he learned that the Duke of Burgundy was advancing to
the relief of Lille. For a week the armies lay opposite each other.
Marlborough and Eugene were anxious to attack the French, whose
position was so bad that Berwick saw nothing but defeat in store for
them if they gave battle; but once again the Dutch deputies threw
away splendid chances by refusing to allow their troops to fight. The
French generals, though under positive orders from Louis to wipe out
their disgrace at Oudenarde by winning a great battle near Lille,
declined the combat, and withdrew to devote themselves to the safer
task of harassing the Allies’ line of communication. By taking up
and holding strongly positions running along the Scheldt and the
Scarpe from Ghent to Douai, they hoped to intercept all convoys from
Brussels, at that time the Duke’s chief source of supply, but they
forgot that in Ostend, which Marlborough had recaptured two years
before, he possessed on the open sea a port within easy distance of
England. The troops which had just returned from the expedition to
Normandy--an expedition as futile as most of our similar enterprises
seemed fated to be--were landed at Ostend, where they were employed
most usefully in forming a new base.
The chief interest in this part of the campaign is centred in
Marlborough’s success in keeping the besiegers supplied with food and
ammunition, for the French could range at will over the greater part
of the country between Ostend and Lille, and they had possession
of the sluices that could inundate the districts through which the
convoys had to pass. After the brilliant little fight at Wynendal,
where a valuable convoy fought its way through a very superior force,
de Vendôme laid the neighbourhood of Ostend under water; but the Duke
organised a service of punts in which, despite the attentions of
French gunboats, stores were transported over the deepest part of the
flood, and then transferred to vehicles fitted with very high wheels
to keep their loads above the level of the water.[54]
The strain upon the Commander-in-Chief at this time must have been
indescribable, for in addition to the constant anxiety about his
commissariat, things did not always go well at Lille, where de
Boufflers defended himself in a masterly manner: Eugene was so badly
wounded that for some weeks he could not direct the operations: the
engineers made mistakes, and the supply of ammunition was always
scanty. When to these troubles was added the arrival from the Rhine
of a large body of the enemy under the Elector of Bavaria, who
laid vigorous siege to Brussels, the nerves of most men would have
suffered; but with unbroken serenity Marlborough prepared to rescue
Brussels from the danger threatening it. After misleading the French
by false reports about his movements, he burst through their line of
defences on the Scheldt, and so alarmed the Elector that he hurriedly
decamped, leaving behind him his sick, his wounded, and his guns.
The details of the doings of the XVIIIth in the siege of Lille
are very scanty; but it is known that in a great, though not very
successful assault on September 7, when Eugene lost about 3000 men,
his five British regiments between them had 350 casualties, or from
a fifth to a sixth of their whole strength.[55] In a desperate
attack on the counterscarp a fortnight later, Eugene was followed
by a number of British troops, among whom were some regiments lent
for the occasion by the covering army. In his memoirs he relates
that after two assaults had been repulsed with great slaughter, he
spoke a few words in English to the brave fellows who rallied round
him, and then led them back to the fire, where a musket-ball knocked
him senseless. The men thought he was dead; but an intelligent
soldier remembered that he was a great friend of the Duke’s, and
after looking for some conveyance on which to transport him to his
quarters, carried him back on a dung cart! On the 9th of December de
Boufflers surrendered on excellent terms, granted him as a proof of
Marlborough’s admiration for his splendid defence, which had cost
France 8000 men, and the Allies about 14,000 in killed and wounded
alone. The returns of the British losses are incomplete: Millner
states that from the beginning of the siege to October 22, when the
French abandoned the town and retreated in the citadel, the five
British regiments in Eugene’s force lost 1600 officers and men; the
casualties for the remainder of the siege he was unable to obtain.
Stearne briefly dismisses the services of the XVIIIth at Lille in
the following words: “Our regiment suffered very much, having two
captains and three subalterns killed: our major, with several other
officers wounded, and upwards of 200 men killed and wounded.”[56]
It would be deeply interesting to know how many of the Royal Irish
who watched the garrison of Lille march out with all the honours
of war had seen the ceremonial at Namur thirteen years before.
Unfortunately it occurred to none of the literary officers of
the XVIIIth to record the numbers. The mental attitude of these
old warriors is very curious: they seem to have grown tired of
writing about battles and sieges, and as the war went on cut their
descriptions shorter and shorter, though they were ready to dilate on
any departure from the usual routine of warfare. Thus, for example,
they all give accounts of a daring attempt to throw reinforcements
of powder into Lille. Two thousand cavalrymen started from Douai,
carrying large bags of powder behind them, and wearing in their hats
“boughs of trees,” in imitation of the Germans who always decorated
themselves in this way when on an expedition--or as the British
soldier would now express it, “when on the job.” In the dusk they
rode up to the outer barrier of the line of circumvallation, gave
over the pass-word, and stating they were a detachment of German
Horse with prisoners, were allowed to enter. Then they rode on
undetected, until one of the party, to use modern slang, “gave the
show away,” by remarking in French to a comrade that they had got
through the barrier very easily. A watchful sentry overheard him,
drew his own conclusions, and by promptly firing at the speaker gave
the alarm. The troops, says Millner,
“instantly turned out of their Tents in only their Shirts and
Cartridge Boxes with their Ammunition, and seiz’d their Arms from
their Belts, and in a Trice form’d themselves into as good Order
as could be expected, and with undaunted Courage, though in the
Dark, fired amongst the thickest of the Enemy putting them in
great Disorder and Confusion, so that in the Hurly-Burly thereof,
several of the Bags of Powder fell off on a Causeway, and was
broke; the which by the prancing of the Horses’ Feet, took Fire,
and thereby blowed up and tore to pieces upwards of one Hundred
Men of them, and likewise destroyed a good many of their Horses;
but in the interim thereof, a few of them slipt into the City
with some Ammunition also; but the major Part was obliged to
retire, and that in very great Haste, Disorder and Confusion
back again to Tournai.... The Besieged made a great Huzzaing
that Night because they had got those few in with some Relief of
Powder.”
While de Boufflers was discussing with Marlborough the terms of
capitulation, the other French Generals, thinking that the Duke was
as much worn out by the campaign as they were themselves, sent their
men into winter quarters and went off to Paris. But they reckoned
without their host. Marlborough sprang at Ghent, and invested it,
repulsed a great sortie on Christmas Day, and accepted the surrender
of the garrison on January 2, 1709. The French troops in Bruges did
not wait to be attacked, but abandoned the town and citadel: and
then, but not till then, the Allies were allowed to disperse to their
winter quarters.
During the greater part of the year 1708 the regiment was deprived
of the services of the adjutant, Captain Robert Parker, who was
specially selected to act as instructor in discipline and drill to
the regiments at that time quartered in Ireland. To any officer
the compliment would have been great; but in Parker’s case it was
especially flattering, because he was a self-made man who had risen
from the ranks. His story is an interesting one. His father was
a farmer near Kilkenny, where the boy was sent to a school which
boasted of a company of cadets (as we should now call them), who
were “armed with wooden guns and took great delight in marching and
exercising.” These cadets must have been a remarkable set of lads, as
more than thirty of them obtained commissions, and some indeed became
General officers. Parker soon discovered that soldiering was the
trade for him, and running away from home, enlisted in an independent
company commanded by Captain Frederick Hamilton, the future Colonel
of the XVIIIth Regiment. During the Tyrconnel troubles both
Hamilton and Parker were disbanded, but April, 1689, found them in
Meath’s regiment, the one a major, the other a full private. Parker
joined with a strong determination to get on in his profession. “I
determined to be very circumspect in my behaviour, by which I gained
the esteem of my Major and most of the officers of the regiment. I
applied myself diligently to the use of arms, and soon became expert
in it.” Whether he had risen to be a sergeant in the Irish wars is
not known: all he tells us about himself at that time is that at
Athlone in throwing up an entrenchment he “received a favourable shot
on the crown of the head; the ball only grazed on a good thick skull
and went off”; and that at the end of the siege he was much injured
by a stone dropped on him by the defenders of the castle. He must
have been a non-commissioned officer in 1695; desperately wounded
at Namur, he found when he returned to duty after seven months in
hospital, that he had been gazetted to a commission, with seven
ensigns junior to him. Eleven years later he was Captain-Lieutenant
and Adjutant, and after receiving at Menin “a contusion on the side
of the head which was likely to be fatal,” was promoted to be captain
of the grenadier company. Parker was so successful in disciplining
the infantry in Ireland that, when after two years he returned to
duty with the regiment in Flanders, Government made him a present of
two hundred pounds.
Though Louis had suffered heavily in 1708, the enormous resources of
his kingdom enabled him to send large numbers of fresh troops to
the Marshal de Villars, whom early in 1709 he placed in command of
the army of Flanders. De Villars’ first care had been to secure the
safety of Arras, the key to the north-east of France, by throwing up
to the east of the town a great line of works which stretched from
the Lys to Douai; and from behind these works, known as the lines
of La Bassée, he watched the Allies, who owing to the lateness of
the season did not take the field till June. Marlborough’s first
move was to make open, even ostentatious preparations to force
the lines; de Villars concentrated to resist them, calling up as
reinforcements a large portion of the garrison of Tournai, a fortress
some sixteen miles east of Lille. As Tournai was Marlborough’s
immediate objective, he marched swiftly upon it, and invested it
before de Villars discovered how completely he had been outwitted. At
the beginning of the siege the XVIIIth took part in an expedition to
reduce various small forts in the neighbourhood, and after marching
night and day returned “greatly fatigued,”[57] but in time to help to
storm the breaches of the ravelin, and to repulse a determined sortie
by the garrison, who strove to make up for the weakness of their
numbers by the vigour of their defence. Up to the time that the town
surrendered and the troops retired into the citadel, the siege had
run on normal lines; but when the attack on the citadel began things
became very different, for this stronghold was celebrated throughout
Europe for its subterranean defences, and the ground outside its
walls was honeycombed with casemates, mines, and secret passages. To
reach these hidden works the besiegers had to sink deep shafts, and
then to drive tunnels fathoms deep under the earth, at any moment
liable to be blown sky-high by the explosion of a mine. The desperate
work done by the XVIIIth in this phase of the siege is well described
by Stearne.
“The enemy and we met several times underground and fought it out
with bayonet and pistol, and in twelve days the French sprang
sixteen mines, which blew up a great many of our men; and one
mine did so much execution that it blew up part of the town wall,
two branches of our trenches with a parallel between them, and
ruined two of our mines, with a Captain and Lieutenant of our
regiment and another officer and forty men, all of which happened
on our attack.... Our miners discovered the branches of another
mine, and as they were busy in finding out the mine itself, they
heard the enemy at work in one of their galleries, whereupon
a Lieutenant and twenty Grenadiers were ordered to dislodge
them, but the Lieutenant being killed at the first onset the
Grenadiers retired immediately; after that another officer with
a fresh detachment was ordered for that service, but the enemy
throwing a great many grenades and making a great smoke with
combustible stuff, forced them to retire being suffocated. The
next day, the miners being supported by a Lieutenant and sixteen
Grenadiers, were at work, to pierce through a gallery they had
discovered, but upon their breaking into it, the enemy threw
in upon them a great quantity of straw, hemp, powder and other
combustible matter, and being set on fire the Lieutenant and
ten of the Grenadiers were stifled. After this manner was this
terrible siege carried on, till by degrees we wrought ourselves
almost into the ditch. The enemy sprang a mine which was their
last effort, with which we had near four hundred men killed, but
notwithstanding we lodged ourselves that night on our attack near
their palisades, where we raised a prodigious quantity of cannon.”
The citadel capitulated on the 3rd of September, after more than
3000 French officers and men had fallen. The besiegers’ casualties
are given in Millner’s return as 1233 killed, 4055 wounded, or a
grand total of 5288. Millner is not as clear as usual about the loss
of the British, but it seems probable that 178 were killed and 521
wounded, or 699 of all ranks. To what extent the Royal Irish suffered
it is impossible to say, but it is probable that in such continuous
fighting more officers and men were placed _hors de combat_ than are
mentioned in Stearne’s narrative.[58]
As soon as Marlborough saw that the defence of Tournai was weakening,
he marched a large force towards the lines of La Bassée; again
demonstrated against de Villars, whom he puzzled completely, and
then, after a march of forty-nine miles in fifty-six hours, in
pouring rain over roads knee-deep in mud, swooped upon Mons, a town
important to the French, though at that time only weakly held. When
de Villars slowly realised that the Duke had no intention of wasting
his strength in storming highly fortified lines, he advanced with
95,000 men, and entrenched himself at the Trouée d’Aulnoit, one of
the few gaps in a belt of woodland which lay a few miles to the south
of Mons. He outnumbered the Allies so greatly that they decided
not to attack him until the troops left to level the siege-works
at Tournai had rejoined headquarters, and thus made Marlborough’s
numerical strength equal to that of his opponent. These troops, among
which were the XVIIIth and several other British regiments, were
ordered up at once, but while they were on the march de Villars,
by working night and day, rendered his position very formidable.
His right rested on the forest of Laignières, half a mile from the
village of Malplaquet,[59] which has given its name to the battle
of the 11th of September, 1709: his centre ran across the southern
end of the gap, which was open, fairly level, and about 2000 yards
in width: his left was thrown forward into the continuous series of
woods known respectively as those of Taignières, Blangies, and Sart.
Across his centre he built long lines of trenches, gun emplacements,
chains of abattis, and many strong redans; the woods on his flanks
were similarly protected, and when the attackers had forced their way
through the abattis which fringed the edges they came under the fire
of field-works hidden in the depths of the forest. The weak point
of the position was that cavalry could only act offensively on the
plain--_i.e._, the gap between the woods; and as this open ground was
covered with defences Villars had to draw up his Horse in rear of the
rest of his troops, where they would be unable to come into action
unless the Allies broke through some part of the front line.
For the attack of this position, which from the nature of its
fortifications had virtually become a fortress, the Duke issued the
following orders: The Prince of Orange with thirty-one battalions,
most of which were Dutch, was to make a demonstration against the
right of the French line; sixty-eight battalions were to assail the
northern and eastern faces of the woods of Taignières and Sart; while
General Withers, with five British and fourteen foreign battalions,
was to strike and turn the extreme left of the enemy’s line at the
village of La Folie. As the pressure on the French left became
intense, the Duke expected (as did actually happen) that de Villars
would draw largely from his centre to reinforce the point of danger;
then fifteen British battalions and other infantry, till then held
back in the centre, were to be launched at the works in the gap,
capture them, and thus win a passage for the allied cavalry, which
was then to crash through Villars’ centre and cut his army in twain.
The heavier guns were massed into two great batteries--one playing on
the enemy’s right, the other on his left.
Though the advanced parties of the hostile armies watched each other
throughout the night at little more than a musket’s shot distance,
nothing happened to disturb the few hours’ rest which the Duke
allowed his men.[60] Long before daylight the troops were under arms,
and when morning service had been read at the head of every regiment,
the Duke rode through his army, correcting faulty dispositions and
sending to their places in the line of battle the horse and dragoons
who during the night had arrived from Tournai. They had left behind
them on the road the infantry, who came on as best they could, the
last to reach the battlefield being the Royal Irish, whose march
was retarded by the slow-moving guns they had to escort.[61] After
an hour’s artillery duel Marlborough began to carry his plan into
effect, and launched his infantry columns against Villars’ flanks. At
first things went well. His right made some progress, though in the
woods of Taignières and Sart the French fought superbly, disputing
every inch of ground, and by vigorous counter-attacks often sending
their assailants reeling back upon their supports; and on his
left the Prince of Orange kept the enemy occupied in the forest of
Laignières by his feigned attack. Suddenly, in direct defiance of
his orders from the Duke, this General took upon himself to attack
in real earnest; but the French fell upon his column with such
resistless energy that the Dutch, stubborn fighters as they were,
were driven back with hideous slaughter. Marlborough received this
startling news with composure; he directed the Prince of Orange to
content himself with holding the French without again attacking them;
and confident of ultimate success, in no way altered his original
dispositions.
While the Prince of Orange was being buffeted on the left, Eugene,
who commanded on the right flank, was forcing the French backwards
through the woods. The process, though slow and very costly, was
sure; and when de Villars, who had taken charge of the French left,
heard that the red-coats of Withers’ column were appearing on his
flank at La Folie, he did exactly what Marlborough expected him to
do, and weakened his centre to reinforce his left. Three brigades,
one of them composed of the Irishmen who had done so well at
Blenheim, hurried up to de Villars’ help, plunged into the wood, and
drove the Allies back on their supports. In this charge the Irish
Brigade with reckless valour pursued so far that they lost their
formation, and the whole or part of one of its battalions found
itself alone in a glade, where it was attacked by the Royal Irish.
The XVIIIth had come so late into action that it had been sent off to
the extreme right of the whole army, where, in modern phraseology, it
seems to have acted “on its own,” and according to Parker marched on
till it came
“to an open in the wood. It was a small plain, on the opposite
side of which we perceived a battalion of the enemy drawn up.
Upon this Colonel Kane who was then at the head of the regiment,
having drawn us up and formed our Platoons, advanced gently
towards them, and the six Platoons of our first fire made ready.
When we had advanced within a hundred yards of them, they gave us
a fire of one of their ranks, whereupon we halted, and returned
them the fire of our six Platoons at once; and immediately made
ready the six Platoons of our second fire, and advanced upon
them again. They then gave us the fire of another rank, and we
returned them a second fire, which made them shrink; however they
gave us the fire of a third rank after a scattering manner, and
then retired into the wood in great disorder, on which we sent
our third fire after them, and saw them no more. We advanced
cautiously up to the ground which they had quitted and found
several of them, killed and wounded; among the latter was one
Lieutenant O’Sullivan, who told us the battalion we had engaged
was the Royal Regiment of Ireland in the French service.”
In this skirmish the XVIIIth, or Royal regiment of Foot of Ireland,
had but few casualties; while the Iro-Gallic regiment, as “their
opposite number” in Louis’ army was termed, is said to have lost
several officers and about forty men.[62]
While the Irishmen were settling their quarrel, the climax of the
battle was approaching. Eugene had rallied his infantry in the wood
of Taignières, and was struggling to hold his own against the fresh
troops which de Villars in person led against him. Both generals
were wounded--Eugene was struck on the head by a musket-ball, but
refused to leave the fighting line to have his injury attended
to by a surgeon; de Villars, hard hit in the leg, made a gallant
effort to direct the battle from a chair, but swooning from pain
was carried away insensible to the nearest village. Though deprived
of their leader, the French fought obstinately, and on the right
of the allied line the combat raged without any decisive result,
neither side knowing that when the three brigades were moved from
the centre to the left of de Villars’ line, Marlborough had ordered
the Dutch forward on his left, and had hurled himself against the
heart of the French position. Orkney’s fifteen battalions of British
infantry, who for many hours had been waiting for their chance,
were let loose against the redans across their front, and carrying
them after a sharp fight, promptly lined with marksmen the reverse
parapets--_i.e._, those looking backwards into the enemy’s second
line. On the left, the Dutch infantry atoned for their mistake in
the morning by capturing not only the wood of Laignières, but the
abattis and trenches connecting it with the works now in the hands
of the red-coated battalions, and the Dutch cavalry poured through
the openings won by their infantry comrades. But in the scramble
over shelter trenches and abattis their ranks became disordered,
and before they had time to re-form they were attacked by the
Gendarmerie, and forced to take shelter under the muskets of Orkney’s
battalions, whose steady shooting beat off the French and gained
time for Marlborough to come up with the British and Prussian horse.
These were driving the Gendarmerie backwards, when a splendid
counter-attack of the French Household troops crashed through
their first line, penetrated the second, and threw the third into
confusion. At that moment Eugene, dashing up bloodstained from his
wound, threw his last squadrons against the enemy’s flank; Louis’
Bodyguard wavered and gave way, and de Boufflers, on whom the command
had devolved after de Villars was wounded, seeing that his centre was
pierced, his right dislodged, and his left beaten though not routed,
ordered a retreat.
His retirement was quite unmolested by the Allies, who were too much
exhausted to pursue an enemy who after such a desperate struggle
was still able to retire in good order. Marlborough had begun
the engagement with about 95,000 troops, but by three o’clock in
the afternoon twenty thousand of his men were killed or wounded.
Millner’s analysis of the casualties shows that the Germans lost 5321
officers and men; the Prussians, 1694; the Hanoverians, 2219; the
Dutch (thanks to the Prince of Orange’s untimely movement), 8680; and
the British, 1783. In the British contingent 32 officers were killed
and 111 wounded; among the other ranks, 492 were killed and 1073
wounded. Of the XVIIIth, two officers were wounded, four men killed
and six wounded.[63] Though the French lost the day, only twelve
thousand of their men fell; and the only trophies of the victory left
in the hands of the Allies were sixteen guns, five hundred prisoners,
and many standards.
Three days after the battle the Duke resumed the siege of Mons, where
the Royal Irish were among the regiments of the covering force, and
when the fall of the fortress brought the campaign to an end, the
XVIIIth returned to its usual winter quarters in the town of Ghent.
[Illustration: MAP N^o. 1.
OUDENARDE
July 11, 1708
BLENHEIM
August 13, 1704
RAMILLES
May 23, 1706
MALPLAQUET
Sept. 11, 1709
W. & A.K. Johnston Limited, Edinburgh & London.]
Though no great battle occurred in 1710, the army in Flanders was
by no means idle. As Marlborough failed to induce Villars to try
conclusions with him in the field, he began to prepare for a future
invasion of France by the successive capture of the fortresses of
Douai, St Venant, Bethune, and Aire. The XVIIIth was in the besieging
force at Aire, where the small garrison defended itself gallantly for
nearly ten weeks, not surrendering until it had lost about 1400 men
and inflicted nearly five times as many casualties on the attackers.
Nothing is known of the work done in this siege by the XVIIIth;
Stearne and Parker contented themselves with recording that owing to
the capture of a convoy food was very scarce in camp,[64] and that
the regiment had three officers killed and five wounded, with
about eighty casualties among the other ranks.[65]
During the winter of 1710-11 the French made gigantic efforts to
protect their country against the threatened invasion, and threw up
fresh lines, which ran from Namur to a point on the English Channel
a few miles south of Boulogne, using rivers and canals, swamps, and
artificial inundations as barriers against the general whom they
feared so greatly. Before Marlborough was ready to open the campaign
of 1711, his trusted friend and invaluable colleague, Prince Eugene,
was recalled to Austria with a large body of troops, but though left
with forces greatly inferior in numbers to those of de Villars, he
resolved to carry out the first task he had already set himself,
the capture of Bouchain. As this fortress was protected by the new
lines, which were far too strong to be carried by force, the Duke
determined to decoy Marshal de Villars from the opening in the works
at Arleux, where he intended to cross. He advanced and retired;
threatened first one part of the lines and then another; issued
contradictory orders; pretended to be cast down at the loss of a weak
detachment intentionally thrown away as a bait to his adversary;
simulated alternately rage, dejection, rashness; and deceived not
only the French spies in his camp, but also his own army, who began
to fear that their beloved “Corporal John” had lost his judgment. By
acting apparently like a madman, but really with the profound skill
of a great master of war, he lured de Villars forty miles to the
westward of Arleux, and on the morning of August 4, ostentatiously
reconnoitred the Marshal’s position, explaining in unusual detail to
the generals who accompanied him the part each was to play in the
assault which was to be delivered on the morrow: then he returned to
camp and issued orders for the coming battle. At tattoo the word was
passed to strike tents and fall in at once, and in an hour the troops
were in motion. At first they thought they were merely taking up
ground for the attack next day, but when hour after hour they plodded
steadily eastward, they were fairly puzzled until, just before dawn,
the message ran down the column: “The cavalry have reached Arleux
and have passed the lines, and the Duke desires that the infantry
will step out.” And step out they did! They forgot the fatigue of the
fifteen miles they had marched already with heavy muskets on their
shoulders and fifty pounds’ weight upon their backs, and without a
halt for rest or food trudged manfully over an apparently endless
plain. When the sun grew hot the work began to tell, and it became
a question of the survival of the fittest. The weaker men dropped
exhausted on the ground, first by scores, then by hundreds, and later
in the day literally by thousands; but without stopping to help their
comrades, those soldiers who still had the strength to keep their
places in the ranks set their teeth and staggered on, determined not
to be beaten in the race by the French, whose horsemen they could
see on the other side of the lines hurrying in the same direction as
themselves. Early in the afternoon the leading battalions reached
Arleux and reinforced the cavalry, who were already in possession
of the entrance to the works. The XVIIIth came up about 4 P.M.;
apparently the discipline and the marching powers of the regiment
had brought it there fairly intact, but when the men realised that
the prize was won and Arleux safe in the Duke’s hands, the reaction,
inevitable after so prolonged a strain, set in, and half of the Royal
Irish collapsed, dead beat and unable to walk another yard. Barely
fifty per cent of the infantry had kept up with the army in this
forced march, when nearly forty miles was covered in eighteen hours.
Numbers of men were found dead from exhaustion, and it was fully
three days before all the stragglers had rejoined the Colours.
Marlborough now laid siege to Bouchain, and handled the covering
force so well against de Villars’ superior numbers that the French
failed to interfere with his operations, and on the 13th of September
had the mortification of seeing the garrison surrender. The investing
force was desperately hard worked during the siege. For thirteen days
consecutively the Royal Irish marched and dug trenches all day, and
at night stood to their arms, ready to fight at any moment. “This,”
says Parker, “was the greatest fatigue I ever underwent at any one
time of my life.” Though the French surrendered before the breach
was stormed, they inflicted heavy losses on the besiegers, whose
casualties amounted to 4018, of which 1154 were among the fifteen
British battalions employed in the siege. The Royal Irish were
fortunate: only four officers were wounded, and about forty of the
other ranks killed or wounded.[66] It is said that an officer of the
XVIIIth, whose courage was as high as his stature was low, was nearly
drowned in wading across a deep inundation, so he had himself hoisted
on the shoulders of the biggest of the grenadiers of his party, and
when safely landed at the foot of the parapet led an assault upon the
enemy’s works.
The capture of Bouchain was the last service the Duke of Marlborough
was allowed to render to his country. Political intrigues had long
been directed against him, and when he returned to England in the
autumn he was coldly received by Queen Anne, insulted in the House
of Lords, prosecuted for peculation by the House of Commons, and
deprived of all his offices. Nay, more, to such a height did party
pamphleteers rouse popular indignation against him, that the General
“who never fought a battle that he did not gain nor sat down before
a fortress he did not take” was forced to go to the Continent to
escape from the jeers of the London mob. Even before his fall, the
Ministers in power had begun secret negotiations with Louis, by which
England was to desert her Allies and make a separate peace with
France; and when the Duke of Ormond, his successor in command of the
British forces in Flanders, joined the army in the spring of 1712, he
understood that he was on no account to cross swords with de Villars.
During several months the British troops were in a very miserable
position; for being still, at least in name, part of the allied
army, to the supreme command of which Eugene had now succeeded, they
followed its operations, but in a novel and humiliating capacity:
they were no longer chief actors, but spectators--soldiers whom their
Government would not allow to fight; and when Ormond announced to
them that the suspension of hostilities between England and France
was signed, the news filled them with profound grief. In July they
turned their backs upon their former comrades and returned to Ghent
and Bruges, after a gloomy march past Douai, Tournai, Bouchain,
Lille, and Oudenarde, places which they had helped to take, but to
which the Dutch garrisons now contemptuously refused them admittance.
After twenty years of almost uninterrupted fighting, every army
requires careful handling at the beginning of peace, but more
especially one sore at the ill-treatment of its beloved Chief, sorer
still at the loss of its honour by its desertion of its comrades in
the time of need. Ormond did not manage his men well, and neglected
their commissariat; the garrison of Ghent lost their discipline,
listened to the words of agitators, and formed a mad scheme to rise;
loot and burn the town, and then disperse over the Netherlands. The
plot was discovered, but two or three thousand men seized part of the
town, where they barricaded themselves, holding out until field-guns
were brought against them. Soon after this mutiny was put down the
troops were withdrawn to England, but the Royal Irish and another
regiment were left to garrison the town until political questions
regarding it had been settled. Their detention at Ghent gave them the
opportunity to see Marlborough once more, for when he passed through
the town at the end of 1712 the whole garrison was on foot to do him
honour.
To many of the officers and men of the XVIIIth Ghent must have been
more familiar than their own homes in Ireland, for they had wintered
there for many years during the war, and did not finally leave it
until the autumn of 1715, when the regiment returned to England. A
few months later it was quartered at Oxford, where “the scholars
and the soldiers did not agree,” until the officers ordered their
men to leave their weapons behind them when they went out at night,
taking instead stout cudgels with which to teach the undergraduates
good manners. This stopped the trouble, and all was quiet until, on
the Prince of Wales’ birthday, the officers lit a bonfire outside
the Post Office, and then went to supper. While they were at table
stones began to come in through the window; a number of soldiers
rushed to the defence of their officers, and broke the windows of
the house from which the supper party had been pelted. Then arose
a furious row: the townsmen turned out; so did the soldiers from
their quarters, and headed by a Lieutenant of grenadiers, who “was
a little elevated,” a mass of Royal Irishmen went through the town
breaking every window they could reach that was not illuminated in
honour of the Royal birthday. Patrols were sent out to stop the
window-breaking, but it is possible they were not very zealous--at
any rate, much damage was done before the rioting was stopped. The
Dons announced that they would have every officer in the regiment
cashiered for this insult to the University, and solemnly complained
to the Privy Council, who at once asked for “reasons in writing,”
or their equivalent at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
Then the House of Lords debated the matter at great length, and
finally decided in favour of the officers, charging the University
with disloyalty for not celebrating properly the Prince of Wales’
birthday. Thus the affair ended without detriment to the regiment,
and to the great benefit of the Oxford glaziers who had to replace
£500 worth of broken glass.
In January, 1712, Lieutenant-General Ingoldsby died.
Brigadier-General Richard Stearne, his successor, made over the
regiment in 1717 to Colonel William Cosby.[67]