The Making Of The British Army (9 page)

There were changes in the rest of the line too. The proportion of pikemen to shot had been steadily reducing as the musket became more efficient, but it was the introduction of the bayonet in 1670 that signalled the end for the pike, for the musketeer could now truly be his own pikeman. The first bayonets had been plug-ended, slotting into the muzzle of the musket, with obvious limitations. Indeed a dramatic setback in the field, at the ‘battle’ of Killiekrankie in the Highlands during the Glorious Revolution, had demonstrated just how disastrous those limitations could be. Two English regiments were routed having fixed bayonets too soon, thereby rendering themselves unable to fire. A
new pattern was therefore designed – the ‘socket’ bayonet, with a ‘cranked’ hilt fitting over the muzzle to carry the blade to one side, allowing the musket to be reloaded with the blade fixed. It was so effective that at the end of the Nine Years War the pike was withdrawn from service altogether, only the half-pike (‘spontoon’) or halberd remaining in the hands of NCOs and some officers, more as an instrument of correction than a weapon.
²⁴

The change from pike to bayonet changed the character of the infantry, promoting aggression rather than mere proficiency with unwieldy arms. Indeed, the bayonet would become more than just a weapon: it would acquire iconic status as the symbol of infantry spirit. The ‘push of pike’ had always been a lumbering affair, a clumsy locking of horns; but the bayonet charge achieved rapid results. The infantry could now generate ‘shock action’, which hitherto had been the role of the cavalry. At Minden in 1759 six British regiments of infantry would put the French cavalry to flight at the point of the bayonet. ‘Fix bayonets!’ now, as then, is as much a statement of resolve as it is an order, and though it is by no means the historical preserve of the British army, the British infantry have long made an art of it.

And it was at Steenkirk (Steenkerque or Steenkerke), one of the least-known but hardest-fought battles in the army’s history, that the bayonet was properly blooded. The battle was fought some 30 miles south-west of Brussels on 3 August 1692, beginning before dawn and continuing until late afternoon – an uncommonly long fighting day in the experience of most Englishmen – with 15,000 allied troops under William’s personal command pitted against a much larger force under the capable and experienced duc de Luxembourg. It began well, for the French were not expecting the allies to attack, not least because of William’s dissembling tactics. Having achieved his immediate object in the days before – the capture of the fortress of Namur – he had camped nearby and made a pretence of resting. But since the early hours of 3 August his troops had in fact been moving stealthily towards the duc de Luxembourg’s camp, and as dawn approached his advance
guard was within striking distance of the sleeping French. But then the alarm was raised, and a furious, piecemeal fight began.

The main body of William’s force quickened to the sound of the fight but got stuck in thick woodland. By nine o’clock they had managed to get some guns forward, but the French made good use of the respite to form a strong battle line. Not until midday did William’s own line start to form properly, by which time the advance guard of British and Danes had been in action for the best part of nine hours. William nevertheless ordered an attack, which broke the first French line with the bayonet.

The duc de Luxembourg was too experienced a soldier to be unnerved by a poorly supported attack, however, and stood his ground as the British and Danes ran out of steam. Seeing the loss of momentum, the Dutch lieutenant-general Count Solms ordered up his cavalry, which was still with the main body, but they too found it difficult to move over the bad roads and heavy ground, and ended up blocking the way for the infantry. Cursing Solms and all the other Dutch generals in the usual way an infantryman curses everyone outside his own regiment, some of the British now pushed to the front, bayonets fixed, whereupon Solms ordered them to clear the way for his cavalry. William’s counter-order for the cavalry to halt only appears to have made things worse, and by early afternoon the allied advance was at a standstill. The French now counter-attacked, forcing the allies to abandon the field. Five British regiments were completely destroyed, and their commander, Major-General Hugh Mackay, was killed (as was Solms himself). The survivors blamed the Dutch for incompetence, though the retreat was ably covered by General Ouwerkerk, William’s second-in-command. Allies are never so ‘useless’ as in a defeat.

Although Marlborough was not at Steenkirk – indeed, he was not long out of the Tower – the battle told him just as soberly as it told the army in the field what the face of battle with the French would be like: hard pounding, heavy casualties, and certain defeat if things were mismanaged. The events at Steenkirk were soon public knowledge and remained vivid in the public consciousness even after the victories that followed. In his 1759 novel
Tristram Shandy
, Laurence Sterne recounts the soldiers’ memories of the battle when Captain Toby Shandy, invalided from the army after the subsequent French siege of Namur, regales his old servant, the former Corporal Trim, with memories of the fighting, Parson Yorick adding his own views:

Discharging a musket had at least been easier at Steenkirk than at Edgehill, for by then most infantrymen, not just the Fusiliers, were carrying the flintlock. But it was still a novel weapon, its potential not yet realized. Under Marlborough, in the hands of infantrymen who were acquiring a reputation for pugnacity and discipline not enjoyed since Elizabeth I’s day, the flintlock musket would become the instrument of the British habit of victory – the deadly volley and then the bayonet charge. Three centuries later, in the Falklands War, the Scots Guards would run at the Argentinian defenders of Tumbledown Mountain with the same instinct for cold steel as their forebears had at Steenkirk. And other regiments since then, in Iraq and Afghanistan, have pressed home just as vigorously with the bayonet. The battle of Steenkirk pointed to the enduring future for the infantry: their job then was to close with the enemy and kill him, and it remains so today.

But Marlborough’s greatest victories were ten years and more away. In 1692 he remained
persona non grata
with William, and perhaps even more so with the Queen. His rehabilitation was painfully slow, but when Mary died in December 1694 the thaw began, for the childless William was increasingly conscious of the succession; and Mary’s sister Anne was a staunch supporter of Marlborough, not least through her close friendship with Sarah Churchill, his wife. Nevertheless, it was not
until 1698, a year after the formal ending of the Nine Years War, that the earl of Marlborough was restored to his lieutenant-generalcy and to the Privy Council.

And here Marlborough’s story might have ended, his name that of a general even less well known today than Monck – but for ‘events’. The Treaty of Ryswick had brought the war to an inconclusive end: the underlying conflict between Bourbons and Habsburgs remained unresolved, and the peace was therefore an unstable one. Yet Parliament expected retrenchment, and so the army was reduced once more – to a paltry 7,000 on English soil, with 17,000 in Ireland and the overseas garrisons. Thus was set the pattern of premature disbandment that has continued ever since – what in recent years has become known sardonically as taking the ‘peace dividend’. And excessively premature it was too, for almost as soon as the regiments were disbanded Charles II of Spain, who was so interbred even for a Habsburg that he was called
El Hechizado
(The Bewitched), died childless. It was Nature’s blessing, said some – though not a blessing on Europe, for at a stroke the future of the Spanish Netherlands was back on an agenda that could be settled only by war.

William’s health was deteriorating too. And if he is remembered with little affection outside Northern Ireland, perhaps he should be given credit for deciding that Marlborough, with his influence over the soon-to-be Queen and his undoubted soldier’s laurels, should take centre stage in the unfolding drama. William sent him to The Hague as ambassador-extraordinary and commander of English forces in the Netherlands to arrange a new coalition against France and Spain. The embassy bore fruit in September 1701 with the Treaty of the Second Grand Alliance, signed by England, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic. Six months later William died after a fall while riding in Richmond Park, his horse stumbling on a molehill. At once the Jacobites were toasting the mole, ‘the little gentleman in black velvet’, and dreaming of an early restoration of the rightful Stuart king. Indeed, as Marlborough’s greatest biographer and descendant, Sir Winston Churchill, put it in his
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, William’s passing ‘opened the trapdoor to a host of lurking foes’.

Most pressing of those foes was the alliance of France and Spain, a formidable military combination, its gold, men and ships prodigious, and its leader, Louis XIV, wielding such absolute power and lust for
La Gloire
as to blind him to the cost of war. And England was now
without a monarch of experience. Marlborough, however, was both willing and able to act, so that Count Wratislaw, the Imperial ambassador in London, was soon writing to the Emperor that ‘The greatest consolation in this confusion is that Marlborough is fully informed of the whole position and by reason of his credit with the Queen can do everything.’

This credit now paid a handsome personal as well as public dividend: in recognition of his diplomatic and military accomplishments, Anne appointed Marlborough Master General of the Ordnance, knight of the garter and ‘Captain-General of Her Majesty’s Armies at Home and Abroad’. Now at last, with the power both to organize the nation’s land forces and to direct their employment, Marlborough was able to show what an English general might achieve, and of what feats of arms British troops were capable.

IT WAS A SIGHT TO BEHOLD: TWO GENERALS IN FULL-BOTTOMED WIGS
sweating up the steps of the church tower in the little village of Tapfheim. They had met only two months before – the duke of Marlborough (elevated two ranks to the pinnacle of non-royal nobility by Queen Anne in reward for his diplomatic and military achievements and to give him the necessary standing with foreign heads of state) and Prince Eugene of Savoy, President of the Imperial War Council and de facto commander-in-chief of the Holy Roman Empire. Together they commanded an allied army of 52,000 men: 160 squadrons of cavalry, 66 battalions
²⁶
of infantry and 60 guns. If only 16,000 of these were truly ‘British’ (English, Scots and Irish), their red coats were as conspicuous as their capability, for these were now seasoned soldiers, the core of Marlborough’s military machine.

The sight that greeted the two military leaders of the Grand Alliance when they reached the top of the church tower was ripe indeed: a mere
2 miles to the south-west, before the village of Blindheim (spelled ‘Blenheim’ in the dispatches), were the tents, horse lines, artillery and baggage of the 56,000-strong Franco-Bavarian army: 147 squadrons of cavalry, 84 battalions of infantry and 120 guns.

Marlborough was fifty-four years old. He had heard the sound of the guns almost yearly, and yet he was still to command in a major battle. His opponent Marshal Tallard, the former ambassador at the Court of St James, was fifty-two (both Wellington and Bonaparte were forty-six at Waterloo) and one of the most experienced battlefield commanders in Europe. Prince Eugene of Savoy was forty-one; he had spent half his life on active service, with the brilliant success of the battle of Zenta seven years earlier to his name. For Tallard and Eugene the Upper Danube was, if not familiar, then certainly not
terra incognita:
France lay not 100 miles to the west, Austria not 100 miles east. But Antwerp, the English base-port where Marlborough’s regiments would have to re-embark if the campaign went badly, lay 350 miles north-west. Britons had indeed marched, in Winston Churchill’s ringing words, ‘where Britons never marched before’. Monck’s men had marched the same distance from Edinburgh to London, but no English soldier had marched so deep into the territory of a continental enemy, and with a flank exposed to the most powerful army in the world. It was as prodigious a feat of imagination as it was of organization. But in the decade since the first faltering steps into the world of continental campaigning (at Dutch William’s command and under his Dutch generals), the British army had changed in marked degree. Marl-borough had been one of the engines of that change, as he would now be its principal beneficiary.