Free The Making Of The British Army by Allan Mallinson

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 nowwithout 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.



Corporal John

The north bank of the Upper Danube, Bavaria, 12 August 1704
     
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 mere2 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.
To begin with, the army had grown to an unprecedented size. In addition to the ‘guards and garrisons’