Free The Battle of Blenheim by Hilaire Belloc

Danube so clearly impossible that nothing would be left but what the strategy of the last few days had imposed upon Marlborough, namely, a retreat upon his base northward, away from the Danube, towards Nördlingen. It was not imagined that the two commanders of the imperialforces would attack this Franco-Bavarian position, and so risk a general action; for by a retreat upon Nördlingen their continued existence as an army was assured, while an indecisive result would do them far more harm than it would do their opponents. Did Marlborough and Eugene force an action, it is doubtful whether Tallard had considered the alternative of refusing it.
    At any rate, on this Tuesday, the 12th of August, Tallard and the Elector had no intention but to take up a position and camp which would make a retreat up the Danube impossible to Marlborough and Eugene; and certainly neither imagined that any attempt to force the camp would be made, since an alternative of retreat and complete safety was offered the enemy towards Nördlingen.
    While the French fourriers were ordering the lines of the encampment—the tents stretching, the streets staking out—the English duke and Eugene overlooked the business from the church tower of Tapfheim and saw what Tallard designed. Between the main of their own forces and the camp which the Franco-Bavarians were pitching was a distance of about five miles. The location of each body was therefore perfectly well known to the other, and rarely havetwo great hosts lain in mutual presence for full twenty-four hours in so much doubt of an issue, in such exact opposition, and each with so complete an apprehension of his opponent’s power.
    At this point—let us say noon of Tuesday, August 12th—it is essential for us to dwell upon the character of such battles as that upon which Marlborough was already determined; for by the time he had seen the French disposition of their camp, the duke had determined upon forcing an action.
    It is the characteristic of great captains that they live by and appreciate the heavy risk of war.
    When they suffer defeat, history—which soldiers and those who love soldiers so rarely write—contemns the hardiness of their dispositions. When victory, that capricious gift, is granted them, history is but too prone to fall into an opposite error, and to see in their hardihood all of the calculating genius and none of the determined gambler.
    Justice would rather demand that the great captain should be judged by the light in the eyes of his men, by the endurance under him of immense fatigues, by the exact accomplishment of one hundred separate things a day, each clearly designed andremembered, by his grasp of great sweeps of landscape, by his digestion of maps and horizons, and finally and particularly by this—that the great captain, whether he loses or he wins, risks well: he smells the adventure of war, and is the opposite of those who, whether in their fortunes or their bodies, chiefly seek security.
    Judged by all these tests, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was a supreme commander; and it is not the least part in our recognition of this, that the first and chief of the great actions upon which his fame reposes was an action essentially and typically hazardous, and one the disastrous loss of which was as probable as, or more probable than, the successful issue which it obtained.
    He could not know the special factor of weakness in his opponent’s cavalry; he was to misjudge the first element in the position when he broke his best infantry in the futile attack upon the village. But he was to benefit by those small, hidden, momentary things which determine great battles, and which make of soldiers, as of men who follow the sea, determined despisers of success, and as determined worshippers of the merit which may or may not attain it.
    To have led his army as he had led it for now three months, to have designed the general plan that he had designed, and to have accomplished it; to