The Making Of The British Army (11 page)

And so, in Churchill’s ever colourful words, the ‘scarlet caterpillar, upon which all eyes were at once fixed, began to crawl steadfastly day by day across the map of Europe, dragging the whole war with it’. The scarlet caterpillar was, like the first polar expeditions, a supreme demonstration of the art of the possible, a masterpiece of organization and planning, and an example for the future. Ever since then, British soldiers, and for that matter politicians, have accepted the idea of
hazarding far from the island fastness, on exterior lines
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and against an enemy of the first rank. It had become ‘no big deal’.

How did the scarlet caterpillar do it? Captain Parker of the Royal Regiment of Ireland described the routine:

Little wonder the troops called Marlborough, affectionately, ‘Corporal John’. His diligence in appointing subordinates and agents to provide such order and regularity – including novelties such as light, two-wheeled carts to carry the tents and camp kettles rather than relying on the troops themselves as beasts of burden – was as inspired as it was uncommon. The simple, but not easy, expedient of breaking camp, marching two hours before first light and halting at nine kept the exertions to the coolest part of the summer day. Eight to ten miles in the day, 40 miles in five days, may seem slow progress, hardly ‘the angel guiding the whirlwind’ as one essayist described Marlborough’s generalship (Churchill’s ‘scarlet caterpillar’ was altogether better chosen). But a march of 350 miles (the route from the assembly area at Bedburg, 20 miles north-west of Cologne, to the Danube at Blindheim) could not have been conducted at any greater speed without considerable attrition in horses, guns
and
men. The non-marching days were filled with work, or ‘interior economy’, too – oiling, cleaning, making and mending, baking bread. And it worked: fewer than 1,000 men – less than 5 per cent of the force that left Bedburg – fell out along the way. On 12 August, as Marlborough and Eugene spied out the French lines from the top of the steeple in Tapfheim, they could be confident the army was fit to fight.

But if the 1704 campaign was a turning point in the army’s strategic
confidence, it did not follow that its campaigning ability was forever assured. Supply of the army would remain in the hands of a civilian commissariat for a century and a half, and it took a strong-minded commander to get the commissary officers to answer to him first rather than to the Treasury. It was not until the Napoleonic Wars that a military Corps of Waggoners was formed – an unglamorous organization in uniform but one which earned the increasing admiration of the troops whose biscuit and powder the Waggoners carried. In the long peace that followed Waterloo the corps would be disbanded, for ‘Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer,’ as Queen Elizabeth’s adviser Lord Burghley had once remarked – and perhaps none more so than those ‘behind the line’. It would take the very public failures of the Crimean War to get supply placed on a regular footing once more. Thereafter, tellingly, the newly formed Army Service Corps would be the only branch of the army to avoid criticism in the Boer War. If not the certainty, then the expectation of success had taken root on that march to the Danube: if the duke of Marlborough had once made his logistics work, so in the future could others.

From the top of their steeple in Tapfheim, Marlborough and Eugene were able to make a fair estimate of Marshal Tallard’s dispositions. The French infantry were bivouacked behind a marshy tributary of the Danube, the Nebel, their flanks secured by the Danube itself and the fortified villages of Blindheim on the right and Lutzingen, itself backed by the rising hills, on the left – in all, a frontage of 5 miles (vastly more than any of the battles of the English Civil War). The cavalry, Marlborough and Eugene supposed, would be posted on either flank in the usual way, but they could see good galloping ground just west of Blindheim, too. Tallard’s dispositions did not look as formidable as they might have been, however. In truth he did not believe the allies would seek battle against a more powerful army, especially when they were running short of supplies, as Tallard believed Marlborough was. And so, expecting the allies to retire north as soon as they discovered the presence of superior forces, he had merely taken the customary defensive precautions of the marching camp. It was a fatal assumption: in the heat of that high summer’s afternoon, Marlborough and Eugene decided to attack the following morning – Sunday.

Not long after midnight, therefore, the allied army was roused silently from its sleep under the stars (and brilliant they were that
night) in the wooded hills between Tapfheim and Munster to the east. At two o’clock they broke camp and crossed the Reichen stream beyond the village, which Marlborough’s pioneers had been clearing of bosky obstacles all evening, and on across the Kessel stream. In eight columns of double brigades they advanced undetected by Tallard’s patrols, a considerable feat of field discipline almost impossible a decade earlier with glowing slow-matches and clanking tin cartridges. Across the Kessel, on the favourable open ground which Marlborough and Eugene had observed from the church tower, they formed up in line of battle, but with the cavalry (the only arm in which the allies were superior) in the centre, and the infantry on the flanks. Marlborough intended delivering such a violent attack on Blindheim that Tallard would have to reinforce the village or risk his flank being turned. In reinforcing, he would have to weaken the centre, and it was there that the allied cavalry would strike the decisive blow. Meanwhile Marlborough’s guns were being hauled up as stealthily as possible along the Munster – Hochstadt road.

In essentials Marlborough’s artillery was little different from Cromwell’s. It was principally a siege train still, with a few lighter field pieces to thicken up the infantry’s firing line. Marlborough had begun trying to make the heavier guns more manœuvrable, but since the cannon, horse-teams and drivers belonged to the Board of Ordnance he had had only limited success.
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Had the artillery possessed the handiness even of Wellington’s a century later, he might have had the guns forward sooner at Blenheim en masse to wreak havoc with Tallard’s ponderous dispositions, but the dominance of field artillery in major battles would have to wait for the emergence of Bonaparte, the supreme gunner, and his belief that ‘It is with artillery that war is made’ (although the British army would not fully subscribe to that view until the First World War).

Marlborough could expect some spirited fire, nevertheless, for his gunners had gained much skill with the three types of ammunition now carried in their limbers. ‘Canister’ (commonly but inaccurately called grapeshot, which was the naval equivalent) consisted of little more than a gun barrel full of scrap metal that was fired point-blank in
the face of the oncoming infantry or cavalry – a desperate, last-minute device requiring as much nerve as skill. The standard projectile, however, was the solid, round iron shot which battered down the walls behind which the infantry took cover, or scythed through their ranks in the battle line – the more ranks, the more casualties. The bigger guns could send shot half a mile, though Marlborough’s main piece, the sixteen-pounder (the weight of the shot it threw) was at its best at 500 yards. But the most sophisticated type of shot, the one that most tested the gunner’s skill, was explosive shell. It looked like solid shot but was hollow inside and packed with gunpowder. A fuse inserted in the touch-hole was ignited by the firing of the gun’s main charge, and the round would explode among the enemy, the shell case fragmenting into lethal shards. The gunner’s skill lay in trimming the fuse to just the right length: too short and the shell would explode in flight; too long and it would hiss harmlessly past its target. The best gunners could trim the fuse to make the shell explode above the infantry – ‘air burst’ as it would later be known – though shell was at its most effective if the enemy’s lines were stationary. As soon as they began to advance, solid shot was the most serviceable – much faster to load, and the gun itself requiring the least ‘re-laying’ (an artillery piece is ‘laid’ not aimed).

But at Blenheim Marlborough expected the heavy work to be done by his cavalry and infantry; the shock would come not from artillery but from surprise – the impudence of attack against superior forces, and the audacity of attack at dawn.

And shock it was too. The comte de Mérode-Westerloo, one of Tallard’s cavalry commanders, was still asleep when the curtain of his camp bed was pulled aside by his groom – not with the customary cup of chocolate but with the news that the allies were pouring on to the field. ‘I rubbed my eyes in disbelief,’ he recalled afterwards, pulling on clothes and rushing to the horse lines to harry his equally sleepy troopers into the saddle, as signal guns called in the foraging parties.

By eight o’clock the French artillery were managing to send solid shot towards the allied ranks as they formed up, but neither the infantry nor the cavalry, despite the encouragement of Mérode-Westerloo, were in any shape to counter-attack – not even when Marlborough’s engineers came forward to lay bridges across the Nebel. Towards ten o’clock the English brigades on the left, under Major-General John ‘Salamander’Cutts (so-called for his remarkable ability to
survive fire), were able to get across the stream to begin the assault on Blindheim; but they then had to wait, and under increasingly troublesome artillery, until Eugene, who had the harder approach march, could get into position. There being nothing else to do but bear the cannonade, and it being Sunday, Cutts ordered the drums to be piled, altar-like, the colours laid on them, and the regimental chaplains to conduct divine service – the prayer probably a deal more earnest than usual.

At midday, with Eugene now forward and Blindheim ablaze from well-directed shell fire, the assault got properly under way. Heavy fighting quickly spread the length of the 5-mile line, which even without the thick pall of smoke soon shrouding the battlefield would have been a challenge to Marlborough’s capacity for control. Yet in his first test as a major battlefield commander he showed the same sure judgement as Wellington at Waterloo in choosing where best to place himself both to observe and to influence – how to ‘read the battlefield’. He did so with considerable luck, too, for there were close shaves: at one point a round shot struck the ground between his horse’s legs and showered him with earth – just as at Waterloo a cannon ball took off the leg of an officer sitting astride his horse next to Wellington. But Marlborough also relied on picked men to bring him intelligence of the battle. It was standard practice to have a suite of aides-de-camp to relay orders, but ADCs acted as messengers and interpreters of instructions, and they were mounted on the fleetest horses. Marlborough’s two dozen ‘running footmen’ were dismounted, making them less likely to become casualties – hand-picked young officers and NCOs who not only carried orders but observed for themselves how the battle was going.
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In the Second World War, Field Marshal Montgomery copied Marlborough’s system, with young men in jeeps ‘battle reporting’.

It took most of the afternoon to accomplish, but on the allied right Eugene was able to keep the Elector of Bavaria’s troops fixed while on the left Cutts managed to tie down virtually all of Tallard’s infantry in and around Blindheim. The centre ground therefore became a free-manœuvre space for the cavalry, as Marlborough had planned. He was still taking no chances, however, and took the unusual step of placing a line of infantry between his two lines of cavalry.

Tallard’s cavalry fell into the trap, charging and breaking through the
first line of allied cavalry, only to be met by withering volleys from the infantry. The matter was now decided in Cromwellian fashion by the second line of cavalry charging home with the sword, Marlborough himself at their head. The shaken French, instead of counter-charging, pistol-volleyed then fled – all of them, including the vaunted Maison du Roi, the French Household Cavalry. The French infantry beyond were quickly surrounded and cut down, and Tallard’s flanks, suddenly isolated, collapsed.

The unthinkable now happened: Tallard’s army began streaming from the field. A century later Robert Southey, the poet laureate, would sum it up in five memorable words: ‘It was a famous victory.’

Famous, complete and
bloody.
The French lost 30,000 killed, wounded and missing, a huge ‘butcher’s bill’ by the standards of the time. The allies lost 10,000. The spoils were colossal too: guns, powder, shot, horses, waggons, coaches, coin, plate, wine, beer, 30,000 tents, 10,000 sides of beef, and no doubt a
vivandière
or two. There was even a French marshal’s baton, with the marshal holding it.

‘Marshal Tallard is in my coach,’ wrote Marlborough on the back of a tavern bill to his duchess that very evening: ‘I have not the time to say more but to beg you will give my duty to the Queen and let her know that her Army has had a glorious victory.’