CONTENTS
BLENHEIM
PART I. THE POLITICAL OBJECTIVE
PART II. THE EARLY WAR
PART III. THE MARCH TO THE DANUBE
PART IV. THE SEVEN WEEKS — THE THREE PHASES
The First Phase
The Second Phase
The Third Phase
PART V. THE ACTION
CRÉCY
INTRODUCTION
I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
II. THE CAMPAIGN OF CRÉCY
III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
IV. THE TERRAIN OF CRÉCY
V. THE ACTION
TOURCOING
PART I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCE
PART II. THE GENERAL MILITARY SITUATION
PART III. THE PLAN OF THE ALLIES
PART IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
PART V. THE TERRAIN
PART VI. THE ACTION
SUMMARY OF SITUATION ON THE SOUTH BY THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, MAY 17th.
CLERFAYT’S COLUMN.
SUNDAY, MAY the 18th, 1794.
WATERLOO
I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
The Advance
III. THE DECISIVE DAY
IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE
V. THE ACTION
The First Part of the Action
The Second Part of the Action
MALPLAQUET
I. THE POLITICAL MEANING OF MALPLAQUET
II. THE SIEGE OF TOURNAI
III. THE MANŒUVRING FOR POSITION
IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
V. THE ACTION
POITIERS
INTRODUCTION
PART I. THE CAMPAIGN
PART II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION
PART III. THE TERRAIN
PART IV. THE ACTION
PART V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES
PART VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE
Title page and frontispiece of the Blenheim volume
Plate I. The Battle of Blenheim.
BLENHEIM
PART I. THE POLITICAL OBJECTIVE
THE PROPER UNDERSTANDING of a battle and of its historical significance is only possible in connection with the campaign of which it forms a part; and the campaign can only be understood when we know the political object which it was designed to serve.
A battle is no more than an incident in a campaign. However decisive in its immediate result upon the field, its value to the general conducting it depends on its effect upon the whole of his operations, that is, upon the campaign in which he is engaged.
A campaign, again, is but the armed effort of one society to impose its will in some particular upon another society. Every such effort must have a definite political object. If this object is served the campaign is successful. If it is not served the campaign is a failure. Many a campaign which began or even concluded with a decisive action in favour of one of the two belligerents has failed because, in the result, the political object which the victory was attempting was not reached. Conversely, many a campaign, the individual actions of which were tactical defeats, terminated in favour of the defeated party, upon whom the armed effort was not sufficient to impose the will of his adversary, or to compel him to that political object which the adversary was seeking. In other words, military success can be measured only in terms of civil policy.
It is therefore essential, before approaching the study of any action, even of one so decisive and momentous as the Battle of Blenheim, to start with a general view of the political situation which brought about hostilities, and of the political object of those hostilities; only then, after grasping the measure in which the decisive action in question affected the whole campaign, can we judge how the campaign, in its turn, compassed the political end for which it was designed.
The war whose general name is that of the Spanish Succession was undertaken by certain combined powers against Louis XIV. of France (and such allies as that monarch could secure upon his side) in order to prevent the succession of his grandson to the crown of Spain.
With the various national objects which Holland, England, the Empire and certain of the German princes, as also Savoy and Portugal, may have had in view when they joined issue with the French monarch, military history is not concerned. It is enough to know that their objects, though combining them against a common foe, were not identical, and the degrees of interest with which they regarded the compulsion of Louis XIV. to forego the placing of his grandson upon the Spanish throne were very different. It is this which will largely explain the various conduct of the allies during the progress of the struggle; but all together sought the humiliation of Louis, and joined on the common ground of the Spanish Succession.
The particular object, then, of the campaign of Blenheim (and of those campaigns which immediately preceded and succeeded it) was the prevention of the unison of the crowns of France and Spain in the hands of two branches of the same family. Tested by this particular issue alone, the campaign of Blenheim, and the whole series of campaigns to which it belongs, failed. Louis XIV. maintained his grandson upon the throne of Spain; and the issue of the long war could not impose upon him the immediate political object of the allies.
But there was a much larger and more general object engaged, which was no less than the defence of Austria — more properly the Empire — and of certain minor States, against what had grown to be the overwhelming power of the French monarchy.
From this standpoint the whole period of Louis XIV.’s reign — all the last generation of the seventeenth century and the first decade and more of the eighteenth — may be regarded as a struggle between the soldiers of Louis XIV. (and their allies) upon the one hand, and Austria, with certain minor powers concerned in the defence of their independence or integrity, upon the other.
In this struggle Great Britain was neutral or benevolent in its sympathies in so far as those sympathies were Stuart; but all that part of English public life called Whig, all the group of English aristocrats who desired the abasement of the Crown, perhaps the mass of the nation also, was opposed, both in its interests and in its opinions, to the supremacy of Louis XIV. upon the Continent.
William of Orange, who had been called to the English throne by the Revolution of 1688, was the most determined opponent Louis had in Europe. Apart from him, the general interests of the London merchants, and the commercial interests of the nation as a whole, were in antagonism to the claims of the Bourbon monarchy. We therefore find the forces of Great Britain, in men, ships, guns, and money, arrayed against Louis throughout the end of his reign, and especially during this last great war.
Now, from this general standpoint — by far the most important — the war of the Spanish Succession is but part of the general struggle against Louis XIV.; and in that general struggle the campaign of 1704, and the battle of Blenheim which was its climax, are at once of the highest historical importance, and a singular example of military success.
For if the general political object be considered, which was the stemming of the French tide of victory and the checking of the Bourbon power, rather than the particular matter of the succession of the Spanish throne, then it was undoubtedly the campaign of 1704 which turned the tide; and Blenheim must always be remembered in history as the great defeat from which dates the retreat of the military power of the French in that epoch, and the gradual beating back of Louis XIV.’s forces to those frontiers which may be regarded as the natural boundaries of France.
Not all the French conquests were lost, nor by any means was the whole great effort of the reign destroyed. But the peril which the military aptitude of the French under so great a man as Louis XIV. presented to the minor States of Europe and to the Austrian empire was definitely checked when the campaign of Blenheim was brought to its successful conclusion. That battle was the first of the great defeats which exhausted the resources of Louis, put him, for the first time in his long reign, upon a close defensive, and restored the European balance which his years of unquestioned international power had disturbed.
Blenheim, then, may justly rank among the decisive actions of European history.
In connection with the campaign of which it formed a part, it gave to that campaign all its meaning and all its complete success.
In connection with the general struggle against Louis, that campaign formed the turning point between the flow and the ebb in the stream of military power which Louis XIV. commanded and had set in motion.
From the day of Blenheim, August 13th, 1704, onwards, the whole French effort was for seven years a desperate losing game, which, if its end was saved from disaster by the high statesmanship of the king and the devotion of his people, was none the less the ruin of that ambitious policy which had coincided with the great days of Versailles.
The war was conducted, as I have said, by various allies. Its success depended, therefore, upon various commanders regarded as coequal, acting as colleagues rather than as principals and subordinates. But the story of the great march to the Danube and its harvest at Blenheim, which we are about to review, sufficiently proves that the deciding genius in the whole affair was that of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The plan was indeed Eugene’s; and in the battle itself he shared the glory with his English friend and colleague. Again, the British troops present were few indeed compared with the total of the allied forces. At Blenheim, in particular, they amounted to less than a third of the numbers present. The excellence of their material, however, their magnificent work at the Schellenberg and on Blenheim field itself, coupled with the fact that the general to whom the final success is chiefly due was the great military genius of this country, warrants the historian in classing this battle among British actions, and in treating its story as a national affair.
I will approach the story of the campaign and of the battle by a conspectus of the field of war in which Marlborough was so unexpectedly to show the military genius which remains his single title to respect and his chief claim to renown.
PART II. THE EARLY WAR
IN ORDER TO grasp the strategic problem presented to Marlborough and the allies in the spring of 1704, it is first necessary to understand the diplomatic position at the outbreak of the war, and the military disposition of the two years 1702 and 1703, and thus the general position of the armies which preceded Marlborough’s march to the Danube.
Louis XIV. recognised his grandson as king of Spain late in 1700. The coalition immediately formed against him was at first imperfect. Savoy, with its command of the passes over the Alps into Austrian territory, was in Louis’ favour. England, whose support of his enemies was (for reasons to be described) a capital factor in the issue, had not yet joined those enemies. But, from several causes, among the chief of which was Louis’ recognition of the Pretender as king of England after James the II.’s death, the opinion of the English aristocracy, and perhaps of the English people, was fixed, and in the last months of 1701 the weight of England was thrown into the balance against France.
Why have I called this — the decision of the English Parliament — a capital factor in the issue of the war?
Excepting for a moment the military genius of Marlborough — whose great capacity had not yet been tested in so large a field — two prime characters gave to Great Britain a deciding voice in what was to follow. The first of these was her wealth, the second that aristocratic constitution of her polity which was now definitely established, and which, for nearly a century and a half, was to make her strength unique in its quality among all the elements of European competition.
As to the first of these — the Wealth of England — it is a matter of such importance to the comprehension of all the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth that it should merit a far longer analysis and affirmation than can be devoted to it in these few lines. It must be enough for our purpose to say that Great Britain, from about 1680 onwards, was not only wealthier (in proportion to her population) than the powers with whom she had to deal as enemies or allies, but was also proceeding to increase that wealth at a rate far exceeding that of her rivals. Again, what was perhaps, for the purposes of war, the chief point of all, England held that wealth in a mobile, fluid form, which could at once be translated into munitions, the wages of mercenaries, or the hire of transports, within the shortest time, and at almost any point in Western and Northern Europe.
Essentially commercial, already possessed of a solid line of enterprises beyond the seas, having defeated and passed the Dutch in the race for mercantile supremacy, England could afford or withhold at her choice the most valuable and rapid form of support — money.
How true this was, even those in Europe who had not appreciated the changed conditions of Great Britain immediately perceived when the determination of Parliament, at the end of 1701, to support the alliance against Louis XIV., took the form of voting 40,000 men, all of whom would be immediately supplied and paid with English money.
True, of the 40,000 not half were British; but (save for the excellent quality of the British troops), the point was more or less indifferent. The important thing was that England was able to provide and to maintain this immense accretion to the coalition against France, and to use it where she would. We shall see later how this power turned the fate of the war.
If I have insisted so strongly upon the financial factor, it is both because that factor is misappreciated in most purely military histories, and also because, in the changed circumstances of our own time, it is not easy for the reader to take for granted, as did his ancestors, the overwhelming superiority which England once enjoyed in mobilised wealth, usable after this kind. It can best be compared to the similar superiority enjoyed in the Middle Ages by the Republic of Venice, to whose fortunes, both good and ill, the story of modern England affords so strange a parallel.
The second factor I have mentioned — the aristocratic constitution of the country — though almost equally important, is somewhat more elusive, and might be more properly challenged by a critic.
England had not, in the first years of the eighteenth century, reached that calm and undisturbed solidity which is the mark of an aristocratic State at its zenith. Faction was bitter, the opposition between the old loyalty to the Crown and the new national régime was so determined as to make civil war possible at any moment. This condition of affairs was to last for a generation, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century was passed that it disappeared.
Nevertheless, compared with the Continental States, Great Britain already presented by 1701 that elasticity in substance and tenacity in policy which accompany aristocratic institutions. Corruption might be rife, but it was already growing difficult to purchase the services of a member of the governing class against the national interests. That knowledge of public affairs, diffused throughout a small and closely combined social class, which is the mark of an aristocracy, was already apparent. The power of choosing, from a narrow and well-known field, the best talents for any particular office (which is another mark of aristocracy), was already a power apparent in the government of this country. The solidarity which, in the face of a common enemy, an aristocracy always displays, the long-livedness, as of a corporate body, which an aristocracy enjoys, and which permits it to follow with such strict continuity whatever line of foreign policy it has undertaken, was clearly defining itself at the moment of which I write.
In a word, the new settlement of English life upon the basis of class government, the exclusion of the mass of the people from public affairs, the decay (if you will) of a lively public opinion, the presence of that hopeless disinherited class which now forms the majority of our industrial population; the organisation of the universities, of justice, of the legislature, of the executive, as parts of one social class; the close grasp which that class now had upon the land and capital of the whole country, which it could utilise immediately for interior development or for a war — all this marked the youth and vigour of an oligarchic England, which was for so long to be at once invulnerable and impregnable.
At what expense in morals, and therefore in ultimate strength and happiness, such experiments are played, is no matter for discussion in a military history. We must be content to remark what vigour her new constitution gave to the efforts of England in the field, while yet that constitution was young.
England, then, having thrown this great weight into the scale of the Empire, and against France, the campaign of 1702 was entered upon with the chances in favour of the former, and with the latter in an anxiety very different from the pride which Louis XIV. had taken for granted in the early part of his reign.
If the reader will consider the map of Western Europe, the effect of England’s joining the allies will be apparent.
The frontier between the Spanish Netherlands and Holland — that is, between modern Belgium and Holland — was the frontier between the forces of Louis XIV. and those of opponents upon the north. Thus Antwerp and Ostend were in the hands of the Bourbon, for the Spanish Netherlands had passed into the hands of the French king’s grandson, and the French and Spanish forces were combined. Further east, towards the Upper Rhine, a French force lay in the district of Cleves, and all the fortresses on the Meuse, running in a line south of that post, with the exception of Maestricht, were in French hands.
French armies held or threatened the Middle Rhine. Upon the Upper Rhine and upon the Danube an element of the highest moment in favour of France had appeared when the Elector of Bavaria had declared for Louis XIV., and against Austria.
Had not England intervened with the great weight of gold and that considerable contingent of men (in all, eighteen of the new forty thousand), France would have easily held her northern position upon the frontier of Holland and the Lower Rhine, while the Elector of Bavaria, joining forces with the French army upon the Upper Rhine, would have marched upon Vienna.
The Emperor was harried by the rising of the Hungarians behind him; and as the principal forces of the French king would not have been detained in the north, the whole weight of France, combined with her new ally the Elector of Bavaria, would have been thrown upon the Upper Danube.
As it was, this plan was, in its inception at least, partially successful, but only in its inception, and only partially.
For, with the summer of 1702, Marlborough, though hampered by the fears of the Dutch with whom he had to act in concert, cleared the French out of Cleves, caused them to retire southward in the face of the great accession of strength which he brought with the new troops in English pay and the English contingents. Following the French retirement, he swept the whole valley of the Meuse, and took its fastnesses from Liége downwards, all along the course of the stream.
By the end of the year this northern front of the French armies was imperilled, and Marlborough and his allies in that part hoped to undertake with the next season the reduction of the Spanish Netherlands.
It must be remembered, in connection with this plan, that France has always been nervous with regard to her north-eastern frontier; that the loss of this frontier leaves a way open to Paris: an advance from Belgium was to the French monarchy what an advance along the Danube was to Austria — the prime peril of all. As yet, France was nowhere near grave peril in this quarter, but pressure there marred her general plans upon the Danube.
Nevertheless, the march upon Vienna by the Upper Danube had been prepared with some success. While part of the northern frontier was thus being pressed and part menaced, while the Meuse was being cleared of French garrisons, and the French fortresses on it taken by Marlborough and his allies, the Elector of Bavaria had seized Ulm. The French upon the Upper Rhine, under Villars, defeated the Prince of Baden at Friedlingen, and established a road through the New Forest by which Louis XIV.’s forces, combined with those of the Elector of Bavaria, could advance eastward upon the Emperor’s capital. It was designed that in the next year, 1703, the troops of Savoy, in alliance with those of France, should march from North Italy through the passes of the Alps and the Tyrol upon Vienna, while at the same time the Franco-Bavarian forces should march down the Danube towards the same objective.
When the campaign of 1703 opened, however, two unexpected events determined what was to follow.
The first was the failure of Marlborough in the north to take Antwerp, and in general his inability to press France further at that point; the second, the defection of Savoy from the French alliance.
As to the first — Marlborough’s failure against Antwerp. The Spanish Netherlands were now solidly held; the forces of the allies were indeed increasing perpetually in this neighbourhood, but it appeared as though the attempt to reduce Brabant, Hainault, and Flanders, which are here the bulwark of France, would be tedious, and perhaps barren. A sort of “consolation” advance was indeed made upon the Rhine, and Bonn was captured; but no more was done in this quarter.
The General Situation in 1703.
As to the second point, the solid occupation of the Upper Danube by the Franco-Bavarians was indeed fully accomplished. The imperial forces were defeated upon the bank of that river at Hochstadt, but the advance upon Vienna failed, for the second half of the plan, the march from Northern Italy upon Austria, through the Tyrol, had come to nothing, through the defection of Savoy. The turning of the scale against Louis by the action of England was beginning to have its effect; Portugal had already joined the coalition, and now Savoy had refused to continue her help of the Bourbons.
The year 1704 opened, therefore, with this double situation: to the south Austria had been saved for the moment, but was open to immediate attack in the campaign to come; meanwhile, the French had proved so solidly seated in the Spanish Netherlands (or Belgium) that repeated attacks on them in this quarter would in all probability prove barren.
It was under these circumstances that Eugene of Savoy came to the great decision which marked the year of Blenheim. He determined that it was best — if he could persuade his colleagues — to carry the war into that territory which was particularly menaced. He conceived the plan of marching a great force from the Netherlands right down to the field of the Upper Danube. There could be checked the proposed march upon the heart of the coalition, which was Vienna. There, if fortune served the allies, they would by victory make all further chance of marching a Franco-Bavarian force down the Danube impossible; meanwhile, and at any rate, the new step would alarm all French effort towards the Upper Rhine, weaken the French organisation upon its northern frontier, and so permit of a return of the allies to an attack there at a later time.
Eugene of Savoy was a member of the cadet branch of that royal house. His grandfather, the younger son of Charles Emmanuel, had founded the family called Savoy Carignan. His father had been married to one of Mazarin’s nieces. Eugene was her fifth son, and at this moment not quite forty years of age.
His character, motives, and genius must be clearly seized if we are to appreciate the campaign and the battle of Blenheim.
It was the Italian blood which formed that character most, but he was thoroughly French by birth and training. Born in Paris, and desiring a career in the French army, it was a slight offered to his mother by the French king that gave his whole life a personal hatred of Louis XIV. for its motive. From boyhood till his death, between sixty and seventy, this great captain directed his energies uniquely against the fortunes of the French king. When, later in life, there was an attempt to acquire his talents for the French service, he replied that he hoped to re-enter France, but only as an invader. It has been complained that he lacked precision in detail, and that as an organiser he was somewhat at fault; but he had no equal for rapidity of vision, and for seizing the essential point in a strategic problem. From that day in his twentieth year when he had assisted at Sobiesky’s destruction of the Turks before Vienna, through his own great victory which crushed that same enemy somewhat later at Zenta, in all his career this quality of immediate perception had been supremely apparent.
He was at this moment — the end of the campaign of 1703 — the head of the imperial council of war; and he it was who first grasped the strategic necessity which 1703 had created. The determination to carry the defence of the empire into the valley of the Upper Danube was wholly his own. He wrote to Marlborough suggesting a withdrawal of forces as considerable as possible from the northern field to the southern.
By a happy accident, the judgment of the Englishman exactly coincided with his own, and indeed there was so precise a sympathy between these two very different men that when they met in the course of the ensuing campaign there sprang up between them not only a lasting friendship, but a mutual comprehension which made the combination of their talents invincible during those half dozen years of the war which all but destroyed the French power.
Such was the origin of Marlborough’s advance southward from the Netherlands in the early summer of 1704, an advance famous in history under the title of “the march to the Danube.”
PART III. THE MARCH TO THE DANUBE
THE POSITION OF the enemy at the moment when Marlborough’s march to the Danube from the Netherlands was conceived may be observed in the sketch map on page 59.
Under Villeroy, who must be regarded as the chief of the French commanders of the moment, lay the principal army of Louis XIV., with the duty of defending the northern front and of watching the Lower Rhine.
It was this main force which was expected to have to meet the attack of Marlborough and the Dutch in the same field of operations as had seen the troops in English pay at work during the two preceding years. But Villeroy was, of course, free to detach troops southwards somewhat towards the Middle Rhine, or the valley of the Moselle, if, as later seemed likely, an attack should be made in that direction.
On the Upper Rhine, and in Alsace generally, lay Tallard with his corps. This marshal had captured certain crossing-places over the Rhine, but had all his munitions and the mass of his strength permanently on the left bank.
Finally, Marcin, with his French contingent, and Max-Emanuel, the Elector of Bavaria, with the Bavarian army, held the whole of the Upper Danube, from Ulm right down to and past the Austrian frontier.
Over against these forces of the French and their Bavarian allies we must set, first, the Dutch forces in the north, including the garrisons of the towns on the Meuse which Marlborough had conquered and occupied; and, in the same field, the forces in the pay of England (including the English contingents). These amounted in early 1704 to 50,000 men, which Marlborough was to command.
Next, upon the Middle Rhine, and watching Tallard in Alsace, was Prince Eugene, who had been summoned from Hungary by the Imperial government to defend this bulwark of Germany, but his army was small compared to the forces in the north.
Finally, the Margrave of Baden, Louis, with another separate army, was free to act at will in Upper Germany, to occupy posts in the Black Forest, or to retire eastward into the heart of Germany or towards the Danube as circumstances might dictate. This force was also small. It was supplemented by local militia raised to defend particular passes in the Black Forest, and these, again, were supported by the armed peasantry.
It is essential to a comprehension of the whole scheme to understand that before the march to the Danube the whole weight of the alliance against the French lay in the north, upon the frontier of Holland, the valley of the Meuse, and the Lower Rhine. The successes of Bavaria in the previous year had given the Bavarian army, with its French contingent, a firm grip upon the Upper Danube, and the possibility of marching upon Vienna itself when the campaign of 1704 should open.
The great march upon the Danube which Eugene had conceived, and which Marlborough was to execute so triumphantly, was a plan to withdraw the weight of the allied forces suddenly from the north to the south; to transfer the main weapon acting against France from the Netherlands to Bavaria itself; to do this so rapidly and with so little leakage of information to the enemy as would prevent his heading off the advance by a parallel and faster movement upon his part, or his strengthening his forces upon the Danube before Marlborough’s should reach that river.
Such was the scheme of the march to the Danube which we are now about to follow; but before undertaking a description of the great and successful enterprise, the reader must permit me a word of distinction between a strategic move and that tactical accident which we call a battle. In the absence of such a distinction, the campaign of Blenheim and the battle which gives it its name would be wholly misread.
A great battle, especially if it be of a decisive character, not only changes history, but has a dramatic quality about it which fixes the attention of mankind.
The general reader, therefore, tends to regard the general movements of a campaign as mere preliminaries to, or explanations of, the decisive action which may conclude it.
This is particularly the case with the readers attached to the victorious side. The French layman, in the days before universal service in France, wrote and read his history of 1805 as though the march of the Grand Army were deliberately intended to conclude with Austerlitz. The English reader and writer still tends to read and write of Marlborough’s march to the Danube as though it were aimed at the field of Blenheim.
This error or illusion is part of that general deception so common to historical study which has been well called “reading history backwards.” We know the event; to the actors in it the future was veiled. Our knowledge of what is to come colours and distorts our judgment of the motive and design of a general.
The march to the Danube was, like all strategic movements, a general plan animated by a general objective. It was not a particular thrust at a particular point, destined to achieve a highly particular result at that point.
Armies are moved with the object of imposing political changes upon an opponent. If that opponent accepts these changes, not necessarily after a pitched battle, but in any other fashion, the strategical object of the march is achieved.
Though the march conclude in a defeat, it may be strategically sound; though it conclude in a victory, it may be strategically unsound. Napoleon’s march into Russia in 1812 was strategically sound. Had Russia risked a great battle and lost it, the historical illusion of which I speak would treat the campaign as a designed preface to the battle. Had Russia risked such a battle and been successful, the historical illusion of which I speak would call the strategy of the advance faulty.
As we know, the advance failed partly through the weather, partly through the spirit of the Russian people, not through a general action. But in conception and in execution the strategy of Napoleon in that disastrous year was just as excellent as though the great march had terminated not in disaster but in success.
Similarly, the reputation justly earned by Marlborough when he brought his troops from the Rhine to the Danube must be kept distinct from his tactical successes in the field at the conclusion of the effort. He was to run a grave risk at Donauwörth, he was to blunder badly in attacking the village of Blenheim, he was to be in grave peril even in the last phase of the battle, when Eugene just saved the centre with his cavalry.
Had chance, which is the major element in equal combats, foiled him at Donauwörth or broken his attempt at Blenheim, the march to the Danube would still remain a great thing in history. Had Tallard refused battle on that day, as he certainly should have done, the march to the Danube would still deserve its great place in the military records of Europe.
When we have seized the fact that Marlborough’s great march was but a general strategic movement of which the action at Blenheim was the happy but accidental close, we must next remark that the advance to the Danube was the more meritorious, and gives the higher lustre to Marlborough’s fame as a general, from the fact that it was an attempt involving a great military hazard, and that yet that attempt had to be made in the face of political difficulties of peculiar severity.
In other words, Marlborough was handicapped in a fashion which lends his success a character peculiar to itself, and worthy of an especial place in history.
This handicap may be stated by a consideration of three points which cover its whole character.
The first of these points concerns the physical conditions of the move; the other two are peculiar to the political differences of the allies.
It was in the nature of the move that a high hazard was involved in it. The general had calculated, as a general always must, the psychology of his opponent. If he were wrong in his calculation, the advance on the Danube could but lead to disaster. It was for him to judge whether the French were so nervous about the centre of their position upon the Rhine as to make them cling to it to the last moment, and tend to believe that it was either along the Moselle or (when he had left that behind) in Alsace that he intended to attack. In other words, it was for him to make the French a little too late in changing their dispositions, a little too late in discovering what his real plan was, and therefore a little too late in massing larger reinforcements upon the Upper Danube, where he designed to be before them.
Marlborough guessed his opponent’s psychology rightly; the French marshals hesitated just too long, their necessity of communicating with Louis at Versailles further delayed them, and the great hazard which he risked was therefore risked with judgment. But a hazard it remained until almost the last days of its fruition. The march must be rapid; it involved a thousand details, each requiring his supervision and his exact calculation, his knowledge of what could be expected of his troops, and his survey of daily supply.
There was another element of hazard.
Arrived at his destination upon the plains of the Danube, Marlborough would be very far from any good base of supply.
The country lying in the triangle between the Upper Danube and the Middle Rhine, especially that part of it which is within striking distance of the Danube, is mountainous and ill provided with those large towns, that mobilisable wealth, and those stores of vehicles, munitions, food, and remounts which are the indispensable sustenance of an army.
The industry of modern Germany has largely transformed this area, but even to-day it is one in which good depots would be rare to find. Two hundred years ago, the tangle of hills was far more deserted and far worse provided.
By the time Marlborough should have effected his junction with his ally in the upper valley of the Danube only two bases of supply would be within any useful distance of the new and distant place to which he was transferring his great force.
The most important of these, his chief base, and his only principal store of munitions and every other requisite, was Nuremberg; and that town was a good week from the plains upon the bank of the Danube where he proposed to act. As an advanced base nearer to the river, he could only count upon the lesser town of Nordlingen.
Therefore, even if he should successfully reach the field of action which he proposed, cross the hills between the two river basins without loss or delay, and be ready to act as he hoped upon the banks of the Danube before the end of June, his stay could not be indefinitely prolonged there, and his every movement would be undertaken under the anxiety which must ever haunt a commander dependent on an insufficient or too distant base of supply. This anxiety, be it noted, would rapidly increase with every march he might have to take southward of the Danube, and with every day’s advance into Bavaria itself, if, as he hoped, the possibility of such an advance should crown his efforts.
We have seen that the great hazard which Marlborough risked made it necessary, as he advanced southward up the Rhine during the first half of his march, to keep Villeroy and Tallard doubtful as to whether his objective was the Moselle or, later, Alsace; and while they were still in suspense, abruptly to leave the valley of the Rhine and make for the crossing of the hills towards the Danube. So long as the French marshals remained uncertain of his intentions, they would not dare to detach any very large body of troops from the Rhine valley to the Elector’s aid: under the conditions of the time, the clever handling of movement and information might create a gap of a week at least between his first divergence from the Rhine and his enemy’s full appreciation that he was heading for the south-east.
He so concealed his information and so ordered his baffling movements as to achieve that end.
So much for the general hazard which would have applied to any commander undertaking such an advance.
But, as I have said, there were two other points peculiar to Marlborough’s political position.
The first was, that he was not wholly free to act, as, for instance, Cæsar in Gaul was free, or Napoleon after 1799. He must perpetually arrange matters, in the first stages with the Dutch commissioner, later with the imperial general, Prince Louis of Baden, who was his equal in command. He must persuade and even trick certain of his allies in all the first steps of the great business; he must accommodate himself to others throughout the whole of it.
Secondly, the direction in which he took himself separated him from the possibility of rapidly communicating his designs, his necessities, his chances, or his perils to what may be called his moral base. This moral base, the seat both of his own Government and of the Dutch (his principal concern), lay, of course, near the North Sea, and under the immediate supervision of England and the Hague. This is a point which the modern reader may be inclined to ridicule until he remembers under what conditions the shortest message, let alone detailed plans and the execution of considerable orders, could alone be performed two hundred years ago. By a few bad roads, across a veritable dissected map of little independent or quasi-independent polities, each with its own frontier and prejudices and independent government, the messenger (often a single messenger) must pass through a space of time equivalent to the passage of a continent to-day, and through risks and difficulties such as would to-day be wholly eliminated by the telegraph. The messenger was further encumbered by every sort of change from town to town, in local opinion, and the opportunities for aid.
More than this, in marching to the Danube, Marlborough was putting between himself and that upon which he morally, and most of all upon which he physically, relied, a barrier of difficult mountain land.
Having mentioned this barrier, it is the place for me to describe the physical conditions of that piece of strategy, and I will beg the reader to pay particular attention to the accompanying map, and to read what follows closely in connection with it.
In all war, strategy considers routes, and routes are determined by obstacles.
Had the world one flat and uniform surface, the main problems of strategy would not exist.
The surface of the world is diversified by certain features — rivers, chains of hills, deserts, marshes, seas, etc. — the passage across which presents difficulties peculiar to an army, and it is essential to the reading of military history to appreciate these difficulties; for the degrees of impediment which natural features present to thousands upon the march are utterly different from those which they present to individuals or to civilian parties in time of peace. Since it is to difficulties of this latter sort that we are most accustomed by our experience, the student of a campaign will often ask himself (if he is new to his subject) why such and such an apparently insignificant stream or narrow river, such and such a range of hills over which he has walked on some holiday without the least embarrassment, have been treated by the great captains as obstacles of the first moment.
Map showing the peril of Marlborough’s march to the Danube,
beyond the hills which separate the Rhine from the Danube.
The reason that obstacles of any sort present the difficulty they do to an army, and present it in the high degree which military history discovers, is twofold.
First, an army consists in a great body of human beings, artificially gathered together under conditions which do not permit of men supplying their own wants by agriculture or other forms of labour. They are gathered together for the principal purpose of fighting. They must be fed; they must be provided with ammunition, usually with shelter and with firing, and if possible with remounts for their cavalry; reinforcements for every branch of their service must be able to reach them along known and friendly (or well-defended) roads, called their lines of communication. These must proceed from some base, that is from some secure place in which stores of men and material can be accumulated.
Next, it is important to notice that variations in speed between two opposed forces will nearly always put the slow at a disadvantage in the face of the more prompt. For just as in boxing the quicker man can stop one blow and get another in where the slower man would fail, or just as in football the faster runner can head off the man with the ball, so in war superior mobility is a fixed factor of advantage — but a factor far more serious than it is in any game. The force which moves most quickly can “walk round” its opponent, can choose its field for action, can strike in flank, can escape, can effect a junction where the slower force would fail.
It is these two causes, then — the artificial character of an army, with its vast numbers collected in one place and dependent for existence upon the labour of others and the supreme importance of rapidity — which between them render obstacles that seem indifferent to a civilian in time of peace so formidable to a General upon the march.
The heavy train, the artillery, the provisioning of the force, can in general only proceed upon good ways or by navigable rivers. At any rate, if the army departs from these, a rival army in possession of such means of progress will have the supreme advantage of mobility.
Again, upon the flat an army may proceed by many parallel roads, and thus in a number of comparatively short columns, marching upon one front towards a common rendezvous. But in hilly country it will be confined to certain defiles, sometimes very few, often reduced to one practicable pass. There is no possibility of an advance by many routes in short columns, each in touch with its neighbours; the whole advance resolves itself into one interminable file.
Now, in proportion to the length of a column, the units of which must each march one directly behind the other, do the mechanical difficulties of conducting such a column increase. Every accident or shock in the long line is aggravated in proportion to the length of the line. Finally, a force thus drawn out on the march in one exiguous and lengthy trail is in the worst possible disposition for meeting an attack delivered upon it from either side.
All this, which is true of the actual march of the army, is equally true of its power to maintain its supply over a line of hills (to take that example of an obstacle); and therefore a line of hills, especially if these hills be confused and steep, and especially if they be provided with but bad roads across them, will dangerously isolate an army whose general base lies upon the further side of them.
What the reader has just read explains the peculiar character which the valley of the Upper Danube has always had in the history of Western European war.
The Rhine and its tributaries form one great system of communications, diversified, indeed, by many local accidents of hill and marsh and forest, with which, for the purposes of this study, we need not concern ourselves.
In a lesser degree, the upper valley of the Danube and its tributaries, though these are largely in the nature of mountain torrents, forms another system of communications, nourishing considerable towns, drawing upon which communications, and relying upon which towns as centres of supply, an army may manœuvre.
But between the system of the Rhine and that of the Danube there runs a long sweep of very broken country, the Black Forest merging into the Swabian Jura, which in a military sense cuts off the one basin from the other.
At the opening of the eighteenth century, when that great stretch of hills had but a score of roads, none of them well kept up, when no town of any importance could be found in their valleys, and when no communication, even of a verbal message, could proceed faster than a mounted man, this sweep of hills was a very formidable obstacle indeed.
It was these hills, when Marlborough determined to strike across them, and to engage himself in the valley of the Upper Danube, which formed the chief physical factor of his hazard; for, once engaged in them, still more when he had crossed them, his appeals for aid, his reception of advice, perhaps eventually a reinforcement of men or supplies, must depend upon the Rhine valley.
True he had, the one within a week of the Danube, the other within two days of it, the couple of depots mentioned above, the principal one at Nuremberg, the advanced one at Nordlingen. Nevertheless, so long as he was upon the further or eastern side of the hills, his position would remain one of great risk, unless, indeed, or until, he had had the good fortune to destroy the forces of the enemy.
All this being before the reader, the progress of the great march may now be briefly described.
In the winter between 1703 and 1704 domestic irritation and home intrigues, with which we are not here concerned, almost persuaded Marlborough to give up his great rôle upon the Continent of Europe.
Luckily for the alliance against Louis and for the history of British arms, he returned upon this determination or phantasy, and with the very beginning of the year began his plans for the coming campaign.
He crossed first to Holland in the middle of January 1704, persuaded the Dutch Government to grant a subsidy to the German troops in the South, pretended (since he knew how nervous the Dutch would be if they heard of the plan for withdrawing a great army from their frontiers to the Danube) that he intended operating upon the Moselle, returned to England, saw with the utmost activity to the raising of recruits and to the domestic organisation of the expedition, and reached Holland again to undertake the most famous action of his life in the latter part of April.
It was upon the 5th of May that he left the Hague. He was at Maestricht till the 14th, superintending every detail and ordering the construction of bridges over the Meuse by which the advance was to begin. Upon the 16th he left by the southward road for Bedburg, and immediately his army broke winter quarters for the great march.
It was upon the 18th of May that the British regiments marched out of Ruremonde by the bridges constructed over the Meuse, aiming for the rendezvous at Bedburg.
The very beginning of the march was disturbed by the fears of the Dutch and of others, though Marlborough had carefully kept secret the design of marching to the Danube, and though all imagined that the valley of the Moselle was his objective.
Marlborough quieted these fears, and was in a better position to insist from the fact that he claimed control over the very large force which was directly in the pay of England.
He struck for the Rhine, up the valley of which he would receive further contingents, supplied by the minor members of the Grand Alliance, as he marched.
By the 23rd he was at Bonn with the cavalry, his brother Churchill following with the infantry. Thence the heavy baggage and the artillery proceeded by water up the river to Coblentz, and when Coblentz was reached (upon the 25th of May) it was apparent that the Moselle at least was not his objective, for on the next day, the 26th, he crossed both that river and the Rhine with his army, and continued his march up the right bank of the Rhine.
But this did not mean that he might not still intend to carry the war into Alsace. He was at Cassel, opposite Mayence, three days after leaving Coblentz; four days later the head of the column had reached the Neckar at Ladenberg, where bridges had already been built by Marlborough’s orders, and upon the 3rd of June the troops crossed over to the further bank.
Here was the decisive junction where Marlborough must show his hand: the first few miles of his progress south-eastward across the bend of the Neckar would make it clear that his object was not Alsace, but the Danube.
He had announced to the Dutch and all Europe an attack upon the valley of the Moselle; that this was a ruse all could see when he passed Coblentz without turning up the valley of that river. The whole week following, and until he reached the Neckar, it might still be imagined that he meditated an attack upon Alsace, for he was still following the course of the Rhine. Once he diverged from the valley of this river and struck across the bend of the Neckar to the south and east, the alternative he had chosen of making the Upper Danube the seat of war was apparent.
It is therefore at this point in his advance that we must consider the art by which he had put the enemy in suspense, and confused their judgment of his design.
The first point in the problem for a modern reader to appreciate is the average rate at which news would travel at that time and in that place. A very important dispatch could cover a hundred miles and more in the day with special organisation for its delivery, and with the certitude that it had gone from one particular place to another particular place. But general daily information as to the movements of a moving enemy could not be so organised.
We must take it that the French commanders upon the left bank of the Rhine at Landau, or upon the Meuse (where Villeroy was when Marlborough began his march), would require full forty-eight hours to be informed of the objective of each new move.
For instance, on the 25th of May Marlborough’s forces were approaching Coblentz. To find out what they were going to do next, the French would have to know whether they were beginning to turn up the valley of the Moselle, which begins at Coblentz, or to cross that river and be going on further south. A messenger might have been certain that the latter was their intention by midday of the 26th, but Tallard, right away on the Upper Rhine, would hardly have known this before the morning of the 29th, and by the morning of the 29th Marlborough was already opposite Mayence.
It is this gap of from one to three days in the passage of information which is so difficult for a modern man to seize, and which yet made possible all Marlborough’s manœuvres to confuse the French.
Villeroy was bound to watch until, at least, the 29th of May for the chance of a campaign upon the Moselle.
Meanwhile, Tallard was not only far off in the valley of the Upper Rhine, but occupied in a remarkable operation which, had he not subsequently suffered defeat at Blenheim, would have left him a high reputation as a general.
This operation was the reinforcement of the army under the Elector of Bavaria and Marcin by a dash right through the enemy’s country in the Black Forest.
Early in May the Elector of Bavaria had urgently demanded reinforcements of the French king.
The mountains between the Bavarian army and the French were held by the enemy, but the Elector hurried westward along the Danube, while Tallard, with exact synchrony and despatch, hurried eastward; each held out a hand to the other, as it were, for a rapid touch; the business of Tallard was to hand over the new troops and provisions at one exact moment, the business of the Elector was to catch the junction exactly. If it succeeded it was to be followed by a sharp retreat of either party, the one back upon the Danube eastward for his life, the other back westward upon the Rhine.
Tallard had crossed the Rhine on the 13th of May with a huge convoy of provisionment and over 7000 newly recruited troops. Within a week the thing was done. He had handed over in the nick of time the whole mass of men and things to the Elector. He had done this in the midst of the Black Forest and in the heart of the enemy’s country, and he immediately began his retirement upon the Rhine. Tallard was thus particularly delayed in receiving daily information of Marlborough’s march.
Let us take a typical date.
On the 29th of May Tallard, retiring from the dash to help Bavaria, was still at Altenheim, on the German bank of the Rhine. It was only on that day that he learnt from Villeroy that Marlborough had no idea of marching up the Moselle, but had gone on up the Rhine towards Mayence. Marlborough had crossed the Moselle and the Rhine on the 26th, but it took Tallard three days to know it. Tallard, knowing this, would not know whether Marlborough might not still be thinking of attacking Alsace: to make that alternative loom large in the mind of the French commanders, Marlborough had had bridges prepared in front of his advance at Philipsburg — though he had, of course, no intention at all of going as far up as Philipsburg.
It was on June 3rd, as we have seen, that the foremost of Marlborough’s forces were nearing the banks of the Neckar, and upon the 4th that anyone observing his troops would have clearly seen for the first time that they were striking for the Danube. But it was twenty-four hours before Tallard, who had by this time come down the Rhine as far as Lauterberg to defend a possible attack upon Alsace, knew certainly that the Danube, and not the Rhine, would be the field of war.
All this time it was guessed at Versailles, and thought possible by the French generals at the front, that the Danube was Marlborough’s aim. But a guess was not good enough to risk Alsace upon.
By the time it was certain Marlborough was marching for the Danube — June 4th and 5th — Tallard’s force was much further from the Elector of Bavaria than was Marlborough’s, as a glance at the map will show. There was no chance then for heading Marlborough off, and the chief object of the English commander’s strategy was accomplished. He had kept the enemy in doubt as to his intentions up to the moment when his forces were safe from interference, and he could strike for the Danube quite unmolested.
Map illustrating Marlborough’s march to the Danube.
Villeroy at once came south in person, and joined Tallard at Oberweidenthal. The two commanders met upon the 7th of June to confer upon the next move, but at this point appeared that capital element of delay which hampered the French forces throughout the campaign, namely, the necessity of consulting with the King at Versailles. The next day, the 8th, Tallard and Villeroy, who had gone back to their respective commands after their conference, sent separate reports to Versailles. It was not until the 12th that Louis answered, leaving the initiative with his generals at the front, but advising a strong offensive upon the Rhine in order to immobilise there a great portion of the enemy’s forces.
The advice was not unwise. It did, as a fact, immobilise Eugene for the moment, and kept him upon the Rhine for some weeks, but, as we shall see later, that General was able to escape when the worst pressure was put upon him, to cross the Black Forest with excellent secrecy and speed, and to effect his junction with Marlborough in time for the battle of Blenheim.
But, meanwhile, Baden had chased the Elector of Bavaria out of the Black Forest and down on to the Upper Danube. Marlborough might, at any moment, join hands with Baden. The Elector sent urgent requests for yet more reinforcements from the French, and Tallard, in a letter to Versailles of the 16th of June, advised the capture and possession of such points in the Black Forest as would give him free access across the mountains, the proper provisioning of his line of supply when he should cross them, and the accomplishment of full preparations for joining the Elector of Bavaria in a campaign upon the Upper Danube.
Let the day when the French court received this letter be noted, for the coincidence is curious. At the very moment when Tallard’s letter reached Versailles, the 22nd of June, Marlborough was effecting his junction with Baden outside the gates of Ulm at Ursprung. The decision of Louis XIV., that Tallard should advance beyond the hills in force to the aid of the Elector, exactly coincides with the appearance of the English General upon the Danube, and it was on the 23rd of June, the morrow, that the King wrote to Villeroy the decisive letter recommending Tallard to cross over from Alsace towards Bavaria with forty battalions and fifty squadrons, say 25,000 men.
But this advance of Tallard’s across the Black Forest and his final junction with the Elector and Marcin before the battle of Blenheim did not take place until after Marlborough had joined Baden and the march to the Danube was accomplished. It must therefore be dealt with in the next division, which is its proper place. For the moment we must return to Marlborough’s advance upon the Danube, which we left at the point where he crossed the Neckar upon the 3rd and 4th of June. He had, as we have just seen, and by methods which we have reviewed, completely succeeded in saving the rest of his advance from interference.
Safe from pursuit, and with no further need for concealing his plan, Marlborough lingered in the neighbourhood of the Neckar, partly to effect a full concentration of his forces, partly to rest his cavalry. It was a week before he found himself at Mundelsheim, between Heilbron and Stuttgart, and at the foot of the range which still divided him from the basin of the Danube. Here Eugene, the author of the whole business, met Marlborough; between them the two men drew up the plans which were to lead to so momentous a result, and knitted in that same interview a friendship based upon the mutual recognition of genius, which was to determine seven years of war.
Upon the 13th of June these great captains met and conferred also with the Margrave, Louis of Baden, who commanded all the troops in the hills, and who was to be the third party to their plan. He was a man, cautious, but able, easily ruffled in his dignity, often foolishly jealous of another’s power. He insisted that Marlborough and he should take command upon alternate days — he would not serve as second — and in all that followed, the personal relations between himself and Marlborough grew less and less cordial up to the eve of the great battle. His prudence and arrangement, however, his exact synchrony of movement and good hold over his troops, made Marlborough’s decisions fruitful.
Upon the 14th of June the passage of Marlborough’s column over the hills between the Rhine and the Danube began. Baden went back to the command of his army, which already lay in the plain of the Upper Danube, and awaited the arrival of Marlborough’s command, and the junction of it with his own force before Ulm.
A heavy rain, drenched and bad roads, marked Marlborough’s crossing of the range. It was not until the 20th that the cavalry reached the foot of the final ascent, but in two days the whole body had passed over. It was thus upon the 22nd of June that the junction between Marlborough and Baden was effected. From that day on their combined forces were prepared to operate as one army upon the plain of the Upper Danube. They stood joined at the gates of Ulm, and in their united force far superior to the Franco-Bavarians, who had but just escaped Baden’s army, and who lay in the neighbourhood watching this fatal junction of their rivals.
I say, “who had but just escaped Baden’s army,” for it was part of the general plan (and a part most ably executed) that not only should the seat of war be brought into the valley of the Upper Danube by Marlborough’s march to join Baden, but, as a preparation for this, that the army of the Elector, with his French allies under Marcin, should be driven eastward out of the mountains and cut off from the main French forces upon the Rhine.
This chasing of the Franco-Bavarians down on to the Danube and out of the Black Forest was begun just after the spirited piece of generalship by which Tallard had, as we have seen, reinforced the Elector of Bavaria in the middle of May. That rapid and brilliant piece of work had been effected only just in time. Hardly was it accomplished when Baden’s force in the mountains marched, as part of Marlborough’s general plan, against the Elector, with the object of forcing him back into the Danube valley at full speed.
It was on the 18th of May that the British regiments were crossing the Meuse, and the advance upon the Danube had begun.
It was on the 18th of May that Louis of Baden appeared at the head of his army in the Black Forest and initiated that separation of the Bavarian forces from the French which was a necessary part of the general plan we have spoken of. It was but a few hours since Tallard had stretched out his hand and passed the recruits and the provisions over to the Franco-Bavarian forces.
The Elector of Bavaria had with him certain French regiments, and Marshal Marcin was under his commands, while Marlborough’s plan was still quite unknown. Therefore no large French force could apparently be spared from the valley of the Rhine to help the Elector in that of the Danube; the Duke of Baden could have things his own way against the lesser force opposed to him.
On the 19th he was advancing on Ober and Neder Ersasch. The Duke of Bavaria had evacuated these villages upon the 20th, and on the same night the Duke of Baden reached Meidlingen. Pursuer and pursued were marching almost parallel, separated only by the little river of Villingen. Now and then they came so close that Baden’s artillery could drop a shot into the hurrying ranks of the Elector.
On the 21st Baden was at Geisingen, threatening Tuttlingen. On the 23rd he had reached Stockach, and was pressing so hard that his van had actually come in contact with the rear of the Bavarians, a situation reminiscent of the Esla Bridge in Moore’s retreat on Coruña.
The valley of the Danube opened out before the two opponents. The Elector found it possible to maintain his exhausted but rapid retreat, and, ten days later, he had escaped. For by the 3rd of June the Franco-Bavarian forces lay at Elchingen, the Duke of Baden was no nearer than Echingen, and the former was saved after a fortnight of very anxious going; but, though saved, they were now completely cut off for the moment from French reinforcement. Marlborough was approaching the hills; he would cross them in a few days. He would join Baden’s army; and the moment Marlborough should have joined Baden, the Elector would be in peril of overwhelming adversaries.
We have seen how the plan matured. Three weeks after the Bavarian army’s escape from the Black Forest, upon the 22nd of June, Marlborough’s force had crossed the range and made one with Baden’s before Ulm.
PART IV. THE SEVEN WEEKS — THE THREE PHASES
FROM THE DAY when the Duke had appeared upon the southern side of the mountains, and was debouching into the plains of the Danube, to the day when he broke the French line at Blenheim, is just over seven weeks; to be accurate, it is seven weeks and three days. It was on the last Sunday but one of the month of June that he passed the mountains; it was upon the second Wednesday of August that he won his great victory.
These seven weeks divide themselves into three clear phases.
The first is the march of Marlborough and Baden upon Donauwörth and the capture of that city, which was the gate of Bavaria.
The second is the consequent invasion and ravaging of Bavaria, the weakening of the Elector, and his proposal to capitulate; the consequent precipitate advance of Tallard to the aid of the Elector, and the corresponding secret march of Eugene to help Marlborough.
The third occupies the last few days only: it is concerned with the manœuvres immediately preceding the battle, and especially with the junction of Marlborough and Eugene, which made the victory possible.
The First Phase
FROM THE JUNCTION of Marlborough and Baden to the fall of Donauwörth
When the Duke of Marlborough had joined hands with the forces of Baden upon the 22nd of June 1704 his general plan was clear: the last of his infantry, under his brother Churchill, would at once effect their junction with the rest at Ursprung, and he and Baden had but to go forward.
His great march had been completely successful. He had eluded and confused his enemy. He was safe on the Danube watershed, and within a march of the river itself. The only enemies before him on this side of the hills were greatly inferior in number to his own and his ally’s. His determination to carry the war into Bavaria could at once be carried into effect.
With this junction the first chapter in that large piece of strategy which may be called “the campaign of Blenheim” comes to an end.
Between the successful termination of his first effort, which was accomplished when he joined forces with Baden upon the Danube side of the watershed in the village of Ursprung, and the great battle by which Marlborough is chiefly remembered, there elapsed, I say, seven summer weeks. These seven weeks are divided into the three parts just distinguished.
In order to understand the strategy of each part of those seven weeks, we must first clearly grasp the field.
The accompanying map shows the elements of the situation.
East of the Black Forest lay open that upper valley of the Danube and its tributaries which was so difficult of access from the valley of the Rhine. In the hills to the north of the Danube, and one day’s march from the town of Ulm, were now concentrated the forces of Marlborough and the Duke of Baden. They were advancing, ninety-six battalions strong, with two hundred and two squadrons and forty-eight guns: in all, say, somewhat less than 70,000 men.
Map illustrating the march of Marlborough and Baden across
Marcin’s front from the neighbourhood of Ulm to Donauwörth.
At Ulm lay Marcin, and in touch with him, forming part of the same army, the Elector of Bavaria was camped somewhat further down the river, near Lauingen.
The combined forces of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria numbered, all told, some 45,000 men, and their inferiority to the hostile armies, which had just effected their junction north of Ulm at Ursprung, was the determining factor in what immediately followed.
Marcin crossed the Danube to avoid so formidable a menace, and took up his next station behind the river at Leipheim, watching to see what Marlborough and the Duke of Baden would do. The Elector of Bavaria, in command of the bridge at Lauingen, stood fast, ready to retire behind the stream. The necessity of such a retreat was spared him. The object of his enemies was soon apparent by the direction their advance assumed.
For the immediate object of Marlborough and Baden was not an attack upon the inferior forces of the Elector and Marcin, but, for reasons that will presently be seen, the capture of Donauwörth, and their direct march upon Donauwörth took them well north of the Danube. On the 26th, therefore, Marcin thought it prudent to recross the Danube. He and the Elector joined forces on the north side of the Danube, and lay from Lauingen to Dillingen, commanding two bridges behind them for the crossing of the stream, and fairly entrenched upon their front. Meanwhile their enemies, the allies, passed north of them at Gingen. This situation endured for three days.
When it was apparent that the allied forces of the English general and the Duke of Baden intended to make themselves masters of Donauwörth (and the Elector of Bavaria could have no doubt of their intentions after the 29th of July, when their march eastward from Gingen was resumed), a Franco-Bavarian force was at once detached by him to defend that town, and it is necessary henceforward to understand why Donauwörth was of such importance to Marlborough’s plan.
It was his intention to enter Bavaria so as to put a pressure upon the Elector, whose immediate and personal interests were bound up with the villages and towns of his possessions. The Elector could not afford to neglect the misfortunes of its civilian inhabitants, even for the ends of his own general strategy; still less could he sacrifice those subjects of his for the strategic advantage of the King of France and his marshal.
This Marlborough knew. To enter Bavaria, to occupy its towns (only one of which, Ingolstadt, was tolerably fortified), and if possible to take its capital, Munich, had been from its inception the whole business and strategic motive of his march to the Danube.
But if Marlborough desired to enter Bavaria, Donauwörth was the key to Bavaria from the side upon which he was approaching.
This word “key” is so often used in military history, without any explanation of it which may render it significant to the reader, that I will pause a moment to show why Donauwörth might properly be called in metaphor the “key” of Bavaria to one advancing from the north and west.
Bavaria could only be reached by a general coming as Marlborough came, on condition of his possessing and holding some crossing-place over the Danube, for Marlborough’s supplies lay north of that river (principally at Nördlingen), and the passing of the enormous supply of an army over one narrow point, such as is a bridge over such an obstacle as a broad river, demands full security.
It will further be seen from the map that yet another obstacle, defending Southern Bavaria and its capital towards the west, as the Danube does towards the north, is the river Lech; a passage over this was therefore also of high importance to the Duke of Marlborough and his allies. Now, a man holding Donauwörth can cross both rivers at the same time unmolested, for they meet in its neighbourhood.
Further, Donauwörth was a town amply provisioned, full of warehouse room, and in general affording a good advanced base of supply for any army marching across the Danube. It afforded an opportunity for concentration of supplies, it contained waggons and horses and food. Supplies, it must be remembered, were the great difficulty of each of the two opposed forces, in this moving of great numbers of men east of the Black Forest, in a comparatively poor country, largely heath and forest, and ill populated.
Map showing how Donauwörth is the key of Bavaria from the North-West.
No serious permanent defences, such as could delay the capture of the town, surrounded Donauwörth; but up above it lies a hill, called from its shape “the Schellenberg” or “Bell Hill.” This hill is not isolated, but joins on the higher ground to its north by a sort of flat isthmus, which is level with the summit or nearly so.
The force which, on perceiving the Duke of Marlborough’s intention of capturing Donauwörth, the Elector of Bavaria very rapidly detached to defend that town, was under the command of Count d’Arco; it consisted of two regiments of cavalry and about 10,000 infantry (of whom a quarter were French). D’Arco had orders to entrench the hill above the town as rapidly as might be and to defend it from attack; for whoever held the Schellenberg was master of Donauwörth below. But the Elector could only spare eight guns for this purpose from his inferior forces.
Upon the 2nd of July, in the early morning, Marlborough, by one of those rapid movements which were a prime element in his continuous success, marched before dawn with something between seven and eight thousand infantry carefully chosen for the task and thirty-five squadrons of horse for the attack on the Schellenberg. It was Marlborough’s alternate day of command.
With all his despatch, he could not arrive on the height of the hill nor attack its imperfect but rapidly completing works until the late afternoon. It is characteristic of his generalship that he risked an assault with this advance body of his without waiting for the main part of the army under the Duke of Baden to come up. With sixteen battalions only, of whom a third were British, he attempted to carry works behind which a force equal to his own in strength was posted. The risk was high, for he could hardly hope to carry the works with such a force, and all depended upon the main body coming up in time. There was but an hour or two of daylight left.
The check which Marlborough necessarily received in such an attempt incidentally gave proof of the excellent material of his troops. More than a third of these fell in the first furious and undecided hour. They failed to carry the works. They had already once begun to break and once again rallied, but had suffered no final dissolution under the ordeal — though it was both the first to which the men were subjected during this campaign, and probably also the most severe of any they were to endure.
Whether they, or indeed any other troops, could long have survived such conditions as an attempt to storm works against equal numbers is not open to proof; for, while the issue was still doubtful (but the advantage naturally with the force behind the trenches), the mass of the army under the Duke of Baden came up in good time upon the right (that is, from the side of the town), poured almost unopposed over the deserted earthworks of that side, and, five to one, overwhelmed the 12,000 Franco-Bavarians upon the hill.
After one of those short stubborn and futile attempts at resistance which such situations discover in all wars, the inevitable dissolution of d’Arco’s command came before the darkness. It was utterly routed; and we may justly presume that not 4000 — more probably but 3000 — rejoined the army of Marcin and of the Elector of Bavaria.
The loss of the Schellenberg had cost Marlborough’s enemies, whose forces were already gravely inferior to his own, eight guns and close upon one-fifth of their effective numbers. The Franco-Bavarians hurried south to entrench themselves under Augsburg, while Donauwörth, and with it the passage of the two great rivers and the entry into Bavaria, lay in the possession of Marlborough and his ally.
The balance of military and historical opinion will decide that Marlborough played for too high stakes in beginning the assault so late in the evening and with so small a force. But he was playing for speed, and he won the hazard.
It was a further reward of his daring that he could point after this first engagement to the fine quality of his British contingent.
It was upon the evening of July the 2nd, then, that this capital position was stormed. It was upon the 5th that Marcin and the Elector lay hopeless and immobile before Augsburg, while their enemies entered a now defenceless Bavaria by its north-western gate. And this complete achievement of Marlborough’s plan was but the end of the first phase in the campaign upon the Danube.
Meanwhile, a large French reinforcement under Tallard was already far up on its way from the Rhine, across the Black Forest, to join Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria and set back the tide of war, and, when it should have effected its junction with those who awaited it at Augsburg, to oppose to Marlborough and the Duke of Baden a total force greater than their own.
The French marshal, Tallard, was in command of the army thus rapidly approaching in relief of the Franco-Bavarians. His arrival, if he came without loss, disease, or mishap, promised a complete superiority over the English and their allies, unless, indeed, by some accident or stroke of genius, reinforcement should reach them also before the day of the battle.
This reinforcement, in the event, Marlborough did receive. He owed it, as we shall see, to the high talents of Prince Eugene; and it is upon the successful march of this general, his junction with Marlborough, and the consequent success of Blenheim, that the rest of the campaign turns.
We turn next, then, to follow the second phase of the seven weeks, which consists in Tallard’s advance to join the Elector, and in Eugene’s rapid parallel march, which brought him, just in time, to Marlborough’s aid.
The Second Phase
THE ADVANCE OF Tallard
To follow the second phase of the seven weeks, that is, the phase subsequent to the capture of the Schellenberg and the retirement of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria on to Augsburg, it is necessary to hark back a little, and to trace from its origin that advance of Tallard’s reinforcements which was to find on the field of Blenheim so disastrous a termination.
We shall see that in this second phase Tallard did indeed manage to effect his junction with the Elector and Marcin with singular despatch; that this junction compelled Marlborough and Baden to cease the ravaging of Bavaria upon which they had been engaged, and to join in closely watching the movement of the Franco-Bavarian forces, lest their own retreat or their line of supplies should be cut off by that now large army.
The Schellenberg was stormed, as we have seen, on the 2nd of July.
Tallard, as we have also seen, had orders from Versailles, when Marlborough’s plan of reaching the Danube was clear, to put himself in motion for an advance to the Elector’s aid.
He moved at first with firmness and deliberation, determined to secure every post of his advance throughout the difficult hills, and thoroughly to provision his route. He crossed the Rhine upon July 1st, and during the very hours that, far to the east, the disaster of Donauwörth was in progress, he was assembling his forces upon the right bank of the river before beginning to secure his passage through the Black Forest. Upon the 4th he began his march over the hills.
A week later he was in the heart of the broken country at Hornberg, and on the 16th of July he had contained the garrison of Villingen, the principal stronghold which barred his route to the Danube, and which, did he leave it untaken, would jeopardise his provision and supply, the health and even the maintenance of his horses and men by the mountain road.
Upon the 18th he opened fire upon the town; but on the very day that the siege thus began he received from Marcin the whole story of the disaster of the Schellenberg, which had taken place a fortnight before, and a most urgent request for immediate reinforcement.
Tallard’s deliberation, his attempt to secure the enemy’s one stronghold upon the line of his passage across the hills, and amply to provision his advance, were fully justified. He knew nothing of the fall of Donauwörth. He believed himself to have full time for a properly organised march to join the Elector of Bavaria, and that meant the capture of Villingen. And the siege of that fortress had the further advantage that it compelled Eugene and his army to remain near the Rhine. Only at this late day, the 18th of July, did Tallard learn that the forces of Marlborough and of Baden had captured the crossing of the Danube and the Lech, and were pouring into Bavaria.
He should have known it earlier, but the despatch which bore him the information had miscarried.
Already, upon the 9th, Marcin had written from Augsburg a pressing letter to Tallard, bidding him neglect everything save an immediate march, and, ill provisioned as he was, and insecure as he would leave his communications, to hasten to the aid of the Elector. Marlborough and Baden (he wrote) had crossed the Danube and the Lech on the 5th and 6th of July. They were before Rhain; and when Rhain fell (as fall it must), all Bavaria would be at their mercy.
This letter Tallard never received.
Marcin was right. Rhain could not possibly hold out: none of the Bavarian strongholds except Ingolstadt were tolerably fortified. Rhain was destined to fall, and with its fall all Bavaria would be the prey of the allied generals.
The Elector, watching all this from just beyond the Lech, was in despair. He proposed to sue for terms unless immediate news of help from the French upon the Rhine should reach him. And if the Elector sued for terms and retired from the contest, France would be left alone to bear the whole weight of the European alliance: its forces would at once be released to act upon the Rhine, in Flanders, or wherever else they would.
When, upon the 14th, Marcin wrote that second letter to Tallard, telling him to neglect everything, to march forward at all costs, and to hasten to Bavaria’s relief — the letter which Tallard did receive, and which came to him on the 18th of July, just as he was beginning the siege of Villingen — Rhain still held out; but, even as Tallard read the letter, Rhain had fallen, and the terrible business of the harrying of Bavaria had begun. For Baden and Marlborough proceeded to ravage the country, a cruel piece of work, which Marlborough believed necessary, because it was his supreme intention to bring such pressure to bear upon the Elector as might dissuade him from taking further part in the war.
The villages began to burn (one hundred and twenty were destroyed), the crops to be razed. The country was laid waste to the very walls of Munich, and that capital itself would have fallen had the Englishman and his imperial ally possessed a sufficient train to besiege it.
Tallard was still hesitating to abandon the siege of Villingen when, upon the 21st of July, came yet a third message from Marcin, which there was no denying. Tallard learnt from it of the fall of Rhain, of the ravaging of Bavaria, of the march of Marlborough and Baden upon Munich, of the crucial danger in which France lay of seeing the Elector of Bavaria abandon her cause.
Wholly insufficient as the provisioning of the route was, Marcin assured Tallard it was just enough to feed his men and horses during the dash eastwards; and, with all the regret and foreboding necessarily attached to leaving in his rear an unconquered fortress and marching in haste upon an insufficiently provided route, Tallard, on the next day, the 22nd, raised the siege of Villingen and risked his way across the mountains down to the valley of the Danube.
The move was undoubtedly necessary if the Bavarian alliance was to be saved, but it had to be accomplished in fatal haste.
Sickness broke out among Tallard’s horses; his squadrons were reduced in a fashion that largely determined the ultimate issue at Blenheim.
His troops, ill fed and exhausted, marched upon wretched rations of bread and biscuit alone, and with that knowledge of insecurity behind them which the private soldier, though he can know so little of the general plan of any campaign, instinctively feels when he is taking part in an advance of doubtful omen.
A week later, upon the 29th of July, the army was in sight of Ulm. It found there but six thousand sacks of flour. It knew that it would find no sufficient provisionment in Augsburg at the end of its advance, yet advance it must unless the forces of Bavaria were to be lost to the cause of Louis XIV.
Five days later the junction was effected, and upon Monday the 4th of August the united armies of Tallard and the Elector of Bavaria faced, in the neighbourhood of Augsburg, the opposing armies of Marlborough and Baden upon the further side of the Lech.
In spite of the deplorable sickness and loss among his horse, the absence of remounts, the exhaustion of his men, the poor provisioning, and the insecurity of the line of supply behind him, Tallard could now present forces somewhat superior (counted by battalions and nominal squadrons) — far superior in artillery — to the forces of the allies.
Had this reluctant and tardy advance of Tallard’s on the one hand, the ravaging of Bavaria by Baden and Marlborough on the other, between them constituted the whole of the second phase in the preliminaries of Blenheim, the result of the campaign might have been very different, in spite of the impoverished condition of the Franco-Bavarian army.
But a third element, of the utmost importance, must be added: the rapid, the secret, and the successful march of Eugene during these same days across the northern part of these same hills which the French had just traversed by their southern passes, and the debouching of that formidable captain with his admirably disciplined force, especially strong in cavalry, upon the upper valley of the Danube to reinforce Marlborough and to decide the war.
So long as Tallard proceeded, with soldierly method, to the proper affirmation of his line of advance and to the reduction of Villingen, Eugene had been pinned to the neighbourhood of the Rhine.
Would Eugene, when the siege of Villingen was raised, and when Tallard had been persuaded to that precipitous eastern move, go back to hold the line of the Rhine against the French forces there situated, or would he decide for the risk of detaching a large command, perhaps of leading it himself, and of joining Marlborough? That was the doubtful factor in Tallard’s plans.
As in the case of Marlborough’s own march to the Danube, either alternative was possible. The safer course for Eugene, and that one therefore which seemed in the eyes of his enemies the more probable, was for him to remain on the Rhine. But it was conceivable that he would run the risk of leading a force to the Danube; and did he so decide, the whole business of the French remaining on the Rhine was to discover his intention, the whole business of Eugene to hide it.
As in the case of Marlborough’s march to the Danube, Eugene was led by a just instinct to gamble on the chance of the French army in Alsace not noting his move, and of the few troops he left opposite them upon the Rhine sufficing to screen his movements and to give the effect of much larger numbers. In other words, though his task in the coalition was to watch the central Rhine, he decided to take the risk of seeing the Rhine forced, and to march in aid of the English general whom he had himself summoned to Bavaria, with whose genius his own had such sympathy, and at whose side he was to accomplish the marvels of the next seven years.
Like Marlborough, he was successful in concealing his determination, but, with a smaller force than Marlborough’s had been, he was able to be more successful still.
Villeroy, who commanded the French upon the Middle Rhine, was informed by numerous deserters and spies that Eugene, after the fall of Villingen, was at Radstadt, and intended detaching but two or three battalions at most from his lines upon the right bank of the Rhine, and these not, of course, for work upon the Danube, but only to cover Wurtemburg by garrisoning Rottweil.
This information, coming though it did from many sources, was calculatedly false, and Eugene’s movements, after the siege of Villingen had been raised, were arranged with a masterly penetration of his enemy’s mind. A leisurely two days after the siege of Villingen was raised he entered that fortress, ordered the breaches to be repaired, and, in his every order and disposition, appeared determined to remain within the neighbourhood of the Upper Rhine. Nearly a week later he was careful to show himself at Rottweil, hardly a day’s march away, apparently doing no more than cover Wurtemburg against a possible French attack from beyond the Rhine; and, so far as such leisure and immobility could testify to his intentions, he proclaimed his determination to remain in that neighbourhood, and in no way to preoccupy himself with what might be going on in the valley of the Upper Danube.
With due deliberation, he left eight battalions in Rottweil to garrison that place, posted seventeen upon his lines upon the Rhine, and himself openly proceeded — and that at no great speed — to march for the valley of the Neckar with 15,000 men… Those 15,000 had been picked from his army with a particular care; nearly one-third were cavalry in the highest training, and the command, which seemed but one of three detachments all destined to operate upon the Rhine, was in fact a body specially chosen for a very different task. Eugene continued to proceed in this open fashion and slow as far as Tübingen…
Map showing Eugene’s march on the Danube from the Black Forest.
It was many days since Tallard had begun his advance; many days since Villeroy, on the Rhine, had been watching the movements of Eugene; and during all these days that great general had done no more than assure his original positions with ample leisure, and to begin, with what was apparently a gross lack of concealment, a return by the Neckar round the north of the Black Forest to the Rhine valley.
Suddenly, from the moment of his reaching Tübingen, all this slow and patient work ceases. Eugene and his 15,000 abruptly disappear.
In place of the open march which all might follow, friend and foe alike, there is a void; in place of clear and reiterated information upon his unhurried movements, there is nothing but a fog, contradictory rumours, fantastic and ill-credited.
Never was a design better kept or concealed to a moment so near its accomplishment. When that design was accomplished, it was to determine, as we shall see in what follows, the whole issue of the campaign of Blenheim.
The Third Phase
THE APPEARANCE OF Eugene
The third phase in the operations which led up to the battle of Blenheim is one of no more than nine days.
It stands distinct from all that went before, and must be regarded in history as a sort of little definite and enclosed preface to the great action. The distinctive character of this, the third phase, resides in the completion of the Franco-Bavarian force, its manœuvring in the presence of the enemy, and its finding itself unexpectedly confronted with the reinforcements of Eugene.
To seize the character of this third phase, the sketch map opposite must be referred to.
It is the 5th of August. Tallard has fully effected his junction with Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria, and the united Franco-Bavarian force lies in and to the east of Augsburg. On the opposite bank of the river Lech this force is watched by the army of Marlborough and Baden, which has been ravaging Bavaria. But Marlborough and Baden, though they have an advanced depot at Donauwörth, have their forward munitions and supplies far up northwards. Nördlingen is their advanced base, two days’ marching beyond the Danube. A week away to the north Nuremberg contains their only large and permanent collection of stores. Marlborough and Baden are in perpetual difficulty for food, for ammunition, and for forage — especially for ammunition.
Map showing the situation when Eugene suddenly appeared at Hochstadt, August 5-7, 1704.
Since the whole object of Marlborough in marching to the Upper Danube was to embarrass in this new seat of war the alliance of the French and Bavarian forces, it is, conversely, the business of the French commander to get him out of the valley of the Upper Danube and restore the liberty of action of the French monarch and of his ally the Elector of Bavaria.
The surest way of getting Marlborough out of the Upper Danube is to threaten his line of supply. He will then be compelled to fall back northward upon his base. Further (though Tallard did not know it at the moment), there is present the very real difficulty of friction between the two commanders of the army opposing him. Marlborough and Baden are not getting on well together. If it were possible for Marlborough to persuade Baden to go off on some little expedition of his own, withdrawing but a few soldiers, Marlborough would be well content, and Marlborough is by far the more formidable of the two men. But though the opportunity for such a riddance of divided command is open, for Prince Louis of Baden is anxious to besiege Ingolstadt, Marlborough dares not weaken the combined forces, even by a few battalions, now that Tallard has effected his junction with the Elector and with Marcin, and that a formidable force is opposed to him.
These elements in the situation, once clearly seized, the sequel follows from them logically enough.
The above describes the situation on the 5th of August.
On the 6th, Wednesday, the united Franco-Bavarian force began its march northward towards the Danube, a march parallel with Marlborough’s line of supply, and threatening that line all the way, ready to cut it when once the northern bank of the Danube was reached. Marlborough was compelled, in view of that march, to go back northward, step for step with his opponents. The artery that fed him was in danger, and everything else must be neglected.
In the evening of that Wednesday, August the 6th, Tallard and the Elector were at Biberach, Marlborough and Baden at Schobenhausen, which, as the map shows, lies also a day’s march to the north from the last position these troops had held, and was on the way to the crossing of the Danube at Neuburg, as the Franco-Bavarians were on the way to the crossing of the same great river at Dillingen.
On the 7th there was no movement, but on the 8th, the Friday, as the Franco-Bavarian host approached the crossing of the Danube at Dillingen, their leader (if Tallard may be regarded as their leader — he was nominally under the orders of the Elector, but he was the marshal of Louis XIV.) heard suddenly that Eugene had appeared at Hochstadt with thirty-nine squadrons and twenty battalions.
The trick was done. The rapid and secret march of Eugene had been accomplished with complete success, and his force was within speaking distance of Marlborough’s.
When the news came to the French camp, it was even there evident what a sudden transformation had come over the campaign; but to one who could see, as the historian sees, the moral condition of both forces, the event is more significant still.
A great commander, whose name was henceforth to be linked most closely with that of Marlborough’s himself, was present upon the Upper Danube. He brought with him troops not only equivalent in number to a third of his colleague’s existing forces, but trained under his high leadership, disciplined in his excellent school, and containing, what will prove essential to the fortunes of the coming battle, a very large proportion of cavalry. Further, the appearance of Eugene at this critical moment permitted Marlborough to rid himself of Louis of Baden, to despatch him to the siege of Ingolstadt in the heart of Bavaria, at once to be free of the clog which the slow decision and slow movements of that general burdened him with, to threaten the heart of the enemy’s country by that general’s departure on such a mission, and to unite himself and his forces with a man whose methods were after his own heart.
It is true that a minor problem lay before Eugene and Marlborough which must be solved before the great value of the junction they were about to effect could be taken advantage of. Their forces were still separated by the Danube: Marlborough lay a day’s march to the south of it, and were he to cross the Danube at Neuburg he would be two days’ march from Eugene. But each army was free to march towards the other, and all that their commanders had to decide was upon which side of the river the junction should be effected. Were the junction effected to the south — that is, were Eugene to cross the Danube and join Marlborough in Bavaria — Tallard, crossing the Danube at Dillingen, could strike at the great northern line of communications which conditioned all these movements. It was, therefore, the obvious move for Eugene and Marlborough to join upon the northern bank of the Danube, and to move upon and defend that all-important line of communications, point for point, as Tallard might threaten it.
It was on the 8th, the Friday, as I have said, that Eugene’s presence was known both to Tallard and to Marlborough, for Eugene had ridden forward and met his colleague.
Upon the 9th, the Saturday, the French marched towards the bridge of Dillingen. Eugene, who was already on the way back to his army, returned to inform Marlborough of this, then rode westward again to his forces, and, while the French made their arrangements for crossing the river on the morrow, he busied himself in conducting his 15,000 eastward down the north bank of the Danube. Three thousand of Marlborough’s cavalry went forward to meet him, and to begin that junction between the two forces which was to determine the day at Blenheim.
The next day, Sunday the 10th, the Franco-Bavarian army passed the river and lay in the position with which their forces had in the past been so familiar, the position from Lauingen to Dillingen which Marcin and the Elector had held when, six weeks before, Marlborough and Baden had passed across the Franco-Bavarian front to the north in their march upon Donauwörth and the Schellenberg.
On the same Sunday, the 10th, Marlborough had brought up his main force to Rhain, within an hour of the Danube, and Eugene was drawing up his force at a safe distance from the French position north of the village of Münster, and behind the brook of Kessel, where that watercourse joins the Danube.
But, though junction with Marlborough was virtually effected, it must be effected actually before Eugene could think himself safe from that Franco-Bavarian force a day’s march behind him, which was three times his own and more. His urgent messages to Marlborough led that commander to march up his men through the night. Before the dawn of August the 11th broke, Churchill, with twenty battalions, had crossed at Merxheim, and the whole army, marching in two columns, was upon the move — the right-hand column following Churchill to the bridge of Merxheim, the left-hand column crossing the Lech by the bridge of Rhain, to pass the Danube at Donauwörth. In the afternoon of that Monday the whole of Marlborough’s command was passing the Wornitz, and long after sunset, following upon a march which had kept the major part of the great host afoot for more than twenty hours, Eugene and Marlborough were together at the head of 52,000 men, established in unison, and defending, with now no possibility of its interruption, the line of communications from the north.
Every historian of this great business has justly remarked the organisation and the patient genius of the man who made such a concentration possible under such conditions and in such a time, without appreciable loss, at hurried notice, and with a complete success.
It is a permanent example and masterpiece in that inglorious part of war, the function of transport and of marching orders, upon which strategy depends as surely as an army depends on food.
Fully accompanied by his artillery, Marlborough’s force could not have accomplished the marvel that it did; yet even this arm was brought up, in the rear of the army, by the morning of Tuesday the 12th, and from that moment, given a sufficient repose, the whole great weapon under the two captains could act as one.
On that same morning, Tuesday the 12th, the Franco-Bavarian army under Tallard and the Elector were choosing out with some deliberation a camp so situated as to block any movement of their enemy up the valley of the Danube. The situation of the camp was designed to make this advance up the 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 imperial forces 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 have two 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 and remembered, 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 have effected the splendid concentration but a few hours since upon the Kessel — these formed a work sufficient to deserve the reward of victory, Marlborough had the fortune not only to deserve, but to achieve.
The night of that Tuesday fell with no alarm upon the one side or upon the other. In the camp of Marlborough and of Eugene was the knowledge that the twin commanders had determined upon an action; in that of Tallard and the Elector the belief that it was more probable their opponents would follow the general rules of war, and fall back to recruit their supplies by the one route that was widely open to them.
Midnight passed. It was already the morning of Wednesday the 13th before the one had moved, or the other had guessed the nature of his enemy’s plan.
It was moonless and pitch-dark, save for the dense white mist which, in the marshy lands of that river valley, accompanies the turn of the August night. This mist had risen and covered the plain. The little villages were asleep after their disturbance by the advent of so many armed men. The cockcrows of midnight were now well past when there was stir in Marlborough’s camp, and from this moment, somewhere about two of the morning of Wednesday, August the 13th, the action of Blenheim begins.
PART V. THE ACTION
THE FIELD OF Blenheim has changed in its physical aspect less than any other of the great battlefields of Europe during the two hundred years and more that have passed since Marlborough’s victory.
He who visits to-day this quiet Bavarian corn-land, with its pious and happy peasantry, its modest wealth, and its contempt for haste and greed, sees, if he come in the same late summer of the year, just what the mounted parties saw who rode out upon that Wednesday before the eight columns of Marlborough and Eugene under the early morning.
Thus, approaching the field of Blenheim from the east, the view consists in a low and strangely regular line of closely-wooded hills to the right and northwards; southwards, and to the left, a mass of undergrowth, the low trees of the marshes, occasional gaps of rank herbage which make bright green patches interspersing the woodland, mark the wide and marshy course of the Danube, with its belt of alluvial soil and swamp on either side.
Between this stretch of damp river-ground to the south and the regular low wooded hills to the north lies a plain just lifted above the level of the river by such few feet as are sufficient to drain it and no more. Crossing this plain transversely, on their way to the Danube, ooze and trickle rather than run certain insignificant streams; each rises in the wooded hills to the north, falls southward, and in the length of a very few miles reaches the main river. These streams are found, as one goes up the great valley, at every mile or so. With one, the Nebel, we shall be particularly concerned, for during the action at Blenheim it formed the only slight obstacle separating the two armies. This plain, which in August is all stubble, is some three miles across, such a space separates the hills from the river, and that distance, or a trifle more, is the full length of the little muddy brooks which thus occasionally intersect it.
To the eye which takes in that landscape at a first glance, bare of crops and under a late summer sun, the plain seems quite even and undisturbed by any hollows or rolls of land. It is, in fact, like most such apparently simple terrains, slightly diversified: its diversity is enough to affect in some degree the disposition of soldiers, to afford in certain places occasional cover, and to permit of opportunities for defence.
But these variations from the flat are exceedingly slight. The hollow which the Nebel has made, for instance, is not noticed on foot or even in mechanical traction as one follows the main road which runs the whole length of the plain, though if one goes across country on foot, one notices the slight bank of a few feet separating the cultivated land from a narrow belt of rough grass, which is boggy in wet weather, and which, in varying breadth, accompanies the course of the stream.
The plain also, as might be expected, rises slightly from its low shelf just above the Danube swamps and meadows, to the base of the hills. Its ascent in its whole three miles of breadth is but sixty feet.
Over this level sweep of tilled land rise at intervals the spires of rare villages, round which scattered houses and gardens of the Bavarian sort — broad-eaved, flat-roofed, gay with flowers — are gathered. But for these few human groups there is no break in the general aspect of the quite open fields.
As might be expected, an interrupted chain of such villages marks the line of the great river from Donauwörth to Ulm, each standing just on the bank and edge of what for long was the flood-ground of the Danube, and is still in part unreclaimed marsh and water meadow. Each is distant a mile or two from its next fellow. Thus, nearest Donauwörth we have Münster, upon which the left of the allied army reposed when it lay in camp before the battle. Next in order come Tapfheim and Schwenningen, through which that army marched to the field. Further up-stream another group stretches beyond the Nebel, the hamlet of Sonderheim, the little town of Hochstadt, the village of Steinheim, etc.; and, in the middle of this line, at the point where the Nebel falls into the old bed of the Danube, is built that large village of Blindheim, which, under its English form of Blenheim, has given the action the name it bears in this country.
I say “the old bed of the Danube,” for one feature, and one alone, in that countryside has changed in the two hundred years, though the change is not one which the eye can note as it surveys the plain, nor one which greatly affects the story of the action. This change is due to the straightening of the bed of the great river.
At the time when Blenheim was fought, the Danube wound in great loops, with numerous islands and backwaters complicating its course, and swung back and forth among the level swamps of its valley. It runs to-day in an artificial channel, which takes the average, as it were, of these variations, drains the flood-ground, and leaves the old bed in the form of stagnant, abandoned lengths of water or reeds, in which the traveller can trace the former vagaries of the river. Thus Blindheim, which stood just above the broad and hurrying water at the summit of one such loop, is now 800 yards away from the artificial trench which modern engineering has dug for the river. But the new channel has no effect upon the landscape to the eye. The floor on which the Danube runs is still a mass of undergrowth and weeds and grass, which marks off the cultivated land on the south, as it has been limited since men first ploughed.
I have said that the little slow and muddy streamlet called the Nebel must particularly meet with our attention, because it formed at the beginning of the action of Blenheim a central line dividing the two hosts, and round its course may be grouped the features of the terrain upon which the battle was contested.
Blindheim, or, as we always call it, Blenheim, lay, as we have seen, just above the bank of the Danube at the mouth of this stream. Following up the water (which is so insignificant that in most places a man can cross it unaided in summer), at the distance of about one mile, is the village of Unterglauheim, lying above the left bank, as Blenheim does above the right. Further on, another three-quarters of a mile up the right bank, is the village of Oberglauheim; and where the water dribbles in various small streams from the hills, and at their base, where the various tiny rivulets join to form the Nebel, at the edge of the woods, is Schwennenbach.
The tiny hamlet of Weilheim may be regarded as an appendix of this last or of Oberglauheim indifferently. It lies opposite the latter village, but on the further side of the stream, and about half a mile away.
Right behind Oberglauheim, at the base of the hills to the westward, and well away from the Nebel, is the larger village of Lutzingen.
These names, and that of the Nebel, are sufficient for us to retain as we follow the course of the battle, remembering as we do so that one good road, the road by which the allies marched in the morning to the field from Münster, and the road by which the Franco-Bavarian forces retreated after the defeat — the main road from Donauwörth to Ulm — traversed, and still traverses, the terrain in its whole length.
It was at two in the morning of Wednesday the 13th of August that the allies broke camp and began their march westward towards the field of Blenheim.
That they intended to reach that field was not at first apparent. They might equally well have designed a retirement upon Nördlingen, and it was this that the commanders of the Franco-Bavarian army believed them to intend. The dense mist which covered the marshes of the river and the plain above clung to the soil long after sunrise. It was not until seven o’clock that the advancing columns of the enemy were observed from the French camp, distant about a mile away, and beginning to deploy in order to set themselves in line of battle. But, though they were then first seen, their arrival had been appreciated two hours before, and the French line was already drawn up opposite them on the further bank of the Nebel as they deployed.
The French order of battle is no longer to be found in the archives, though we can reconstruct it fairly enough, and in parts quite accurately, from the separate accounts of the action given by Tallard, by Marcin himself, by Eugene, and from English sources. The line of battle of the allies we possess in detail; and the reader can approach with a fair accuracy the dispositions of the two armies at the moment when the action began, though it must be understood that the full deployment of Marlborough and Eugene was not accomplished until after midday on account of the difficulty the latter commander found in posting his extreme right at the foot of the hills and in the woods of Schwennenbach; while it must be further noted that the first shots of the battle sounded long before its main action began, that is, long before noon — for the French guns upon the front of their line opened at long range as early as nine o’clock, and continued a lively cannonade until, at half-past twelve, Eugene being at last ready, the first serious blows were delivered by the infantry.
All this we shall see in what followed. Meanwhile we must take a view of the two armies as they stood ranged for battle before linesman or cavalryman had moved.
The map on following page indicates in general terms the situation of the opposing forces.
The French stood upon the defensive upon the western bank of the Nebel. Their camp lay behind their line of battle, a stretch of tents nearly two miles long.
It is particularly to be noted that though, for the purpose of fighting this battle, they formed but one army, the two separate commands, that of the Elector (with Marcin) and that of Tallard, were separately treated and separately organised. The point is of importance if we are to understand the causes of their defeat, for it made reinforcement difficult, and put two loosely joined wings where a strong centre should have stood.
Tallard’s command, thirty-six battalions and (nominally) forty-four squadrons, extended from Blindheim to the neighbourhood of Oberglauheim. Its real strength may be taken at about 16,000 to 18,000 infantry, and at the most 5200 cavalry; but of these last a great number could not be used as mounted men.
The Elements of the Action of Blenheim.
The village of Oberglauheim itself, and all that stretched to the left of it up the Nebel as far as the base of the hills, was occupied by the army of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria. This force was forty-two battalions and eighty-three squadrons strong. The cavalry in this second army, the left of the whole force, had been less severely tried by disease, rapid marching, and ill provisionment than that of Tallard. We may reckon it, therefore, at its full or nearly its full strength, and say that Marcin and the Elector commanded over 20,000 men and close upon 10,000 horse. In a word, the total of the Franco-Bavarian forces, though we have no documents by which to estimate their exact numbers, may be regarded, from the indications we have of the losses of the cavalry, etc., as certainly more than fifty and certainly less than fifty-three thousand men, infantry and cavalry combined. To these we must add ninety guns, disposed along the whole front after the fashion of the time, and these under the general and separate command of Frézelière.
This disposition of the guns in a chain along the whole front of the line the reader is begged especially to note.
The particular dispositions of the Franco-Bavarian forces must now be seized, and to appreciate these let us first consider the importance of the village of Blenheim.
Blenheim, a large scattered village, with the characteristic Bavarian gardens round each house, lay so close to the course of the Danube as it then ran that there was no possibility of an enemy’s force passing between it and the river. It formed a position easy to be defended, lying as it did on a slight crest above the brook Nebel, where that brook joined the main river.
Blenheim, therefore, if it were soundly held, blocked any attempt to turn the French line upon that side; but if it were carried by the enemy, that enemy would then be able to enfilade the whole French line, to take it in flank and to roll it up. Tallard, therefore, with perfect judgment, posted in the village a very strong force of his infantry. This force consisted at first of nine battalions, shortly after, by reinforcement, of sixteen battalions of foot, and further of four regiments of dragoons dismounted.
Not content with throwing into Blenheim between 8000 and 10,000 men, Tallard placed behind the village and in its neighbourhood a further reserve of at least eleven battalions. Of his thirty-six battalions, therefore, only nine remained to support his cavalry over the whole of the open field between Blenheim and Oberglauheim, a distance of no less than 3500 yards. Consequently, this great gap had to be held in the main by his insufficient and depleted cavalry. Eight squadrons of these (of the red-coated sort called the Gendarmerie) formed the first section of this line, stretching from Blenheim to the neighbourhood of the main road and a little beyond it. Further along, towards Oberglauheim, another ten squadrons of cavalry were lined up to fill the rest of the gap. In a second line were ten more squadrons of cavalry under Silly; and the nine battalions of infantry remaining, when those in and near Blenheim had been subtracted, lay also in the second line, in support of the cavalry of the first line.
Such was Tallard’s disposition, of which it was complained both at the time and afterwards that in putting nearly the whole of his infantry upon his right in the village of Blenheim and behind it he far too greatly weakened the great open gap between Blenheim and Oberglauheim. His chief misfortune was not, however, lack of judgment in this, but the character of the man who commanded the troops in Blenheim. This general officer, whose name was Clérambault, was of the sort to be relied upon when orders are strict and plain in their accomplishment: useless in an emergency; but it is only an emergency that proves the uselessness of this kind of man. The army of the Elector and Marcin, which continued the line, similarly disposed their considerable force of cavalry in front, along the banks of the stream; their infantry lay, in the main, in support of this line of horse and behind it; they had also filled Oberglauheim with a mass of infantry; but the disposition of this left half of the French line is of less interest to the general reader, for it held its own, and contributed to the defeat only in this, that it did not at the critical moment send reinforcements to Tallard upon the right.
In general, then, we must see the long French line set out in two main bodies. That on the right, under Tallard, had far the greater part of its infantry within or in support of Blenheim, while the cavalry, for the most part, stretched out over the open centre of the field, with Silly’s ten squadrons and what was left of the infantry in reserve. That on the left, under Marcin and the Elector, had its far more numerous cavalry similarly disposed upon its front along the brook, most of its infantry behind, and a great number of these holding the village of Oberglauheim, with cavalry in front of them also. Along the whole line the ninety guns were disposed in a chain, as I have described.
Such being the disposition of the French troops, let us now turn to that of the Imperialists and their English and other allies under Eugene and Marlborough. These appeared within a mile of the French position by seven in the morning, and all that part of their left which lay between the river and the highroad was drawn up within long range of the French artillery somewhat before nine o’clock. But, as a glance at the map will show, their right had to march much further in order to come into line along the course of the Nebel, the course of which leans away from the line of Marlborough’s advance. The difficulty of swampy land under the hills and of woods made the final disposition of the extreme left particularly tardy and tedious, nor was it fully drawn up until just after midday. During all the interval of three hours a brisk cannonade at long range had been proceeding from the guns in front of the French line — and, as nearly always the case with artillery before the modern quick-firer, was doing less damage than the gunners imagined.
When the allied line was finally formed its disposition was as follows: —
On the extreme left six columns of infantry, half of which consisted of British regiments.
These stood immediately opposite the village of Blenheim, and were designed for that attack upon it which Marlborough, in his first intention, desired to make the decisive feature of the action.
Next, towards the main road, came four lines, two of infantry before and behind, and in the midst two parallel lines of cavalry, the foremost of which was British, and in which could be distinguished the mounting and horsemanship of the Scots Greys.
Next again, to the north, and astraddle of the great road, lay the main force; this it will be remarked was drawn up precisely in front of that part in the long French line which was the weakest, and which indeed consisted of little more than the ten squadrons of horse which filled the gap between the Gendarmerie and Oberglauheim. This main force was also drawn up in four great lines; the first of infantry, the two next of cavalry, the rear of infantry: it contained no British troops, and, with the others already mentioned, formed Marlborough’s command. All the rest, along the north and the east, along the left bank of the Nebel, from Willheim up into the woods, and the gorge at the source of the brook, was Eugene’s command — not a third of the whole.
As to the total strength of the allied forces which we must attempt to estimate as we estimated that of the Franco-Bavarians, we know it accurately enough — it was some 52,000 men. The opposing hosts were therefore little different in numbers. But it is of great importance to note the disproportion of cavalry. In that of the Imperialists under Marlborough and Eugene, not only was the cavalry better mounted and free from the fatigue and disease that had ravaged Tallard’s horses, but it was nearly double in number that of its opponents. On the other hand, the artillery of the allies was far inferior. Only sixty-six guns at the most were opposed to the French ninety.
Blenheim, in the issue, turned out to be a cavalry battle — a battle won by cavalry, and its effect clinched by cavalry. The poor rôle played by the guns and the inability of the French to make use of their numerical superiority in this arm was a characteristic of the time, which had not yet learnt to use the cannon as a mobile weapon.
A general action is best understood if the reader is first told the main event, and later observes how the details of its progress fit in with that chief character of it.
The main event of the battle of Blenheim was simply this: —
Marlborough first thought to carry Blenheim: he failed. Having failed before the village of Blenheim, he determined to break through Tallard’s left, which formed the centre of the French line, and was successful in doing so. By thus breaking through the centre of the French line, he isolated all Tallard’s army upon the right, except such small portion of it as broke and fled from the field. The remainder crowded into the village of Blenheim, was contained, surrounded, and compelled to surrender. The undefeated left half of the French line was therefore compelled to retire, and did so through Lutzingen upon the Danube, crossing which river in hurried retreat, it fell back upon Ulm. In one conspectus, the position at the beginning of the action was this: —
and at the end of it this: —
Now let us follow the details of the fight which brought about such a result.
First, at half-past twelve, when all was ready, came Marlborough’s attack upon Blenheim.
We have seen some pages back how well advised was Tallard to treat Blenheim as the key of his position, and how thoroughly that large village, once properly furnished with troops and fortified with palisades, would guarantee his right. On that very account, Marlborough was determined to storm it; for if it fell, there would instantly follow upon its fall a complete victory. The whole French line would be turned.
It may be argued that Marlborough here attempted the impossible, but it must be remembered, in the first place, that he was by temperament a man of the offensive and of great risks. His first outstanding action, that of the Schellenberg, proved this, and proved it in his favour. Five years later, in one of his last actions, that of Malplaquet, this characteristic of his was to appear in his disfavour. At any rate, risk was in the temperament of the man, and it is a temperament which in warfare accounts for the greatest things.
First and last, some 10,000 men were employed against the one point of Blenheim; and the assault upon the village, though a failure, forms one of the noblest chapters in the history of British arms.
It was one o’clock of the afternoon when the serious part of the action opened by the two first lines of Marlborough’s extreme left advancing under Lord Cutts to pass the Nebel, to cross the pasture beyond, and to force the palisades of the village. The movement across the stream was undertaken under a fire of grape from four guns posted upon a slight rise outside the village. Cutts’ body crossed the brook in face of this opposition, re-formed under the bank beyond, left their Hessian contingent in shelter there as a reserve, while the British, who were the remainder of the body, advanced against the palisades.
The distance is one of about 150 yards. The Guards and the four regiments with them came up through the long grass of the aftermath, Row at their head. Two-thirds of that short distance was passed in silence. The guns upon the slope beyond could not fire at a mark so close to their own troops behind the palisades. The English had orders not to waste a shot until they had carried the line of those palisades with the bayonet. The French behind the palisades reserved their fire.
It was one of those moments which the eighteenth century, with its amazingly disciplined professional armies, alone can furnish in all the history of war, an episode of which the Guards at Fontenoy were, a generation later, to afford the supreme example, and one depending on that perfection of restraint for which the English service was deservedly renowned. When a distance but a yard or two longer than a cricket pitch separated the advancing English from the palisades, the French volley crashed out. One man in three of the advancing line fell agonised or dead.
The British regiments, still obedient to Row’s instructions, reserved their fire until their leader touched the woodwork with his sword. Then they volleyed, and having fired, wrestled with the palisades as though to drag them down by sheer force. Perhaps some few parties here and there pressed in through a gap, but as the English soldiers struggled thus, gripped and checked by the obstacle, the French fire poured in again was deadly; the British assault was broken, and fled in disorder over the little field to the watercourse. As it fled, the Gendarmerie charged it in flank, captured the colours of the 21st, were repelled again by the Hessians in reserve (who recaptured the flag), and the first fierce moment of the battle was over.
One-third of Cutts’ command had been concerned in this first failure against Blenheim village. Two-thirds remained to turn that failure into a success. But before this second two-thirds was launched, there took place an episode in the battle, not conspicuously noted at the time, and given a minor importance in all accounts save Tallard’s own. It was significant in the extreme.
As Cutts’ broken first line was passing out of range and was effecting its retirement after the first disorder, and after the Hessians had repelled the first and partial cavalry charge of the French, the Gendarmerie, eight squadrons strong, prepared to charge again as a whole. They came upon the English before these had regained safety. Cutts naturally begged for cavalry to meet this cavalry danger, and Lumley sent five British squadrons to cross the stream and check the French charge. The English horse came to the further bank after some little difficulty with the mud of the sluggish stream, which difficulty has been exaggerated, and in no way affected the significance of what followed.
For what followed was the singular sight of eight French squadrons charging down a slope against only five, those five cramped in the hollow near a stream bed, and yet succeeding in receiving the shock of the charge of numbers so greatly superior, and, so far from yielding, breaking the offensive of their opponents into a confusion.
I repeat, it was but an episode, one that took place early in the day, and apparently of no weight. But, in a general historical view of the battle, it is of the first importance, for it showed what different stuff the opposed cavalries were made of, and that the allied army, which was already numerically the superior in cavalry — nearly double its opponents — had also better mounts, better riders, and a better discipline in that arm. A universal observer, seeing this one early detail in the battle of Blenheim, might have prophesied that the action would be a cavalry action as a whole, and that the cavalry of Marlborough would decide it.
I left Cutts prepared to launch the remaining two-thirds of his force at Blenheim village, in the hope of accomplishing what the first third had failed to do.
The whole combined body which the French had estimated at 10,000 men, and which seems to have been at least of some 8000, surged up in the second attempt against the palisades of the village. Part of that line and many of the outer gardens were carried, but the attack could not be driven home. It was, perhaps, at this moment that Tallard sent in those extra men which raised the French battalions in Blenheim from nine to sixteen, and gave the defenders, behind their walls, a force equal to the attackers. At any rate, the main attack was thrust back as the first had been, and the great corps of men, huddled, confused, rallied here and there as best they could be, broke from before the village.
The loss was terrible, and Marlborough having failed, not only failed, but saw that he had failed. It was his salvation. His subordinates would have returned to the fruitless attack with troops already shaken and dreading the ground. Marlborough ordered a false attack to be kept up from the further bank, upon the village, and, with that elasticity of command which is the prime factor of tactical success, and which commonly distinguishes youth rather than middle age in a general, turned all his efforts upon the centre.
Here the main road crosses the Nebel by a stone bridge. Four other bridges had been thrown across at other points between this stone bridge and Unterglauheim. By these the infantry were crossing, which infantry, it will be remembered (and my frontispiece shows it), stood as to their first line in front of the cavalry in the main central body. This almost undisputed passage of the Nebel would not have been possible had not the distance between Blenheim and Oberglauheim been what it was. The gap was great, the French line defending it too thin, and the possibility of a cross fire defending the centre was eliminated by the width of that centre.
Even as it was, the passage of the Nebel led to one very difficult moment which might by accident or genius have turned the whole action in favour of the French; and in connection with this episode it must be remembered that the French commanders asserted that the passage of the Nebel was no success on the part of their enemy, but was deliberately permitted to that enemy in order that he might be overwhelmed upon the opposing slope, with the marshy stream behind him, when the time for a counter-attack should come.
The moment came when the greater part of Marlborough’s cavalry had crossed, but before they had fully formed upon the further bank. While they were still in the disorder of forming, the French cavalry upon their left — that is, between the main road and Blenheim — charged down the slight slope, and something like a dismemberment of the whole of Marlborough’s mounted line began. It was checked for a moment by the fire of the British infantry, during which check Marlborough brought over certain Danish and Hanoverian squadrons which had remained upon the further bank. But the French charged again, and though infantry of Marlborough’s which was pouring over the stream up beyond the stone bridge came up in time to prevent a complete break down, the moment was critical in the extreme. All Marlborough’s centre was pressed and shaken; a further spurt against it and it would break.
It was such a moment as commanders of rapid decision and quick eye have always seized; and if it be asked how Tallard should have seized it, the answer is that there were French guns to mass, there was French infantry in Blenheim unused, and more in reserve behind Blenheim wholly useless. There were the ten squadrons of Tallard’s second line of cavalry under Silly, a couple of hundred yards away, to be summoned in a few moments.
Rapid decision and keen sight of this sort would have done the business; but Tallard was slow of perception; an excellent strategist, but short-sighted and a great gentleman; one, moreover, who had advanced by favour rather than by intrigue. He lost the moment.
Marlborough’s cavalry managed to form, struggling beyond the brook, and the last final phase of the action was at hand — for Marlborough’s cavalry would reiterate that general lesson which the whole battle teaches, to wit, that the horse of the allies was not only far stronger numerically, but far better trained than the French cavalry before them, and, with equal chances, must destroy it. Tallard, by missing his moment, had permitted those equal chances to be restored. Even so, yet one other last accident favoured the French. The hour was about five, or rather later in the mid-afternoon. In order to be able to form his cavalry beyond the Nebel, Marlborough wanted to have a clear right flank, and with that object he had launched from 6000 to 7000 Hanoverians against Oberglauheim. The excellent infantry of Blainville, less in numbers, emerged from the village, threw the Hanoverians into gross disorder, and captured their commander. At this point there was beginning to be a rout. This new French success, properly followed up, would again have had a chance to break the allied centre at its weakest point, just at the link where Marlborough joined on to Eugene.
Marcin, inferior as was his command, gripped the opportunity, sent cavalry at once to Oberglauheim, and that cavalry charged. But here the greatness of Marlborough as a personal commander suddenly appeared. He seized the whole character of the moment in a way that Tallard on his first chance had wholly failed to do. He put himself in person at the head of the Danish brigade that lay in reserve, brought it across the rivulet, and came just in time to take the charge of the French cavalry. Even as that charge was preparing, Marlborough sent to Eugene for cavalry at the gallop. He (Marlborough) must hold fast with his Danes against the French horse — five minutes, ten, fifteen at the most — till help should come from the right.
Here, again, another factor in the success of the day appeared — that Eugene and Marlborough understood each other.
Eugene had just suffered a sharp check upon the extreme right; he was re-forming for a new attack when he got Marlborough’s message. Without the loss of a moment in weighing his own immediate necessities, he sent Fugger thundering off, and Fugger, with the imperial cuirassiers, came galloping full speed upon Marlborough’s right flank just as the French charge was at its hardest pressure upon the Danish line. He took that French charge in flank, broke its impetus, permitted the Danish infantry to hold their own, and so compelled the French horse to fall back; within a quarter of an hour from its inception the peril of a breach in Marlborough and Eugene’s centre was thus dissolved.
Here, then, is yet another incident in the battle, which shows not only on which side rapidity of perception lay, but also on which side lay sympathy between commanders, and, most important of all, the discipline and material eminence of the dominating arm.
It was now nearly six o’clock, and the August sun was red and low in the face of the English General. The French line still stood intact before him.
Marlborough’s first great effort against Blenheim had disastrously failed all during the earlier afternoon; he had but just escaped a terrible danger, and had but barely been saved, by Eugene’s promptitude in reinforcement, from seeing his line cut in two. Nevertheless, he was the master of the little daylight that remained. His cavalry, and indeed nearly all his troops, were now formed beyond the Nebel; he had the mass of his forces now all gathered opposite the weakest part of the French line. It was his business to pierce that line and to conquer.
As he advanced upon it, the French infantry, then stationed over the long evening shadows of the slope, though there deplorably few in numbers, met his advance by so accurate a fire that his own line for a moment yielded. Even then the day might have been retrieved if the French cavalry under Tallard’s command had been capable of a charge. To charge — if we may trust the commander’s record — they received a clear order. As a point of fact, charge they did not. A failure to comprehend, a tardy delivery of the dispatch, fatigue, or error was to blame — we have no grounds on which to base a decision. There was a discharge of musketry from the saddle, an abortive attempt to go forward, which in a few minutes was no more an attempt but a complete failure, and in a few more minutes not a failure but a rout. The words of Tallard himself, who saw that almost incredible thing, and who writes as an eye-witness, are sufficiently poignant. They are these: —
“I saw one instant in which the battle was won if the cavalry had not turned and abandoned the Line.”
What happened was that the incipient, doubtful, and confused French charge had broken before a vigorous and united counter-charge of Marlborough’s cavalry: the French horse backed, turned, bunched, fell into a panic; and when the mass of their cavalry had fled in that panic, the French centre, that is, the thin line of infantry still standing there, were ridden through and destroyed.
They lay in heaps of dead or wounded, cut down with the sword, for the most part unbroken in formation, their feet eastward whence the charge had come, and their faces to the sky. Over and beyond those corpses rode the full weight of Marlborough’s cavalry, right through Tallard’s left, which was the centre of the French line, while Tallard vainly called for troops to come out of Blenheim and check the fury, and as vainly sent for reinforcements to come from Marcin on the left, which should try and dam the flood that was now pouring through the bulwark of his ranks. On the left, Marcin heard too late. As to the messenger to Blenheim on the right he was taken prisoner; Tallard himself, hastening to that village, was taken prisoner in turn.
What followed, at once something inevitable and picturesque, must not be too extended in description for the purpose of a purely military recital. The centre being pierced, while the left under Marcin and the Elector still held its own against Eugene, the right, that is, the huddled battalions — now twenty-seven — within Blenheim village, and the four mounted regiments of dragoons therein, were the necessary victims of the victory. The piercing of the centre had cut them off from all aid. They were surrounded and summoned to surrender.
Clérambault, their commander, had already drowned himself in despair, or had been drowned in a deplorable attempt at flight — at any rate, was dead.
Blausac, an honest man, the second in command, refused to surrender. British cavalry rode round to prevent all egress from the village upon its western side. Churchill brought up the mass of Marlborough’s infantry. Upon the side towards the Danube the churchyard was stormed and held. Still Blausac would not ask for terms.
It looked for a moment, under the setting sun of that fatal day, as though the 11,000 thus isolated within the streets of Blenheim would be massacred for mere glory, for Blausac was still obstinate. A subordinate officer, who saw that all was lost, harangued the troops into surrender, and the last business of the great battle was over.
Plate II. The Battle of Blenheim.
To face page 143.
As darkness gathered, the undefeated left under Marcin and the Elector — the half now alone surviving out of the whole host, the other half or limb being quite destroyed or surrendered — retreated with such few prisoners and such few colours as they had taken. They retreated hastily with all their train and their artillery, abandoning their camp, of course, and all through the night poured towards the Danube and built their bridges across the stream.
Darkness checked the pursuit. Some few remnants of Tallard’s escaped to join the retreat. The rest were prisoners or dead.
Of the fifty odd thousand men and ninety guns that had marshalled twelve hours before along the bank of the Nebel, 12,000 men had fallen, 11,000 had surrendered, and one-third of the pieces were in the hands of the enemy.
The political consequences of this great day were more considerable by far than was even its character of a military success. It was the first great defeat which marked the turn of the tide against Louis XIV. It was the first great victory which stamped upon the conscience of Europe the genius of Marlborough. It wholly destroyed all those plans, of which the last two years had been full, for an advance upon Vienna by the French and Bavarian forces. It utterly cleared the valley of the Danube; it began to throw the Bourbons upon the defensive at last. It crushed the hopes of the Hungarian insurrection. It opened that series of successes which we couple with the names of Marlborough and Eugene, and which were not to be checked until, five years later, the French defence recovered its stubbornness at Malplaquet.
FINIS
CRÉCY
INTRODUCTION
BETWEEN THOSE LAST precise accounts of military engagements which antiquity has left us in small number, and what may be called the modern history of war, there lies a period of many centuries — quite 1400 years — during which the details of an action and even the main features of a campaign are never given us by contemporary recorders.
Through all that vast stretch of time we are compelled, if we desire to describe with any accuracy, and at any length, the conduct of a battle, to “reconstitute” the same. In other words, we have to argue from known conditions to unknown. We have to establish by a comparison of texts and of traditions, and by other processes which will be dealt with in a moment, a number of elements which, where a modern action is concerned, numerous memoirs and official record often accompanied by elaborate maps can put clearly before us.
We should note that the line of division between what we will call a medieval battle and a modern one, though it cannot, of course, be precisely established, corresponds roughly to the sixteenth century. The battles of the seventeenth are for the most part open in detail to the historian, from copious evidence afforded by contemporary writers and by our considerable knowledge of the tactics and armament of the time. And this, of course, is still truer of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent to the wide employment of printing, and throughout the sixteenth century, the tendency shown by contemporaries to set down detail steadily increases, but the whole of that century is transitional in this matter.
The battles of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth, and earlier centuries, differ entirely as to their evidence. We must gather it from manuscript authorities, often rare, sometimes unique. Those authorities are, again, not always contemporary. They never by any chance give us a map, and rarely a definite topographical indication. They are summary, their motive is ecclesiastical or civil rather than military, they present at the best the picturesque side of an engagement, and at the worst they preserve a bare mention of its date, or the mere fact that it took place.
Even in the elementary point of numbers, without some knowledge of which it is so difficult to judge the nature of a field, we are commonly at a loss. Where a smaller force upon the defensive has discomfited a larger attacking force, the dramatic character of such a success (and Crécy was one of them) has naturally led to an exaggeration of the disproportion. The estimate of loss is very commonly magnified and untrustworthy, for that is an element which, in the absence of exact record, both victors and vanquished inevitably tend to enlarge. We are not as a rule given the hours, sometimes, but not often, the state of the weather, and, especially in the earlier cases, the local or tactical result is of so much greater importance to the chronicler than the strategical plan, that we are left with little more knowledge at first hand than the fact that A won and B lost.
So true is this, that with regard to the majority of the great actions of the Dark Ages no contemporary record even enables us to fix their site within a few miles. That is true, for instance, of the decisive defeat of Attila in 451, of the Mahommedans by Charles Martel in 732, and of the final victory of Alfred over the Danes in 878.
Scholarship has established, with infinite pains and within small limits of doubt, the second and the third. The first is still disputed. So it is with the victory of Clovis over the Visigoths, and with any number of minor actions. Even when we come to the later centuries, and to a more complete knowledge, we are pursued by this difficulty, though it is reduced. Thus we know the square mile within which the Battle of Hastings was fought, but the best authorities have disputed its most important movements and characters. Similarly we can judge the general terrain of most of the Crusading fights, but with no precision, and only at great pains of comparison and collation.
The battle which forms the object of this little monograph, late as was its date, was long the subject of debate during the nineteenth century, upon the elementary point of the English position and its aspect. And, though that and other matters may now be regarded as established, we owe our measure of certitude upon them not to any care upon the part of our earliest informers, but to lengthy and close argument conducted in our time.
There is no space in such a short book as this to discuss all the causes which combined to produce this negligence of military detail in the medieval historian: that he was usually not a soldier, that after the ninth century armies cannot be regarded as professional, and that the interest of the time lay for the mass of readers in the results rather than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.
But though we have no space for any full discussion, it is worth the reader’s while to be informed of the general process by which scholarship attempts to reconstitute an engagement, upon which it has such insufficient testimony; and as the Battle of Crécy is the first in this series which challenges this sort of research, I will beg leave to sketch briefly the process by which it proceeds.
The first thing to be done, then, in attempting to discover what exactly happened during such a battle as that of Crécy, is to tabulate our sources. These are of three kinds — tradition, monuments, and documents.
Of these three, tradition is by far the most valuable in most research upon affairs of the Dark or Middle Ages, and it is nothing but a silly intellectual prejudice, the fruit of a narrow religious scepticism, now fast upon the wane, which has offered to neglect it.
Unfortunately, however, tradition is a particularly weak guide in this one department of knowledge. In estimating the character of a great man it is invaluable. It plays a great part in deciding us upon the nature of social movements, in helping us to locate the sites of buildings that have disappeared, and particularly of shrines; it gives us ample testimony (too often neglected) to the authenticity of sacred documents, and to the origin of laws. It is even of some assistance in establishing certain main points upon a military action, if documents are in default. For instance, a firm tradition of the site of a battle is evidence not only in the absence of documents, but in negation of doubtful or vague ones, and so is a firm tradition concerning the respective strength of the parties, if that tradition can be stated in general terms. But for the particular interest of military history it is worthless because it is silent. Even the civilian to-day, and, for that matter, the soldier as well, who is not accustomed to this science, would find it tedious to note, and often impossible to recognise, those points which form the salient matters for military history. There can be no tradition of the exact moments in which such and such a development in a battle occurred, of contours, of range, etc., save where here and there some very striking event (as in the case of the projectile launched into the midst of Acre during the Third Crusade) startles the mind of the onlooker, and remains unforgotten.
In the particular case of Crécy, tradition fixes for us only two points — though these have proved of considerable importance in modern discussion — the point where the King of Bohemia fell, and the point from which Edward III. watched the battle.
Of monuments, again, we have a very insufficient supply, and in the case of Crécy, hardly any, unless the point already alluded to, where the blind king was struck down, and the cross marking it be counted, as also the foundations of the mill, which was the view-point of the English commander.
It is to documents, then, that we must look, and, unfortunately for this action, our principal document is not contemporary. It is from the pen of Froissart, who was but nine years old when the battle was fought, and who wrote many years after its occurrence. Even so, his earlier version does not seem to be familiar to the public of this country, though it is certainly the more accurate.
Froissart used a contemporary document proceeding from the pen of one “John the Fair,” a canon of Liége. Of the lesser authorities some are contemporary: notably Baker of Swynford, and Villani, who died shortly after the battle.
But the whole bulk of material at our disposal is pitifully small, and the greater part of what the reader will have set before him in what follows is the result of an expansion and criticism of the few details which writers of the period have bequeathed to us.
When the documentary evidence, contemporary, or as nearly contemporary as possible, has been tabulated, the historian of a medieval battle next proceeds to consider what may be called the “limiting circumstances” within which the action developed, and these have much more than a negative value. As he proceeds to examine and to compare them, they illuminate many a doubtful point and expand many an obscure allusion.
For instance, in the case of Crécy, we carefully consider the contours, upon the modern map, of a terrain which no considerable building operations or mining has disfigured. We mark the ascertainable point at which the Somme was crossed, and calculate the minimum time in which a host of the least size to which we can limit Edward’s force could have marched from that to the various points mentioned in the approach to the battle-field. We ascertain the distance from the scene of action to the forest boundary. We argue from the original royal possession and subsequent conservation of that forest its permanent limits. We can even establish with some accuracy the direction of the wind, knowing how the armies marched, how the sun stood relative to the advancing force, and their impression of the storm that broke upon them. We calculate, within certain limits of error, the distance necessary for deployment. We argue from the known character of the armour and weapons employed certain details of the attack and defence. We mark what were certainly the ancient roads, and we measure the permanent obstacles afforded by the physical nature of the field.
I give these few points as examples only. They are multiplied indefinitely as one’s study proceeds, and in the result a fairly accurate description of so famous, though so ill attested, an action as this of Crécy can be reconstituted.
With all this there remains a large margin which cannot be generally set down as certain, and which even in matters essential must be written tentatively, with such phrases as “it would seem,” or “probably” to excuse it. But history is consoled by the reflection that all these gaps may be filled by further research or further discovery, and that each new effort of scholarship bridges one and then another.
As to the critical power by which each individual writer will decide between conflicting statements, or apparently irreconcilable conditions, this must be left to his own power of discrimination and to the reader’s estimate of his ability to weigh evidence. He is in duty bound — as I have attempted to do very briefly in certain notes — to give the grounds of his decision, and, having done so, he admits his reader to be a judge over himself: with this warning, however, that historical judgment is based upon a vast accumulation of detail acquired in many fields besides those particularly under consideration, and that a competent historian generally claims an authority in his decisions superior to that reposing upon no more than a mere view of limited contemporary materials.
I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
THE BATTLE OF Crécy was the first important decisive action of what is called “The Hundred Years’ War.” This war figures in many history books as a continued struggle between two organised nations, “England” and “France.” To present it in its true historical character it must be stated in far different terms.
The Hundred Years’ War consisted in two groups of fighting widely distant in time and only connected by the fact that from first to last a Plantagenet king of England claimed the Crown of France against a Valois cousin. Of these two groups of fighting the first was conducted by Edward III., and covers about twenty years of his reign. It was magnificently successful in the field, and gave to the English story the names of Crécy and of Poitiers. So far as the main ostensible purpose of that first fighting was concerned, it was unsuccessful, for it did not result in placing Edward III. upon the French throne.
The second group of actions came fifty years later, and is remembered by the great name of Agincourt.
This latter part of the Hundred Years’ War was conducted by Henry V., the great-grandson of Edward III. and the son of the Lancastrian usurper. And Henry was successful, not only in the tactical results of his battles, but in obtaining the Crown of France for his house. After his death his success crumbled away; and a generation or so after Agincourt, rather more than one hundred years after the beginning of this long series of fights, the power of the kings of England upon the Continent had disappeared. As a visible result of all their efforts, nothing remained but the important bastion of Calais, the capture of which was among the earliest results of their invasions.
When we say that the ostensible object of all this conflict from first to last was the establishment of the Plantagenet kings of England as kings of France in the place of their cousins the Valois, we must remember what was meant by those terms in the fourteenth century, when Edward first engaged in the duel. There was no conception of the conquest of a foreign power such as would lie in the mind of a statesman of to-day. Society was still feudal. Allegiance lay from a man to his lord, not from a man to his central political government. Not only the religion, the thoughts, and the daily conduct of either party to the war were the same, but in the governing society of both camps the language and the very blood were the same. Edward was a Plantagenet. That is, his family tradition was that of one of the great French feudal nobles. It was little more than one hundred years before that his great-grandfather had been the actual and ruling Lord of Normandy, and of France to the west and the south-west, for the first Plantagenet, had though holding of the Crown at Paris, been the active monarch of Aquitaine, of Brittany, of Anjou, Normandy, and Maine.
So much for the general sentiment under which the war was engaged. As to its particular excuse, this was slight and hardly tenable, and we may doubt whether Edward intended to press it seriously. He engaged in the war from that spirit of chivalric adventure (a little unreal, but informed by an indubitable taste for arms) which was the mark of the fourteenth century, and which was at the same time a decline from the sincere knightly spirit of the thirteenth.
The excuse given was this. The French monarchy had descended, from its foundation in 987 right down to the death of Charles IV. in 1328, directly from father to son, but in that year, 1328, male issue failed the direct line. The obviously rightful claimant to the throne, according to the ideas of those times — and particularly of Northern France — was Philip of Valois, the first cousin of the king, Charles IV., who had just died.
Charles IV. had been the son of King Philip IV., and Philip of Valois was the son of Charles of Valois, Philip IV.’s brother. Philip of Valois was therefore the eldest in unbroken male descent of the house.
It might be claimed (and it was claimed by Edward III.) that the daughters of elder brothers and their issue should count before the sons of younger brothers. Now there were two female heiresses or their issue present as against Philip of Valois. Charles IV., the king just dead, had a sister Isabella, and Isabella was the mother of Edward III. of England.
But an elder brother to Charles IV., namely, Louis X., had himself left a daughter, who was now the Queen of Navarre.
If this principle that the daughter or the issue of the daughter of an elder brother should count before the male issue of a younger brother had been granted in its entirety, Edward would have had no claim, because this elder brother of Charles IV., Louis X., had had issue — that daughter, Joan, the wife of the King of Navarre. So Edward qualified this first general principle, that one could inherit through women, by another principle, to wit, that, though the claim to the throne should proceed through the daughters of elder brothers rather than through the sons of younger ones, yet the throne could itself only actually be held by a male!
By this tortuous combination Edward III. advanced his claim. His mother had been the grand-daughter of Philip III. of France, and he was a male. Her father was the elder brother of Philip of Valois’ father, so he claimed before Philip of Valois.
The whole scheme is apparent from the following table: —
But, I repeat, we must not take Edward’s political claim too seriously. His real object was not so much to establish himself upon the throne of France and to create a great French-speaking united monarchy of French and British under the single rule of the Plantagenets, as to try a great adventure and to see what would come of it.
It was this that gave to Edward’s wars the character not of campaigns with a fixed object, but Great Raids, the very successes of which were unexpected and only half fruitful. It was this, again, which made him so uncertain and vacillating as to how he should use those successes when they came; which made him suggest now this, now that basis for peace after each victory, but never to insist very particularly, however surprising and thorough his work in the field, upon the French throne.
It was this, again, which gave to the actual results of his battles haphazard consequences, as it were, the most notable and permanent of which was the English hold upon Calais. And it was this which always left so huge a disproportion between the object he in theory desired to obtain and the forces with which he set out to attain it. To sum up, we shall only understand the victory of Crécy and the succeeding twin victory of Poitiers ten years later, if we conceive of the whole business as something of a tournament rather than a true political or even dynastic struggle.
Further, we must always remember that the leaders upon both sides came of one society, were of one speech and of one manner, often closely related in blood. We must remember that it was no desertion for a French lord to serve the King of England, and that even brothers would be found (as were the two Harcourts) honourably attached, according to the ideas of the time, to opposing forces.
Beneath this social aspect of the wars there was, of course, the growing national sentiment of the French and of the English. Most of the men who fought against Edward at Crécy, especially of the obscure men, thought of Paris as the only possible seat of authority, and of the Valois as their only possible king. All the Archers at Crécy, and many of the squires there — and a good half even of the forces at Poitiers — were English-speaking, and had no experience of life save that confined to this island, up to the moment when they set out for the Great Raids upon the Continent.
As the Hundred Years’ War proceeded, as it approached its second phase in which Henry V. was actually successful in obtaining the Crown of France, or rather the reversion of it, the national feeling was growing rapidly upon either side, and by the time of Joan of Arc’s campaign and of the subsequent loss of Normandy by the Plantagenets, everyone outside the small governing class of either country had come to think of the business as a national one upon either side. But with Crécy it was not so, and we must approach the military problems of Crécy with the political provision in mind that the whole affair of that battle and of its immediate successors was a feudal occupation — one had almost said pastime — engaged within the circle of that widespread French-speaking nobility, common to and intermarried between Gaul and Britain, which, for three hundred years, ruled society from the Grampians to the Mediterranean.
II. THE CAMPAIGN OF CRÉCY
THE CAMPAIGN OF Crécy took place within a district of France contained by an east and west base 200 miles in length and an eastern border north and south 160 miles in length, and sketched in the map opposite.
The rectangular parallelogram so formed is nearly equally divided between land and sea, the south-eastern half being a portion of Northern France, and the north-western half the English Channel. The land half is thus roughly triangular, having Paris at its extreme south-eastern corner, Calais at its extreme north-eastern, the neighbourhood of Avranches with St Malo Bay at its south-western corner. It includes part of the provinces of Normandy, the Ile de France, Picardy and Artois, and part, or all, of the modern departments of the Manche, Orne, Calvados, Eure, Seine-et-Oise, Seine, Seine-Inférieure, Oise, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais.
It will be seen that this territory is nearly evenly divided by the River Seine, and the campaign of Crécy is also divided by that river in the sense that the English advance took place wholly to the west of it, and the English retreat wholly to the east of it.
The campaign, as a whole, resolves itself (up to and including the Battle of Crécy, which is the subject of this book, and excluding the continuation of the march after Crécy, and the capture of Calais) into an advance from the Channel coast to Paris, and a retreat from Paris to the Channel again, the two portions being divided by the crossing of the Seine at Poissy. The advance leaves the coast at the summit of that projection of Normandy called the Cotentin, and proceeds a little south of east towards Paris, the walls of which are reached by its outermost skirmishers, while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. The retreat is effected from Poissy northward to the victorious field of Crécy, and later from Crécy, on the same line, to the siege and capture of Calais.
The time occupied from the day of landing to the day of the Battle of Crécy inclusive, is but forty-six days, of which not quite two-thirds are taken up by advance, and rather more than a third by the retreat. The English troops landed on Wednesday, July 12th, 1346. They crossed the Seine at Poissy upon August 14th. They fought at Crécy upon Saturday, August 26th.
The total distance traversed by the main body in these two limbs of the campaign is instructive as showing the leisure of the first part, its advance, and the precipitancy of the second part, its retreat.
The distance by road as the army marched from St Vaast, where it landed, across the river at Poissy, and so to Crécy, was a total of 345 miles. Of this the first part, or advance, was 215, the second part, or retreat, 130. The first part occupied, counting the day of landing and the day of crossing at Poissy, not less than 34 days, while the latter portion or retreat of 130 miles, including the day of battle itself, took up not more than 12 days, or, excluding the battle, only 11. The average rate of the advance was not more than 6¼ miles a day, the average rate of the retreat very nearly double.
It must not be imagined, of course, that the advance took place in prompt and regular fashion. It was, as we shall see, irresolute for many days, and irregular throughout, while the retreat was a hurried one upon all but one day of which the troops were pressed to their uttermost. But the contrast is sufficient to show the difference between the frames of mind in which Edward III. took up the somewhat hazy plan of an “invasion,” which was really no more than a raid, and that in which he attempted to extricate himself from the consequences of his original vagueness of intent. In the first, he was as slow as he was uncertain; in the second, he was as precipitate as he was determined.
In the last days of June, 1346, Edward III. had gathered a force, small indeed for the purpose which he seems to have had in mind, but large under the conditions of transport which he could command. It was probably just under 20,000 actual fighting men. At this point, however, as it is of material interest to the rest of the story, we must pause to consider what these units meant. When we say a little less (or it may have been a little more) than 20,000 fighting men, we mean that the “men-at-arms” (that is, fully equipped, mounted men, for the most part gentlemen), together with not 4000 Welsh and Border Infantry, and approximately 10,000 Archers, bring us near to that total.
But an army of the fourteenth century was accompanied by a number of servants, at least equal to its mounted armed gentry: men who saw to the equipment and service of the knights. No man at arms was fit to pass through a campaign without at least one aide, if only for armouring; and for all the doubtfulness of the records, we know that the Yeoman Archers were also served by men who carried a portion of their equipment, and who saw to their supply in action. It is impossible to make any computation at all accurate of the extra rations this organisation involved, nor of what proportion of these uncounted units could be used in the fighting. We are perhaps safe in saying that the total number who landed were not double the fighting men actually counted, and that Edward’s whole force certainly was much more than 20,000 but almost as certainly not 40,000 men. We must imagine, all told, perhaps 5000 horses to have been assembled with the force for transport over sea: others would be seized for transport on the march. It is remarkable that Edward carefully organised certain small auxiliary bodies, smiths, artificers, etc., and took with him five cannon.
It was not until Tuesday, the 11th of July, that the very large fleet which the King had pressed for the service was able to sail from the Solent and Spithead. It crossed in the night with a northerly breeze, and appeared upon the following morning off St Vaast.
St Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by a south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the wind under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this considerable expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such circumstances, that though Edward had announced his decision of sailing for southern France, the point of disembarkation had been carefully settled, and that a course had been laid for it.
A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a body of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been assigned.
For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and the countryside was ravaged.
It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its march to the south and east.
No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.
The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has only recently been attempted.
Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.
When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart’s but contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker’s Chronicle and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been saved.
Baker’s Chronicle was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in 1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont, a point not hitherto established.
First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen’s accounts is by far the most valuable.
It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness is the most trustworthy.
I mean by “unconscious” evidence the evidence afforded by one who is not interested in the type of action which one is attempting to establish. Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what day a Prime Minister of England left London for Paris upon some important mission. His biographer who sets out to write an interesting political life and to insist upon certain motives in him, will say it is the 20th of June, because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary, and because he finds a letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on the 21st. Perhaps it is more important to the picturesqueness of the detail that the journey should be a hurried one, and without knowing it the biographer is biased in that direction. There may be twenty documents from the pens of people concerned with affairs of State which would lead us to infer that he left London on the 20th, and perhaps only five that would lead us to infer that he left on an earlier day, and, weighing the position and responsibility of the witnesses, the biographer will decide for the twenty.
But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime Minister’s valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime Minister’s overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which we find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a converging set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to make the journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial duties, and each unconscious of the effect upon history of their evidence. It would be extraordinary if the servant had forged a date, and if we suppose him to have made a mistake, we are corrected by the equally trivial points of the postmark and the French stamp and the mention of the weather.
So it is with this manuscript record of the King’s Kitchen expenses and of the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever there is conflict, it must override all other evidence.
The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable testimony, was one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a beautifully neat, but not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment, and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.
With every day’s halt the place where victuals were bought for the King, that is, where the King’s household lay, has its name marked upon these accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS., coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [e.g. m from ni, n from u, etc.] upon parchment which time has faded, and on the top of that the indifference of the scribe to the foreign names themselves, do not render the task particularly easy. The MS. has not, I believe, ever been published. I have spent a good deal of time over it, and I will give my conclusions as best I can.
The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is, until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the bulk of the force did not move.
On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10½ miles. No proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.
From Valognes there is a two days’ march to Carentan, which town was the lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a town called Ste Mère l’Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King’s staff did not follow the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day’s march of over fourteen miles, but the next day’s march, that of Thursday the 20th, to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight or nine (allowing in both cases for the windings of the side-road). On Friday the 21st the King lay at Pont Hébert. This is another example of something very like a long march followed by a short one upon the morrow. St Lô was the halting-place of the Saturday, and Pont Hébert is but four miles from St Lô. Of a total, therefore, of nearly seventeen miles, over thirteen are covered upon one day, and but four upon the next.
At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance with which we are dealing. Edward had been blamed for sluggishness. He was not so much sluggish as apparently without plan. He did not know quite what he was going to do next. His general intention seems to have been to make sooner or later for his allies in Flanders, and meanwhile to take rich towns and loot them, and to bring pressure upon the King of France by ravaging distant and populous territories which the French army could not rapidly reach. He therefore often makes a good and steady marching in this advance, but he also lingers uselessly at towns, and intercalates very short marches between the long ones. Thus he deliberately struck inland to St Lô on his way to Caen, because St Lô was a fine fat booty, instead of making by the short road which runs from Carentan through Bayeux. The whole character of the advance clearly betrays the point I have already made, that this early part of the Hundred Years’ War was essentially a series of raids.
At this stage it is well to point out to the reader two difficulties which have confused historians. The first is the fact that the Clerk of the Kitchen often takes a shot at a French name which he has either heard inaccurately or which he attempts to spell phonetically, so that we have to interpret him not infrequently to make sense of his record.
The second is the fact that the chronicler will give some particular spot quite consonant with the marching powers of troops for one day, but different from that given by the Clerk of the Kitchen.
This apparent discrepancy is due to the fact that an army marches if it can upon parallel roads involving various halting-places for various sections of it on the same night. An army upon a raid such as this also throws out foraging parties and detachments, which leave its main body for the purposes of observation or of plunder.
Again, we must always regard the King’s household (and therefore the Kitchen Accounts) as moving with what may be called “the staff.” Often, therefore, it will go much faster than the rest of the army, while at other times it will lie behind or to one side of it. Thus, at the very end of this campaign you have a transference of the King’s quarters, twenty miles to the north in one day, which would be a terribly long march for the army as a whole, and which, as a fact, we can discover on other evidence the army as a whole did not take.
With so much said, we can proceed to build up an exact account of the advance and the retreat.
Upon Sunday the 23rd of August Edward advanced from St Lô to a place which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls “Sevances.” The spelling is inaccurate. The place intended is Sept Vents, twelve miles to the south and east of St Lô. But other portions of the army halted elsewhere in the neighbourhood, as we know from Baker. The next halt, that of the 24th, is at Torteval, only five miles away, but a portion of the army got south of Fontenay le Pesnel, which the King did not reach till the 25th, and which the Clerk calls “Funtenay Paynel.” Three days are thus taken between St Lô and Caen, and the whole army arrives before the latter large town, the capital of West Normandy, upon Wednesday, July 26th.
The town of Caen was not properly defended. It had no regular walls, and was a very rich prey indeed. The Constable of France and the Chamberlain were in the town, and the castle was held by a handful (300) of Genoese mercenaries. There was an armed force of militia and of knights in the streets of the town, of what exact size we do not know. The Prince of Wales with the advance guard occupied the outskirts of the city which lie beyond the branches of the Orne (the northern branch now runs mainly in sewers under the streets from the Hôtel de Ville to the Church of St Peter). There was sharp fighting at the bridge, at one moment of which the King ordered a retreat, but the Earl of Warwick disobeyed the order. The King followed him, and the bridge was taken. There was considerable slaughter in the streets of the city; the Constable and the Chamberlain were taken prisoners, and about one hundred of the wounded knights. The English loss, which was not heavy, fell mainly upon the Archers and Spearmen, and the total, including wounded, was but five hundred, and was mainly due to the resistance of the inhabitants of the houses. The town was given over to pillage, and Edward thought of burning it, but was restrained. It is characteristic of the march that a delay of four days from the morning of the 5th was occupied in the loot of Caen, from which town (in communication with the sea by its river) Edward sent back his plunder on board the Fleet which he dismissed.
The army marched out of Caen on Monday, the 31st of July, and undertook its three days’ march to Lisieux, the next rich town upon this random advance, now deprived of support from the sea. Edward probably intended to force some passage of the Seine, preferably, it may be surmised, at Rouen, or a little higher up, with the vague object of making for the north-east and Calais. We are not certain of this. It is more than possible that the capture of Calais later on in the campaign gave rise to the story that some such plan was intended. Anyhow, we get two halts and three marches between Caen and Lisieux, a distance of only twenty-five miles, which could easily have been accomplished in two days had there been a really definite plan in the commander’s head. We may be pretty certain that there was not.
The halts of the King himself on the 31st of July and the 1st of August were made at two places which read in the MS. as “Treward,” and an abbreviated name which stands for “Leopurtuis.” The first of these is Troarn at the crossing of the Dives river. Other forces halted on that night at Agences, four miles to the south. The second is Léaupartie, a mile or so from Rumenise, where one other column halted, while a second column camped about five miles to the south. Lisieux was entered upon the 2nd of August after a march of ten miles on the part of the King, and of eleven and twelve on the part of the other two bodies.
At Lisieux two Cardinals who were despatched to offer terms met King Edward and proposed this arrangement to complete the war: that he should have the Duchy of Aquitaine upon the same tenure as his ancestors had held it. He refused those terms, and, after wasting a day at Lisieux, continued his march eastward.
Leaving Lisieux on the morning of the 4th, he pitched his tent that evening at Duramelle, a march of nine miles, with at least one column a mile ahead at Le Teil. On Saturday the 5th he got something better out of his troops, or at any rate out of the vanguard, and made something like seventeen miles to Neubourg.
I confess here to a very considerable doubt. The entry in the Accounts of the Kitchen is hopelessly misspelt, but the “Lineubourg” does not correspond to any other possible place, and Le Neubourg would be a very convenient halting-place for the King himself, well provisioned and lodged. We cannot believe, of course, that the army covered the full distance, but there is no reason why the King and his household should not have pushed on ahead with mounted troops. What makes it more probable is that the King spent the whole day of Sunday the 6th at Le Neubourg, presumably for the bulk of the army to come up and make two days’ march of the twenty odd miles which the most distant contingents had to cover.
It was on the next day, Monday the 7th, that he reached the Seine, and approached that river, as we may presume, with the object of crossing it. It was a ten-mile march, and the whole force could be on the banks before evening at Elbœuf. But the bridges were broken and it was impossible. It was from this point of Elbœuf that the raid turned to follow the valley of the Seine up towards Paris, always seeking some crossing-place, and always finding the bridges broken. The nearer he got to Paris the more dangerous became Edward’s position, and the larger grew the forces of the French King in the neighbourhood of the capital which threatened him.
Tuesday the 8th was spent in ravaging the country. Pont de L’Arche was burnt in revenge for the destruction of its bridge; a detachment went round by Louviers, which was looted, but the King himself went forward by the river bank and lodged that night at Vaudreuil, ten miles on from Elbœuf (which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls “Pount-Vadreel”). The bulk of the force halted at Léry, a mile or two behind.
Upon Wednesday, August 9th, Edward lay at Angreville (the “Langville” of the accounts), just south of Gaillon, and on Thursday the 10th, having burnt Vernon, where again he found the bridge cut, at Jeufose, rather more than eleven miles march up the river. (“Frevose,” as I read it in the MS.) His next hope for a bridge was at Mantes, and he was getting perilously near the heart of the country and the gathering French forces. That bridge was nine or ten miles along the road. He found it cut like all the others.
He was already across the borders of Normandy, and anxiety must have been growing upon him. He seized Mantes after some resistance. It was useless to his purpose, and he hurried on another six miles to Epone (“Appone” in the Accounts), making that day a really long march in his natural haste and compelling his escort to the same — sixteen miles. But he both fatigued his main army in that attempt, and it also lost some time in storming a fortified house on “the White Rock,” because the next day he evidently had to wait for stragglers to come up, advancing but a couple of miles to Aubergenville, where we find him upon Saturday the 12th. Upon the 13th, the Sunday, he got his opportunity. A march of only eight miles brought the host to Poissy, and there, though the bridge was cut, the stone piles upon which its trestles had stood were uninjured. Edward at once began to take advantage of this and to put his artificers to work. All that Sunday and all the Monday the task proceeded, and during this delay parties were despatched to ravage. They burnt St Germain and St Cloud. An advance party entered the Bois de Boulogne. But there could, of course, be no thought of an attack on Paris with so small a force and without base or provision.
By Tuesday the 15th of August these ravaging parties were recalled, and the whole host was streaming across the repaired bridge at Poissy.
This day, Tuesday the 15th, is strategically the turning point of the campaign. In an attempt to note in history no more than the great raid of Edward up to the very walls of the Capital, and his rapid and successful retreat, the crossing of Poissy would form the central term of our story. As it happened, however, the great chance which occurred to Edward in that retreat upon the field of Crécy, and his magnificent use of it, has eclipsed the earlier story, and for many the interest of the campaign as a whole, and the importance of this rapid seizure and repair of Poissy, is missed.
While his army was crossing the river, Edward received the challenge of the King of France. It was native indeed to the time: a sort of tournament-challenge, offering the English monarch battle upon any one of five days, in that great plain between Paris and St Germains which the last siege of the French capital has rendered famous in military history. The French feudal levies for which Philip had been waiting were now fast gathering, especially those for which he had had to wait longest, the main forces which had been away down south in Guienne. Edward most wisely refused the challenge, for it would have been against great odds, and to accept, though consonant to the spirit of the time, would have been a ludicrously unmilitary proceeding. In place of such acceptation he sent back false news that he would meet Philip far to the south. He then proceeded to cross the river and make the best haste he could back northwards to the sea. The French King found out the trick; a day and a half late he started in pursuit with his large and increasing host. That host was gathered at St Denis when on the Wednesday night, the 16th, Edward had got his men to Grisy, well north of Pontoise, and something like seventeen miles by cross roads from his hastily repaired bridge across the Seine. What followed was a fine feat of marching.
On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days, by the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles further north as the crow flies (and more like thirty by the roads), at Sommereux. Edward halted at Troussures (of which the clerk makes “Trusserux”) to see it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the 20th, he was at Camps in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push of fifteen miles for mass of the force, and of more than twenty for himself and his staff.
At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that tremendous feat of marching (and what it meant anyone who has covered close on fifty miles in three days under military conditions will know — there are few such) the great host of Philip was pounding at his heels.
Now, if the reader will glance at the map at the beginning of this section, he will see that just as Edward had been under a necessity to cross the Seine in the first part of his raid, he was now under a still greater necessity of crossing the Somme. A force much larger than his own was pressing him against that river into a sort of corner, and his only chance of safety lay in reaching the Straits of Dover through the county of Ponthieu, which lay beyond the stream. Every effort had been made to press the march. The force appears to have been divided for this purpose and to have marched in parallel columns, and the single case of marauding (the burning of the Abbey of St Lucien outside Beauvais) had been punished with the death of twenty men.
To turn and meet his pursuers (who were evidently in contact with him through their scouts) would have meant, so long as he was on this side of the Somme, no chance of retreat in case of defeat.
Every mile he went to the north the Somme valley, already a broad expanse of marsh upon his flank, grew broader and more difficult. The decision, therefore, which Edward took at this critical moment, at once perilous and masterly, showed that rapid grasp of a situation which, for all his lack of a general plan during this campaign, this great soldier could boast. In the first place, he himself rides forward no less than twenty full miles to the village of Acheux. He has behind him the whole army strung out in separate bodies parallel to the Somme. Himself, from the head of that long line of twenty miles, commands all that should be done along it. He next orders separate bodies to approach the valley and seek a crossing, first, if possible, up river, then, as they fail, lower and lower down, and each to be ready as it is foiled at each bridge to fall back north in concentration, and to group in gathering numbers further and further down the stream, and near to his place at the head of the line, Acheux.
The whole thing is a fine piece of sudden decision, and is at once a combination of the rapidity of the retreat and of the attempt to force the river, in this the fourth week of August 1346, which so nearly brought disaster to the English force.
Three days, the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, were taken up in this manœuvre. The English flung themselves successively against the bridges: Picquigny, Long Pré, Pont Rémy. The hardest and first push was at Picquigny at the beginning or southernmost of the effort. The body detached for that effort was beaten back.
It was the same with the next blow lower down at Long Pré: the same lower down still at Pont Rémy. At no bridge were the English successful. Everywhere the valley was impassable to them, and as they attempted one place after another down the stream with its broadening marshland and now tidal water, to find a traverse seemed impossible.
At last, then, upon Wednesday the 23rd of August the whole host was gathered, foiled, round its King at Acheux. He marched on a few miles to Boismont, going on his way through Mons, and there, as it chanced, picking up a prisoner who proved invaluable: for that prisoner betrayed the ford.
As the English army lay at Boismont that night of the 23rd, the broad estuary of the Somme stretched to the north of them with no more bridges across it, cut or uncut, and apparently no fate but a choice between a desperate action against superior numbers (nor any retreat open) and surrender.
Edward’s only chance lay in the discovery across that mile of land (flooded at high tide, and at low tide a morass) of some kind of ford. Such a ford existed. With difficulty, but in the nick of time, it was discovered and used; the French force defending it upon the further side was overthrown, and the retreat and its dependent victory of Crécy were made possible.
Edward had had good faith that “God and Our Lady, and St George would find him a passage,” and a passage he found.
The crossing of that ford and the advance to Crécy field must form the matter of our next section, “The Preliminaries of the Action.”
The reader will note that in the latter part of the above I have wholly abandoned the more usual account of the last three days of the retreat from Poissy to the Somme, and that the reconstruction I have attempted includes several matters hitherto not suggested in any recent history, and is in contradiction with the view which has hitherto been most generally accepted.
The evidence upon which I rely for this description of the retreat on Acheux and subsequently on Boismont will I hope be found set out in detail in the number of the English Historical Review for October 1912. Meanwhile, I owe it to my readers, who may use this book for purposes of school or university work, to state briefly the way in which the matter has hitherto been set forth, and my reason for adopting this new version.
Most Froissart MSS., which have misled history in this regard, say that King Edward was at Oisemont upon the evening of the 23rd. Lingard, the father of all modern English historical writing, and a man whom every historian begins by reading (though very few go on by acknowledging him), expanded this mere reference into a whole phrase, and wrote that Edward “had the good fortune to capture the town of Oisemont, and so find a night’s lodging.” A neglect of military conditions, or of the map, or of both, has perpetuated the error. Edward was never at Oisemont. The argument against it, and in favour of Boismont, is dependent upon a number of converging proofs, which I will very briefly recapitulate.
(1) The MSS. of Froissart are none of them original.
(2) They vary among themselves with regard to this particular word, most of them giving “Oisemont,” but one giving “Nysemont.”
(3) Even where all the MSS. agree with regard to a place, and where Froissart certainly mentioned it, he is wildly inaccurate, evidently going by hearsay, and often by a doubtful memory: thus he has no idea on which side of the Seine the town of Gisors stands, and he calls the village of Fontaine a “strong town,” etc.
(4) Even were he an accurate, he is not a contemporary authority. He had to depend entirely upon older accounts which we can prove that he misread, or did not read at all, but only heard spoken of, and very often botched horribly.
(5) In this particular campaign he is particularly haphazard. Thus, upon the all-important point of the order in which the various crossings of the Somme were attempted, he gets them at sixes and sevens, describing the first last and the last first. He was a man always attending to picturesqueness of incident, and one who thought exactitude very negligible.
Those are the five points which weaken any positive evidence which Froissart may give. But it is the evidence independent of Froissart, and of his accuracy or inaccuracy, which is so overwhelming.
(1) Oisemont lies actually ten miles back from Abbeville upon the line of the retreat. To occupy Oisemont was to incur a deliberate running into that danger which it was all Edward’s effort to avoid.
(2) We know, as a matter of fact, that Philip, the King of France, was before the night of the 23rd abreast of Abbeville; a retreat upon Oisemont would therefore have been physically impossible to Edward.
(3) Oisemont would have involved keeping in touch with bodies ten, twelve, fifteen, and twenty miles distant, even if Oisemont had been occupied for two days, whereas the only mention we have of that occupation represents it as taking place on the 23rd.
These three points render it, as to two of them morally impossible, as to one of them physically, that Edward could have been at Oisemont upon that night. But they are negative: we have positive points which clinch the whole matter. These are: —
(1) Edward marched with his whole army to the ford or it could not all have crossed, therefore it was concentrated before he marched. The march was a very short one. Even Froissart says that “he started at the break of day” and reached the ford “a little after sunrise.” It must also have been short because we know as a matter of positive history that the soldiers who took that morning march waited some time for the tide to ebb, then fought a sharp and successful action upon the northern bank of the river, and again on the same day stormed certainly one and possibly two defended places: also that their total march before the night, and beyond the river, was quite ten miles, including the actions just mentioned.
(2) We also know that there was an assault on St Valery, which was actually twenty miles from Oisemont by the nearest roads!
(3) We know that the traitor was captured at Mons, which, if Edward had been at Oisemont, would have meant that someone had not only caught him at that great distance from Oisemont, but had brought him back (a total ride of twenty-four miles) without previous knowledge that he was capable of the valuable information he only gave later and after offers.
(4) There is no contemporary mention of Oisemont, but we do positively know from contemporary evidence that the King’s household was, and had been for three days, at Acheux.
Now all this combined is quite conclusive. Oisemont is impossible. Boismont satisfies every part of the evidence. An hour’s riding from it permits the attack on St Valery. Mons, where the traitor comes from, is only two miles off; the march from Boismont to the Ford is just such an advance as would take the dawn and sunrise of a day — whereas the advance from Oisemont, impossible for all those other reasons, would involve fourteen to fifteen miles of marching, and is utterly incompatible with the idea of two or possibly three heavy fights, and the long march succeeding it.
One last piece of evidence would be conclusive even if we had not all the rest. There is contemporary record of the Mayor of Abbeville watching from the heights of Caubert Hill the English army streaming northward to concentrate round the advanced position of the King. From that height such an advance could be discerned crossing the plateau which leads to Acheux, to Mons, and to Boismont. You could no more see a concentration on Oisemont from it than you could see a concentration on Greenwich from Camden Hill.
Sketch showing Estuary of the Somme at Blanchetaque in 1346
III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
THE MANŒUVRES OF the French and English armies preliminary to the Battle of Crécy are so instructive upon many points, involved movements so hazardous and so complex, gave rise to so sharp a series of engagements, and form in general so large a part of our subject, that they merit a far larger study than do the approaches to most battles.
They illustrate the comparative lack of thought-out plan which characterised medieval warfare; they afford a contrast between the compact and fairly well organised command of Edward III., and the chaotic host of the King of France. They show the effect upon the military profession of a time without maps and without any properly managed system of intelligence; and, above all, they show the overwhelming part which chance plays in all armed conflict between forces of the same civilisation and approximately the same aptitudes.
The situation upon Wednesday the 23rd of August (at which point we concluded the survey of Edward III.’s great raid through Normandy, and of his retreat down the line of the Somme) is already known to the reader, and will be the clearer if he will look at the map upon page 28.
Edward had made a very fine march indeed, not only averaging something like twelve miles a day, or more, but arranging for expeditions to leave the main host during the latter part of this rapid retreat, and attempt to force, at various points, the passages of the River Somme. We have seen that he was compelled, if possible, to force a passage because he would otherwise find himself shut up between the Somme and the sea, with a much superior force cutting him off to the south. In case of defeat he would have no line of retreat, and even in case of success, unless that success were overwhelming, he would find himself strategically stalemated, still caught in a trap, and still doomed to await the next onslaught of the enemy. We have further seen that with every mile that he proceeded towards the sea his ability to cross the Somme decreased. The river runs through a marshy valley which, even to-day, is a mass of ponds and water meadows, and which then was a belt of marsh. It is bounded on either side by fairly steep banks, rising to heights of 60, 70, and 100 feet, and inland to 150, between which the flat swamped land grows broader and broader as one approaches the sea. At Picquigny this level belt of swamp through which the Somme twines is quite 500 yards across. At Long Pré it is nearer 800, below Abbeville it is 1000, and at the point whence Edward overlooked it when he was halted at bay on the evening of that 23rd of August, it is well over 2000 yards in width and nearer 2500.
Boismont, a village climbing the southern bank of the estuary, was the spot on which the King had gathered the army upon the evening of that Wednesday, and, not a day’s march behind him, the most advanced mounted men of his pursuers, with the King of France among them, were camping. The peril was extreme, and an issue from that peril as extremely doubtful.
It was hopeless for the army to attempt to retrace its steps to the upper river. To have done so would have been to march with the flank of its march exposed to an immediate advance of French forces, and almost certainly to be caught in column; and Edward had already suffered such repulses before Long Pré, Pont Rémy, and Picquigny as left him no hope for success should he attempt these bridges again. His only chance was to find, if it were possible, some practicable ford across the broad estuary itself that lay before him.
The moon was within a few hours of the full that night, the highest of the spring-tides was making — in the open sea they were at their full height of 25 feet, an hour before midnight, — and though where he would strike the estuary he might hope for a tide more tardy, Edward had before him as he watched, his only avenue of escape, a great flood that appeared to deny him all access to the further shore.
Every effort was made to discover from local knowledge whether any passage existed. The highest rewards were offered, in vain, for in all that countryside a feeling which if not national was at least strongly opposed to the invader, forbade treason, and the near presence of the French King’s great force was an active reminder of the punishment that would attend it. Late in this period of suspense a guide was found.
A man of the name of Gobin Agache, who had been taken prisoner by the army, was that guide. His was that “invaluable” capture which I mentioned in the last section. He was a peasant of those parts, and a native of Mons-en-Vimieux, through which the army had marched from Acheux to Boismont. He yielded to temptation when all others had refused. He was promised a hundred pieces of gold (say £500 of our money), his own liberty, and that of twenty of his companions. For that price he sold himself, and promised to discover to the King and to his army the only practicable ford across the estuary.
Just at the end of the night the host set out and marched during the first hours of the moonlit Wednesday morning along the old road which still leads over the hills that separate Boismont from Saigneville and marked the southern bank of the valley. The marshalling was long; the full ordering of the force, now that it was all gathered together and marching along one narrow way, inexpeditious; and the two miles that separated the head of its column from the neighbouring village were not traversed by its last units, nor was the whole body drawn up at the foot of the hills against the water until the sun of that late August day was beginning to rise, and to show more clearly the great sheet of flood-water and the steep distant bank beyond it.
The place to which their guide had led them was the entry to the ford of Blanchetaque, a name famous in the military history of this country. Hidden beneath the waters which, though now ebbing strongly, were still far too deep for any attempt at a crossing, ran the causeway. By it, upon the faith of the traitor, they could trust to gaining the opposite shore. As the racing ebb lowered more and more, the landward approaches of that causeway appeared in a lengthening white belt pointing right across towards the further bank, and assured them that they had not been betrayed. It was built of firm marl in the midst of that grassy slime which marks the edges of the Somme valley, and they had but to wait for low water to be certain that they could make the passage. Beyond, upon the northern shore which showed in a high, black band (for it was steep) against the broadening day, they could distinguish a force that had been gathered to oppose them.
It was mid-morning before the ebb was at its lowest, and they could begin to march “twelve abreast, and with the water no more than knee-high,” across the dwindled stream now at its lowermost of slack water, and running near the further bank with a breadth not a fifth of what it had been at the flood. But before proceeding further and describing the assault shore, I would lay before my readers the process by which I have established the exact locality of this famous ford. It has been a matter of considerable historical debate. It is and will always remain a matter of high historical interest, and this must be my excuse for digressing upon the evidence which, I think it will be admitted, finally establishes the exact trajectory of Blanchetaque.
The site of Blanchetaque is one which nature and art have combined to render obscure: nature, because a ford when its purpose disappears and it is no longer kept up, that is, an artificial ford, tends to disappear more rapidly than any other monument; art, because the old estuary of the Somme has of recent years been further and further reclaimed. It was, when I first began studying this district, already banked across below Boismont, and, if I am not mistaken, the great railway bridge right across the very mouth of the river has, in the last few months, been made the boundary of the reclaimed land.
Now, Blanchetaque was an artificial ford. We know this because there is no marl formation near by, and could be none forming a narrow rib across the deep alluvial mud of the estuary; the marl, then, can only have been brought from some little distance. It is not only an artificial hardening which we have to deal with, but one in the midst of a tidal estuary where a violent current swept the work for centuries. Finally, the cause for keeping the ford in some sort of repair early disappeared in modern times before the process of reclaiming the land of the estuary began. Numerous modern bridges, coupled with the great development of modern roads, permitted the crossing of the Somme at and below Abbeville: notably the Bridge of Cambron. The railway, the growth of the tonnage of steamers, and other causes, led to the decline of the little riverside town of Port — formerly the secure head of marine navigation upon the river and largely the cause that Blanchetaque was kept in repair.
Again, the reclamation of the land has been carried out with a French thoroughness only too successful in destroying the contours of the old river bed. In the sketch map on I have indicated to the best of my ability the channel of the river at low tide as it appears to have been before reclamation began, but even this can barely be traced upon the levelled, heightened, and now fruitful pastures.
It is all this which has made the exact emplacement of Blanchetaque so difficult to ascertain, and has led to the controversies upon its site.
Now, if we will proceed to gather all forms of evidence, we shall find that they converge upon one particular line of trajectory which in the end we can regard as completely established.
We have in the first place (and most valuable of all, of course) tradition. Local traditions luckily carefully gathered as late as 1840, but the indications of the peasants pointing out the traditional site of the then ruined way were, unfortunately, not marked on a map. What was done was to give an indication unfortunately not too precise, and to leave it on record that the northern end of the ford was “from 1200 to 1500 metres below Port.” This gives us a margin of possible error, not of 300 yards as might be supposed, but of more than double that distance, for Port itself is 500 yards in length from east to west. We can be certain, however, that so far as tradition goes we need not look more than a mile below Port for the ford, nor less than say half a mile from its last houses.
Fortunately, we have other convergent indications which can guide us with greater precision.
We must remember that, apart from the bringing of merchandise over to the neighbourhood of Port, the ford, which may, and most probably did, exist before Port became of any importance, led all the central traffic of the Vimieux country (which is the district on the left bank of the Somme) towards the Straits of Dover and their principal port at Boulogne.
Now, the way from the right bank of the Somme to Boulogne is interrupted by several streams, much the most marshy and broad of which is the Authie. The Romans bridged the Authie at Ad Pontes in the course of their great Trunk Road to Britain, and any way which led from the lowest ford over the Somme to Boulogne would have to join that great Trunk Road before or at the bridge if it were to take advantage, as commerce would have to do, of that sole passage of the very difficult and marshy Authie valley which can nowhere be crossed save upon a causeway. I have in a former page remarked upon the importance of Ad Pontes (the modern Ponches), and pointed out that it gives the whole county its name of Ponthieu. We must expect, therefore, any direct commercial way northward from the ford to make directly for Ponches. To strike the great Trunk Road higher up would be to go out of one’s way; to strike it lower down would be to strike the Authie Valley at an impassable point.
When an ancient way has disappeared, certain indications of its track, especially as that track may be presumed to be direct, survive, and among these are wayside tombs, parish boundaries, and mills or other places which, for the conveyance of heavy merchandise, are placed near such a road if possible. All these three kinds of indications are available in this particular case. The medieval mill which was so important a monopoly of the medieval community was not built in the most natural place for it, on the summit of the hill just above Port, but some thousand yards and more away down the river bank, and over against it is a group of tombs. Moreover, between the two runs the long north-western boundary of the parish or commune of Port which is prolonged in the boundary of the parish of Sailly. We have here, then, a convergence of proof which confirms the vaguer traditional site, for the end of this line upon the river, passing between the tombs and the old mill, strikes the bank within the limits of distance from Port which were set down in the local notes printed in 1840.
But there is more. The forming of successive embankments one below the other for the gradual reclamation of land in the Somme estuary was not an easy matter. They had to be strong to withstand a strong tide, and there was no good bottom to be found in the deep mud of the valley floor. It is a significant evidence of this difficulty that the embankments stand so far apart, and that the last has had to take advantage of the long-established work of the railway viaduct. It is therefore a legitimate conjecture that the hard bottom afforded by the old Blanchetaque would be made use of, and as a fact we find the principal embankment between Port and the sea coinciding exactly with the line established by the tombs, the parish boundaries, and the site of the mill.
There is even more than this. If we follow the present embankment across the estuary towards the southern bank, we find ourselves checked before reaching that bank by the now canalised and artificial straight ditch of the Somme. There is no bridge, but on the further side leading across the remaining 700 yards to the southern bank, a village road exactly continues the direction, and this road, older than the reclamation of the valley, is the last converging point clinching the argument.
It cannot be doubted that the road leading from Saigneville northward across the flat to the canal, and continued beyond the canal by the embankment, is the line of the old Blanchetaque.
Though the French army had been pursuing Edward during his march upon the left bank of the Somme, the possibility of his getting across the estuary had not been neglected, and a force had been detached to watch the right bank at the point where the only passage across the stream, Blanchetaque, touched that right bank.
Here one of Philip’s nobles, Godemard de Fay, was waiting with a considerable force to oppose the passage. The exact size of this force is not easy to determine, for it is variously stated, even by contemporary authorities, but we are fairly safe if we reckon it at more than 2000 and less than 4000 men, some hundreds of whom were mounted knights. In other words, it counted in “capital units” from one-sixth to one-eighth of Edward’s army, and, counting all fighting men against all fighting men, perhaps much the same proportion. There was sharp fighting, but it was defeated, principally through the action of the Archers. In Godemard’s command was a very considerable body of Genoese cross-bowmen. As we shall see when we come to the Battle of Crécy itself, this arm was gravely inferior in rapidity of fire, and possibly in range, to the English long-bow. The latter weapon could deliver three to the cross-bow’s one, and to this, coupled with the discipline of the English column, the success must be ascribed. Grave as was the balance of numbers against the French side, equal armament and equal discipline should have enabled it to prevail. The holding of a tête de pont with a smaller number properly deployed should always be possible against a larger column compelled to debouch from a narrow line, especially a line of such difficulty as a ford across a broad stream.
The action was a picturesque one, and the sight presented to a spectator watching it from the heights behind Godemard’s command must have been a picture vivid and well framed. One hundred mounted and armoured knights, carefully chosen, led the way across the ford. They were met actually in the water itself by mounted men advancing on to the causeway from Godemard’s side, and the twin banners of Edward’s two marshals and the cries of “God and St George!” with which the English vanguard met the enemy rose for a few moments from a confused mêlée of men and horses struggling in the stream. But the issue was decided by the comparative strength of missile weapons, and not by the sword. The Genoese cross-bowmen behind the French knights, and upon either side of their rear, shot into the English mounted ranks with some success, when the Archers of Edward, who were just behind the knights, and seem to have deployed somewhat over the marshy land on either side of the ford, returned their fire with that superiority of the long-bow which helped to decide this campaign. It was the regular fire of the Archers, the weight and the rapidity of it, which finally threw the supporting infantry of the French command into confusion, and permitted the mounted head of the English column to force its way over the landward end of the ford and through the now isolated body of French knights. Once the bank was gained, the English head of the column in its turn held the tête de pont, and the passage of the whole force was only a question of time.
But time was a factor of vast importance at this juncture: how important what immediately followed will show. A force of anything between twenty-four and thirty-nine thousand men, combatant and non-combatant, with its wagons and sumpter horses, the considerable booty of its raid, its tents, its reserve of armour and of weapons, we cannot reckon, even upon a front of twelve deep, at less than a couple of miles in length, even under the best and strictest conditions of marshalling. Indeed, that estimate is far too low and mechanical. It is more likely that by the time the head of the column was pouring from the causeway on to the right bank of the estuary, and there deploying, a good third of the armed men were still waiting upon the further shore to file over the narrow passage.
At any rate, before the great bulk of the train could have got upon the ford, the first horse of the King of France’s scouts and vanguard appeared upon the sky-line of the heights above Saigneville, and immediately a considerable force of the enemy were upon the English wagons with their insufficient rearguard. The King of France himself, following upon Edward’s track mile by mile, had reached Mons, had learnt that Edward had doubled back from Boismont, and had detached a body to cut across country to the ford on the chance of preventing Edward from crossing. He had not been quick enough to achieve this, but the French appeared in time, as I have said, to catch the wheeled vehicles behind the English army before they had got into line upon the causeway. Edward, with that good military head, which always seized immediate things upon a field, had stayed somewhat to the rear of the main body to watch for such an accident. He was not able to save the bulk of his train, but he saved his army. Much of the booty and of the provision fell to the French.
This mishap, which shows how close a chance permitted the safety of Edward’s fighting force, had no little effect upon the succeeding two days, for it left the English army in part without food. I say “in part,” because for some of them the defect was remedied, as we shall see, by the capture of Crotoy.
So the English army passed with the loss of some of its train, but with very little loss of men. Pursuit was impossible; the tide now rising forbade even the thought of it, and somewhere about noon the entire host was marshalled upon the northern bank of the river, and was safe. The whole story forms one of the most striking details in the history of medieval warfare.
What followed the discomfiture of Godemard’s command and Edward’s passage with his forces intact, is not easy to gather in the authorities themselves, though it is easy enough to reconstruct with the aid of the Kitchen Accounts, and by the help of the analogy of Edward’s action throughout the campaign. The King’s tent, his domesticity, and what we may by an anachronism call his staff, proceeded to the edge of the forest of Crécy, which lies upon the inland heights north-eastward of the ford, a distance of five miles. But it did not proceed there directly. In company with the whole army, it first turned north-westward down the bank of the estuary to the capture of the castle and town of Noyelles, rather more than two miles away. This castle it took, and it is characteristic of these wars that the mistress of it was English in sympathy, and, what is more, had married her daughter to the nephew of one of Edward’s principal generals. From Noyelles on the same day, Thursday, Edward and the staff turned back north-eastward towards the forest. There was a skirmish at Sailly Bray with Godemard’s command, which, though defeated, was not yet broken, and which had hung upon the flanks of the English army. But the belated struggle was of little importance, and Edward camped that night upon the edge of the forest in the neighbourhood of Forêt L’Abbye to the west of the little railway line and station which mark those fields to-day.
Meanwhile, during the remaining hours of that Thursday, the customary raiding and pillaging parties which had been characteristic of all this great raid were being sent out. The chief one under Hugh the Dispenser took Crotoy and thus provisioned his own force and perhaps some of the neighbouring detachments, but the bulk of Edward’s army “went famished that day,” and, for that matter, were insufficiently provided during the ensuing Friday as well.
The host camped upon that Thursday night somewhat widely spread around its King, with foraging parties still distant and appointed to return upon the morrow.
Upon that morrow, the Friday, the advance north-eastward was continued. It was organised in a fashion whose exactitude and forethought are worthy of note, considering the haphazard conditions of most medieval fighting, and of Edward’s own previous conduct of the earlier part of this campaign.
These were the conditions before him: he must get as best he might to the Straits of Dover, that is, up northward and north-eastward, and he may already have had a design upon Calais. The force which was pursuing him had been checked by the tide of the Somme. It was too large to use Blanchetaque with any rapidity. He knew that it must double back to Abbeville in order to cross the river before it could turn northward again and come up with him. From where it lay, or rather where its commander and staff had lain, between Mons and Saigneville, that morning and noon, back to Abbeville was a matter of seven or eight miles; a distance nearly as great separated him from Abbeville upon his side. He had gained a full day even if the French army had been collected, highly disciplined, and in column. Instead of that it was scattered over twenty miles of country. Many of its contingents were still following up, and it was under very various and loose commands. Even should a large body of French appear upon the next day, Friday, Edward had the forest at hand with which to cover his troops long before contact could be established. But good scouting informed Edward that there was no chance of such contact, at least before Saturday. The whole of the next day, Friday, would be at his disposal to bring his troops where he would, and he proposed to get them on the far side of the forest, that is, in the neighbourhood of Crécy town, during the interval.
Whether he had already decided on that Thursday to make a stand we cannot tell, but it is not probable, because he had as yet no knowledge of the positions beyond the forest, and of the chance the ground would afford him of meeting an attack. One thing he already knew, which was that his retreat was secure. The pace of the French pursuit might compel him to a decision on Saturday at earliest, but, short of complete disaster, he had a road open behind him across the Authie by the passage of Ponches and along the great Roman way which led from Picardy to the Straits of Dover.
What he did was this. He sent the bulk of the army round by the main road whose terminals are Abbeville and Hesdin, and which skirts the forest. His own household he accompanied through the wood, presumably with the object of keeping in touch with the foraging parties who would during that Friday be coming up along the southern edge of the woods to follow the main force along the high road. A further advantage of so moving through the wood himself was that he could thus lie upon the flank of his force and let it march round him until it got in front of him in the open country by Crécy. Then he could join it, coming up in its rear, that is, upon the side from which attack was expected, gather his information, study the positions, learn the approach of the French advance, and in general organise the coming action, if an action should prove necessary. Edward camped, therefore, in the forest upon that Friday night, and upon the further side of it, just above Crécy town; while the whole of his main body was marching up to the right or east of him by the high road that skirts the woods. That main force, joined by the foraging parties which had gone further westward on the day before, easily covered the few miles, and camped on the evening of the Friday upon the ridge which runs in a level line eastward and northward from just above the town of Crécy to the village of Wadicourt, for somewhat over a mile. Leaving his tents and domestics upon the edge of the wood, he spent the last hours of that day establishing his forces along the ridge for the night, for it was there that he had now determined to await the French army and to bring it to action.
The advantage of that position which upon emerging from the forest Edward had immediately seized, will be dealt with in the ensuing section; meanwhile we must return to inquire what was happening to the French pursuit.
We must not consider the French army as one united body. Had it been that, it would not have been defeated, and, what is more, the particular place of Crécy in military history, and its lesson of the contrast between the older feudal and the newer regular levies, would never have been taken; for Crécy, as we shall see, was largely a victory of things then new over things then old. No records give us precisely the positions, number, or routes of the King of France and his allies, but we know the following points, from which we can construct a general picture.
First: The commands were various and disunited. That personal system which had arisen five hundred years before, and more, when the old Roman tradition of the Frankish monarchy gradually transformed itself into a series of summonses to lords who should bring their vassals, was still the method by which a French host was tardily and irregularly summoned. For general and lengthy expeditions it was sufficient. For the prosecution of the innumerable local conflicts of the Middle Ages it was actually necessary. Upon occasion at long distances from home, and after long companionship in the field, if there were also present a very leading character among the feudal superiors, and especially if that character were clothed with titular rank, it could achieve something like unity of command. But Philip’s army, the last contingents of which were still in act of joining him, enjoyed no such advantages. At least five separate great bodies, four of which were largely subdivided, were loosely aggregated over miles of country, gathering as they went chance reinforcements, and losing by chance defections.
Secondly: A certain proportion of regular paid men, including the foreign mercenaries, accompanied the King of France. These were in part with the King himself, in part detached to watch the passages of the river.
Thirdly: The King, with a considerable personal force, and with some of his mercenaries as well, was up in the neighbourhood of Saigneville upon the noon and early afternoon of the Thursday. He retraced his steps towards Abbeville, and recrossed the river there himself either upon the Thursday evening, or more probably upon the Friday.
Fourthly: Round about Abbeville the bulk of the incongruous force was gathered when the King reached it, and very considerable bodies lay in the suburbs to the north of the town.
Finally, we know that on the Saturday morning the King heard Mass and took Communion at the Church of St Stephen (now demolished).
From all this we can construct a fairly accurate view of the French advance, especially when we consider where the French forces lay when they reached the field. From Abbeville to the field of Crécy is, as the crow flies, ten miles. A great main road (along the further part of which the English had marched on the Friday) led to the neighbourhood of the field and past it: the main road which goes from Abbeville to Hesdin. By this road, breaking up probably rather late upon the Saturday morning, the largest of the loosely gathered French contingents marched. Far to the right of them over the countryside would be advancing the other feudal levies under the King of Bohemia and John of Luxembourg, the exiled Count of Flanders, the ex-King of Majorca, and other friends, connections, and vassals whom Philip had summoned with their arrays. It is to be presumed that certain bodies on the extreme right went up by the Roman road which misses Abbeville coming from the south, and makes for Ponches, bounding the battlefield of Crécy on its extreme eastern side.
Following this chaotic advance of the dispersed host, gathered in a jumble, the wholly untrained peasant levies which had been swept up from the villages on the advance proceeded in disorder. And it was thus without regular formation, save among the Genoese mercenaries (some 15,000 in number at the outset of the campaign, though we do not know of what strength on the field itself), that the first lines of mounted men caught sight from the heights of Noyelles and Domvast of the English line on the ridge of Crécy three miles away.
It was early in the afternoon before that sight was seen. The wind was from the sea, and gathering clouds promising a storm were coming up before it, and hiding the sun.
Before these advance lines of the French army, and between it and Edward’s command, the ground fell gradually away in low, very gentle slopes of open field towards the shallow depression above which a somewhat steeper and shorter bank defended the line, a mile and a half long, upon which Edward had stretched his men.
There was an attempt at some sort of deployment, and the first of three main commands or “battles” were more or less formed under Alençon, the French King’s brother. Immediately before it were deployed the trained mercenaries, including the Italian cross-bowmen under their own leaders, Dorio and Grimaldi. Behind was a confused mass of arriving horse and foot, the King himself to the rear of it, and much of it German and Flemish separate commands. We do not know their composition at all. Still further to the rear, and stretched out for miles to the south, straggling up from Abbeville, came, that late afternoon, the rest of the ill-ordered host at random. Before the action was begun, the whole sky was darkened by the approaching storm, and violent pelting rain fell upon either host. The clouds passed, the sky cleared again, but it was nearly five o’clock before the first attack was ordered.
In order to explain what followed we must next grasp the nature of the terrain, and the value of the defensive position upon which Edward had determined to stand.
IV. THE TERRAIN OF CRÉCY
THE ACTION DECIDED upon the field of Crécy developed wholly within the central space shown in the frontispiece of this volume.
The general frame within which the battle took place must be regarded as a parallelogram corresponding to the exterior limits of that map, not quite four miles in length from east to west, and some 2½ miles in breadth from north to south, having the town of Crécy a little to the north of the medial line, and a good deal on the left or western side of the area. But the emplacement of the troops and the actual fighting, including the partial pursuit by the victors, is wholly contained within a smaller area, which lies aslant, with its major axis pointing north-west, its minor axis pointing north-east, and surrounding the dip called “the Val aux Clercs.”
The aspect of this countryside is that of so many in the north-east of France. The passage of six and a half centuries has not greatly modified it. The limits of the Royal Forest of Crécy are what they have been perhaps from Roman, certainly from early medieval, times. The characteristic hedgeless, rolling, ploughed land, which is the normal landscape of all French provinces and of many others, has been disturbed by no growth of modern industrialism, and its contours remain unmodified by any considerable excavations of the soil. The villages attaching to the battlefield, Estrées, Wadicourt, Fontaine, are in extent, and even in appearance, much what they were when the armies of the fourteenth century occupied them, and the little market-town of Crécy has not appreciably extended its limits.
Even minor features such as the small groups of woodland and the spinnies seem, judged by our remaining descriptions of the battle, to be much the same to-day as they were then.
The terrain of Crécy offers, therefore, an excellent opportunity for the reconstruction of the medieval scene, and I will attempt to bring it before the eyes of my readers.
Ponthieu is a district of low, open, and slightly undulating fertile lands, whose highest ridges touch such contours as 300 feet above the sea, and the depressions in which, very broad and easy, do not commonly fall more than a 100 feet or so below the higher rolls of land. In the particular case of the field of Crécy we shall have to deal with figures even less marked. The crests from which the opposing armies viewed each other before the action average full 200 feet above the sea; the broad, shallow depression between its confronting ridges descends to little more than sixty feet below them.
All this wide expanse of fertile land, affording from one lift of its undulations and another great even views for miles and miles, is cut by streams which run parallel to each other in trenches five to seven miles apart, and make their way by curiously straight courses north-westward to the neighbouring sea. These are the Conche, the Authie (the crossing of whose marshes by the great Roman road formed those pontes which, as we have seen, give the district its name of Ponthieu), and the Maye.
This last little river alone concerns us. We deal in the matter of the Battle of Crécy only with the first rising waters of the Maye. Its source springs just below the village which derives from that river-head its name of Fontaine, and the Church of Crécy stands not two miles down the young stream. These two miles of its course, and a slight depression tributary to this its upper basin, mould the battlefield.
For this shallow depression, called the “Val aux Clercs,” among the least of the many long waves and troughs of land upon which Ponthieu is modelled, was the centre of the engagement, and, though too short and shallow to develop the smaller stream, such water as it collects is tributary to the Maye. This depression runs up from the level exactly north-eastward, gradually rising until it fades, not quite two miles above the river, into the upper levels of the plateau.
On either side of this Val aux Clercs lift the soft and inconspicuous slopes that bound it. The one that bounds it on the north and west, and from which a man faces the south-east and the direction of Amiens, was the eminence occupied by the army of Edward III. At its southern end, where it overlooks the narrow rivulet of the Maye, it descends abruptly to the meadow level of the stream. The fall at this terminal of the bank is one of 100 feet. Its slope varies from one in ten to one in twelve, and on that slope and on the meadow level below it the little town of Crécy stands. There is the mouth of the Val aux Clercs, and the further one walks along the road which marks the position of the English line, and the nearer one approaches Wadicourt, the shallower and less conspicuous and flatter does the Val aux Clercs appear upon one’s right, as its depression rises towards the general level of the plateau. At last, in the neighbourhood of Wadicourt itself (the first houses of which stand 2000 yards from the last houses of Crécy) the depression has almost disappeared.
The bank or fall of land from this crest of the English position down to the lowest point of the trough, steeper towards its southern, or Crécy, easier towards its northern, or Wadicourt, end is, upon the average, a slope of one in thirty; just steep enough to produce its effect upon a charging crowd (especially over soil drenched by rain), and falling just sufficiently to give their maximum value to the arrow-shafts of the long-bow, which was the chief arm of Edward’s command.
The opposing slope, that which lies to the south and east of the vale, and from which the traveller faces the sea-breeze blowing from a shore not fifteen miles away, is much easier and more gentle even than its counterpart. The ridge of it stands above the lowest point of the Val aux Clercs no higher than the corresponding and opposite ridge which the English King occupied with his army, but the fall covers double the distance. It is not 400 yards, but more like a mile, and the average of the decline is one in fifty at the most.
Moreover, this opposing ridge is neither as cleanly marked as the Crécy-Wadicourt line nor parallel to it. It is impossible to fix upon it, with any definition, a true crest. The slope undulates very gradually into the general level of the plateau, and is so formed that the Val aux Clercs is funnel-shaped, much wider at the mouth on the Maye than towards its upper end.
The depression, therefore, which was the theatre of the action, is in the main V-shaped, and its mouth is a full mile in breadth, while its last faint upper portion is not half that width.
Such, in detail, is the field of Crécy.
I have attempted in the cut opposite to express graphically its main features as they would appear upon a model carved in wood and plotted to show the actual relief of the soil.
I will conclude by pointing out to the English reader a curious parallel. The field of Crécy has many analogies to the field of Waterloo. In both cases two opposing ridges roughly determine the general plan. In both a depression, double and complex in the modern, single in the medieval, instance, lies between the two lines. That of Crécy, as was suitable for a day in which no missiles of long range were available, is somewhat more marked and affords somewhat more of an obstacle to the offensive than that of Waterloo. In both the French formed the attacking force and in both the defensive position was chosen with singular mastery. Indeed, an eye for a defensive position marks Edward’s plan most strongly, and is, quite apart from the successful result of his action, his best title to repute in military history.
At the close of this section the plainest duty of an historian, as well as the satisfaction of common humour, compels me to allude to a characteristic production of the University of Oxford. There has proceeded from this university a school-book, perhaps the most universally used in the public schools of this country, known as Bright’s History of England. I was myself brought up on it. It is taken, I suppose (like much other Oxford matter), as something hall-marked and official. This text-book has upon page 226 of its first volume a full-page map of the Battle of Crécy. It is fair to say that such a production could not have proceeded, I do not say from any university upon the Continent of Europe, but from the humblest schoolmaster in a French, Swiss, or German village. The features marked upon it are wholly and unreservedly imaginary. There is not even the pretence of a remote similarity between this grotesque thing and the terrain of the famous battle: it is a pure invention. It is almost impossible to express in words the difference between this product of fancy, and even the most inaccurate map sketched from memory, or the merest jottings set down by someone who had no more to guide him than some vague recollection of an account of the battle. There is nothing in it bearing the remotest resemblance to any hill, river, road, wood, village, or point of the compass concerned with the field of Crécy, and to this astonishing abortion is modestly added in the left-hand bottom corner, “From Sprüner.” I have not by me as I write Sprüner’s collection of historical maps which were given us at the University, but if that eminent authority was the model for such a masterpiece, it is a sufficient commentary upon the rest of his work. I have before me as I write the flabbergasting plan in Bright’s History which I have treasured ever since my boyhood, and I trust that this note may be read by many who still believe that the function of our universities is to train the governing class of the nation, not so much in learning as in “character.”
Contrast the excellent and accurate little map in the first-rate manual which Mr Barnard published twelve years ago from the Clarendon Press. The whole of this book is to be most highly recommended. I believe that this map, the only doubtful features of which are the angular formation of the English Archers and the concentration of the French rear upon the Roman road, is from the pencil of Mr Oman.
V. THE ACTION
KING EDWARD, UPON that Saturday morning before he had yet caught sight of the French, of whose advance his scouts informed him, rode on a little horse slowly up and down the ranks encouraging his army, as it sat and lay at rest, with shield and helm and bow upon the grass before each man, along the crest of the slight hill.
In his hand the King bore a white wand and no weapon, and this visitation of his lasted until nearly ten o’clock. His last orders were that all his men should eat and drink heartily, and he himself conveyed that order to his own division, which lay behind the main line. He had organised the defence upon a very simple pattern.
That battalion which was called the First Battalion consisted of 1200 men-at-arms, that is, fully armoured knights upon horseback, with 4000 Archers and 4000 Welshmen. They occupied that turn or shoulder of the slope which runs round from the town of Crécy itself into the beginning of the Val aux Clercs, and were under the nominal command of the lad the Prince of Wales. But at his side the real orderers of that force were Warwick and Oxford. Such was the English right.
Next, in the centre, and back from the first battalion, was the line of English Archers. It was very carefully organised, with the object of a purely defensive action. Small pits were dug before each man’s station, and this infantry was arranged in “harrow” formation, much as trees are planted in an orchard in quincunx, so that any five of them formed a figure somewhat like the five in a pack of cards. It is evident that this formation, if the men were sufficiently dispersed, as they were, gave the freest play to their missiles, all of which could be shot through the intervals; and when we remember the rate of fire, three to one of the cross-bow, we shall understand how formidable was this infantry, and how well able it was to break any cavalry charge prepared by nothing more than the shots of the Genoese. All the tradition and sentiment of medieval warfare gave to the mounted knight the glory of battle, but, as I shall have occasion to remark in the sequel, the great feature of Crécy was the presence of an ordered, highly trained infantry, expected to await, and capable of awaiting, a rush of horse until that cavalry should receive at, say, fifty to eighty yards the whole weight of a furious and sustained discharge of missiles. Beyond the Archers, some 3000 in number at this point, were 1200 mounted knights, who, together with the Archers at the centre, were under the command of Northampton.
There may have been a certain number of Archers to the left again of these knights, but, at any rate, Northampton’s command covered the rest of the ridge and reposed upon Wadicourt. Here, lest it should be turned, the left flank of the English line was protected by a park of wagons drawn up close together, vehicles taken from such of the train as had been saved from the French attack upon the rearguard at the ford two days before.
The remainder of the wagons, provisions, and impedimenta were drawn up in the rear near the wood, and in front of them and between them and the defensive line upon the ridge was a strong reserve of over 10,000 men under Edward himself. Taking no account of non-combatants, we must reckon Archers, armoured men and spear-men together at perhaps 25,000 men, and certainly not more than 30,000; but we must remember, as I said upon a former page, that every Archer was served by aides, that a man-at-arms needed a squire, and that drivers and domestics of various kinds, and many recruits from Normandy, swelled the host.
The large force against which this defensive was drawn up has been variously estimated. Its dispersion over the countryside, the lack of any cohesive command, the absence of all precise figures, the considerable bodies of wholly untrained country folk who were straggling up behind the army, make an estimate of the actual forces engaged on the French side extremely difficult. We do not know how many Germans, Luxemburgians, and others had been brought up with the feudal levy. The rough guess of contemporaries at the whole numbers present and arriving during this confused marshalling of Philip’s host, calls it 100,000. A recent and very careful English authority has estimated the enemy actually in line at 60,000. If we say that Edward met forces more than double his own, but not three times his own, we are as near the truth as we can hope to get. But the right way to estimate the disproportion between the offensive and the defensive upon this famous day is to contrast the fully armoured mounted men of either side, and, further, to contrast
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The trained infantry, armed with missile weapons.
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The infantry, trained or untrained, armed only with spear, dagger, or sword.
Upon such an analysis we get some such result as follows: —
Some 4000 fully armoured mounted men in Edward’s command, of whom only 3000 or less were out of the reserve and in the line. Some 7000 Archers actually in the defensive line, with a much smaller number (unknown) in the reserve. Add 4000 Spearmen, for the most part Welsh. Against these on the offensive you may set, at the very least, quite four times their number of fully mounted armoured men and probably six times their number, or even more. As against the English Archers, we must count for the missile arm upon the French side somewhat less. The only contemporary authority, Villani, who gives us any exact figures, names 6000 as their number.
When we come to the few trained non-missile infantry of the English forces — some 4000 in the line, not counting the reserve, — and contrast them with the rabble of untrained and scattered French countrymen, most of whom were still coming up in the rear and did not take part in the action (save to suffer slaughter in the darkness after it was over), we can take any multiple we choose. They may have been five, six or eight times as numerous as the Welshmen with whom they did not come into contact at all.
It will be seen from the above that the real point of the battle, and that which decided it, was the power of the trained missile infantry of Edward (1) to await a charge of horse in no matter what numerical superiority it might arrive, confident that they could always check it before it reached their line or broke it; and inspired by that confidence, because (2) the only missile infantry that could be brought against them to prepare such a cavalry charge was armed with a weapon which delivered only one shot to their three. That was the deciding element of the Battle of Crécy: the power of the long-bow to stop horse upon any front equivalent to the front of the Archers, and the confidence of the bowman in that power.
The action opened regularly enough with the advance of the French missile infantry, the Genoese mercenaries, at the hour, as I have said, of about five o’clock. They proceeded down the slight slope into the Val aux Clercs, followed at a foot’s pace by a strong body of the first battalion of the French mounted knights under Alençon.
Advancing thus deployed, a body of 6000 men had difficulty in keeping its line, a thing essential to the simultaneous effect of short-range weapons. Twice they were halted to correct their alignment, and though perhaps at the second halt they were at the lowest point of the valley and just in extreme range of the English arrows from the height above, those arrows did not yet come. The English had been ordered to reserve their fire. They began to climb the opposing slope, shouting as was their custom, and after a third halt had been called, and a third strict alignment made so near to the English front as to be certainly in range for their cross-bows, the order to shoot was given. With the first flight of the Genoese bolts, the English Archers took each man his step forward and began pouring in that terrible fire, sustained, accurate, and rapid, to which they were so admirably trained, and of which hitherto, save in the fight at the ford, no example had been given in continental warfare.
Under that murderous and unceasing rain of missiles the Italian mercenaries, whose weapon compelled them to a complicated process of winding and ratcheting and laying, very ill-suited to such a strain, fell into disorder. A sufficient proportion of them broke, and their confusion at once angered and churned up the great body of mounted French knights, which awaited impatiently immediately behind their line. They were ridden down in the eagerness of these armoured horsemen to retrieve this first check by a charge, and Alençon’s men spurred hard (badly hampered by that obstacle of their own men fallen into confusion before them) upon the English right and the Prince of Wales’s battalion. Some of them got home, especially those who found themselves opposite the most advanced section of the Prince of Wales’s command, where it stood thrust forward in a semicircle upon the shoulder and last slopes of the hill. The boy himself was unhorsed, and for a moment the pressure was severe. But the effect of the arrow fire upon all the rest of the charging line told heavily. It never got home. Indeed, it must have been apparent to Edward at that moment that for all the fixed tradition of chivalry and that overwhelming atmosphere of military religion which in every age, according to its traditions, confuses the soldier, had he kept all his men at arms in reserve and put Archers only in the front line, they would have sufficed to win his battle.
There stands upon the Crécy end of the ridge a great mound to this day. It is the foundation of an old stone windmill which stood there for centuries, and which has been shamefully pulled down within living memory. From that mill it was that Edward watched the whole action proceeding upon the slope beneath him. He saw the head of the French charge get home but its extended line wavering, checked, and broken up on the Val aux Clercs as a continuous rain of arrows poured in. He saw all the front ranks of horses broken: the animals lashing out or fallen stampeding rearward, mounted or riderless: the heavily armoured knights fallen helpless and trampled, the whole thing a vast confusion.
It was near six o’clock. The westering sun was within an hour of its setting, and shone right up the vale, coming aslant upon the burnished armour of the charge. Had this kind of warfare already established a tradition, and had men learned by experience what unshaken infantry could do against horse, it would already have been apparent that the action was decided. But there was no such experience and no such knowledge. Over the long slopes of open field which fronted the English ridge, line after line of knights were coming forward in successive waves, as though mere weight of horses and men could win home in spite of the increasing welter of flying, dead, and maddened mounts, and of fallen men and iron that now lined all the front with a belt of obstacle more formidable than earth or wall. And of those, such few as could struggle through to within range might hope to escape the deadly and now converging fire which struck horse after horse as the foot of the ridge was reached. By gaps in the deadly confusion of the stampede and the corpses, round to their right further and further up the valley (upon their left the marshes of the Maye forbade a turning movement), the French charges followed and spread. A dozen or more were counted, and each as it came met the missile defence and was broken, with no counter missile offensive to tame that fire.
The sun was setting, but one effort was made which should have been made far earlier in the short crisis. It was an effort of the French right to turn the English left by Wadicourt.
Due, we may imagine, to no regular order, an occasion seized upon by some one commander who saw his chance, a charge of horse was led right up to that end of the English line, the barricade of wagons prevented its getting home, and, though the struggle was violent, the obstacle was never pierced or overcome. Well after sunset, and as the light was fading, the King of France himself led a great body to the centre, and seems to have come into range of the arrows, but he, no more than any of his lieges, could force horse against steady infantry and an unremitting fire. The darkness came, the late moon rose, and still were desultory and sporadic charges continued, haphazard and blindly. They had not even a hazard of success. These last efforts of the failing battle were repelled with ease, but even up to midnight the final pulses of the fight throbbed, with lesser and lesser pulsations; until after these seven hours of it — most of it by darkness, and all the while the line of Archers standing unbroken, and all the while supplied with their unexhausted ammunition, and finding strength to draw and to discharge — the thing was over.
Throughout that night great bodies of disordered peasantry, half-armed, the militia of the Communes, fled or wandered aimlessly southward over the bare, rolling land. The mounted knights had ridden away from a field where all was utterly lost, and the English line broke up to move forward by the light of lanterns over the face of the countryside, to despatch or to capture the wounded, to loot, to search for the faces and the ensigns of the greater dead. But in that darkness the magnitude of the result was not seen. The English army seems to have guessed the issue mainly by the dying down of the noise, and the ceasing of the cries of men rallying to their lords’ banners.
This was the end of the Battle of Crécy, in the night of Saturday the 26th of August, 1346.
Early upon the Sunday morning, Edward’s forces stood to arms again, not knowing whether even yet a new attack might not be made. Mist covered all the landscape, through which fog, dimly, bodies of men seemed to be advancing upon them from the south. They were reinforcements of Philip’s come up in ignorance of what had passed the day before, or at any rate not appreciating how decisive the day had been. Five hundred knights riding out easily dispersed them. Further bodies straggling up in similar fashion were dealt with in detail, and all that morning the English soldiers going at large over the fields found and put to the sword lost fragments of militia, came, as they tracked the flight, upon dead and wounded lords, and cut off bewildered remnants, making they knew not whither over the land.
The total French losses will never be known. The legend of disaster calls them now ten, now twenty thousand. Of the mounted and armoured men of rank the heralds made a precise account, and returned a list to King Edward of 1542 fallen and dead upon the front of the battle and in the first fields of the retreat. To these due sepulchre was given. The mass of the fallen were buried in common trenches, marks of which may be seen to this day; and it is said that fires were lit to rid the ground of the dead.
The English loss was wholly insignificant. Its exact amount, like that of its enemy, we cannot tell, because a list of but two knights, one squire, and forty of the rest, not counting a few Welsh, is all that we are given. But, even if this total (which hardly corresponds to the fierce mêlée at the beginning of the action on the right) be below the true number, we may be certain that that number was very small indeed. The line was never pierced; the English fight was wholly defensive, and a defensive maintained at range against troops which disposed, after the first rout of the Genoese, of no missiles upon their side.
Upon the Monday morning, the 28th of August, the host set forth upon its northern march, quite free now from any danger of pursuit. By the first days of September it had sat down before Calais. All winter and all the succeeding summer the blockade continued, and upon the 4th of August 1347, nearly a year after Crécy, the town was taken and the lasting fruit of that engagement was garnered. Calais remained an English bastion upon the Continent for more than two hundred years.
TOURCOING
PART I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCE
THE BATTLE OF Tourcoing is one of those actions upon which European history in general is somewhat confused, and English history, in particular, ignorant.
That British troops formed part of those who suffered defeat, and that a British commander, the Duke of York, was the chief figure in the reverse, affords no explanation; for the almost exactly parallel case of Fontenoy — in which another royal duke, also the son of the reigning King of England, also very young, also an excellent general officer, and also in command was defeated — is among the most familiar of actions in this country. In both battles the posture of the British troops earned them as great and as deserved a fame as they had acquired in victory; in both was work done by the Guards in particular, which called forth the admiration of the enemy. Yet Tourcoing remains unknown to the English general reader of history, while Fontenoy is one of the few stock names of battles which he can at once recall.
The reason that British historians neglect this action is not, then, as foreign and rival historians are too inclined to pretend, due to the fact that among the forces that suffered disaster were present certain British contingents.
Again, as will be seen in the sequel, the overwhelming of the Duke of York’s forces at Tourcoing, by numbers so enormously superior to his own, was not due to any tactical fault of his, though it is possible that the faulty plan of the whole action may in some measure be ascribed to him.
Now Tourcoing is a battle which Englishmen should know, both for its importance in the military history of Europe, and for the not unworthy demeanour which the British troops, though defeated, maintained upon its field.
The true reason that Tourcoing is so little known in this country is to be discovered in that other historical fact attaching to the battle, which I have mentioned. It occupied but a confused and an uncertain place in the general history of Europe; though perhaps, were its military significance fully understood, it would stand out in sharper relief. For though the Battle of Tourcoing was not the beginning of any great military series, nor the end of one; though no very striking immediate political consequence followed upon it, yet it was Tourcoing which made Fleurus possible, and it was Fleurus that opened the victorious advancing march of the French which, looked at as a whole, proceeded triumphantly thenceforward for nearly eighteen years and achieved the transformation of European society.
What, then, was the political circumstance under which this action was fought?
The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy.
With the steps that led from the first peril of conflict to its actual outbreak, we are not concerned. That outbreak took place in April 1792, almost exactly three years after the meeting of the first Revolutionary Parliament in Versailles.
The first stages of the war (which was conducted by Austria and Prussia upon the one side, against the French forces upon the other) were singularly slow. No general action was engaged in until the month of September, and even then the struggle between the rival armies took the form not so much of a pitched battle as of an inconclusive cannonade known to history as that of Valmy. This inconclusive cannonade took place in the heart of French territory during the march of the invaders upon Paris. Disease, and the accident of weather, determined the retreat of the invaders immediately afterwards. In the autumn of the year, the French forces largely recruited by enthusiastic volunteer levies, but of low military value, poured over the country then called the Austrian Netherlands and now Belgium. But their success was shortlived. A mere efflux of numbers could not hold against the trained and increasing resistance of the Imperial soldiers. In the spring of 1793 the retreat began, and through the summer of that year the military position of Revolutionary France grew graver and graver. Internal rebellions of the most serious character broke out over the whole territory of the Republic. In Normandy, in the great town of Lyons, in Marseilles, and particularly in the Western districts surrounding the mouth of the Loire, these rebellions had each in turn their moment of success, while the great naval station of Toulon opened its port to the enemy, and received the combined English and Spanish Fleets.
Coincidently with the enormous task of suppressing this widespread domestic rebellion, the Revolutionary Government was compelled to meet the now fully organised advance of its foreign enemies. It was at war no longer with Austria and Prussia alone, but with England, with Holland, with Spain as well, and the foreign powers not only thrust back the incursion which the French had made beyond their frontiers, but proceeded to attack and to capture, one after the other, that barrier of fortresses in the north-east which guarded the advance on Paris.
The succession of misfortune after misfortune befalling the French arms was checked, and the tide turned by the victory won at Wattignies in October 1793. After that victory the immediate peril of a successful invasion, coupled with the capture of Paris, was dissipated. But it was yet uncertain for many months which way the tide would turn — whether the conflict would end in a sort of stale-mate by which the French should indeed be left independent for the moment, but the armed governments of Europe their enemies also left powerful to attack and in the end to ruin them; or whether (as was actually the case) the French should ultimately be able to take the offensive, to re-cross their frontiers, and to dictate to their foes a triumphant peace.
As I have said, the great action from which history must date the long series of French triumphs, bears the name of Fleurus; but before Fleurus there came that considerable success which made Fleurus possible, to which history gives the name of Tourcoing (from the town standing in the midst of the very large and uncertain area over which the struggle was maintained), and which provides the subject of these pages.
Fleurus was decided in June 1794. It was not a battle in which British troops were concerned, and therefore can form no part of this series. Tourcoing was decided in the preceding May, and though, I repeat, it cannot be made the fixed and striking starting-point from which to date the long years of the French advantages, yet it was, as it were, the seed of those advantages, and it was Tourcoing, in its incomplete and complicated success, which made possible all that was to follow.
Tourcoing, then, must be regarded as an unexpected, not wholly conclusive, but none the less fundamental phase in the development of political forces which led to the establishment of the modern world. Its immediate result, though not decisive, was appreciable. To use a metaphor, it was felt in Paris, and to a less extent in London, Berlin, and in Vienna, that the door against which the French were desperately pushing, though not fully open, was thrust ajar. The defeat of a portion of the allied forces in this general action, the inefficacy of the rest, the heartening which it put into the French defence, and the moral effect of such trophies gained, and such a rout inflicted, were of capital import to the whole story of the war.
This is the political aspect in which we must regard the Battle of Tourcoing, but its chief interest by far lies in its purely military aspect; in the indiscretion which so nearly led the French forces to annihilation; in the plan which was laid to surround and to destroy those forces by the convergence of the English, Prussian, and Austrian columns; in the way in which that plan came to nothing, and resulted only in a crushing disaster to one advanced portion of the forces so converging.
Tourcoing is rather a battle for military than for civilian historians, but those who find recreation in military problems upon their own account, apart from their political connection, will always discover the accidents of this engagement, its unexpected developments, and its final issue to be of surpassing interest.
PART II. THE GENERAL MILITARY SITUATION
IN ORDER TO understand what happened at the Battle of Tourcoing, it is first necessary to have in mind the general situation of the forces which opposed each other round and about what is now the Franco-Belgian frontier, in the spring of 1794.
These forces were, of course, those of the French Republic upon the one hand, upon the other the coalition with its varied troops furnished by Austria, by Prussia, by England, and some few by sundry of the small States which formed part of the general alliance for the destruction of the new democracy.
The whole campaign of 1794 stands apart from that of 1793. The intervening winter was a period during which, if we disregard a number of small actions in which the French took the offensive, nothing of moment was done upon either side, and we must begin our study with the preparations, originating in the month of February, for the active efforts which it was proposed to attempt when the spring should break.
In that month of February, Mack, recently promoted to the rank of Major-General in the Austrian army, met the Duke of York, the young soldier son of George III., in London, to concert the common plan. It was upon the 12th of that month that this meeting took place. Mack brought the news to the British Cabinet that the Emperor of Austria, his master, was prepared to act as Commander-in-Chief of the allied army in the coming campaign, proposed a general plan of advancing from the Belgian frontier upon Paris after the capture of the frontier fortresses, and negotiated for the largest possible British contingent.
Coburg, it was arranged, should be the General in practical command (under the nominal headship of the Emperor). Prussian troops, in excess of the twenty thousand which Prussia owed as a member of the Empire, were obtained upon the promise of a large subsidy from England and Holland, and with the month of April some 120,000 men were holding the line from Treves to the sea. This passed through and occupied Dinant, Bavai, Valenciennes, St Amand, Denain, Tournai, Ypres, and Nieuport. To this number must be added men in the garrisons, perhaps some 40,000 more. Of this long line the strength lay in the centre.
The central army, under the general command of Coburg, who had his headquarters at Valenciennes, was, if we exclude men in garrisons, somewhat over 65,000 in strength, or more than half the whole strength of the long line. With Coburg in the central army was the Duke of York with some 22,000, and the Prince of Orange with a rather smaller contingent of Dutch.
Over against this long line with its heavy central “knot” or bulk of men under Coburg, in the neighbourhood of Valenciennes, the genius of Carnot had mustered over 200,000 French troops, which, when we have deducted various items for garrisons and other services, counted as effective more than 150,000 but less than 160,000 men. This French line extended from the sea to Maubeuge, passing through Dunquerque, Cassel, Lille, Cambrai, and Bouchain.
It was as a fact a little before the opening of April that the French began the campaign by taking the offensive on a large scale upon the 29th of March.
Sketch Map showing the opposing French and Allied lines. April 1794
Pichegru, who was in command of that frontier army, attacked, with 30,000 men, the positions of the allies near Le Cateau, well to the right or south-east of their centre and his, and was beaten back.
It was upon the 14th of April that the Emperor of Austria joined Coburg at Valenciennes, held a review of his troops (including the British contingent, which will be given later in detail), fixed his headquarters in the French town of Le Cateau, and at once proceeded to the first operation of the campaign, which was the siege of the stronghold of Landrecies. The Dutch contingent of the allies drove in the French outposts and carried the main French position in front of the town within that week. By the 22nd of April the garrison of Landrecies was contained, the beleaguering troops had encircled it, and the siege was begun.
After certain actions (most of them partial, and one of peculiar brilliance in the history of the British cavalry), actions each of interest, and some upon a considerable scale, but serving only to confuse the reader if they were here detailed, Landrecies fell after eight days’ siege, upon the 30th of April. An advance of the Austrian centre, after this success, was naturally expected by the French.
That normal development of the campaign did not take place on account of a curious episode in the strategy of this moment to which I beg the reader to give a peculiar attention. It is necessary to grasp exactly the nature of that episode, for it determined all that was to follow.
While the fate of Landrecies still hung in the balance, and before the surrender of the town, Pichegru had, in another part of the long line, scored one of those successes which in any game or struggle are worse than losing a trick or suffering a defeat. It was one of those successes in which one gets the better of one’s opponent in one chance part of the general contest, but so triumphs without a set plan, with no calculation upon what should follow upon the achievement, and therefore with every prospect of finding oneself in a worse posture after it than before.
To take an analogy from chess: Pichegru’s error, which I will presently describe, might be compared to the action of a player who, taking a castle of his opponent’s with his queen, thereby leaves his king unguarded and open to check-mate.
Wherever men are opposed one to the other in lines, each line having the mission to advance against the other, it is a fatal move to get what footballers call “‘fore side”: to let a portion of your forces advance too far from the general line held by the whole, and to have the advanced part of that portion thus isolated from the support of its fellows. Such a formation invites a concentration of your opponents against the isolated body, and may lead to its destruction.
It was precisely in this position that Pichegru placed a portion of his forces by the ill-advised advance he made down the valley of the Lys to Courtrai.
Taking advantage of the way in which the main forces of the allies were tied to the siege of Landrecies, the French commander wisely moved forward the whole of his forces to the north and west, pushing the enemy back before him to the line Ypres-Menin, and besieging Menin itself. But most unwisely he not only permitted to advance, but himself directed and led, a body of 30,000 men (the command of General Souham) far forward of this general movement: he actually carried it on as far as the town of Courtrai.
The accompanying sketch map shows how much too far advanced this wedge of men (so large a contingent to imperil by isolation!) was beyond the general line, and, to repeat the phrase I have just used, a metaphor which best expresses my meaning, Souham and his division, by Pichegru’s direct orders, had got “‘fore side.”
The only excuse that can be pleaded for Pichegru’s folly in this matter, was the temptation presented by the weak garrison of Courtrai, and the bait which a facile temporary success always holds out for a man who has formed no consistent general plan. But that very excuse is the strongest condemnation of the inexcusable error, and this strategical fault of Pichegru’s was soon paid for by the imperilling of all the great body of French troops within that rashly projected triangle.
For the moment Pichegru may have foolishly congratulated himself that he had done something of military value, as he had certainly done something striking. Menin fell to the French on the same day that Landrecies did to the Austrians, and this further success doubtless tempted him to remain with the head of his wedge at Courtrai, when every consideration of strategy should have prompted him to retrace his steps and to recall the over-advanced division back into line.
This isolated position down the valley of the Lys, this wedge thrust out in front of Lille, positively asked the allies to attack it.
The enemy was a fortnight developing his plan, but his delay was equalled by Pichegru’s determination to hold the advanced post he had captured; and when the allies did finally close in upon that advanced post, nothing but a series of accidents, which we shall follow in detail when we come to the story of the action, saved Souham from annihilation. And the destruction of Souham’s division, considering its numbers and its central position, might have involved the whole French line in a general defeat.
As I have said, it was at the end of April that this false success of Pichegru’s was achieved, and a whole fortnight was to elapse before the allies concentrated to take advantage of that error, and to cut off Souham’s division.
That fortnight was full of minor actions, not a few of them interesting to the student of military history, and one again remarkable as a feat of English horse. I deliberately omit all mention of these lest I should confuse the reader and disturb his conception of the great battle that was to follow.
That battle proceeded upon a certain plan thought out in detail, perfectly simple in character, and united in conception. It failed, as we shall see; and by its failure turned what should have been the cutting-off and destruction of Souham’s command into a signal French victory. But before we can understand the causes of its failure, we must grasp the plan itself in its major lines, and with that object I shall discuss it in my next section under the title of “The Plan of the Allies.”
PART III. THE PLAN OF THE ALLIES
IF THE READER will look at the map opposite he will see in what disposition the armies of the allies were, at the end of April and the first days of May 1794, to carry into effect the plan which I proceed to describe.
There, in its triangle or advanced wedge, with a base stretching across Lille and an apex at Courtrai, lay the exposed French division, Souham’s.
Clerfayt was to the north of that wedge. The French, in pushing their wedge up to Courtrai, had thus separated him from the rest of the allies. Clerfayt lay with his command round about the district of Roulers; he attempted to return and oust Souham, but he failed, and to the north of the French wedge, and separated from the rest of the allies by its intervening thousands, he remained up to, throughout, and after the great battle that was to follow.
Right away down south, nearly sixty miles as the crow flies, lay the bulk of the Austrian army, Coburg’s command, round the town which it had just captured, Landrecies. The Duke of York’s command, detached from this main army of Coburg, had been ordered north, and was, by May 3rd, at Tournai. To the east lay the Prussian forces together with a small body of Hanoverians, about 4000 in number, which last could be brought up on to the Scheldt River when necessary.
It will thus be seen that the allies, at the moment when the plan was about to be formulated, lay on either side of the French wedge, and that any scheme for cutting off that wedge from the main French line must consist in causing a great force of the allies to appear rapidly and unexpectedly between Courtrai and Lille.
In order to do this, it was necessary to get Clerfayt to march down south to some point where he could cross the River Lys, while the rest of the allies were marching north from their southern positions to join hands with him.
When this larger mass of the allies coming up from the south and the east should have joined hands with Clerfayt, all the great French body lying advanced in the valley of the Lys round Menin and Courtrai would be cut off.
Now the success of such a plan obviously depended upon two factors: synchrony and surprise. That is, its success depended upon the accurate keeping of a time-table, and upon carrying it out too quickly and unexpectedly for Souham to fall back in time.
Clerfayt’s force coming down from the north, all the rest of the allies coming up from the east and the south must march with the common object of reaching “R,” a fixed rendezvous, agreed upon beforehand, and of meeting there together at some appointed time. If any considerable body lagged behind the rest, if part of the great force marching up from the south, for instance, failed to keep in line with the general advance, or if Clerfayt bungled or delayed, the junction would be imperfect or might even not take place at all, and the number of men present to cut off the French when a partial and imperfect junction had been effected, might be too small to maintain itself astraddle of the French communications, and to prevent the great French force from breaking its way through back to Lille.
So much for synchrony: and as for surprise, it is obvious that for the success of this plan it was necessary to work both rapidly and secretly.
Here was Souham with a body of men which recent reinforcement had raised to some 40,000, lying much too far ahead of the general French line and in peril of being cut off. Pichegru was foolish to maintain him in that advanced position, but, though that was an error, it was an error based upon a certain amount of calculation. Pichegru, and Souham under his orders, kept to their perilous position round Courtrai, because it did after all cut the allies in two, and because they knew that they could deal with Clerfayt’s force upon the north (which was only half their own), while they also knew that the bulk of their enemies were tied down, far away to the south, by the operations round Landrecies.
If Souham at Courtrai got news in time of the march northward of that main southern force, he had only to fall back upon Lille to be saved.
It was not until the 10th of May that the plan was elaborated whereby it was hoped to annihilate Souham’s command, and this plan seems to have occurred first to the Duke of York upon the evening of that day, after a successful minor action between his troops and the French just outside Tournai.
The Duke of York had been at Tournai a week, having come up there from Landrecies after the fall of that fortress, though the mass of the Austrian forces still remained away in the south. The week had been spent in “feeling” the south-eastern front of the French advanced “wedge,” and it was by the evening of the 10th that the Duke of York appears to have decided that the time was ripe for a general movement.
At any rate, it was upon the morrow, the 11th, that the English Prince sent word to Clerfayt that he intended to submit to the Emperor, who was the ultimate authority upon the side of the allies, a plan for the general and decisive action he desired to bring about. On the next day, the 12th, a Monday, the Duke of York wrote to Clerfayt that he hoped, “on the day after the morrow” (that is, upon the Wednesday, the 14th), “to take a decisive movement against the enemy.” And we may presume that the Duke had communicated to the Emperor the nature of his plan. For on the 13th, the Tuesday, the Emperor was in possession of it, and his orders, sent out upon that day, set out the plan in detail. That plan was as follows: —
Clerfayt, with his force, which was rather less than 20,000 all told, was to march south from Thielt, his headquarters for the moment, and advance upon the little town of Wervicq upon the River Lys. Here there was a bridge, and Clerfayt was also in possession of pontoons wherewith to pass the stream. Meanwhile, the southern mass of the allies was to concentrate upon the Scheldt in the following manner:
The few thousand Hanoverians, under Bussche, were to take up their position at Warcoing, just upon and across that river. Two miles further south, Otto, with a larger Austrian force accompanied by certain English cavalry (the numbers will follow), was to concentrate at Bailleul.
The Duke of York’s own large force, which had been at Tournai for over a week, was to go forward a little and concentrate at Templeuve. Five miles to the south of Templeuve, at Froidmont, a column, somewhat larger than the Duke of York’s, under Kinsky, was to concentrate.
There were thus to be concentrated upon the south of the French wedge four separate bodies under orders to advance northward together.
The first, under Bussche, was only about 4000 strong, the Hanoverians and Prussians; the second, under Otto, from about 10,000 strong; the third, under the Duke of York, of much the same strength, or a little less; and the fourth, under Kinsky, some 11,000.
These four numbered nearly, or quite, 35,000 men, less than the “nearly 40,000” at which certain French historians have estimated their strength.
To these four columns (which I will beg the reader to remember by their numbers of first, second, third, and fourth, as well as by the names of their commanders, Bussche, Otto, York, and Kinsky) a fifth must be added, the appreciation of whose movements and failure is the whole explanation of the coming battle.
The fifth column was a body of no less than 16,000 men coming from the main Austrian body far south, and ordered to be at St Amand upon the Scheldt somewhat before the concentration of the other four columns, and to advance from St Amand to Pont-à-Marcq. Upon reaching Pont-à-Marcq this fifth column would be in line with the other four at Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, and Froidmont, and ready to take its part in the great forward movement towards the north.
In order to appreciate the way in which the issue was bound to depend upon this fifth column, I must now detail the orders given to all six, the five columns in the valley of the Scheldt, and the sixth body, under Clerfayt, north of the Lys; for it is these orders which constitute the soul of the plan.
Bussche, with his small body of 4000 Hanoverians, the first column, had the task of “holding” the apex of the French wedge when the attack should begin. That is, it was his task to do no more with his inferior forces than send one portion up the road towards Courtrai, so that the advanced French troops there should be engaged while another part of his small command should attack the little town of Mouscron, which the French held, of course, for it was within their wedge of occupation. It was obviously not hoped that this little body could do more than keep the French occupied, prevent their falling back towards Lille, and perhaps make them believe that the main attack was coming from Bussche’s men.
The second column, under Otto, was to advance upon Tourcoing, in those days a little town, now a great manufacturing city.
The third column, that under the Duke of York, was to march side by side with Otto’s column, and to make for Mouveaux, a village upon a level with Tourcoing upon this line of advance, and to be reached by marching through Roubaix (now also a great manufacturing town, but then a small place).
None of these advances, Bussche’s, Otto’s, or York’s, was of any considerable length. The longest march through which any of these three columns had to fight its way was that of the Duke of York from Templeuve to Mouveaux, and even this was not eight miles.
The fourth column, under Kinsky, had a harder task and a longer march. It was to carry Bouvines, which was in the hands of the French and nearly seven miles from Froidmont (Kinsky’s point of departure), and when it had done this it was to turn to the north with one part of its force in order to shelter the march of the Duke of York from attacks by the French troops near Lille, while another part of its force was to join with the fifth column and march up with it until both came upon a level with York and Otto in the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
Now it was to this fifth column, the 16,000 men or more under the Arch-Duke Charles, that the great work of the day was assigned. From Pont-à-Marcq they must attack a great French body quite equal to their own in numbers, even when part of Kinsky’s force had joined them, which French force lay in the camp at Sainghin. They must thrust this force back towards Lille, pour up northward, and arrive in support of Otto and York by the time these two commanders were respectively at Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
In other words, the fifth column, that of the Arch-Duke Charles, was asked to make an advance of nearly fourteen miles, involving heavy fighting in its first part, and yet to synchronise with columns who had to advance no more than five miles or seven.
Supposing all went well, Clerfayt — crossing the Lys at Wervicq at the same hour which saw the departure of the five southern columns from Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq respectively, was to advance southward from the river towards Mouveaux and Tourcoing, a distance of some seven miles, while the others were advancing on the same points from the south.
If the time-table were accurately kept and this great combined movement all fitted in, Clerfayt would join hands with the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux, a great force of over 60,000 men would lie between the French troops at Lille and Souham’s 40,000 in the “advanced wedge,” and those 40,000 thus isolated were, in a military sense, destroyed.
Such being the mechanism or map of the scheme, we must next inquire the exact dates and hours upon which the working of the whole was planned.
The Duke of York, as we have seen when he was arranging the business and writing to Clerfayt and the Emperor, had talked of moving upon the 14th, by which presumably he meant organising the attack on the 14th, and setting the first columns in motion from their places of rendezvous in the early hours of that day, Wednesday, before dawn.
If that was in his mind, it shows him to have been a prompt and energetic man, and to have had a full appreciation of the place which surprise occupied in the chances of success. If, indeed, the Emperor got the Duke of York’s message in time on the 12th, if he had at once accepted the plan, and had with Napoleonic rapidity ordered the bulk of his forces (which were still right away south and east) to move, he might have had them by forced marches upon and across the Scheldt, and ready to execute the plan by the 14th, or at any rate by the morning of the 15th.
But from what we know of the family to which the Duke of York belonged, it is exceedingly improbable that this younger son of George III. had, on this one occasion only, any lightning in his brain; and even if he did appreciate more or less the importance of rapid action, the Emperor did not appreciate it. He committed the two contradictory faults of delaying the movement and of asking too much marching of his men, and it was not until the morning of the Wednesday, May the 14th, that the bulk of the Austrian army, which still lay in the Valenciennes and Landrecies district, broke up for its northward march, to arrive at the rendezvous beyond the Scheldt, and to carry out the plan.
It was not until Thursday the 15th of May that the Emperor joined the Duke of York at Tournai, and very late upon the same day the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up the main body of the Austrian forces from the south to the town of St Amand.
We shall see later what a grievous error it was to demand so violent an effort from the men of the Arch-Duke Charles’ command. From Landrecies itself to St Amand is 30 miles as the crow flies; and though, of course, the mass of the troops which the Arch-Duke Charles had been thus commanded to bring up northward in such haste were most of them well on the right side of Landrecies when the order to advance reached them, yet the average march undertaken by his men in little more than twenty-four hours was a full twenty miles, and some of his units must have covered nearer thirty. I will not delay further on this point here; its full importance will appear when we come to talk of the action itself.
The Arch-Duke Charles being only as far as St Amand on the evening of Thursday the 15th, and his rendezvous, that of the fifth column in the great plan, being Pont-à-Marcq, a further good sixteen miles north-westward, it was evident that the inception of that plan and the simultaneous advance of all the five columns from their five starting-points of Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq, could not begin even upon the 16th. It would take the best part of a day to bring the Arch-Duke Charles up to Pont-à-Marcq; his men were in imperative need of rest during a full night at St Amand, and it is probable, though I have no proof of it, that he had not even fully concentrated there by the evening of the 15th, and that his last units only joined him during the forenoon of the 16th.
The whole of that day, therefore, the 16th, was consumed so far as the first, second, third, and fourth columns were concerned, in merely gathering and marshalling their forces, and occupying, before nightfall, the points from which they were to depart simultaneously in the combined advance of the morrow. They had to wait thus for the dawn of the 17th, because they had to allow time for the fifth column to come up.
The time-table imposed upon the great plan by these delays is now apparent. The moment when all the strings of the net were to be pulled together round Souham was the space between midnight and dawn of Saturday the 17th of May. And the hour when all the six bodies of the allies were to join hands at “R” near Tourcoing was the noon of that day.
Before day broke upon the 17th, Clerfayt was to find himself at Wervicq upon the River Lys and across that stream, while of the five southern columns the Arch-Duke Charles was to be attacking the French troops just in front of Pont-à-Marcq with the fifth column at the same moment; Kinsky, with the fourth, was to be well on the way from Froidmont to Bouvines where he was to attack the French also and cross the bridge; the Duke of York, with the third, was to be well on the way from Templeuve to Lannoy; Otto, with the second, was to be equally advanced upon his line, somewhere by Wattrelos in his march upon Tourcoing; while Bussche, with his small first column, on the extreme north, was to be getting into contact with the French posts south of Courtrai, which it was his duty to “hold,” impressing upon Souham the idea that a main attack might develop in that quarter, and so deluding the French into maintaining their perilously advanced stations until they were cut off from Lille by the rest of the allies.
The morning would be filled by the advance of Clerfayt from Wervicq southward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing, while the corresponding fighting advance northward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing also, of Otto, York, Kinsky, and the Arch-Duke Charles, should result somewhere about noon in their joining hands with Clerfayt and forming one great body: a body cutting off Courtrai from Lille, and the 40,000 under Souham from their fellows in the main French line.
With such a time-table properly observed, the plan should have succeeded, and between the noon and the evening of that Saturday, the great force which Souham commanded should have been at the mercy of the allies.
Such was the plan and such the time-table upon which it was schemed. Its success depended, of course, as I have said, upon an exact keeping of that time-table, and also upon the net being drawn round Souham before he had guessed what was happening. The second of these conditions, we shall see when we come to speak of “The Preliminaries of the Action,” was successfully accomplished. The first was not; and its failure is the story of the defeat suffered by the Duke of York in particular, and the consequent break-down of the whole strategical conception of the allies.
But before dealing with this it is necessary to establish a disputed point.
I have spoken throughout of the plan as the Duke of York’s. Because it failed, and because the Duke of York was an English prince, historians in this country have not only rejected this conclusion, but, as a rule, have not even mentioned it. The plan has been represented as Mack’s plan, as a typical example of Austrian pedantry and folly, the Duke of York as the victim of foolish foreigners who did not know their business, and it has even been hinted that the Austrians desired defeat! With the latter extravagant and even comic suggestion I will deal later in this study; for the moment I am only concerned with the responsibility of the Duke of York.
It must, in the first place, be clearly understood that the failure of the plan does not reflect upon the judgment of that commander. It failed because Clerfayt was not up to time, and because too much had been asked of the fifth column. The Duke came of a family not famous for genius; he was exceedingly young, and whatever part he may have had in the framing of this large conception ought surely to stand to his credit.
It is true that Mack, the Austrian General, drafted details of the plan immediately before it was carried into execution, and our principal military historian in this country tells us how “on the 16th, Mack prepared an elaborate plan which he designed.”
Well, the 16th was the Friday.
Now we know that on the 11th of May, the Sunday, the Emperor and his staff had no intention of making a combined attack to cut off Souham from Lille, for orders were given to Clerfayt on that day to engage Souham along the valley of the Lys for the purpose of holding the attention of the French, and in the hope of recovering Menin — the exact opposite of what would have been ordered if a secret and unexpected attempt to cut off Souham by crossing further up the river had been intended. It was at the same moment that the Duke of York was sending word to Clerfayt on his own account, to the effect that he intended to submit a plan to the Emperor, and it is worth noting that in the very order which was sent to Clerfayt by the Emperor he was told to refer to the Duke of York as to his future movements.
The archives of the Ministry of War at Vienna have it on record that the Duke of York made a definite statement of a plan to Clerfayt, which plan he intended to submit to the Emperor immediately, and a letter dated upon the Monday, the 12th — four days before there is any talk of Mack’s arranging details, — York writes to Clerfayt telling him that he hopes to make his decisive movement against the enemy on the Wednesday, the 14th.
On the 13th, Tuesday, the orders of the Emperor to both Clerfayt and the Duke of York (which are also on record) set down this plan in detail, mentioning the point Wervicq at which Clerfayt was expected to cross the river Lys, and at the same time directing the Duke of York to march northward with the object of joining Clerfayt, and thus cutting off the French forces massed round Courtrai from their base. Further, in this same despatch, the initiative is particularly left to the Duke of York, and it is once more from him that Clerfayt is to await decisions as to the moment and details of the operation.
The same archives record the Duke of York sending Lieut.-Colonel Calvert to Clerfayt upon the 14th, to tell him that he meant to attack upon the morrow, the 15th, and they further inform us that it was on the English Prince’s learning how scattered were Clerfayt’s units, and how long it would therefore take him to concentrate, that action was delayed by some thirty-six hours.
Evidence of this sort is absolutely conclusive. The plan was not Mack’s; it was York’s.
PART IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
TOURCOING IS AN action the preliminaries of which are easy to describe, and need occupy little of our space, because it was a battle in which the plan of one side was developed and prosecuted almost to its conclusion without a corresponding plan upon the other side.
As a rule, the preliminaries of a battle consist in the dispositions taken by each side for hours or for days — sometimes for weeks — beforehand, in order to be in a posture to receive or to attack the other side. These preliminaries include manœuvring for position, and sometimes in the fighting of minor subsidiary actions before the main action takes place.
Now, in the case of Tourcoing, there was none of this, for the French at Tourcoing were surprised.
The surprise was not complete, but it was sufficiently thorough to make the whole of the fighting during the first day, Saturday (at least, the whole of the fighting in the centre of the field), a triumph for the allied advance.
Let us first appreciate exactly how matters looked to Souham when, on the 15th, the Thursday, the blow was about to fall upon him.
He had under his orders, with headquarters now at Courtrai, now at Menin (see sketch map on ), rather less than 40,000. In that dash upon Courtrai a fortnight before, which had led to the dangerous establishment of so large an advanced body in front of the main French line, one main effect of that advance had been to push back, away to the left beyond the Lys, more than 16,000, but less than 20,000 men under the Austrian General, Clerfayt. With that army, Clerfayt’s body, Souham had remained continually in touch. Detachments of it were continually returning to the valley of the Lys to harass his posts, and, in a word, Clerfayt’s was the only force of the enemy which Souham thought he had need to bear in mind.
The bulk of the Austrian army he knew to be quite four days’ march away to the south, at first occupied in the siege of Landrecies, and later stationed in the vicinity of that fortress.
Of course, lying in his exposed position, Souham knew that a general attack upon him from the south was one of the possibilities of the situation, but it was not a thing which he thought could come unexpectedly: at any rate he thought himself prepared, by the use of his scouts and his spies, to hear of any such advance in ample time.
In case he should be attacked, the attack might take one of many forms. It might try to drive him over the Lys, where Clerfayt would be ready to meet him; or it might be a general attack upon Courtrai as a centre; or it might be (what had, as we have seen, been actually determined) an attempt to cut him and all his 40,000 off from the main French line.
This main French line ran through the town of Lille, and Lille not only had its garrison, but also at Sainghin, outside the fortifications to the south-east, a camp, under Bonnaud, of 20,000 men. If the attack from the south or from the north, or from both, managed to cut Souham off from Bonnaud’s camp, and from the garrison at Lille, he was ruined, and his 40,000 were lost; but he hoped to be kept sufficiently informed of the enemy’s movements to fall back in time, should such an attempt be made, and to provide for it by effecting a junction with Bonnaud before it was delivered.
Pichegru, the Commander of the whole French army of the north, who had ordered the advance on Courtrai, happened to be absent upon a visit to the posts away south upon the Sambre River. Souham was therefore temporarily in full command of all the troops which were to be concerned in the coming battle. But the position was only a temporary one, and that must account for the deference he paid to the advice of the four generals subordinate to him, and for the council which he called at Menin on the critical Saturday night which decided the issue. He himself quotes his commission in the following terms:— “Commander-in-Chief of all the troops from the camp at Sainghin to Courtrai inclusive.”
From the beginning of the week, when a detachment of his troops had but just recovered from a sharp action with the Duke of York’s men towards Tournai, Souham appreciated that the forces of the enemy were gradually increasing to the south of him, and that the posts upon the Scheldt were receiving additional enforcements of men. But neither his judgment nor the reports that came in to him led him to believe that the mass of the Austrian army was coming north to attack him. And in this he was right, for, as we have seen, the Emperor did not make up his mind until Wednesday the 14th, which was the day when orders were sent to the Arch-Duke Charles to march northward.
Souham’s attitude of mind up to, say, the Thursday may be fairly described in some such terms as follows: —
“I know that a concentration is going on in the valley of the Scheldt to the south and east of me; it is pretty big, but not yet exactly dangerous, though I shouldn’t wonder if I were attacked in a few days from that quarter. What I am much more certain of is that active and mobile force which I beat off the other day, but which is still intact under the best General opposed to me, Clerfayt. I hear that it is marching south again, and my best troops and my offensive must be directed against that. I am far superior in numbers to Clerfayt, and if I can bring him to an action and break him, I can then turn to the others at my leisure: for the moment I have only one front to think of — that on the north.”
But the negligence which he or his informants were guilty of — a negligence that was to prove so nearly fatal to all those 40,000 French troops — consisted in the failure to discover what was up upon Friday the 16th.
During those twenty-four hours the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up his column to St Amand; the other four columns upon the Scheldt were concentrated, and upon the north of the Lys, Clerfayt had got orders to move upon Wervicq, and was, during the middle hours of Friday, actually upon the march. Yet, during all that day, Friday the 16th, Souham remained ignorant of the extremity of his peril.
The orders which he dictated upon the Friday night, and largely repeated upon the following morning of Saturday the 17th of May, show how little he expected the general action that was upon him. He arranged, indeed, for a cordon of troops to be watching, in insufficient numbers, the side towards the Scheldt, and he sent to Bonnaud and the camp at Sainghin, outside Lille, orders to keep more or less in touch with that cordon. The instructions to this cordon of troops along the eastern side of the French position is no more than one of general vigilance. It is still to Clerfayt and towards the north alone that he directs an offensive and vigorous movement.
In a word, he was a good twenty-four hours behind with his information. He was wasting troops north of the Lys in looking for Clerfayt at a time when that General was already on the march to Wervicq, and he was leaving a scattered line of insufficient bodies to meet what he did not in the least expect, the rapid advance of Bussche, Otto, and York during that Saturday upon Mouscron, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.
Therefore it was that although Bussche’s insufficient force was driven out of Mouscron at last by superior numbers, Otto and York succeeded in sweeping all the resistance before them, and, in the course of that Saturday, reached the first Tourcoing, the second Roubaix, and even Mouveaux.
The whole problem of warfare consists in a comparison between the information that each side has of the movements of the other. The whole art of success in war pivots upon the using of your enemy’s ignorance. Had the allies upon this occasion been more accurate in keeping to their time-table, and somewhat more rapid in their movements, they would have caught the French commander still under the illusion that there was no danger, save from the north, and would have succeeded in cutting off and destroying the main French force by getting in all together between Courtrai and Lille. For at that same moment, the early hours before daybreak of the 17th, the allies had begun their movement.
PART V. THE TERRAIN
THE TERRAIN OVER which the plan of the allies was to be tested must next be grasped if we are to understand the causes which led to its ultimate failure.
That terrain is most conveniently described as an oblong standing up lengthways north and south, and corresponding to the sketch map overleaf. That oblong has a base of twenty miles from east to west, a length from north to south of thirty-five.
These dimensions are sufficient to show upon what a scale the great plan of the allies for cutting off Souham at Courtrai was designed.
At its south-eastern corner the reader will perceive the town of St Amand, the furthest point south from which the combined movements of the allies began; while somewhat to the left of its top or northern edge, at the point marked “A,” the northern-most body connected with that plan, the body commanded by Clerfayt, was posted at the origin of the movement.
The object of the whole convergence from the Scheldt on one hand, and from Clerfayt’s northern position upon the other, being to cut off the French forces which lay at and south of Courtrai from Lille, and the main line of the French army, it is evident that the actual fighting and the chances of success or disaster would take place within a smaller interior oblong, which I have also marked upon the sketch map. This smaller or interior oblong measures about sixteen miles at its base by about twenty-five miles in length, and includes all the significant points of the action.
The points marked 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively are the points at which the five columns advancing from the Scheldt valley northward were to find themselves before dawn on the morning of Saturday the 17th of May. We are already acquainted with them. They are Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq respectively; while the point marked 6 is Wervicq, from which Clerfayt was to start simultaneously with the five southern columns with the object of meeting his fellows round Tourcoing.
The town of Courtrai will be perceived to lie in the north-eastern angle of this inner oblong, the town of Lille rather below the middle of its western side. In all the country round Courtrai, and especially to the south of it, within the triangle X Y Z, lay the mass of Souham’s command of 40,000 men. There were many posts, of course, scattered outside that triangle, and connecting Courtrai with Lille; but the links were weak, and the main force was where I have indicated it to be.
A large body of French troops being encamped just under the walls of Lille at B (by which letter I mark Sainghin camp), and that fortress also possessing a garrison, the plan of cutting both these off from the 40,000 French that lay in the country near Courtrai involved getting the main part of the allies up from these points of departure on the south, and Clerfayt’s body down from its point of departure on the north to meet upon the line drawn between Lille and Courtrai. Upon this line (which also roughly corresponds to the only main road between the two cities) may be perceived, lying nearer Lille than the centre of such line, the small town of Tourcoing and the village of Mouveaux. It was upon these two points that four of the five southern columns were to converge northward, the second and third column reaching them first, the fourth and fifth marching up from the left in aid; and it was also, of course, upon these two points that Clerfayt was to march southward from the post at Wervicq, that had been given him as his point of departure before dawn upon that Saturday morning. If everything went perfectly, the great mass of the allied army should have found itself, by noon of Saturday the 17th, as I have said, astraddle of the Lille-Courtrai road, and effectively cutting off the French troops to the north.
What was the nature of the wide countryside over which these various movements were to take place?
It was part of that great plain of Flanders which stretches from the River Scheldt almost unbroken to the Straits of Dover and the North Sea. In the whole of the great oblong represented by my sketch map there is hardly a point 150 feet above the water level of the main river valleys, while the great mass of that territory is diversified by no more than very broad and very shallow rolls of land, the crests of which are sometimes and exceptionally as much as fifty feet above the troughs, but the greater part thirty, twenty, or even less. Here and there an isolated hummock shows upon the landscape, but the general impression of one who walks across from the valley of the Lys to that of the Scheldt is of a flat, monotonous land in which one retains no memory of ascent or descent, and in which the eye but rarely perceives, and that only from specially chosen points, any wide horizon.
To-day the greater part of this country suffers from the curse of industrialism and repeats — of course, with far less degradation — the terrible aspect of our own manufacturing towns. Roubaix and Tourcoing in particular are huge straggling agglomerations of cotton-spinners and their hands. A mass of railways and tramways cut the countryside, and the evil presence of coal-smoke mars it everywhere: at least within the region of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.
In May 1794, though a considerable industry had begun to grow up in Lille itself, the wide, open countryside round the town was entirely agricultural. Much of it was what soldiers call “blind” country: that is, it was cut up into fields with numerous hedges; there were long farm walls and a great number of small watercourses fringed with trees. But, on the other hand, there was very little wood. Moreover, though there were few places from which one could overlook any considerable view, the “blindness” of the field, as a whole, has been much exaggerated in the attempt to excuse or explain the disaster of which it was the theatre. The southern part of it is open enough, and so is the north-eastern portion, in which the first column operated. Of the soil no particular mention is needed; most of the great roads were paved; the weather had created no difficulty in the going, and the only trouble in this respect lay in the northern part, where Clerfayt’s command was condemned to advance over patches of loose and difficult sand, which made the road, or rather rare lanes, very heavy.
It will at once be perceived that, in view of the operations planned, one principal obstacle exists in the terrain, the River Lys. Few bridges crossed this stream, and for the purpose of turning the French position and coming across the Lys from the north to the neighbourhood of Mouveaux, there was in those days no bridge save the bridge at Wervicq (at the point marked 6 on the plan at the beginning of this section); but this difficulty we have seen to be lessened by the presence in Clerfayt’s command of a section of pontoons.
At first sight one might perceive no other considerable obstacle save the Lys to the general movement of the allied army. But when the peculiar course of the little River Marque is pointed out, and the nature of its stream described, the reader will perceive that it exercised some little effect upon the fortunes of the battle, and might have exercised a much greater one to the advantage of the British troops had not the Duke of York blundered in a fashion which will be later described.
In the first place, it should be noted that this little stream (it is no wider than a canal, will barely allow two barges to pass in its lower course, and will not float one to the southward of Lille) turns up quite close to Roubaix, and at the nearest point is not a mile from the market-place of that town.
Now the significance of such a conformation to the battlefield of Tourcoing lay in the fact that it was impossible for any considerable force to manœuvre between the third column (which was marching upon Roubaix) and the Marque River. Had the Marque not existed, Kinsky, with the fourth column, would have been free to march parallel with York, just as York marched parallel with Otto, while the Arch-Duke with his fifth column, instead of having been given a rendezvous right down south at Pont-à-Marcq (the point marked 5 on my sketch), would have gone up the main road from St Amand to Lille, and have marched parallel with Kinsky, just as Kinsky would have marched parallel with York. In other words, the fourth and the fifth columns, instead of being ordered along the dotted lines marked upon my sketch (the elbows in which lines correspond to the crossing places of the Marque), would have proceeded along the uninterrupted arrow lines which I have put by the side of them.
The Marque made all the difference. It compelled the fifth column to take its roundabout road, and the fourth, detained by the delay of the fifth, was held, as we shall see in what follows, for a whole day at one of the crossings of the river.
The little stream has a deep and muddy bottom, and the fields upon its banks are occasionally marshy. This feature has been exaggerated, as have the other features I have mentioned, in order to explain or excuse the defeat, but, at any rate, it prevented the use of crossing places other than bridges. The Marque has no true fords, and there is no taking an army across it, narrow as it is, save by the few bridges which then existed. These bridges I have marked upon the sketch.
So far as the terrain is concerned, then, what we have to consider is country, flat, but containing low defensive positions, largely cut up, especially between the Scheldt and Roubaix, by hedges and walls, though more open elsewhere, and particularly open towards the north: a serious obstacle to the advance of one body in the shape of the River Lys; and another obstacle, irritating rather than formidable in character, but sufficient both by its course and its marshy soil to complicate the advance, namely, the little River Marque.
As to the weather, it was misty but fine. The nights in bivouac were passed without too much discomfort, and the only physical condition which oppressed portions of the allied army consisted in the error of its commanders, and proceeded from fatigue.
PART VI. THE ACTION
AT ABOUT TEN o’clock in the morning of Friday the 16th of May, Clerfayt, in his positions right up north beyond the Lys — positions which lay at and in front of the town of Thielt, with outposts well to the south and west of that town, — received the orders of the Emperor.
These orders were what we know them to be: he was to march southward and westward and strike the Lys at Wervicq. He was to arrive at that point at or before nightfall, for in the very first hours of the morrow, Saturday, and coincidently with the beginning of the advance of the five columns from their southern posts, he was to cross the Lys and to proceed to join hands with those columns in the following forenoon, when the heads of them would have reached the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
Bussche, with the first column, his 4000 Hanoverians, had no task during that day but to proceed the mile and a half which separated Warcoing from the little village of St Leger, and, with the head of his column in that village, prepare to pass the night and be ready to march forward long before dawn the next day.
Field-Marshal Otto, with the second column, was similarly and leisurely occupied marshalling his 10,000 Austrians and his contingent of British cavalry, so that the head of his column was at Bailleul ready also to advance with the early, dark, small hours of the ensuing morning.
The Duke of York, with his third column of similar numbers, or somewhat less, was performing a precisely similar task, and ordering his men so that the head of that column should reach Templeuve by evening and be ready to march at the same moment as the others did, shortly after midnight.
All these three, then, were absolutely ready, fresh from fatigue and in good order, upon that Friday evening at their appointed posts.
It is here necessary, as we are chiefly concerned with the British forces, to detail the composition of this third column which the Duke of York commanded.
It consisted of twelve battalions and ten squadrons, with a further reserve of sixteen British squadrons under General Erskine, which cavalry lay somewhat south of Templeuve, but ready to follow up the advance when it should begin. It was made of two portions, about equal in numbers, British and foreign. The foreign half was composed of four squadrons of Austrian Hussars and seven battalions of infantry, two Hessian and five Austrian. The British half was composed of a Brigade of Guards counting four battalions, with portions of the 14th, 37th, and 53rd Foot, while the British cavalry accompanying it (apart from the squadrons under Erskine) were six squadrons drawn from the 7th, 15th, and 16th Light Dragoons. It is to the credit of the young commander that this third column was the best organised, the most prompt, and, as the event proved, the most successful during the advance and the most tenacious in the subsequent defeat.
The fourth column, under Kinsky, about 11,000 strong, was also ready on that Friday, the 16th of May, concentrated at its point of departure, Froidmont, and ready to move at the same moment as all the others, shortly after midnight. But unlike the other three commanders upon his right, Kinsky was unfortunately handicapped by the position of the fifth column, that great body of 18,000 to 20,000 men, under the Arch-Duke Charles, which lay at St Amand, which was to advance next day parallel with Kinsky and upon his left, and which it was his duty to keep in touch with, and to link up with the Duke of York’s upon the other side. He was handicapped, I say, by the situation of the fifth column, under the Arch-Duke Charles, the heavy strain already imposed upon which, and the accumulating difficulties it was about to encounter, largely determining the unfortunate issue of the battle.
Kinsky got news on that Friday from the Arch-Duke at St Amand that it was hardly possible for his great body of men to reach the appointed post of Pont-à-Marcq at the arranged hour of daybreak the next morning. I have already suggested that this delay cannot only have been due to the very long march which had been imposed upon the Arch-Duke’s command when it had been hurriedly summoned up from the south to St Amand, forty-eight hours before. It must also have been due to the fact that not all its units reached St Amand by the evening of Thursday the 15th. It seemed certain that there must have been stragglers or bad delays on the morning of the 16th, for it was not until long after nightfall — indeed not until ten o’clock in the evening — of Friday the 16th that the Arch-Duke was able to set out from St Amand and take the Pont-à-Marcq road. This unfortunate body, therefore, the fifth column, which had all the hardest work before it, which had but one road by which to march (although it was double any of the others in size), was compelled, after the terrible fatigue of the preceding days, to push forward sixteen miles through the night in a vain attempt to reach Pont-à-Marcq, not indeed by daybreak, for that was obviously impossible, but as soon after as haste and anxiety could command. Kinsky was tied to Froidmont and unable to move forward until that fifth column upon his left was at least approaching its goal. For he had Bonnaud’s 20,000 Frenchmen at Sainghin right in front of him, and further, if he had moved, his left flank would have been exposed, and, what is more, he would have failed in his purpose, which was to link up the Arch-Duke on one side with the Duke of York upon the other.
This first mishap, then, must be carefully noted as one prime lack of synchrony in the origins of the combined movement, and a first clear cause of the misfortune that was to attend the whole affair. The delay of the fifth column was the chief cause of the disaster.
Meanwhile, another failure to synchronise, and that a most grave one, was taking place miles away in the north with Clerfayt’s command beyond the Lys.
It is self-evident that where one isolated and distant body is being asked to co-operate with comrades who are in touch with the commander-in-chief, and with each other, the exact observation of orders on the part of that isolated body is of supreme importance to the success of the combination. They, all lying in much the same region and able to receive and transmit orders with rapidity, may correct an error before it has developed evil consequences. But the isolated commander co-operating from a distance, and receiving orders from headquarters only after a long delay, is under no such advantage. Thus the tardiness of the fifth column was, as we have seen, communicated to the fourth, and the third, second, and first, all in one line, could or should have easily appreciated the general situation along the Scheldt. But the sixth body, under Clerfayt, which formed the keystone of the whole plan, and without whose exact co-operation that plan must necessarily fail, enjoyed no such advantage, and, if it indulged in the luxuries of delay or misdirection, could not have its errors corrected in useful time. A despatch, to reach Clerfayt from headquarters and from the five columns that were advancing northward from the valley of the Scheldt, must make a circuit round eastward to the back of Courtrai, and it was a matter of nearly half a day to convey information from the Emperor or his neighbouring subordinates in the region of Tournai to this sixth corps which lay north of the Lys.
Now it so happened that Clerfayt, though a most able man, and one who had proved himself a prompt and active general, woefully miscalculated the time-table of his march and the difficulties before him.
He got his orders, as I have said, at ten o’clock on the Friday morning. Whether to give his men a meal, or for whatever other reason, he did not break up until between one and two. He then began ploughing forward with his sixteen thousand men and more, in two huge columns, through the sandy country that forms the plain north of the River Lys. He ought to have known the difficulty of rapid advance over such a terrain, but he does not seem to have provided for it with any care, and when night fell, so far from finding himself in possession of Wervicq and master of the crossing of the river there, the heads of his columns had only reached the great highway between Menin and Ypres, nearly three miles short of his goal. Three miles may sound a short distance to the civilian reader, but if he will consider the efforts of a great body of men and vehicles, pushing forward through the late hours of an afternoon by wretched lanes full of loose sand, and finding the darkness upon them with that distance still to do, he would perceive the importance of the gap. If he further considers that it was only the heads of the columns that had reached the high road by dark, and that two great bodies of men were stretched out two miles and more behind, and if he will add to all this the fact that fighting would have to be done before Wervicq, three miles away, could be occupied, let alone the river crossed, he will discover that Clerfayt had missed his appointment not by three miles only in space, but by the equivalent of half a day in time.
Even so he should have pushed on and have found himself at least in contact with the French posts before his advance was halted. He did not do so. He passed the night in bivouac with the heads of his columns no further south than the great high road.
So much for Clerfayt. The Republic would have cut off his head.
While Clerfayt was thus mishandling his distant and all-important department of the combined scheme, the corresponding advance from the valley of the Scheldt northward was proceeding in a manner which is best appreciated by taking the five columns seriatim and in three groups: the first group consisting of the first column (Bussche), the second group of the second and third columns (Otto and York), the third group of the fourth and fifth (Kinsky and the Arch-Duke).
I
THE FIRST COLUMN UNDER BUSSCHE
This column, as we have seen, consisted of only 4000 men, Hanoverians. Its function and general plan was to give the French the impression that they were being attacked by considerable forces at the very extremity of their advanced wedge, and thus to “hold” them there while the great bulk of the allies were really encircling them to the south and cutting them off from Lille.
When we bear this object in view, we shall see that Bussche with his little force did not do so badly. His orders were to advance with two-thirds of his men against Mouscron, a little place about five miles in front of the village of St Leger where he was concentrated; the remaining third going up the high road towards Courtrai. This last decision, namely, to detach a third of his troops, has been severely criticised, especially by English authorities, but the criticism is hardly just if we consider what Bussche had been sent out to do. He was, of course, to take Mouscron if he could and hold it, and if that had been the main object of the orders given him, it would indeed have been folly to weaken his already weak body by the detaching of a whole third of it four miles away upon the high road to the eastward. But the capture of Mouscron was not the main object set before Bussche. The main object was to “hold” the large French forces in the Courtrai district and to give them the impression of a main attack coming in that direction, and with that object in view it was very wise so to separate his force as to give Souham the idea that the French northern extremity was being attacked in several places at once.
With the early morning, then, of Saturday the 17th, Bussche sent rather less than 1500 men up the high road towards Courtrai, and, with rather more than 2500, marched boldly up against Mouscron, where, considering the immensely superior forces that the French could bring against him, it is not surprising that he was badly hammered. Indeed, but for the fact that the French were unprepared (as we saw in the section “The Preliminaries of the Battle”), he could not have done as much as he did, which was, at the first onslaught, to rush Mouscron and to hold it in the forenoon of that day. But the French, thoroughly alarmed by the event (which was precisely what the plan of the allies intended they should be), easily brought up overwhelming reinforcements, and Bussche’s little force was driven out of the town. It was not only driven out of the town, it was pressed hard down the road as far as Dottignies within a mile or two of the place from which it had started; but there it rallied and stood, and for the rest of the day kept the French engaged without further misfortune. A student of the whole action, careful to keep its proportions in mind and not to exaggerate a single instance, will not regard Bussche’s gallant attempt and failure before Mouscron as any part of the general breakdown. On the contrary, the stand which his little force made against far superior numbers, and the active cannonade which he kept up upon this extreme edge of the French front, would have been one of the major conditions determining the success of the allies if their enormously larger forces in other parts of the field had all of them kept their time-table and done what was expected of them.
II
THE SECOND AND THIRD COLUMNS UNDER OTTO AND THE DUKE OF YORK
On turning to the second group (the second column under Otto and the third under York), we discover a record of continuous success throughout the whole of that day, Saturday the 17th of May, which deserved a better fate than befell them upon the morrow.
(A) The Second Column under Otto
The second column under Otto, consisting of twelve battalions and ten squadrons, certain of the latter being English horse, and the whole command numbering some 10,000 men, advanced with the early morning of that same Saturday the 17th simultaneously with Bussche from Bailleul to Leers. It drove the French outposts in, carried Leers, and advanced further to Wattrelos. It carried Wattrelos.
It continued its successful march another three miles, still pressing in and thrusting off to its right the French soldiers of Compere’s command, until it came to what was then the little market-town of Tourcoing. It carried Tourcoing and held it. This uninterrupted series of successes had brought Otto’s troops forward by some eight miles from their starting-point, and had filled the whole morning, and Otto stood during the afternoon in possession of this advanced point, right on the line between Courtrai and Lille, and having fully accomplished the object which his superiors had set him.
From the somewhat higher roll of land which his cavalry could reach, and from which they could observe the valley of the Lys four miles beyond, they must have strained their eyes to catch some hint of Clerfayt’s troops, upon whose presence across the river on their side they had so confidently calculated, and which, had Clerfayt kept to his time-table and crossed the Lys at dawn, would now have been in the close neighbourhood of Tourcoing and in junction with this successful second column.
But there was no sign of any such welcome sight. The dull rolling plain, with its occasional low crests falling towards the river, betrayed the presence of troops in more than one position to the north and west. But those troops were not moving: they were holding positions, or, if moving, were obviously doing so with the object of contesting the passage of the river. They were French troops, not Austrian, that thus showed distinctly in rare and insufficient numbers along the southern bank of the Lys, and indeed, as we know, Clerfayt, during the whole of that afternoon of the 17th, was painfully bringing up his delayed pontoons, and was, until it was far advanced, upon the wrong side of the river.
Otto maintained his position, hoped against hope that Clerfayt might yet force his way through before nightfall, and was still master of Tourcoing and the surrounding fields when darkness came.
(B) The Third Column under York
Meanwhile York, with his 10,000 half British and half Austro-Hessian, had marched with similar success but against greater obstacles parallel with Otto, and to his left, and had successively taken every point in his advance until he also had reached the goal which had been set before him.
Details of that fine piece of work deserve full mention.
Delayed somewhat by a mist in the dark hours before dawn, York’s command had marched north-westward up the road from Templeuve, where now runs the little tramway reaching the Belgian frontier.
The French troops in front of him, as much as those who had met Otto a mile or two off to the right, and Bussche still further off at Mouscron, were taken aback by the suddenness and the strength of the unexpected blow. They stood at Lannoy. York cannonaded that position, sent certain of the British Light Dragoons round to the left to turn it, and attacked it in front with the Brigade of Guards. The enemy did not stand, and the British forces poured through Lannoy and held it just as Otto in those same hours was pouring into and holding Leers and Wattrelos. Beyond Lannoy, a matter of two miles or so, and still on that same road, was the small town, now swollen to a great industrial city, called Roubaix. The Duke of York left a couple of battalions of his allied troops (Hessians) to hold Lannoy, and with the rest of the column pursued his march.
Roubaix offered far more serious resistance than Lannoy had done. The element of surprise was, of course, no longer present. The French forces were concentrating. The peril they were in of being cut off was by this time thoroughly seized at their headquarters, and the roll of land immediately before Roubaix was entrenched and held by a sufficient force well gunned. A strong resistance was offered to the British advance, but once more the Brigade of Guards broke down that resistance and the place was taken with the bayonet.
York’s next objective, and the goal to which his advance had been ordered, was Mouveaux. Mouveaux is a village standing upon a somewhat higher roll of land rather more than two miles from the centre of Roubaix, in continuation of the direction which York’s advance had hitherto pursued. From Mouveaux the eye could overlook the plain reaching to the Lys and to Wervicq, some seven odd miles away, a plain broken by one or two slight hummocks of which the least inconspicuous holds the village of Linselles. Mouveaux was the point to which Clerfayt was expected to advance from his side. It was on a level with Tourcoing, and lay, as Tourcoing did, precisely upon the line between Courtrai and Lille. To reach Mouveaux, therefore, and not to be content with the capture of Roubaix, was consistent with and necessary to the general plan of the allies. Moreover, as Otto with the second column had taken Tourcoing, it was necessary that the third column should proceed to Mouveaux, unless Otto’s left or southern flank was to remain exposed and in peril. One may say, in general, that until Mouveaux was occupied the chance of joining hands with Clerfayt (supposing that General to have kept to his time-table and to be across the Lys and marching up to meet the columns from the Scheldt) was in peril. Therefore, until one has learnt what was happening to the fourth and the fifth columns, it is difficult to understand why the Duke of York, after the difficult capture of Roubaix, desired to make that point the utmost limit of his advance and for the moment to proceed no further. Without anticipating the story of the fourth and fifth columns, it is enough to say that the Duke of York’s desire not to advance beyond Roubaix was sufficiently excused by the aspect of the country to the west and south upon his left.
Roubaix overlooks from a slight elevation the valley of the Marque. Lest the word “valley” be misleading, let me hasten to add that that stream here flows at the bottom of a very slight and very broad depression. But, at any rate, from Roubaix one overlooks that depression for some miles; one sees five miles distant the fortifications of Lille, and the intervening country is open enough to betray the presence of troops. Indeed, once Roubaix was captured, the English commander could see across those fields, a couple of hours’ march away, the tents of the great French camp at Sainghin under the walls of the fortress.
Now, along that river valley and across those fields there should have been apparent in those mid hours of the day, when the Guards had stormed Roubaix, the great host of the fourth and fifth columns coming up in support of the second and third.
If the time-table had been observed, the Arch-Duke and Kinsky, over 25,000 men, should have been across the Marque before dawn, should have pushed back the French forces outside Lille, and should, long before noon, have been covering those fields between Roubaix and Lille with their advancing squadrons and battalions. There was no sign of them. If, or when, the French body near Lille were free to advance and attack the Duke of York’s left flank, there was no one between to prevent their doing so. That great body of the third and fourth columns, more than half of all the men who were advancing from the Scheldt to meet Clerfayt, had failed to come up to time. That was why the Duke of York desired to push no further than Roubaix, and even to leave only an advance guard to hold that place while he withdrew the bulk of his command to Lannoy.
But his decision was overruled. The Emperor and his staff, who, following up the march of this third column, were now at Templeuve, thought it imperative that Mouveaux should be held. Only thus, in their judgment, could the junction with Clerfayt (who, though late, must surely be now near at hand) be accomplished. And certainly, unless Mouveaux were held, Otto could not hold his advanced position at Tourcoing. The order was therefore sent to York to take Mouveaux. In the disastrous issue that order has naturally come in for sharp blame; but it must be remembered that much of the plan was already successfully accomplished, that Clerfayt was thought to be across the Lys, and that if the French around Courtrai, and hitherward from Courtrai to Tourcoing, were to be cut off, it was imperative to effect the junction with Clerfayt without delay. Had Clerfayt been, as he should have been at that hour in the afternoon of Saturday the 17th, between the Lys and the line Mouveaux-Tourcoing, the order given by the Austrian staff to the Duke of York would not only have been approved by the military opinion of posterity, but any other order would have been thought a proof of indecision and bad judgment.
Upon receiving this order to take Mouveaux, York obeyed. The afternoon was now far advanced, very heavy work had been done, a forward march of nearly six miles had been undertaken, accompanied by continual fighting — latterly, outside Roubaix, of a heavy sort. But if Mouveaux was to be held before nightfall, an immediate attack must be made, and York ordered his men forward.
Mouveaux stands upon one of those very slight crests which barely diversify the flat country in which Roubaix and Tourcoing stand. The summit of that crest is but little more than fifty feet higher than the bottom of the low, broad depression between it and the centre of Roubaix, of which swollen town it is to-day a western suburb. Slight as is the elevation, it does, as I have said, command a view towards the Lys and Wervicq; and the evenness and length of the very gentle slope upon the Roubaix side make it an excellent defensive position.
I have pointed out how the columns of attack as they advanced could not fail to find an increasing resistance. Roubaix had held out more strongly than Lannoy, Mouveaux was to hold out more strongly than Roubaix. The position was palisaded and entrenched. Redoubts had even been hastily thrown up by the French at either end of it, but the weight of the attacking column told. It was again the Guards who were given the task of carrying the trenches at the bayonet, and after a sharp struggle they were successful. The French, as they retired, set fire to the village (which stands upon the very summit of that roll of land), and were charged in their retirement by Abercromby with the English Dragoons. They left three hundred upon the field, and three field-pieces as well. Despite the great superiority of numbers which York’s columns still commanded over the enemy immediately before him, it was a brilliant feat, especially when one considers that it came at the very end of a day that was hot for the season, that had begun before one o’clock in the morning, and that had involved the carrying of three positions, each more stoutly defended than the last, within an advance of over seven miles.
Mouveaux thus carried, the head of York’s column was on a line with the head of Otto’s, which held Tourcoing just two miles away. The heads of either column now occupied the main road between Lille and Courtrai (which passes through Mouveaux and Tourcoing), and the heads of either column also held the slight crests from which the belated advance of Clerfayt from the Lys could be watched and awaited.
But though there was evidence of heavy fighting down in the river valley five miles to the north and west, and though it seemed probable from the sound of the firing that Clerfayt with the sixth body had crossed the Lys at Wervicq and was now on the right side of it, upon the southern bank, there was no sign of his advancing columns in those empty fields towards Linselles and the river over which the setting sun glared.
Neither, as his troops prepared to bivouac for the night upon the slopes of Mouveaux, could York, looking southward, find any indication of the fourth and fifth columns under Kinsky and the Arch-Duke which should have come up to this same position at Mouveaux by noon seven hours before. The flat and marshy fields upon either bank of the Marque were anxiously scanned in vain as the twilight deepened. Down there, far off, the cannon had been heard all that afternoon round the French camp at Sainghin, but nothing had come through.
It was therefore under a sense of isolation and of confusion, with the knowledge that their left flank was open, that Clerfayt in front of them was not yet in reach, that the second and third columns, which had so thoroughly accomplished their task, established their posts under the early summer night to await the chances of the morning.
III
THE FOURTH AND FIFTH COLUMNS UNDER KINSKY AND THE ARCH-DUKE CHARLES
Now what had happened to the fourth and fifth columns under Kinsky and the Arch-Duke? I must describe their fortunes, show why they had failed to come up, and thus complete the picture of the general advance from the Scheldt, before I turn to conclude the explanation of the disaster by detailing the further adventures of Clerfayt after he had crossed the Lys.
(A) The Fourth Column under Kinsky
Kinsky with his 11,000 men had been delayed, as we have seen, at Froidmont by the message which the Arch-Duke had sent him from St Amand, to the effect that the fifth column could not hope to be at Pont-à-Marcq before dawn upon the 17th.
At the moment, therefore, when in the small hours of Saturday the 17th Otto and the Duke of York started out simultaneously from Bailleul and Templeuve, Kinsky was still pinned to Froidmont. But he knew that the Arch-Duke had started with his great column some time after dark in the Friday night from St Amand, and when he estimated that they had proceeded far enough along the road to Pont-à-Marcq to be up level with him upon his left, Kinsky set his men in march and made for the Bridge of Bouvines, which was the crossing of the Marque immediately in front of him.
The Bridge of Bouvines lay right in front of the great French camp. It was strongly held, and the hither side of the river, as Kinsky approached it, was found to be entrenched. His men drove the French from those entrenchments, they retired over the bridge, and as they retired they broke it down. Upon the far side of the river in front of their camp the French further established a battery of heavy guns upon that slight slope which is now crowned by the Fort of Sainghin, and Kinsky could not force the passage until the fifth column, or at any rate the head of it, should begin to appear upon his left.
It will be seen upon the frontispiece map that when the Arch-Duke’s men reached Pont-à-Marcq and crossed the river there, they would take the French camp and the main French forces there in reserve, weaken the power of the French resistance at the Bridge of Bouvines, afford Kinsky the opportunity of crossing at that point, and that, immediately after that crossing, Kinsky and the Arch-Duke, having joined hands, would be in sufficient strength to push back the French from Sainghin and to march up north together towards Mouveaux. The appearance of their combined force at Mouveaux by noon would fulfil the time-table, and at mid-day of Saturday, if the time-table were thus fulfilled, the whole combined force of the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns would have been astraddle of the Lille-Courtrai Road, would have cut off Souham’s corps from Lille, and could await Clerfayt if he had not yet arrived. When, therefore, the Arch-Duke and the fifth column should have crossed the Marque at Pont-à-Marcq, the fortunes of the fourth column would have blended with it, and the story of the two would have been one. We may therefore leave Kinsky still waiting anxiously in front of the broken bridge at Bouvines for news of the Arch-Duke, and conclude the picture of the whole advance from the Scheldt by describing what had happened and was happening to that Commander and his great force of 17,000 to 18,000 men.
(B) The Fifth Column under the Arch-Duke Charles
When the Arch-Duke Charles had let Kinsky know upon the day before, the Friday, that he could not be at the appointed post of Pont-à-Marcq by the next daybreak, he had implied that somewhere in the early morning of that Saturday, at least, he would be there. Exactly how early neither he nor Kinsky could tell. His troops had sixteen full miles to march; they had but one road by which to advance, and they were fatigued with the enormous exertion of that hurried march northward to St Amand, which has already been set down.
Such were the delays at St Amand in preparing that advance, that the night was far gone before the fifth column took the road to Pont-à-Marcq, and the effort that was to be demanded of it was more than should have been justly demanded of any troops. Indeed, the idea that a body of this great size, tied to one road, could suffer the severe effort of the rush from the south to St Amand, followed by a night-march, that march to be followed by heavy fighting during the ensuing morning and a further advance of eight or nine miles during the forenoon, was one of the weakest points in the plan of the allies. No such weakness would have been apparent if the main body of the Austrians under the Arch-Duke had been called up on the 12th instead of the 14th, and had been given two more days in which to cover the great distance. But, as it was, the delay of the Emperor and his staff in calling up that main body had gravely weakened its effective power.
The league-long column thrust up the road through the darkness hour upon hour, with its confusion of vehicles and that difficulty in marshalling all units which is the necessary handicap of an advance in the darkness. Long before their task was so much as half accomplished, it was apparent not only that Pont-à-Marcq would not be reached at dawn, but that the mass of the infantry would not be at that river-crossing until the morning was far spent.
When day broke, though cavalry had been set forward at greater speed, the heads of the infantry column were but under the Hill of Beuvry. It was long after six before the force had passed through Orchies, and though Kinsky learnt, in the neighbourhood of eight o’clock, that the cavalry of the fifth column were up on a level with him and had reached the river, the main force of the fifth column was not available for crossing Pont-à-Marcq until noon, and past noon.
Kinsky, thus tied to the broken Bridge of Bouvines until Pont-à-Marcq should be forced, saw mid-day come and pass, and still his force and that of the Arch-Duke upon his left were upon the wrong side of the stream.
Yet another hour went by. His fourth column and the fifth should already have been nine miles up north, by Mouveaux, and they were not yet even across the Marque!
It was not until two o’clock that the passage of the river at Pont-à-Marcq was forced by the Arch-Duke Charles, and that, as the consequence of that passage of the stream, the French were taken in reverse in their camp at Sainghin and were compelled to fall back northward, leaving the passage at Bouvines free. Kinsky repaired the bridge, and was free to bring his 11,000 over, and the two extreme columns, the fourth and the fifth, would then have joined forces in the mid-afternoon of the Saturday, having accomplished their object of forcing the Marque and uniting for the common advance northward in support of Otto and the Duke of York.
Now, had the Arch-Duke Charles’ men been machines, this section of the general plan would yet have failed by half a day to keep its time-table: and by more than half a day: by all the useful part of a working day. By the scheme of time upon which the plan was based, the fifth column should have been across the Marque at dawn; by six, or at latest by seven o’clock the French should have been compelled to fall back from Sainghin, and the combined fourth and fifth columns should have been upon their northward march for Mouveaux. It was not seven o’clock, it was between three and four o’clock by the time the Arch-Duke was well across the Marque and the French retired; but still, if the men of this fifth column had been machines, Kinsky was now free to effect his junction across the Bridge of Bouvines, and the combined force would have reached the neighbourhood of Mouveaux and Tourcoing by nightfall, or shortly after dark.
But the men of the fifth column were not machines, and at that hour of the mid-afternoon of Saturday they had come to the limits of physical endurance. It was impossible to ask further efforts of them, or, if those efforts were demanded, to hope for success. In the Arch-Duke’s column by far the greater part of the 17,000 or 18,000 men had been awake and working for thirty-six hours. All had been on foot for at least twenty-four; they had been actually marching for seventeen, and had been fighting hard at the end of the effort and after sixteen miles of road. There could be no question of further movement that day: they bivouacked just north of the river, near where the French had been before their retirement, and Kinsky, seeing no combined movement could be made that day, kept his men also bivouacked near the Bridge of Bouvines.
Thus it was that when night fell upon that Saturday the left wing of the advance from the Scheldt had failed. And that is why those watching from the head of the successful third column at Mouveaux and Roubaix, under the sunset of that evening, saw no reinforcement coming up the valley of the Marque, caught no sign of their thirty thousand comrades advancing from the south, and despaired of the morrow.
SUMMARY OF SITUATION ON THE SOUTH BY THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, MAY 17th.
IF WE TAKE stock of the whole situation, so far as the advance of the five columns from the Scheldt was concerned, when darkness fell upon that Saturday we can appreciate the peril in which the second and third column under Otto and York lay.
The position which the plan had assigned to the four columns, second, third, fourth, and fifth, by noon of that Saturday (let alone by nightfall), is that marked upon the map by the middle four of the six oblongs in dotted lines marked B. Of these, the two positions on the right were filled, for the second and third columns had amply accomplished their mission. But the two on the left, so far from being filled, were missed by miles of space and hours of time. At mid-day, or a little after, when Kinsky and the Arch-Duke should have been occupying the second and third dotted oblong respectively, neither of them was as yet even across the Marque. Both were far away back at E, E: and these hopeless positions, E, E, right away behind the line of positions across the Courtrai-Lille road which the plan expected them to occupy by Saturday noon, Kinsky and the Arch-Duke pacifically maintained up to and including the night between Saturday and Sunday!
The Elements of Tourcoing
It is evident, therefore, that instead of all four columns of nearly sixty thousand men barring the road between Souham and Lille and effecting the isolation of the French “wedge” round Courtrai, a bare, unsupported twenty thousand found themselves that night alone: holding Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lannoy, Mouveaux, and thrust forward isolated in the midst of overwhelmingly superior and rapidly gathering numbers.
In such an isolation nothing could save Otto and York but the abandonment during the night of their advanced positions and a retreat upon the points near the Scheldt from which they had started twenty hours before.
The French forces round Lille were upon one side of them to the south and west, in number perhaps 20,000. On the other side of them, towards Courtrai, was the mass of Souham’s force which they had hoped to cut off, nearly 40,000 strong. Between these two great bodies of men, the 20,000 of Otto and York were in peril of destruction if the French awoke to the position before the retirement of the second and third columns was decided on.
It is here worthy of remark that the only real cause of peril was the absence of Kinsky and the Arch-Duke.
Certain historians have committed the strange error of blaming Bussche for what followed. Bussche, it will be remembered, had been driven out of Mouscron early in the day, and was holding on stubbornly enough, keeping up an engagement principally by cannonade with the French upon the line of Dottignies. It is obvious that from such a position he could be of no use to the isolated Otto and York five miles away. But on the other hand, he was not expected to be of any use. What could his 4000 have done to shield the 20,000 of Otto and York from those 40,000 French under Souham’s command? His business was to keep as many of the French as possible occupied away on the far north-east of the field, and that object he was fulfilling.
Finally, it may be asked why, in a posture so patently perilous, Otto and York clung to their advanced positions throughout the night? The answer is simple enough. If, even during the night, the fourth and fifth columns should appear, the battle was half won. If Clerfayt, of whom they had no news, but whom they rightly judged to be by this time across the Lys, were to arrive before the French began to close in, the battle would be not half won, but all won. Between 55,000 and 60,000 men would then be lying united across the line which joined the 40,000 of the enemy to the north with the 20,000 to the south. If such a junction were effected even at the eleventh hour, so long as it took place before the 20,000 French outside Lille and the 40,000 to the north moved upon them, the allies would have won a decisive action, and the surrender of all Souham’s command would have been the matter of a few hours. For a force cut in two is a force destroyed.
But the night passed without Clerfayt’s appearing, and before closing the story of that Saturday I must briefly tell why, though he had crossed the Lys in the afternoon, he failed to advance southward through the intervening five or six miles to Mouveaux.
CLERFAYT’S COLUMN.
CLERFAYT HAD, IN that extraordinary slow march of his, advanced by the Friday night, as I have said, no further than the great high road between Menin and Ypres. I further pointed out that though only three miles separated that point from Wervicq, yet those three miles meant, under the military circumstances of the moment, a loss of time equivalent to at least half a day.
We therefore left Clerfayt at Saturday’s dawn, as we left the Arch-Duke at the same time, far short of the starting-point which had been assigned to him.
Whereas the Arch-Duke, miles away over there to the south, had at least pushed on to the best of his ability through the night towards Pont-à-Marcq, Clerfayt did not push on by night to Wervicq as he should have done. He bivouacked with the heads of his columns no further than the Ypres road.
Nor did he even break up and proceed over the remaining three miles during the very earliest hours. For one reason or another (the point has never been cleared up) the morning was fairly well advanced when he set forth — possibly because his units had got out of touch and straggling in the sandy country, or blocked by vehicles stuck fast. Whatever the cause may have been, he did not exchange shots with the French outposts at Wervicq until well after noon upon that Saturday the 17th of May.
When at last he had forced his way into the town (the great bulk of which lies north of the river), he found the bridge so well defended that he could not cross it, or, at any rate, that the carrying of it — the chances of its being broken after the French should have retired and the business of bringing his great force across, with the narrow streets of the town to negotiate and the one narrow bridge, even if intact to use — would put him upon the further bank at a hopelessly late hour. Therefore did he call for his pontoons in order to solve the difficulty by bridging the river somewhat lower down. The Lys is here but a narrow stream, and it would be easy, with the pontoons at his disposal, to pass his troops over rapidly upon a broader front, making, if necessary, two wide bridges. I say “with the pontoons at his disposal.” But by the time Clerfayt had taken this decision and had sent for the pontoons, he found that they were not there!
His section of pontoons had not kept abreast with the rest of the army, and their delay had not been notified to him. It was not until quite late in the day that they arrived; it was not until evening that the laying of the pontoons began, nor till midnight that he was passing the first of his troops over.
He did not get nor attempt to get the mass of his sixteen or seventeen thousand across in the darkness. He bivouacked the remainder upon the wrong side of the river and waited for the morrow.
So that Saturday ended, with Otto and York isolated at the central meeting-place round Tourcoing-Mouveaux, which they alone had reached; with the Arch-Duke Charles and Kinsky bivouacked miles away to the south on either side of the Bridge of Bouvines; and with Clerfayt still, as to the bulk of his force, on the wrong side of the Lys.
It was no wonder that the next day, Sunday, was to see the beginning of disaster.
SUNDAY, MAY the 18th, 1794.
I HAVE SAID that, considering the isolated position in which York and Otto found themselves, with no more than perhaps 18,000 in the six positions of Leers, Wattrelos, and Tourcoing, Lannoy, Roubaix, and Mouveaux, the French had only to wake up to the situation, and Otto and York would be overwhelmed.
The French did wake up. How thoroughly taken by surprise they had been by the prompt and exact advance of Otto and York the day before, the reader has already been told. Throughout Saturday they remained in some confusion as to the intention of the enemy; and indeed it was not easy to grasp a movement which was at once of such great size, and whose very miscarriage rendered it the more baffling of comprehension. But by the evening of the day, Souham, calling a council of his generals at Menin, came to a decision as rapid as it was wise. Reynier, Moreau, and Macdonald, the generals of divisions that were under his orders, all took part in the brief discussion and the united resolve to which it led. “It was,” in the words of a contemporary, “one of those rare occasions in which the decision of several men in council has proved as effective as the decision of a single will.”
Of the troops which were, it will be remembered, dispersed to the north of the Lys, only one brigade was left upon the wrong side of the river to keep an eye on Clerfayt; all the rest were recalled across the stream and sent forward to take up positions north of Otto’s and Kinsky’s columns. Meanwhile the bulk of the French troops lying between Courtrai and Tourcoing were disposed in such fashion as to attack from the north and east, south and westward. Some 40,000 men all told were ready to close in with the first light from both sides upon the two isolated bodies of the allies. To complete their discomfiture, word was sent to Bonnaud and Osten, the generals of divisions who commanded the 20,000 about Lille, ordering them to march north and east, and to attack simultaneously with their comrades upon that third exposed side where York would receive the shock. In other words, the 18,000 or so distributed on the six points under Otto and York occupied an oblong the two long sides of which and the top were about to be attacked by close upon 60,000 men. The hour from which this general combined advance inwards upon the doomed commands of the allies was to begin was given identically to all the French generals. They were to break up at three in the morning. With such an early start, the sun would not have been long risen before the pressure upon Otto and York would begin.
When the sun rose, the head of Otto’s column upon the little height of Tourcoing saw to the north, to the north-east, and to the east, distant moving bodies, which were the columns of the French attack advancing from those quarters. As they came nearer, their numbers could be distinguished. A brigade was approaching them from the north and the Lys valley, descending the slopes of the hillock called Mont Halhuin. It was Macdonald’s. Another was on the march from Mouscron and the east. It was Compere’s. The General who was commanding for Otto in Tourcoing itself was Montfrault. He perceived the extremity of the danger and sent over to York for reinforcement. York spared him two Austrian battalions, but with reluctance, for he knew that the attack must soon develop upon his side also. In spite of the peril, in the vain hope that Clerfayt might yet appear, Mouveaux and Tourcoing were still held, and upon the latter position, between five and six o’clock in the morning, fell the first shots of the French advance. The resistance at Tourcoing could not last long against such odds, and Montfrault, after a gallant attempt to hold the town, yielded to a violent artillery attack and prepared to retreat. Slowly gathering his command into a great square, he began to move south-eastward along the road to Wattrelos. It was half-past eight when that beginning of defeat was acknowledged.
Meanwhile York, on his side, had begun to feel the pressure. Mouveaux was attacked from the north somewhat before seven o’clock in the morning, and, simultaneously with that attack, a portion of Bonnaud’s troops which had come up from the neighbourhood of Lille, was driving in York’s outposts to the west of Roubaix.
How, it may be asked, did the French, in order thus to advance from Lille, negotiate the passage of that little River Marque, which obstacle had proved so formidable a feature in the miscarriage of the great allied plan the day before? The answer is, unfortunately, easily forthcoming. York had left the bridges over the Marque unguarded. Why, we do not know. Whether from sheer inadvertence, or because he hoped that Kinsky had detached men for the purpose, for one reason or another he had left those passages free, and, by the bridge of Hempempont against Lannoy, by that of Breuck against Roubaix, Bonnaud’s and Osten’s men poured over.
As at Tourcoing, so at Mouveaux, a desperate attempt was made to hold the position. Indeed it was clung to far too late, but the straits to which Mouveaux was reduced at least afforded an opportunity for something of which the British service should not be unmindful. Immediately between Roubaix and the River Marque, Fox, with the English battalions of the line, was desperately trying to hold the flank and to withstand the pressure of the French, who were coming across the river more than twice his superiors in number. He was supported by a couple of Austrian battalions, and the two services dispute as to which half of this defending force was first broken. But the dispute is idle. No troops could have stood the pressure, and at any rate the defence broke down — with this result: that the British troops holding Mouveaux, Abercrombie’s Dragoons, and the Brigade of Guards, were cut off from their comrades in Roubaix. Meanwhile, Tourcoing having been carried and the Austrians driven out from thence, the eastern and western forces of the French had come into touch in the depression between Mouveaux and Roubaix, and it seemed as though the surrender or destruction of that force was imminent. Abercrombie saved it. A narrow gap appeared between certain forces of the French, eastward of the position at Mouveaux, and leaving a way open round to Roubaix. He took advantage of it and won through: the Guards keeping a perfect order, the rear defended by the mobility and daring of the Dragoons. The village of Roubaix, in those days, consisted in the main of one long straight street, though what is now the great town had already then so far increased in size as to have suburbs upon the north and south. The skirmishers of the French were in these suburbs. (Fox’s flank command had long ago retired, keeping its order, however, and making across country as best it could for Lannoy.) It was about half-past nine when Abercrombie’s force, which had been saved by so astonishing a mixture of chance, skill, coolness, and daring, filed into the long street of Roubaix. The Guards and the guns went through the passage in perfect formation in spite of the shots dropping from the suburbs, which were already beginning to harass the cavalry behind them. Immediately to their rear was the Austrian horse, while, last of all, defending the retreat, the English Dragoons were just entering the village. In the centre of this long street a market-place opened out. The Austrian cavalry, arrived at it, took advantage of the room afforded them; they doubled and quadrupled their files until they formed a fairly compact body, almost filling the square. It was precisely at this moment that the French advance upon the eastern side of the village brought a gun to bear down the long straight street and road, which led from the market square to Wattrelos. The moment it opened fire, the Austrians, after a vain attempt to find cover, pressed into the side streets down the market-place, fell into confusion. There is no question here of praise or blame: a great body of horsemen, huddled in a narrow space, suddenly pounded by artillery, necessarily became in a moment a mass of hopeless confusion. The body galloped in panic out of the village, swerved round the sharp corner into the narrower road (where the French had closed in so nearly that there was some bayonet work), and then came full tilt against the British guns, which lay blocking the way because the drivers had dismounted or cut the traces and fled. In the midst of this intolerable confusion a second gun was brought to bear by the French, and the whole mob of ridden and riderless horses, some dragging limbers, some pack-horses charged, many more the dispersed and maddened fragments of the cavalry, broke into the Guards, who had still kept their formation and were leading what had been but a few moments before an orderly retreat.
It is at this point, I think, that the merit of this famous brigade and its right to regard the disaster not with humiliation but with pride, is best established. For that upon which soldiers chiefly look is the power of a regiment to reform. The Guards, thus broken up under conditions which made formation for the moment impossible, and would have excused the destruction of any other force, cleared themselves of the welter, recovered their formation, held the road, permitted the British cavalry to collect itself and once more form a rearguard, and the retreat upon Lannoy was resumed by this fragment of York’s command in good order: in good order, although it was subjected to heavy and increasing fire upon either side.
It was a great feat of arms.
As for the Duke of York, he was not present with his men. He had ridden off with a small escort of cavalry to see whether it might not be possible to obtain some reinforcement from Otto, but the French were everywhere in those fields. He found himself with a squadron, with a handful, and at last alone, until, a conspicuous figure with the Star of the Garter still pinned to his coat, he was chivied hither and thither across country, followed and flanked by the sniping shots of the French skirmishers in thicket and hedge; after that brief but exceedingly troubled ride, Providence discovered him a brook and a bridge still held by some of Otto’s Hessians. He crossed it, and was in safety.
His retreating men — those of them that remained, and notably the remnant of the Dragoons and the Guards — were still in order as they approached Lannoy. They believed, or hoped, that that village was still in possession of the Hessians whom York had left there. But the French attack had been ubiquitous that morning. It had struck simultaneously upon all the flanks. At Roubaix as at Mouveaux, at Lannoy as at Roubaix, and the Guards and the Dragoons within musket shot of Lannoy discovered it, in the most convincing fashion, to be in the hands of the enemy. After that check order and formation were lost, and the remaining fragment of the Austrian and British who had marched out from Templeuve the day before 10,000 strong, hurried, dispersed over the open field, crossed what is now the Belgian border, and made their way back to camp.
Thus was destroyed the third column, which, of all portions of the allied army, had fought hardest, had most faithfully executed its orders, had longest preserved discipline during a terrible retreat and against overwhelming numbers: it was to that discipline that the Guards in particular owed the saving from the wreck of so considerable a portion of their body. Of their whole brigade just under 200 were lost, killed, wounded or taken prisoners. The total loss of the British was not quite five times this — just under 1000, — but of their guns, twenty-eight in number, nineteen were left in the hands of the enemy.
There is no need to recount in detail the fate of Otto’s column. As it had advanced parallel in direction and success to the Duke of York’s, it suffered a similar and parallel misfortune. As the English had found Lannoy occupied upon their line of retreat, so Otto’s column had found Wattrelos. As the English column had broken at Lannoy, so the Austrian at Leers. And the second column came drifting back dispersed to camp, precisely as the third had done. When the fragments were mustered and the defeat acknowledged, it was about three o’clock in the afternoon.
For the rest of the allied army there is no tale to tell, save with regard to Clerfayt’s command; the fourth and the fifth columns, miles away behind the scene of the disaster, did not come into action. Long before they could have broken up after the breakdown through exhaustion of the day before, the French were over the Marque and between them and York. When a move was made at noon, it was not to relieve the second and third columns, for that was impossible, though, perhaps, if they had marched earlier, the pressure they would have brought to bear upon Bonnaud’s men might have done something to lessen the disaster. It is doubtful, for the Marque stood in between and the French did not leave it unguarded.
Bussche, true to his conduct of the day before, held his positions all day and maintained his cannonade with the enemy. It is true that there was no severe pressure upon him, but still he held his own even when the rout upon his left might have tempted him to withdraw his little force.
As for Clerfayt, he had not all his men across the Lys until that very hour of seven in the morning when York at Mouveaux was beginning to suffer the intolerable pressure of the French, and Otto’s men at Tourcoing were in a similar plight.
By the time he had got all his men over, he found Vandamme holding positions, hastily prepared but sufficiently well chosen, and blocking his way to the south. With a defensive thus organised, though only half as strong as the attack, Vandamme was capable of a prolonged resistance; and while it was in progress, reinforcements, summoned from the northern parts of the French line beyond Lille, had had time to appear towards the west. He must have heard from eight o’clock till noon the fire of his retreating comrades falling back in their disastrous retreat, and, rightly judging that he would have after mid-day the whole French army to face, he withdrew to the river, and had the luck to cross it the next day without loss: a thing that the French now free from the enemy to the south should never have permitted.
So ended the Battle of Tourcoing, an action which, for the interest of its scheme, for the weight of its results, and, above all, for the fine display of courage and endurance which British troops showed under conditions that should normally have meant annihilation, deserves a much wider fame in this country than it has obtained.
WATERLOO
I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
IT MUST CONTINUALLY be insisted upon in military history, that general actions, however decisive, are but the functions of campaigns; and that campaigns, in their turn, are but the functions of the political energies of the governments whose armies are engaged.
The object of a campaign is invariably a political object, and all its military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that political object.
One human community desires to impose upon the future a political condition which another human community rejects; or each is attempting to impose upon the future, conditions irreconcilable one with the other. Until we know what those conditions are, or what is the political objective of each opponent, we cannot decide upon the success of a campaign, nor give it its true position in history.
Thus, to take the simplest and crudest case, a nation or its government determines to annex the territory of a neighbour; that is, to subject a neighbouring community to the laws of the conqueror. That neighbouring community and its government, if they are so old-fashioned as to prefer freedom, will resist by force of arms, and there will follow what is called a “campaign” (a term derived from the French, and signifying a countryside: for countrysides are the theatres of wars). In this campaign the political object of the attempted conquest on the one hand, and of resistance to it on the other, are the issue. The military aspect of the campaign is subsidiary to its political objects, and we judge of its success or failure not in military but in political terms.
The prime military object of a general is to “annihilate” the armed force of his opponents. He may do this by breaking up their organisation and dispersing them, or by compelling the surrender of their arms. He may achieve success in this purely military object in any degree. But if, as an end and consequence of his military success, the political object be not achieved — if, for instance, in the particular case we are considering, the neighbouring community does not in the future obey laws dictated to it by the conqueror, but remains autonomous — then the campaign has failed.
Such considerations are, I repeat, the very foundation of military history; and throughout this Series they will be insisted upon as the light in which alone military history can be understood.
It is further true that not only may a campaign be successful in the military sense, and yet in the largest historical sense be a failure, but, quite evidently, the actions in a campaign may each be successful and yet the campaign a failure; or each action may, on the whole, fail, and yet that campaign be a success. As the old formulæ go, “You can win every battle and lose your campaign.” And, again, “A great general does not aim at winning battles, but at winning his campaign.” An action results from the contact of the opposing forces, and from the necessity in which they find themselves, after such contact, of attempting the one to disorganise or to capture the other. And in the greater part actions are only “accepted,” as the phrase goes, by either party, because each party regards the action as presenting opportunities for his own success.
A campaign can perfectly well be conceived in which an opponent, consciously inferior in the field, will avoid action throughout, and by such a plan can actually win the campaign in the end. Historical instances of this, though rare, exist. And there have even been campaigns where, after a great action disastrous to one side, that side has yet been able to keep up a broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and exhausting to baulk the conqueror of his political object in the end.
In a word, it is the business of the serious student in military history to reverse the popular and dramatic conception of war, to neglect the brilliance and local interest of a battle for the larger view of the whole operations; and, again, to remember that these operations are not an end in themselves, but are only designed to serve the political plan of the government which has commanded them.
Judged in this true light, we may establish the following conclusions with regard to the battle of Waterloo.
First, the battle of Waterloo was a decisive action, the result of which was a complete military success for the Allies in the campaign they had undertaken, and a complete military defeat for Napoleon, who had opposed them.
This complete military success of the Allies’ campaign was, again, equivalent to a success in their immediate political object, which was the overthrow of Napoleon’s personal power, the re-establishment of the Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before.
Had the effect of this battle and that campaign been permanent, one could speak of their success as complete; but when we discuss that largest issue of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which Waterloo so decisively concluded really effected its object, considering that that object was the permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent re-establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled to arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary with the varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because the drama is not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of all, singularly modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo.
It is obvious, at the first glance we take of European history during, say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy in Waterloo year, that the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action.
The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the old idea of a monarch governing his various “peoples,” and the whole history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence, the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme, etc.) — these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which that older society had fought to restore.
On the other hand, the advance of all this was much slower, much more disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had Napoleon not failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and fallen for ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by the will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.
We may sum up, then, and say that the political effect of the battle of Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for the Allies: that their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century has reversed; but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of society and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had set out to establish.
There is a side question attached to all this, with which I shall conclude, because it forms the best introduction to what is to follow: that question is,— “Would Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even if he had triumphed instead of fallen upon the 18th of June 1815?” In other words, was Waterloo one of these battles the winning or losing of which by either side, meant a corresponding decisive result to that side? Had Wellington’s command broken at Waterloo before the arrival of Blucher, would Napoleon’s consequent victory have meant as much to him as his defeat actually meant to the allies?
The answer of history to this question is, No. Even had Napoleon won on that day he would have lost in the long run.
The date to which we must affix the reverse of Napoleon’s effort is not the 18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October 1812, when the Grand Army began its retreat from Moscow; and the political decision, his failure in which was the origin of his fall, was not the decision taken in June 1815 to advance against the Allies in Belgium, but the decision taken in May 1812 to advance into the vast spaces of Russia. The decisive action which the largest view of history will record in centuries to come as the defeat which ruined Napoleon took place, not south of Brussels, but near the town of Leipzig, two years before. From the last moment of that three days’ battle (again the 19th of October, precisely a twelvemonth after the retreat from Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the French armies are continually falling back. Upon the 4th of April in the following year Napoleon abdicated; and exactly a month later, on the 4th of May, he was imprisoned, under the show of local sovereignty, in the island of Elba.
It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that, having escaped from that island, he landed upon the southern coast of France. There followed the doomed attempt to save somewhat of the Revolution and the Napoleonic scheme, which is known to history as the “hundred days.” Even that attempt would have been impossible had not the greater part of the commanders of units in the French army, that is, of the colonels of regiments, abandoned the Bourbon government, which had been restored at Paris, and decided to support Napoleon.
But even so, the experiment was hazardous in the extreme. Had the surrounding governments which had witnessed and triumphed over his fall permitted him, as he desired, to govern France in peace, and France alone, this small part of the revolutionary plan might have been saved from the general wreck of its fortunes and of his. But such an hypothesis is fantastic. There could be and there was no chance that these great governments, now fully armed, and with all their organised hosts prepared and filled with the memory of recent victory, would permit the restoration of democratic government in that France which had been the centre and outset of the vast movement they had determined to destroy. Further, though Napoleon had behind him the majority, he had not the united mass of the French people. An ordered peace following upon victory would have given him such a support; after his recent crushing defeat it was lacking. It was especially true that the great chiefs of the army were doubtful. His own generals rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more with doubt, while a few betrayed him early in the process of his attempted restoration.
It is impossible to believe that under such circumstances Napoleon could have successfully met Europe in arms. The military resources of the French people, though not exhausted, were reaching their term. New levies of men yielded a material far inferior to the conscripts of earlier years; and when the Emperor estimated 800,000 men as the force which he required for his effort, it was but the calculation of despair. Eight hundred thousand men: even had they been the harvest of a long peace, the whole armed nation, vigorous in health and fresh for a prolonged contest, would not have been sufficient. The combined Powers had actually under arms a number as great as that, and inexhaustible reserves upon which to draw. A quarter of a million stood ready in the Netherlands, another quarter of a million could march from Austria to cross the Rhine. North Italy had actually present against him 70,000 men; and Russia, which had a similarly active and ready force of 170,000, could increase that host almost indefinitely from her enormous body of population.
But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon found to his command not one quarter of that number armed and ready for war. Though Napoleon fell back upon that desperate resource of a starved army, the inclusion of militia; though he swept into his net the whole youth of that year, and accepted conscripts almost without regard to physical capacity; though he went so far as to put the sailors upon shore to help him in his effort, and counted in his effectives the police, the customs officials, and, as one may say, every uniformed man, he was compelled, even after two and a half months of effort, to consider his ready force as less than 300,000, indeed only just over 290,000.
There was behind this, it is true, a reserve of irregulars such as I have described, but the spirit furnishing those irregulars was uncertain, and the yield of them patchy and heterogeneous. Perhaps a quarter of the country responded readily to the appeal which was to call up a national militia. But even upon the eve of the Waterloo campaign there were departments, such as the Orne, which had not compelled five per cent. of those called to join the colours, such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers, which had not furnished eight per cent., and at the very last moment, of every twenty-five men called, not fifteen had come.
Add to this that Napoleon must strike at once or not at all, and it will readily be seen how desperate his situation was. His great chiefs of the higher command were not united in his service, the issue was doubtful, and to join Napoleon was to be a rebel should he fail, — was to be a rebel, that is, in case of a very probable event. The marvel is that so many of the leading men who had anything to lose undertook the chances at all. Finally, even of the total force available to him at that early moment when he was compelled to strike, Napoleon could strike with but a fraction. Less than half of the men available could he gather to deliver this decisive blow; and that blow, be it remembered, he could deliver at but one of the various hosts which were preparing to advance against him.
He was thus handicapped by two things: first, the necessity under which he believed himself to be of leaving considerable numbers to watch the frontiers. Secondly, and most important, the limitations imposed upon him by his lack of provision. With every effort, he could not fully arm and equip and munition a larger force than that which he gathered in early June for his last desperate throw; and the body upon the immediate and decisive success of which everything depended numbered but 124,000 men.
With this force Napoleon proceeded to attack the Allies in the Netherlands. There was a belt of French-speaking population. There was that body of the Allies which lay nearest to his hand, and over which, if he were but victorious, his victory would have its fullest effect. There were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the cutting off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. There was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and with the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium was the least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal in the long succession of struggle from which even a success at this moment would not spare him.
From all these causes combined, and for the further reason that Paris was most immediately threatened from this neighbouring Belgian frontier, it was upon that frontier that Napoleon determined to cast his spear. It was upon the 5th of June that the first order was sent out for the concentration of this army for the invasion of Belgium.
In ten days the 124,000 men, with their 370 guns, were massed upon the line between Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately upon the frontier, and ready to cross it. The way in which the frontier was passed and the river Sambre crossed before the first actions took place form between them the preliminaries of the campaign, and must be the subject of my next section.
II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
TO UNDERSTAND THE battle of Waterloo it is necessary, more perhaps than in the case of any other great decisive action, to read it strategically: that is, to regard the final struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only the climax of certain general movements, the first phase of which was the concentration of the French Army of the North, and the second the passage of the Sambre river and the attack. This second phase covered four days in time, and in space an advance of nearly forty miles.
There is a sense, of course, in which it is true of every battle that its result is closely connected with the strategy which led up to its tactical features: how the opposing forces arrived upon the field, in what condition, and in what disposition and at what time, with what advantage or disadvantage, is always necessarily connected with the history of the campaign rather than of the individual action; but, as we saw in the case of Blenheim, and as might be exemplified from a hundred other cases, the greater part of battles can be understood by following the tactical dispositions upon the field. They are won or lost, in the main, according to those dispositions.
With Waterloo it was not so. Waterloo was lost by Napoleon, won by the Allies, not mainly on account of tactical movements upon the field itself, but mainly on account of what had happened in the course of the advance of the French army to that field. In other words, the military character of that great decisive action is always missed by those who have read it isolated from the movements immediately preceding it.
Napoleon, determining to strike at Belgium under the political circumstances we have already seen, was attacking forces about double his own.
He was like one man coming up rapidly and almost unexpectedly to attack two: but hoping if possible to deal successively and singly with either opponent.
His doubtful chance of success in such a hazard obviously lay in his being able to attack each enemy separately: that is, to engage first one before the second came to his aid; then the second; and thus to defeat each in turn. The chance of victory under such circumstances is slight. It presupposes the surprise of the two allied adversaries by their single opponent, and the defeat of one so quickly that the other cannot come to his aid till all is over. But no other avenue of victory is open to a man fighting enemies of double his numerical strength; at least under conditions where armament, material, and racial type are much the same upon either side.
The possibility of dealing thus with his enemy Napoleon thought possible, and thought it possible from two factors in the situation before him.
The first factor was that the allied army, seeing its great numbers, the comparatively small accumulation of supplies which it could yet command, the great length of frontier which it had to watch, was spread out in a great number of cantonments, the whole stretch of which was no less than one hundred miles in length, from Liège upon the east or left to Tournay upon the west or right.
The second factor which gave Napoleon his chance was that this long line depended for its supply, its orders, its line of retreat upon two separate and opposite bases.
The left or eastern half, formed mainly of Prussian subjects, and acting under Blucher, had arrived from the east, looked for safety in case of defeat to a retreat towards the Rhine, obtained its supplies from that direction, and in general was fed from the east along those communications, continual activity along which are as necessary to the life of an army as the uninterrupted working of the air-tube is necessary to the life of a diver.
The western or right-hand part of the line, Dutch, German, Belgian, and British, acting under Wellington, depended, upon the contrary, upon the North Sea, and upon communication across that sea with England. That is, it drew its supplies and the necessaries of its existence from the west, the opposite and contrary direction from that to which the Prussian half of the Allies were looking for theirs. The effect of this upon the campaign is at once simple to perceive and of capital importance in Napoleon’s plan.
Wellington and Blucher did not, under the circumstances, oppose to Napoleon a single body drawing its life from one stream of communications. They did not in combination command a force defending one goal; they commanded two forces defending two goals. The thorough defeat of one would throw it back away from the other if the attack were delivered at the point where the two just joined hands; and the English or western half under Wellington was bound to movements actually contrary to the Prussian or eastern half under Blucher in case either were defeated before the other could come to its aid.
Napoleon, then, in his rapid advance upon Belgium, was a man conducting a column against a line. He was conducting that column against one special point, the point of junction between two disparate halves of an opposing line. He advanced therefore upon a narrow front perpendicular to, and aimed at the centre of, the long scattered cordon of his double enemy, which cordon it was his business if possible to divide just where the western end of one half touched the eastern end of the other. He designed to fight in detail the first portion he could engage, then to turn upon the other, and thus to defeat both singly and in turn.
I will put this strategical position before the reader in the shape of an English parallel in order to make it the plainer, and I will then, by the aid of sketch maps, show how the Allies actually lay upon the Belgian frontier at the moment when Napoleon delivered his attack upon it.
Imagine near a quarter million of men spread out in a line of separate cantonments from Windsor at one extremity to Bristol at the other; and suppose that the eastern half of this line from Windsor to as far west as Wallingford is depending for its supplies and its communications upon the river Thames and its road system, and is prepared in case of defeat to fall back, down the valley of that stream towards London.
On the other hand, imagine that the western half from Swindon to Bristol is receiving its supplies from the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and must in case of defeat fall back westward upon that line.
Now, suppose an invading column rather more than 120,000 strong to be advancing from the south against this line, but prepared to strike up from almost any point on the Channel. It strikes, as a fact, from Southampton, and marches rapidly north by Winchester and Newbury. By the time it has reached Newbury, the eastern half of the opposing line, that between Wallingford and Windsor, has concentrated to meet it, but is defeated in the neighbourhood of that town.
Such a battle at Newbury would correspond to the battle at Ligny (let it be fought upon a Friday). Meanwhile, the western half, hurrying up in aid, has failed to effect a junction before the eastern half was defeated, comes up too late above Newbury, and finding it is too late, retires upon Abingdon. The victorious invader pursues them, and at noon on the second day engages them in a long line which they hold in front of Abingdon.
If he has only to deal in front of Abingdon with this second or western half, which hurried up too late to help the defeated eastern half, he has very fair chances of success. He is slightly superior numerically; he has, upon the whole, better troops and he has more guns. But the eastern half of the defending army, which has been beaten at Newbury, though beaten, was neither destroyed nor dispersed, nor thrust very far back from the line of operations. It has retreated to Wallingford, that is towards the north, parallel to the retreat of the western half; and a few hours after this western half is engaged in battle with the invader in front of Abingdon, the eastern half appears upon that invader’s right flank, joins forces with the line of the defenders at Abingdon, and thus brings not only a crushing superiority of numbers upon the field against the invader, but also brings it up in such a manner that he is compelled to fight upon two fronts at once. He is, of course, destroyed by such a combination, and his army routed and dispersed. An action of this sort fought at Abingdon would correspond to the action which was fought upon the field of Waterloo, supposing, of course, for the purpose of this rough parallel, an open countryside without the obstacle of the river.
The actual positions of the two combined commands, the command of Blucher and the command of Wellington, which between them held the long line between Tournay and Liège, will be grasped from the sketch map upon the next page.
The reader who would grasp the campaign in the short compass of such an essay as this had best consider the numbers and the positions in a form not too detailed, and busy himself with a picture which, though accurate, shall be general.
Let him, then, consider the whole line between Liège and Tournay to consist of the two halves already presented: a western half, which we will call the Duke of Wellington’s, and an eastern half, which we will call Blucher’s: of these two the Duke of Wellington was Commander-in-chief.
Next, note the numbers of each and their disposition. The mixed force under the Duke of Wellington was somewhat over 100,000 men, with just over 200 guns. They consisted in two corps and a reserve. The first corps was under the Prince of Orange, and was mainly composed of men from the Netherlands. Its headquarters were at Braine le Comte. The second corps was under Lord Hill, and contained the mass of the British troops present. Its headquarters were at Ath. These two between them amounted to about half of Wellington’s command, and we find them scattered in cantonments at Oudenarde, at Ath, at Enghien, at Soignies, at Nivelles, at Roeulx, at Braine le Comte, at Hal. A reserve corps under the Duke’s own command was stationed at Brussels, and amounted to more than one-fifth, but less than one-quarter, of the whole force. The remaining quarter and a little more is accounted for by scattered cavalry (mainly in posts upon the river Dender), by the learned arms, gunners and sappers, distributed throughout the army, and by troops which were occupying garrisons — in numbers amounting to rather more than ten per cent. of the force.
The eastern Prussian or left half of the line was, as is apparent in the preceding map, somewhat larger. It had a quarter more men and half as many guns again as that under the Duke of Wellington, and it was organised into four army corps, whose headquarters were respectively Charleroi, Namur, Ciney, and Liège.
The whole line, therefore, which was waiting the advance of Napoleon, was not quite two and a third hundred thousand men, with rather more than 500 guns. Of this grand total of the two halves, Wellington’s and Blucher’s combined, about eighteen per cent. came from the British Islands, and of that eighteen per cent., again, a very large proportion — exactly how large it is impossible to determine — were Irish.
Now let us turn to the army which Napoleon was leading against this line of Wellington and Blucher. It was just under one hundred and a quarter thousand men strong, that is, just over half the total number of its opponents. It had, however, a heavier proportion of guns, which were two-thirds as numerous as those it had to meet.
This “Army of the North” was organised in seven great bodies, unequal in size, but each a unit averaging seventeen odd thousand men. These seven great bodies were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Army Corps, the 6th Army Corps, the Imperial Guard, and the reserve cavalry under Grouchy.
The concentration of this army began, as I said in a previous section, upon the 5th of June, and was effected with a rapidity and order which are rightly regarded as a model by all writers upon military science.
The French troops, when the order for concentration was given, stretched westward as far as Lille, eastward as far as Metz, southward as far as Paris, in the neighbourhood of which town was the Imperial Guard. The actual marching of the various units occupied a week. Napoleon was at the front on the night of the 13th of June; the whole army was upon the 14th drawn up upon a line stretched from Maubeuge to Philippeville, and the attack was ready to begin.
The concentration had been effected with singular secrecy, as well as with the promptitude and accuracy we have noted; and though the common opinion of Wellington and Blucher, that Napoleon had no intention of attacking, reposed upon sound general judgment — for the hazard Napoleon was playing in this game of one against two was extreme, — nevertheless it is remarkable that both of these great commanders should have been so singularly ignorant of the impending blow. Napoleon himself was actually over the frontier at the moment when Wellington was writing at his ease that he intended to take the offensive at the end of the month, and Blucher, a few days earlier, had expressed the opinion that he might be kept inactive for a whole year, since Bonaparte had no intention of attacking.
By the evening of Wednesday, June the 14th, all was ready for the advance, which was ordered for the next morning.
It would but confuse the general reader to attempt to carry with him through this short account the name and character of each commander, but it is essential to remember one at least — the name of Erlon; and he should also remember that the corps which Erlon commanded was the First Corps; for, as we shall see, upon Erlon’s wanderings with this First Corps depended the unsatisfactory termination of Ligny, and the subsequent intervention of the Prussians at Waterloo, which decided that action.
It is also of little moment for the purpose of this to retain the names of the places which were the headquarters of each of these corps before the advance began. It is alone important to the reader that he should have a clear picture of the order in which this advance took place, for thus only will he understand both where it struck, and why, with all its rapidity, it suffered from certain shocks or jerks.
Napoleon’s advance was upon three parallel lines and in three main bodies.
The left or westernmost consisted of the First and Second Corps d’Armée; the centre, of the Imperial Guard, together with the Third and Sixth Corps. The third or right consisted of the Fourth Corps alone, with a division of cavalry. These three bodies, when the night of Wednesday the 14th of June fell, lay, the first at Sorle and Leer; the second at Beaumont, and upon the road that runs through it to Charleroi; the third at Philippeville.
It is at this stage advisable to consider why Napoleon had chosen the crossing of the Sambre at Charleroi and the sites immediately to the north on the left bank of that river as the point where he would strike at the long line of the Allies.
Many considerations converged to impose this line of advance upon Napoleon. In the first place, it was his task to cut the line of the Allies in two at the point where the extremity of one army, the Prussian, touched upon the extremity of the other, that of the Duke of Wellington. This point lay due north of the river-crossing he had chosen.
Again, the main road to Brussels was barred by the fortress of Mons, which, though not formidable, had been put in some sort of state of defence.
Again, as a glance at the accompanying map will show, the Prussian half of the allied line was drawn somewhat in front of the other half; and if Napoleon were to attack the enemy in detail, he must strike at the Prussians first. Finally, the line Maubeuge-Philippeville, upon which he concentrated his front, was, upon the whole, the most central position in the long line of his frontier troops, which stretched from Metz to the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover. Being the most central point, not only with regard to these two extremities, but also with regard to distant Paris, it was the point upon which his concentration could most rapidly be effected.
This, then, was the position upon the night of the 14th. The three great bodies of French troops (much the largest of which was that in the centre) to march at dawn, the light cavalry moving as early as half past two, ahead of the centre, the whole body of which was to march on Charleroi.
The left, that is the First and Second Corps, to cross the Sambre at Thuin, the Abbaye d’Aulne, and Marchiennes. (There were bridges at all three places.) The right or Fourth Corps was also to march on Charleroi.
Napoleon intended to be over the river with all his men by the afternoon of the 15th, but, as we shall see, this “bunching” of fully half the advance upon one crossing place caused, not a fatal, but a prejudicial delay. Among other elements in this false calculation was an apparent error on the part of Soult, who blundered in some way which kept the Third Corps with the centre instead of relieving the pressure by sending it over with the Fourth to cross, under the revised instructions, by Châtelet.
Disposition of the Four Prussian Corps on June 15th, 1815.
At dawn, then, the whole front of the French army was moving. It was the dawn of Thursday the 15th of June. By sunset of Sunday all was to be decided.
At this point it is essential to grasp the general scheme of the operations which are about to follow.
Put in its simplest elements and graphically, the whole business began in some such form as is presented in the accompanying sketch map.
Napoleon’s advancing army X Y Z, marching on Thursday, June 15th, strikes at O (which is Charleroi), the centre of the hundred-mile-long line of cantonments A B C —— D E F, which form the two armies of the Allies, twice as numerous as his own, but thus dispersed. Just behind Charleroi (O) are a hamlet and a village, called respectively Quatre Bras (Q) and Ligny (P).
Napoleon succeeds in bringing the eastern or Prussian half of this long line D E F to battle and defeating it at Ligny (P) upon the next day, Friday, June 16th, before the western half, or Wellington’s A B C, can come up in aid; and on the same day a portion of his forces, X, under his lieutenant, Marshal Ney, holds up that western half, just as it is attempting to effect its junction with the eastern half at Quatre Bras (Q), a few miles off from Ligny (P). The situation on the night of Friday, June 16th, at the end of this second step, is that represented in this second sketch map.
Believing the Prussians (D E F) to be retreating from Ligny towards their base eastward, and not northwards, Napoleon more or less neglects them and concentrates his main body in order to follow up Wellington’s western half (A B C), and in the hope of defeating that in its turn, as he has already defeated the eastern or Prussian half (D E F) at Ligny (P). With this object Napoleon advances northward during all the third day, Saturday, June 17th. Wellington (A B C) retreats north before him during that same day, and then, on the morrow, the 18th, Sunday, turns to give battle at Waterloo (W). Napoleon engages him with fair chances of success, and the situation as the battle begins at midday on the 18th is that sketched in this third map.
But unexpectedly, and against what Napoleon had imagined possible, the Prussians (D E F), when defeated at Ligny (P), did not retreat upon their base, and have not so suffered from their defeat as to be incapable of further action. They have marched northward parallel to the retreat of Wellington; and while Napoleon (X Y Z) is at the hottest of his struggle with Wellington (A B C) at Waterloo (W), this eastern or Prussian half (D E F) comes down upon his flank at (R) in the middle of the afternoon, and by the combined numbers and disposition of this double attack Napoleon’s army is crushed before darkness sets in.
Such, in its briefest graphic elements, is the story of the four days.
It will be observed from what we have said that the whole thing turns upon the incompleteness of Napoleon’s success at Ligny, and the power of retreating northward left to the Prussians after that defeat.
When we come to study the details of the story, we shall see that this, the Prussian defeat at Ligny, was thus incomplete because one of Napoleon’s subordinates, Erlon, with the First French Army Corps, received contradictory orders and did not come up as he should have done to turn the battle of Ligny into a decisive victory for Napoleon. A part of Napoleon’s forces being thus neutralised and held useless during the fight at Ligny, the Prussian army escaped, still formed as a fighting force, and still capable of reappearing, as it did reappear, at the critical moment, two days later, upon the field of Waterloo.
The Advance
THE RAPIDITY OF Napoleon’s stroke was marred at its very outset by certain misfortunes as well as certain miscalculations. His left, which was composed of the First and Second Corps d’Armée, did indeed reach the river Sambre in the morning, and had carried the bridge of Marchiennes by noon, but the First Corps, under Erlon, were not across — that is, the whole left had not negotiated the river — until nearly five o’clock in the afternoon.
Next, the general in command of the leading division of the right-hand body — the Fourth Corps — gave the first example of that of which the whole Napoleonic organisation was then in such terror, I mean the mistrust in the fortunes of the Emperor, and the tendency to revert to the old social conditions, which for a moment the Bourbons had brought back, and which so soon they might bring back again — he deserted. The order was thereupon given for the Fourth Corps or right wing to cross at Châtelet, but it came late (as late as half-past three in the afternoon), and did but cause delay. At this eastern end of Napoleon’s front the last men were not over the river until the next day.
As to the centre (the main body of the army), its cavalry reached Charleroi before ten o’clock in the morning, but an unfortunate and exasperating accident befallen a messenger left the infantry immediately behind without instructions. The cavalry were impotent to force the bridge crossing the river Sambre, which runs through the town, until the main body should appear, and it was not until past noon that the main body began crossing the Sambre by the Charleroi bridge. The Emperor had probably intended to fight immediately after having crossed the river. Gosselies, to the north, was strongly held; and had all his men been over the Sambre in the early afternoon as he had intended, an action fought suddenly, by surprise as it were, against the advance bodies of the First Prussian Corps, would have given the first example of that destruction of the enemy in detail which Napoleon intended. But the delays in the advance, rapid as it had been, now forbade any such good fortune. The end of the daylight was spent in pushing back the head of the First Prussian Corps (with a loss of somewhat over 1000 men), and when night fell upon that Thursday evening, the 15th of June, the French held Charleroi and all the crossings of the Sambre, but were not yet in a position to attack in force. Of the left, the First Corps were but just over the Sambre; on the right, that is, of the Fourth Corps, some units were still upon the other side of the river; while, of the centre, the whole of the Sixth Corps, and a certain proportion of cavalry as well, had still to cross!
Napoleon had failed to bring the enemy to action; that enemy had fallen back upon Fleurus, pretty nearly intact. All the real work had evidently to be put off, not only until the morrow, but until a fairly late hour upon the morrow, for it would take some time to get all the French forces on to the Belgian side of the river.
When this should have been accomplished, however, the task of the next day, the Friday, was clear.
It was Napoleon’s business to fall upon whatever Prussian force might be concentrated before him and upon his right and to destroy it, meanwhile holding back, by a force sent up the Brussels road to Quatre Bras, any attempt Wellington and his western army might make to join the Prussians and save them.
That night the Duke of Wellington’s army lay in its cantonments without concentration and without alarm, guessing nothing. The head of Wellington’s First Corps, the young Prince of Orange, who commanded the Netherlanders, had left his headquarters to go and dine with the Duke in Brussels.
Wellington, we may believe if we choose (the point is by no means certain), knew as early as three o’clock in the afternoon that the French had moved. It may have been as late as five, it may even have been six. But whatever the hour in which he received his information, it is quite certain that he had no conception of the gravity of the moment. As late as ten o’clock at night the Duke issued certain after-orders. He had previously given general orders (which presupposed no immediate attack), commanding movements which would in the long-run have produced a concentration, but though these orders were ordered to be executed “with as little delay as possible,” there was no hint of immediate duty required, nor do the posts indicated betray in any way the urgent need there was to push men south and east at the top of their speed, and relieve the Prussians from the shock they were to receive on the morrow.
These general orders given — orders that betray no grasp of the nearness of the issue — Wellington went off to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in what the impartial historian cannot doubt to be ignorance of the great stroke which Napoleon had so nearly brought off upon that very day, and would certainly attempt to bring off upon the next.
In the midst of the ball, or rather during the supper, definite news came in that the French army had crossed the river Sambre, and had even pushed its cavalry as far up the Brussels road as Quatre Bras.
The Duke does not seem to have appreciated even then what that should mean in the way of danger to the Prussians, and indeed of the breaking of the whole line. He left the dance at about two in the morning and went to bed.
He was not long left in repose. In the bright morning sunlight, four hours afterwards, he was roused by a visitor from the frontier, and we have it upon his evidence that the Duke at last understood what was before him, and said that the concentration of his forces must be at Quatre Bras.
In other words, Wellington knew or appreciated extremely tardily on that Friday morning about six that the blow was about to fall upon his Prussian allies to the south and east, and that it was the business of his army upon the west to come up rapidly in succour.
As will be seen in a moment, he failed; but it would be a very puerile judgment of this great man and superb defensive General to belittle his place in the history of war upon the basis of even such errors as these.
True, the error and the delay were prodigious and, in a fashion, comic; and had Napoleon delivered upon the Thursday afternoon, as he had intended, an attack which should have defeated the Prussians before him, Wellington’s error and delay would have paid a very heavy price.
As it was, Napoleon’s own delay in crossing the Sambre made Wellington’s mistake and tardiness bear no disastrous fruit. The Duke failed to succour the Prussians. His troops, scattered all over Western Belgium, did not come up in time to prevent the defeat of his allies at Ligny. But he held his own at Quatre Bras; and in the final battle, forty-eight hours later, the genius with which he handled his raw troops upon the ridge of Mont St Jean wiped out and negatived all his strategical misconceptions of the previous days.
From this confusion, this partial delay and error upon Napoleon’s part, this ignorance upon Wellington’s of what was toward, both of which marked Thursday the 15th, we must turn to a detailed description of that morrow, Friday the 16th, which, though it is less remembered in history than the crowning day of Waterloo, was, in every military sense, the decisive day of the campaign.
We shall see that it was Napoleon’s failure upon that Friday completely to defeat, or rather to destroy, the Prussian force at Ligny — a failure largely due to Wellington’s neighbouring resistance at Quatre Bras — which determined the Emperor’s final defeat upon the Sunday at Waterloo.
III. THE DECISIVE DAY
Friday the 16th of June
Quatre Bras and Ligny
We have seen what the 15th of June was in those four short days of which Waterloo was to be the climax. That Thursday was filled with an advance, rapid and unexpected, against the centre of the allied line, and therefore against that weak point where the two halves of the allied line joined, to wit, Charleroi and the country immediately to the north of that town and bridge.
We have further seen that while the unexpectedness of the blow was almost as thorough as Napoleon could have wished, the rapidity of its delivery, though considerable, had been less than he had anticipated. He had got by the evening of the day not much more than three-quarters of his forces across the river Sambre, and this passage, which was mapped out for completion before nightfall, straggled on through the whole morning of the morrow, — a tardiness the effects of which we shall clearly see in the next few pages.
Napoleon’s intention, once the Sambre was crossed, was to divide his army into two bodies: one, on the left, was to be entrusted to Ney; one, on the right, to Grouchy. A reserve, which the Emperor would command in person, was to consist in the main of the Imperial Guard.
The left-hand body, under Ney, was to go straight north up the great Brussels road.
Napoleon rightly estimated that he had surprised the foe, though he exaggerated the extent of that surprise. He thought it possible that this body to the left, under Ney, might push on to Brussels itself, and in any case could easily deal with the small and unprepared forces which it might meet upon the way. Its function in any case, whether resistance proved slight or formidable, was to hold the forces of Wellington back from effecting a junction with Blucher and the Prussians.
Meanwhile, the right-hand body, under Grouchy, was to fall upon the extremity of the Prussian line and overwhelm it.
Such an action against the head of the long Prussian cordon could lead, as the Emperor thought, to but one of two results: either the great majority of the Prussian force, coming up to retrieve this first disaster, would be defeated in detail as it came; or, more probably, finding itself cut off from all aid on the part of Wellington’s forces to the west and its head crushed, the long Prussian line would roll up backwards upon its communications towards the east, whence it had come.
In either case the prime object of Napoleon’s sudden move would have been achieved; and, with the body upon the left, under Ney, pushing up the Brussels road, the body upon the right, under Grouchy, pushing back the head of the Prussian line eastward, the two halves of the Allies would be separated altogether, and could later be dealt with, each in turn. The capital disadvantage under which Napoleon suffered — the fact that he had little more than half as many men as his combined enemies — would be neutralised, because he would, after the separation of those enemies into two bodies, be free to deal with either at his choice. Their communications came from diametrically opposite directions, and, as the plan of each depended upon the co-operation of the other, their separation would leave them confused and without a scheme.
Napoleon in all this exaggerated the facility of the task before him; but before we go into that, it is essential that the reader should grasp a certain character in all military affairs, to misunderstand which is to misread the history of armies.
This characteristic is the necessary uncertainty under which every commander lies as to the disposition, the number, the order, and the information of his opponents.
It is a necessary characteristic in all warfare, because it is a prime duty in the conduct of war to conceal from your enemy your numbers, your dispositions, and the extent of your information. It is a duty which every commander will always fulfil to his best ability.
It is therefore a characteristic, be it noted, which no development of human science can conceivably destroy, for with every advance in our means of communicating information we advance also in our knowledge of the means whereby the new means of communication may be interrupted. An advantage over the enemy in the means one has of acquiring knowledge with regard to him must, of course, always be of supreme importance, and when those means are novel, one side or the other is often beforehand for some years with the new science of their use. When such is the case, science appears to uninstructed opinion to have changed this ancient and fixed characteristic which is in the very nature of war. But in fact there has been no such change. Under the most primitive conditions an advantage of this type was of supreme importance; under conditions the most scientific and refined it is an advantage that may still be neutralised if the enemy has learnt means of screening himself as excellent as our means of discovering him. Even the aeroplane, whose development in the modern French service has so vastly changed the character of information, and therefore of war, can never eliminate the factor of which I speak. A service possessed of a great superiority in this new arm will, of course, be the master of its foe; but when the use of the new arm is spread and equalised among all European forces so that two opposing forces are equally matched even in this new discovery, then the old element of move and countermove, feint, secrecy, and calculated confusion of an adversary, will reappear.
In general, then, to point out the ignorance and the misconceptions of one commander is no criticism of a campaign until we have appreciated the corresponding ignorance and misconceptions of the other. We have already seen Wellington taken almost wholly by surprise on the French advance; we shall see him, even when he appreciated its existence, imagining it to be directed principally against himself. We shall similarly see Napoleon underestimating the Prussian force in front of him, and underestimating even that tardy information which had reached Wellington in time for him to send troops up the Brussels road, and to check the French advance along it. But we must judge either of the two great opponents not by a single picture of his own misconceptions alone, but by the combined picture of the misconceptions of both, and especially by a consideration of the way in which each retrieved or attempted to retrieve the results of those misconceptions when a true idea of the enemy’s dispositions was conveyed to him.
Here, then, we have Napoleon on the morning of Friday the 16th of June prepared to deal with the Prussians. It is his right-hand body, under Grouchy, which is deputed to do this, while he sends up the left-hand body, under Ney, northwards to brush aside, or, at the worst, at least to hold off whatever of the Duke of Wellington’s command may be found upon the Brussels road attempting to join the Prussians.
The general plan of what happened upon that decisive 16th is simple enough.
The left-hand body, under Ney, goes forward up the Brussels road, finds more resistance than it expected, but on the whole performs its task and prevents any effective help being given by the western half of the Allies — Wellington’s half — to the eastern half — the Prussian half. But it only prevents that task with difficulty and at the expense of a tactical defeat. This action is called Quatre Bras.
Meanwhile, the right-hand body equally accomplishes the elements of its task, engages the head of the Prussian line and defeats it, with extreme difficulty, just before dark. This action is called Ligny.
But the minor business conducted by the left, under Ney, is only just successful, and successful only in the sense that it does, at vast expense, prevent a junction of Wellington with Blucher. The major business conducted on the right, by Napoleon himself, in support of Grouchy, is disappointing. The head of the Prussian line is not destroyed; the Prussian army, though beaten, is free to retreat in fair order, and almost in what direction it chooses.
The ultimate result is that Wellington and Blucher do manage to effect their junction on the day after the morrow of Ligny and Quatre Bras, and thus defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
Now, why were both these operations, Quatre Bras and Ligny, incompletely successful? Partly because there was more resistance along the Brussels road than Napoleon had expected, and a far larger body of Prussians in front of him than he had expected either; but much more because a whole French army corps, which, had it been in action, could have added a third to the force of either the right or the left wing, was out of action all day; and wandered aimlessly over the empty zone which separated Ney from Grouchy, Quatre Bras from Ligny, the left half of Napoleon’s divided army from its right half.
This it was which prevented what might have been possible — the thrusting back of Wellington along the Brussels road, and even perhaps the disorganisation of his forces. This it was which missed what was otherwise certainly possible — the total ruin of the Prussian army.
This army corps thus thrown away unused in hours of aimless marching and countermarching was the First Army Corps. Its commander was Erlon; and the enormous blunder or fatality which permitted Erlon and his 20,000 to be as useless upon the 16th of June as though they had been wiped out in some defeat is what makes of the 16th of June the decisive day of the campaign.
It was Erlon’s failure to be present either with Ney or with Grouchy, either upon the left or upon the right, either at Quatre Bras or at Ligny, while each of those two actions were in doubt, which made it possible for Wellington’s troops to stand undefeated in the west, for the Prussians to retire — not intact, but still an army — from the east, and for both to unite upon the day after the morrow, the Sunday, and destroy the French army at Waterloo.
It is upon Erlon’s blunder or misfortune that the whole issue turns, and upon the Friday, the 16th of June, in the empty fields between Quatre-Bras and Ligny, much more than upon the famous Sunday at Waterloo, that the fate of Napoleon’s army was decided.
In order to make this clear, let us first follow what happened in the operations of Napoleon’s right wing against the Prussians opposed to it, — operations which bear in history the name of “the Battle of Ligny.”
LIGNY
“If they fight here they will be damnably mauled.”
(Wellington’s words on seeing the defensive positions chosen by the Prussians at Ligny.)
Napoleon imagined that when he had crossed the Sambre with the bulk of his force, the suddenness of his attack (for, though retarded as we have seen, and though leaving troops upon the wrong bank of the river, it was sudden) would find the Prussian forces in the original positions wherein he knew them to have lain before he marched. He did not think that they would yet have had the time, still less the intention, to concentrate. Those original positions the map upon makes plain.
The 124,000 men and more, which lay under the supreme command of Blucher, had been spread before the attack began along the whole extended line from Liège to Charleroi, and had been disposed regularly from left to right in four corps d’armée.
The first of these had its headquarters in Charleroi itself, its furthest outpost was but five miles east of the town, its three brigades had Charleroi for their centre; its reserve cavalry was at Sombreffe, its reserve artillery at Gembloux. The Second Corps had its headquarters twenty miles away east, at Namur, and occupied posts in the country as far off as Hannut (thirty miles away from Charleroi).
The Third Corps had its headquarters at Ciney in the Ardennes, and was scattered in various posts throughout that forest, its furthest cantonment being no nearer than Dinant, which, by the only good road available, was nearer forty than thirty miles from Napoleon’s point of attack.
Finally, the Fourth Corps was as far away as Liège (nearer fifty than forty miles by road from the last cantonment of the First Corps), and having its various units scattered round the neighbourhood of that town.
Napoleon, therefore, attacking Charleroi suddenly, imagined that he would have to deal only with the First Corps at Charleroi and its neighbourhood. He did not think that the other three corps had information in time to enable them to come up westward towards the end of the line and meet him. The outposts of the First Corps had, of course, fallen back before the advance of the Emperor’s great army; the mass of that First Corps was, he knew, upon this morning of the 16th, some mile or two north and east of Fleurus, astraddle of the great road which leads from Charleroi to Gembloux. At the very most, and supposing this First Corps (which was of 33,000 men, under Ziethen) had received reinforcements from the nearest posts of the Second and the Third Corps, Napoleon did not think that he could have in front of him more than some 40,000 men at the most.
He was in error. It had been arranged among the Prussian leaders that resistance to Napoleon, when occasion might come for it, should be offered in the neighbourhood of the cross-roads where the route from Charleroi to Gembloux crosses that from Nivelles to Namur. In other words, they were prepared to stand and fight between Sombreffe and the village of Ligny. The plan had been prepared long beforehand. The whole of the First Corps was in position with the morning, awaiting the Emperor’s attack. The Second Corps had been in motion for hours, and was marching up during all that morning. So was the Third Corps behind it. Blucher himself had arrived upon the field of battle the day before (the 15th), and had written thence to his sovereign to say that he was fully prepared for action the next day.
Indeed, Blucher on the 15th confidently expected victory, and the end of the campaign then and there. He had a right to do so, for Napoleon’s advance had been met by so rapid a concentration that, a little after noon on that Friday the 16th, and before the first shots were fired, well over 80,000 men were drawn up to receive the shock of Napoleon’s right wing. But that right wing all told, even when the belated French troops beyond the Sambre had finally crossed that river, and even when the Emperor had brought up the Guard and the reserve, numbered but 63,000. Supposing the French had been able to use every man, which they were not, they counted but seven to nine of their opponents. And the nine were upon the defensive; the seven had to undertake the task of an assault.
It was late in the day before battle was joined. Napoleon had reached Fleurus at about ten o’clock in the morning, but it was four hours more before he had brought all his troops across the river, and by the time he had done so two things had happened. First, the Duke of Wellington (who, as we shall see later, had come to Quatre Bras that morning, and had written to Blucher telling him of his arrival) rode off in person to the Prussian positions and discussed affairs near the windmill of Bussy with the Prussian Commander-in-chief. In this conversation, Wellington undoubtedly promised to effect, if he could, a junction with the Prussians in the course of the afternoon. Even without that aid Blucher felt fairly sure of victory; with it, he could be perfectly confident.
The Prussian concentration before Ligny, showing the junction of the
First, Second, and Third Corps on the morning of June 16th,
and the inability of the Fourth Corps to come up in time.
As matters turned out, Wellington found himself unable to effect his junction with Blucher. Ney, as we shall see later, found in front of him on the Brussels road much heavier opposition than he had imagined, but Wellington was also surprised to find to what strength the French force under Ney was at Quatre Bras. Wellington, as we shall see, held his own on that 16th of June, but was quite unable to come up in succour of Blucher when the expected victory of that general turned to a defeat.
The second thing that happened in those hours was Napoleon’s discovery that the Prussian troops massing to oppose him before Ligny were going to be much more than a single corps. It looked to him more like the whole Prussian army. It was, indeed, three-quarters of that army, for it consisted of the First, the Second, and the Third Corps. Only the Fourth, with its headquarters at distant Liège, had not been able to arrive in time. This Fourth Corps would also have been present, and would probably have turned the scale in favour of the Prussians, had the staff orders been sent out promptly and conveyed with sufficient rapidity. As it was, its most advanced units got no further west, during the course of the action, than about halfway between Liège and the battlefield.
Napoleon was enabled to discover with some ease the great numbers which had concentrated to oppose him from the fact that these numbers had concentrated upon a defective position. Wellington, the greatest defensive general of his time, at once discovered this weakness in Blucher’s chosen battlefield, and was provoked by the discovery to the exclamation which stands at the head of this section. The rolling land occupied by the Prussian army lay exposed in a regular sweep downwards towards the heights upon which lay the French, and the Prussian army as it deployed came wholly under the view of its enemy. Nothing was hidden; and a further effect was that, as Napoleon himself remarked, all the artillery work of the French side went home. If a round missed the foremost positions of the Prussian army, it would necessarily fall within the ranks behind them.
This discovery, that there lay before him not one corps but a whole army, seemed to Napoleon, upon one condition, an advantage. The new development would, upon that one condition, give him, if his troops were of the quality he estimated them to be, a complete victory over the united Prussian force, and might well terminate the campaign on that afternoon and in that place. That one condition was the possibility of getting Ney upon the left, or some part at least of Ney’s force, to leave the task of holding off Wellington, to come down upon the flank of the Prussians from the north and west, to envelop them, and thus, in company with the troops of Napoleon himself, to destroy the three Prussian Army Corps altogether.
Had that condition been fulfilled, the campaign would indeed have come to an end decisively in Napoleon’s favour, and, as he put it in a famous phrase, “not a gun” of the army opposing him “should escape.”
Unfortunately for the Emperor, that one condition was not fulfilled. The 63,000 Frenchmen of the right wing, under Napoleon, did indeed defeat and drive off the 80,000 men opposed to them. But that opposing army was not destroyed; it was not contained; it remained organised for further fighting, and it survived to decide Waterloo.
In order to appreciate Napoleon’s idea and how it might have succeeded, let the reader consider the dispositions of the battle of Ligny.
The battlefield named in history after the village of Ligny consists of a number of communes, of which that village is the central one. The Prussian army held the villages marked on the map by the names of Tongrinelle and Tongrinne, to the east of Ligny; it held Brye, St Amand, and Wagnelée to the east. It held also the heights behind upon the great road leading from Nivelles to Namur. When Napoleon had at last got his latest troops over from beyond the Sambre on to the field of battle, which was not until just on two o’clock in the afternoon, the plan he formed was to hold the Prussian left and centre by a vigorous attack, that is, to pin the Prussians down to Tongrinne, Tongrinelle, and Ligny, while, on the other front, the east and south front of the Prussians, another vigorous attack should be driving them back out of Wagnelée and St Amand.
The plan can be further elucidated by considering the elements of the battle as they are sketched in the map over leaf. Napoleon’s troops at C C C were to hold the Prussian left at H, to attack the Prussian right at D, with the Guard at E left in reserve for the final effort.
By thus holding the Prussians at H and pushing them in at D, he would here begin to pen them back, and it needed but the arrival on the field of a fresh French force attacking the Prussians along A B to destroy the force so contained and hemmed in. For that fresh force Napoleon depended upon new and changed instructions which he despatched to Ney when he saw the size of the Prussian force before him. During Napoleon’s main attack, some portion of Ney’s force, and if possible the whole of it, should appear unexpectedly from the north and west, marching down across the fields between Wagnelée and the Nivelles-Namur road, and coming on the north of the enemy at A B, so as to attack him not only in the flank but in the rear. He would then be unable to retreat in the direction of Wavre (W) — a broken remnant might escape towards Namur (N). But it was more likely that the whole force would be held and destroyed.
Elements of Ligny.
Supposing that Napoleon’s 63,000 showed themselves capable of holding, let alone partially driving in, the 80,000 in front of them, the sudden and unexpected appearance of a new force in the height of the action, adding another twenty or thirty thousand to the French troops already engaged, coming upon the flank and spreading to the rear of the Prussian host, would inevitably have destroyed that host, and, to repeat Napoleon’s famous exclamation, “not a gun would have escaped.”
The reader may ask: “If this plan of victory be so obvious, why did Napoleon send Ney off with a separate left wing of forty to fifty thousand men towards Quatre Bras?”
The answer is: that when, upon the day before, the Thursday, Napoleon had made this disposition, and given it as the general orders for that Friday, he had imagined only one corps of Prussians to be before him.
The right wing, with which the Emperor himself stayed, numbering, as we have seen, about 63,000 men, would have been quite enough to deal with that one Prussian corps; and he had sent so large a force, under Ney, up the Brussels road, not because he believed it would meet with serious opposition, but because this was to be the line of his principal advance, and it was his intention to occupy the town of Brussels at the very first opportunity. Having dealt with the single Prussian corps, as he had first believed it would be, in front of Fleurus, he meant that same evening to come back in person to the Brussels road and, in company with Ney, to conduct decisive operations against Wellington’s half of the Allies, which would then, of course, be hopelessly outnumbered.
But when Napoleon saw, a little after midday of the Friday, that he had to deal with nearly the whole of the Prussian army, he perceived that the great force under Ney would be wasted out there on the west — supposing it to be meeting with little opposition — and had far better be used in deciding a crushing victory over the Prussians. To secure such a victory would, without bothering about the Duke of Wellington’s forces to the westward, be quite enough to determine the campaign in favour of the French.
As early as two o’clock a note was sent to Ney urging him, when he had brushed aside such slight resistance as the Emperor expected him to find upon the Brussels road, to return and help to envelop the Prussian forces, which the Emperor was about to attack. At that hour it was not yet quite clear to Napoleon how large the Prussian force really was. This first note to Ney, therefore, was unfortunately not as vigorous as it might have been; though, even if it had been as vigorous as possible, Ney, who had found unexpected resistance upon the Brussels road, could certainly not have come up to help Napoleon with his whole force. He might, however, have spared a portion of it, and that portion, as we shall see later, would have been most obviously Erlon’s corps — the First. Rather more than an hour later, at about a quarter-past three, when Napoleon had just joined battle with the Prussians, he got a note from Ney informing him that the left wing was meeting with considerable resistance, and could hardly abandon the place where it was engaged before Quatre Bras to come up against the Prussian flank at Ligny. Napoleon sent a note back to say that, none the less, an effort must be made at all costs to send Ney’s forces to come over to him to attack the Prussian flank, for such an attack would mean the winning of a great decisive battle.
The distance over which these notes had to be carried to and fro, from Napoleon to Ney, was not quite five miles. The Emperor might therefore fairly expect after his last message that in the late middle of the afternoon — say half-past five or six — troops would appear upon his north-west horizon and march down to his aid. In good time such troops did appear; how inconclusively it will be my business to record.
Meanwhile, Napoleon had begun the fight at Ligny with his usual signal of three cannonshots, and between three and four o’clock the front of the whole army was engaged. It was for many hours mere hammer-and-tongs fighting, the French making little impression upon their right against Ligny or the villages to the east of it, but fighting desperately for St Amand and for Wagnelée. Such a course was part of Napoleon’s plan, for he had decided, as I have said, only to hold the Prussian left, to strike hardest at their right, and, when his reinforcement should come from Ney, to turn that right, envelop it, and so destroy the whole Prussian army.
These villages upon the Prussian right were taken and retaken in a series of furious attacks and counter-attacks, which it would be as tedious to detail as it must have been intolerable to endure.
All this indecisive but furious struggle for the line of villages (not one of which was as yet carried and held permanently by the French) lasted over two hours. It was well after five o’clock when there appeared, far off, under the westering sun, a new and large body of troops advancing eastward as though to reach that point between Wagnelée and St Amand where the left of the French force was struggling for mastery with the right of the Prussians. For a moment there was no certitude as to what this distant advancing force might be. But soon, and just when fortune appeared for a moment to be favouring Blucher’s superior numbers and the French line was losing ground, the Emperor learned that it was his First Army Corps, under the command of Erlon which was thus approaching.
At that moment — in the neighbourhood of six o’clock in the evening — Napoleon must have believed that his new and rapidly formed plan of that afternoon, with its urgent notes to Quatre Bras and its appeal for reinforcement, had borne fruit; a portion at least of Ney’s command had been detached, as it seemed, to deliver that final and unexpected attack upon the Prussian flank which was the keystone of the whole scheme.
Coincidently with the news that those distant advancing thousands were his own men and would turn this doubtful struggle into a decisive victory for the Emperor came the news — unexplained, inexplicable — that Erlon’s troops would advance no further! That huge distant body of men, isolated in the empty fields to the westward; that reinforcement upon which the fate of Napoleon and of the French army hung, drew no nearer. Watched from such a distance, they might seem for a short time to be only halted. Soon it was apparent that they were actually retiring. They passed back again, retracing their steps beyond the western horizon, and were lost to the great struggle against the Prussians. Why this amazing countermarch, with all its catastrophic consequences was made will be discussed later. It is sufficient to note that it rendered impossible that decisive victory which Napoleon had held for a moment within his grasp. His resource under such a disappointment singularly illustrates the nature of his mind.
Already the Emperor had determined, before any sign of advancing aid had appeared, that if he were left alone to complete the decision, if he was not to be allowed by fate to surround and destroy the Prussian force, he might at least drive it from the field with heavy loss, and, as far as possible, demoralised. In the long struggle of the afternoon he had meant but to press the Prussian line, while awaiting forces that should complete its envelopment; these forces being now denied him, he determined to change his plan, to use his reserves, the Guard, and to drive the best fighting material he had, like a spearhead, at the centre of the Prussian positions. Since he could not capture, he would try and break.
As the hope of aid from Erlon’s First Corps gradually disappeared, he decided upon this course. It was insufficient. He could not hope by it to destroy his enemy wholly. But he could drive him from the field and perhaps demoralise him, or so weaken him with loss as to leave him crippled.
Just at the time when Napoleon had determined thus to strike at the centre of the Prussian fine, Blucher, full of his recent successes upon his right and the partial recapture of the village of St Amand, had withdrawn troops from that centre to pursue his advantage. It was the wrong moment. While Blucher was thus off with the bulk of his men towards St Amand, the Old Guard, with the heavy cavalry of the Guard, and Milhaud’s cavalry as well — all Napoleon’s reserve — drew up opposite Ligny village for a final assault.
Nearly all the guns of the Guard and all those of the Fourth Corps crashed against the village to prepare the assault, and at this crisis of the battle, as though to emphasise its character, a heavy thunderstorm broke over the combatants, and at that late hour (it was near seven) darkened the evening sky.
It was to the noise and downpour of that storm that the assault was delivered, the Prussian centre forced, and Ligny taken.
When the clouds cleared, a little before sunset, this strongest veteran corps of Napoleon’s army had done the business. Ligny was carried and held. The Prussian formation, from a convex line, was now a line bent inwards at its centre and all but broken.
Blucher had rapidly returned from the right to meet the peril. He charged at the head of his Uhlans. The head of the French column of Guards reserved their fire until the horse was almost upon them; then, in volley after volley at a stone’s-throw range, they broke that cavalry, which, in their turn, the French cuirassiers charged as it fled and destroyed it. Blucher’s own horse was shot under him, the colonel of the Uhlans captured, the whole of the Prussian centre fell into disorder and was crushed confusedly back towards the Nivelles-Namur road.
Darkness fell, and nothing more could be accomplished. The field was won, indeed, but the Prussian army was still an organisation and a power. It had lost heavily in surrenders, flight, and fallen, but its main part was still organised. It was driven to retreat in the darkness, but remained ready, when time should serve, to reappear. It kept its order against the end of the French pressure throughout the last glimmer of twilight; and when darkness fell, the troops of Blucher, though in retreat, were in a retreat compact and orderly, and the bulk of his command was saved from the enemy and available for further action.
Thus ended the battle of Ligny, glorious for the Emperor, who had achieved so much success against great odds and after the hottest combat; but a failure of his full plan, for the host before him was still in existence: it was free to retreat in what direction, east or north, it might choose. The choice was made with immediate and conquering decision: the order passed in the darkness, “By Tilly on Wavre.” The Prussian staff had not lost its head under the blow of its defeat. It preserved a clear view of the campaign, with its remaining chances, and the then beaten army corps were concentrated upon a movement northwards. Word was sent to the fresh and unused Fourth Corps to join the other three at Wavre, and the march was begun which permitted Blucher, forty hours later, to come up on the flank of the French at Waterloo and destroy them.
Quatre Bras
Such had been the result of the long afternoon’s work upon the right-hand or eastern battlefield, that of Ligny, where Napoleon had been in personal command.
In spite of his appeals, no one had reached him from the western field, and the First Corps had only appeared in Napoleon’s neighbourhood to disappear again.
What had been happening on that western battlefield, three to four miles away, which had thus prevented some part at least of Ney’s army coming up upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, towards the end of the day, and inflicting upon Blucher a complete disaster?
What had happened was the slow, confused action known to history as the battle of Quatre Bras.
It will be remembered that Ney had been entrusted by Napoleon with the absolute and independent command of something less than half of his whole army.
He had put at his disposal the First and the Second Army Corps, under Erlon and Reille respectively — nearly 46,000 men; and to these he had added, by an afterthought, eight regiments of heavy cavalry, commanded by Kellerman.
The rôle of this force, in Napoleon’s intention, was simply to advance up the Brussels road, brushing before it towards the left or west, away from the Prussians, as it went, the outposts of that western half of the allied army, which Wellington commanded.
We have seen that Napoleon, who had certainly arrived quickly and half-unexpectedly at the point of junction between Wellington’s scattered forces and those of the Prussians, when he crossed the Sambre at Charleroi, overestimated his success. He thought his enemy had even less notice of his advance than that enemy really had; he thought that enemy had had less time to concentrate than he had really had. Napoleon therefore necessarily concluded that his enemy had concentrated to a less extent than he actually had.
That mistake had the effect, in the case of the army of the right, which he himself commanded, of bringing him up against not one Prussian army corps but three. This accident had not disconcerted him, for he hoped to turn it into a general disaster for the Prussians, and to take advantage of their unexpected concentration to accomplish their total ruin. But such a plan was dependent upon the left-hand or western army, that upon the Brussels road under Ney, not finding anything serious in front of it. Ney could spare men less easily if the Emperor’s calculation of the resistance likely to be found on the Brussels road should be wrong. It was wrong. That resistance was not slight but considerable, and Ney was not free to come to Napoleon’s aid. Tardy as had been the information conveyed to the Duke of Wellington, and grievously as the Duke of Wellington had misunderstood its importance, there was more in front of Ney upon the Brussels road than the Emperor had expected. What there was, however, might have been pushed back — after fairly heavy fighting it is true, but without any risk of failure — but for another factor in the situation, which was Ney’s own misjudgment and inertia.
Napoleon himself said later that his marshal was no longer the same man since the disasters of two years before; but even if Ney had been as alert as ever, misjudgment quite as much as lack of will must have entered into what he did. He had thought, as the Emperor had, that there would be hardly anything in front of him upon the Brussels road. But there was this difference between the two errors: Ney was on the spot, and could have found out with his cavalry scouts quite early on the morning of Friday the 16th what he really had to face. He preferred to take matters for granted, and he paid a heavy price. He thought that there was plenty of time for him to advance at his leisure; and, thinking this, he must have further concluded that to linger upon that part of the Brussels road which was nearest the Emperor’s forthcoming action to the east by Ligny would be good policy in case the Emperor should have need of him there.
On the night of the 15th Ney himself was at Frasnes, while the furthest of his detachments was no nearer than the bridge of Thuin over the Sambre, sixteen miles away. The rough sketch printed opposite will show how very long that line was, considering the nearness of the strategical point Quatre Bras, which it was his next business to occupy. The Second Army Corps under Reille was indeed fairly well moved up, and all in the neighbourhood of Gosselies by the night between Thursday 15th and Friday 16th of June. But the other half of the force, the First Army Corps under Erlon, was strung out over miles of road behind.
To concentrate all those 50,000 men, half of them spread out over so much space, meant a day’s ordinary marching; and one would have thought that Ney should have begun to concentrate before night fell upon the 15th. He remembered, however, that the men were fatigued, he thought he had plenty of time before him, and he did not effect their concentration. The mass of the Second Army Corps (Reille’s) was, as I have said, near Gosselies on the Friday dawn; but Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in disposition to bring the bulk of it up by the same time. He could not expect to be near Quatre Bras till noon or one o’clock. But even to this element of delay, due to his lack of precision, Ney added further delay, due to slackness in orders.
It was eleven o’clock on the morning of that Friday the 16th before Ney sent a definite order to Reille to march; it was twelve before the head of that Second Army Corps set out up the great road to cover the four or five miles that separated them from Ney’s headquarters at Frasnes. Erlon, lying next behind Reille, could not advance until Reille’s last division had taken the road. So Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in column and beginning his advance with his head troops until after one o’clock.
At about half-past one, then, we have the first troops of Reille’s army corps reaching Ney at Frasnes, its tail-end some little way out of Gosselies; while at the same hour we have Erlon’s First Army Corps marching in column through Gosselies.
It would have been perfectly possible, at the expense of a little fatigue to the men, to have had the Second Army Corps right up at Frasnes and in front of it and deployed for action by nine o’clock, while Erlon’s army corps, the First, coming behind it as a reserve, an equal body in numbers, excellence, and order, would have taken the morning to come up. In other words, Ney could have had more than 20,000 men ready for the attack on Quatre Bras by mid-morning, with as many men an hour or two behind them, and ready on their arrival to act as a reserve. As a matter of fact, he waited with his single battalion and a few horsemen at his headquarters at Frasnes, only giving the orders we have seen, which did not bring Reille’s head columns up to him till as late as half-past one. It was well after two o’clock before Reille’s troops had deployed in front of Frasnes and this Second Army Corps were ready to attack the position at Quatre Bras, which Ney still believed to be very feebly held. The other half of Ney’s command, the First Army Corps, under Erlon, was still far away down the road.
This said, it behoves us to consider the strategical value of the Quatre Bras position, and later to see how far Ney was right in thinking that it was still quite insufficiently furnished with defenders, even at that late hour in the day.
Armies must march by roads. At any rate, the army marching by road has a vast advantage over one attempting an advance across country; and the better kept-up the road the greater advantage, other things being equal, has the army using it over another army debarred from its use.
Quatre Bras is the cross-way of two great roads. The first road is that main road from north to south, leading from the frontier and Charleroi to Brussels; along this road, it was Napoleon’s ultimate intention to sweep, and up this road he was on that morning of the 16th sending Ney to clear the way for him. The second road is the great road east and west from Nivelles to Namur, which was in June 1815 the main line of communication along which the two halves of the Allies could effect their junction.
The invader, then, when he held Quatre Bras, could hold up troops coming against him from the north, troops coming against him from the east, or troops coming against him from the west. He could prevent, or rather delay, their junction. He would have stepped in between.
But Quatre Bras has advantages greater than this plain and elementary strategical advantage. In the first place, it dominates the whole countryside. A patch or knoll, 520 feet above the sea, the culminating point of the plateau, is within a few yards of the cross-roads. Standing there, a few steps to the west of the highway, you look in every direction over a rolling plain, of which you occupy the highest point for some miles around.
Now, this position of the “Quatre Bras” or “Cross Roads” can be easily defended against a foe coming from the south, as were the two corps under Ney. In 1815 its defence was easier still.
A large patch of undergrowth, cut in rotation, called the Wood of Bossu, ran along the high road from Frasnes and Charleroi, flanking that road to the west, and forming cover for troops that might wish to forbid access along it. The ground falls somewhat rapidly in front of the cross-roads to a little stream, and just where the stream crosses the road is the walled farm of Gemioncourt, which can be held as an advanced position, while in front of the fields where the Wood of Bossu once stood is the group of farm buildings called Pierrepont. Finally, that arm of the cross-roads which overlooks the slope down to Gemioncourt ran partly on an embankment which could be used for defence as a ready-made earthwork.
Now, let us see what troops were actually present that Friday morning upon the allied side to defend this position against Ney’s advance, and what others were near enough in the neighbourhood to come up in defence of the position during the struggle.
There was but one division of the Allies actually on the spot. This was the Netherlands division, commanded by Perponcher; and the whole of it, including gunners and sappers (it had hardly any cavalry with it), was less than 8000 strong. It was a very small number to hold the extended position which the division at once proceeded to occupy. They had to cover a front of over 3000 yards, not far short of two miles.
They did not know, indeed, what Ney was bringing up against them; Wellington himself, later on, greatly underestimated the French forces on that day. Now even if Ney had had far less men than he had, it was none the less a very risky thing to disperse the division as Perponcher did, especially with no more than fourteen guns to support him, but under the circumstances it turned out to be a wise risk to have taken. Ney had hesitated already, and was in a mood to be surprised at any serious resistance. The more extended the veil that was drawn before him, the better for the Allies and their card of delay. For everything depended upon time. Ney, as will be seen, had thrown away his chance of victory by his extreme dilatoriness, and during the day the Allies were to bring up unit after unit, until by nightfall nearly 40,000 men not only held Quatre Bras successfully, but pushed the French back from their attack upon it.
Perponcher, then, put a battalion and five guns in front of Gemioncourt, another battalion inside the walls of the farm, four battalions and a mounted battery before the Wood of Bossu and the farm of Pierrepont. Most of his battalions were thus stretched in front of the position of Quatre Bras, the actual Cross Roads where he left only two as a reserve.
Against the Dutchmen, thus extended, the French order to advance was given, and somewhere between half-past two and a quarter to three the French attack began. It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the fields to the right or east of the Brussels road.
The action that followed is one simple enough to understand by description, but difficult to express upon a map. It is difficult to express upon a map because it consisted in the repeated attack of one fixed number of men against an increasing number of men.
Ney was hammering all that afternoon with a French force which soon reached its maximum. The position against which he was hammering, though held at first by a force greatly inferior to his own, began immediately afterwards to receive reinforcement after reinforcement, until at the close of the action the defenders were vastly superior in numbers to the attackers.
I have attempted in the rough pen sketch opposite this page to express this state of affairs on the allied side during the battle by marking in successive degrees of shading the bodies of the defence in the order in which they came up, but the reader must remember the factor of time, and how all day long Wellington’s command at Quatre Bras kept on swelling and swelling by driblets, as the units marched in at a hurried summons from various points behind the battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of the defence gives all its character to the action.
The French, then, began the assault by an advance to the right or east of the Brussels road. They cleared out the defenders from Gemioncourt; they occupied that walled position; they poured across the stream, and were beginning to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when, at about three o’clock, Wellington, who had been over at Ligny discussing the position with Blucher, rode up and saw how critical the moment was.
In a few minutes the first French division might be up to the cross-roads at Q.
Bossu Wood, with the four battalions holding it, had not yet been attacked by the French, because their second division of Reille’s Second Corps (under Napoleon’s brother Jerome), had not yet come up; Erlon’s First Corps was still far off, down the road. The men in the Bossu Wood came out to try and stop the French advance. They were thrown back by French cavalry, and even as this was proceeding Jerome’s division arrived, attacked the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up the whole of Ney’s forces to some 19,000 or 20,000 men.
The French advance, so continued, would now undoubtedly have succeeded against the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three o’clock (and Wellington’s judgment that the situation was critical at that same moment was only too sound) had there not arrived precisely at that moment the first of his reinforcements.
A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from the west along the Nivelles road, and three brigades of infantry appeared marching hurriedly in from the north, along the Brussels road; two of these brigades were British, under the command of Kemp and of Pack, and they formed Picton’s division. The third were a brigade of Hanoverians, under Best. The British and the Hanoverians formed along the Namur road at M N, protected by its embankment, kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire when the enemy’s attacking line should come within close range of their muskets.
The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on the other side of the road, charged the advancing French, but were charged themselves in turn by French cavalry, overthrown, and in their stampede carried Wellington and his staff in a surge past the cross-roads; but the French cavalry, in its turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry fire it met when it had ridden too far. Immediately afterwards the French infantry as they reached the Namur road came unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British and Hanoverians, and were driven back in disorder by heavy volleying at close range from the embankment and the deep cover beyond.
The cavalry charge and countercharge (Jerome beginning to clear the south of the Bossu Wood), the check received by the French on the right from Picton’s brigade and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an hour. It was not far short of four o’clock when Ney received that first urgent dispatch from Napoleon which told him to despatch the enemy’s resistance at Quatre Bras, and then to come over eastward to Ligny and help against the Prussians.
Ney could not obey. He had wasted the whole of a precious morning, and by now, close on four o’clock in the afternoon, yet another unit came up to increase the power of the defence, and to make his chance of carrying the Quatre Bras cross-roads, of pushing back Wellington’s command, of finding himself free to send men to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.
The new unit which had come up was the corps under the Duke of Brunswick, and when this arrived Wellington had for the first time a superiority of numbers over Ney’s single corps (there was still no sign of Erlon) though he was still slightly inferior in guns.
However, the French advance was vigorously conducted. Nearly the whole of the Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Brunswickers, who had been sent forward along the road between Quatre Bras and Gemioncourt, were pushed back as to their infantry; their cavalry broke itself against a French battalion.
It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort that the Duke of Brunswick, son of the famous General of the earlier Revolutionary wars, fell, shot in the stomach. He died that night in the village.
The check to this general advance of the French all along the line was again given by the English troops along the Namur road. Picton seized the moment, ordered a bayonet charge, and drove the French right down the valley. His men were in turn driven back by the time they had cleared the slope, but the check was given and the French never recovered it. Two fierce cavalry charges by the French failed to break the English line, though the Highlanders upon Pack’s extreme right, close against Quatre Bras itself, were caught before they could form square, and the second phase of the battle ended in a draw.
Ney had missed the opportunity when the enemy in front of him were in numbers less than half his own; he had failed to pierce their line when reinforcements had brought up their numbers to a superiority over his own. He must now set about a far more serious business, for there was every prospect, as the afternoon advanced, that Wellington would be still further reinforced, while Ney had nothing but his original 20,000 — half his command; of Erlon’s coming there was not a sign! Yet another hour had been consumed in the general French advance and its repulse, which I have just described. It was five o’clock.
I beg the reader to concentrate his attention upon this point of the action — the few minutes before and after the hour of five. A number of critical things occurred in that short space of time, all of which must be kept in mind.
The first was this: A couple of brigades came in at that moment to reinforce Wellington. They gave him a 25 per cent. superiority in men, and an appreciable superiority in guns as well.
In the second place, Ney was keeping the action at a standstill, waiting until his own forces should be doubled by the arrival of Erlon’s force. Ney had been fighting all this while, as I have said, with only half his command — the Second Army Corps of Reille. Erlon’s First Army Corps formed the second half, and when it came up — as Ney confidently expected it to do immediately — it would double his numbers, and raise them from 20,000 to 40,000 men. With this superiority he could be sure of success, even if, as was probable, further reinforcements should reach the enemy’s line. It is to be noted that it was due to Ney’s own tardiness in giving orders that Erlon was coming up so late, but by now, five o’clock, the head of his columns might at any moment be seen debouching from Frasnes.
In the third place, while Ney was thus anxiously waiting for Erlon, and seeing the forces in front of him swelling to be more and more superior to his own, there came yet another message from Napoleon telling Ney how matters stood in the great action that was proceeding five miles away, urging him again with the utmost energy to have done at Quatre Bras, to come back over eastward upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, and so to destroy their army utterly and “to save France.”
To have done with the action of Quatre Bras! But there were already superior forces before Ney! And they were increasing! If he dreamt of turning, it would be annihilation for his troops, or at the least the catching of his army’s and Napoleon’s between two fires. He might just manage when Erlon came up — and surely Erlon must appear from one moment to another — he might just manage to overthrow the enemy in front of him so rapidly as to have time to turn and appear at Ligny before darkness should fall, from three to four hours later.
It all hung on Erlon: — He might! and at that precise moment, with his impatience strained to breaking-point, and all his expectation turned on Frasnes, whence the head of Erlon’s column should appear, there rode up to Ney a general officer, Delcambre by name. He came with a message. It was from Erlon… Erlon had abandoned the road to Quatre Bras; had understood that he was not to join Ney after all, but to go east and help Napoleon! He had turned off eastward to the right two and a half miles back, and was by this time far off in the direction which would lead him to take part in the battle of Ligny!
Under the staggering blow of this news Ney broke into a fury. It meant possibly the annihilation of his body, certainly its defeat. He did two things, both unwise from the point of view of his own battle, and one fatal from the point of view of the whole campaign.
First, he launched his reserve cavalry, grossly insufficient in numbers for such a mad attempt, right at the English line, in a despairing effort to pierce such superior numbers by one desperate charge. Secondly, he sent Delcambre back — not calculating distance or time — with peremptory orders to Erlon, as his subordinate, to come back at once to the battlefield of Quatre Bras.
There was, as commander to lead that cavalry charge, Kellerman. He had but one brigade of cuirassiers: two regiments of horse against 25,000 men! It was an amazing ride, but it could accomplish nothing of purport. It thundered down the slope, breaking through the advancing English troops (confused by a mistaken order, and not yet formed in square), cut to pieces the gunners of a battery, broke a regiment of Brunswickers near the top of the hill, and reached at last the cross-roads of Quatre Bras. Five hundred men still sat their horses as the summit of the slope was reached. The brigade had cut a lane right through the mass of the defence; it had not pierced it altogether.
Some have imagined that if at that moment the cavalry of the Guard, which was still in reserve, had followed this first charge by a second, Ney might have effected his object and broken Wellington’s line. It is extremely doubtful, the numbers were so wholly out of proportion to such a task. At any rate, the order for the second charge, when it came, came somewhat late. The five hundred as they reined up on the summit of the hill were met and broken by a furious cross-fire from the Namur road upon the right, from the head of Bossu Wood upon the left, while yet another unit, come up in this long succession to reinforce the defence — a battery of the King’s German Legion — opened upon them with grape. The poor remnant of Kellerman’s Horse turned and galloped back in confusion.
The second cavalry charge attempted by the French reserve, coming just too late, necessarily failed, and at the same moment yet another reinforcement — the first British division of the Guards, and a body of Nassauers, with a number of guns — came up to increase the now overwhelming superiority of Wellington’s line.
There was even an attempt at advance upon the part of Wellington.
As the evening turned to sunset, and the sunset to night, that advance was made very slowly and with increasing difficulty — and all the while Ney’s embarrassed force, now confronted by something like double its own numbers, and contesting the ground yard by yard as it yielded, received no word of Erlon.
The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by the right wing of Wellington’s army, reinforced by the newly arrived Guards, took more than an hour. It took as long to push the French centre back to Gemioncourt, and all through the last of the sunlight the walls of the farm were desperately held. On the left, Pierrepont was similarly held for close upon an hour. The sun had already set when the Guards debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only to be met and checked by a violent artillery fire from Pierrepont, while at the same time the remnant of the cuirassiers charged again, and broke a Belgian battalion at the edge of the wood.
By nine o’clock it was dark and the action ceased. Just as it ceased, and while, in the last glimmerings of the light, the major objects of the landscape, groups of wood and distant villages, could still be faintly distinguished against the background of the gloom, one such object seemed slowly to approach and move. It was first guessed and then perceived to be a body of men: the head of a column began to debouch from Frasnes. It was Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour too late.
All that critical day had passed with the First Corps out of action. It had neither come up to Napoleon to wipe out the Prussians at Ligny, nor come back in its countermarch in time to save Ney and drive back Wellington at Quatre Bras. It might as well not have existed so far as the fortunes of the French were concerned, and its absence from either field upon that day made defeat certain in the future, as the rest of these pages will show.
Two things impress themselves upon us as we consider the total result of that critical day, the 16th of June, which saw Ney fail to hold the Brussels road at Quatre Bras, and there to push away from the advance on Brussels Wellington’s opposing force, and which also saw the successful escape of the Prussians from Ligny, an escape which was to permit them to join Wellington forty-eight hours later and to decide Waterloo.
The first is the capital importance, disastrous to the French fortunes, of Erlon’s having been kept out of both fights by his useless march and countermarch.
The Elements of Quatre Bras.
The second is the extraordinary way in which Wellington’s command came up haphazard, dribbling in by units all day long, and how that command owed to Ney’s caution and tardiness, much more than to its own General’s arrangements, the superiority in numbers which it began to enjoy from an early phase in the battle.
I will deal with these two points in their order.
As to the first: —
The whole of the four days of 1815, and the issue of Waterloo itself, turned upon Erlon’s disastrous counter-marching between Quatre Bras and Ligny upon this Friday, the 16th of June, which was the decisive day of the war.
What actually happened has been sufficiently described. The useless advance of Erlon’s corps d’armée towards Napoleon and the right — useless because it was not completed; the useless turning back of that corps d’armée towards Ney and the left — useless because it could not reach Ney in time, — these were the determining factors of that critical moment in the campaign.
In other words, Erlon’s zigzag kept the 20,000 of the First Corps out of action all day. Had they been with Ney, the Allies under Wellington at Quatre Bras would have suffered a disaster. Had they been with Napoleon, the Prussians at Ligny would have been destroyed. As it was, the First Army Corps managed to appear on neither field. Wellington more than held his own; the Prussians at Ligny escaped, to fight two days later at Waterloo.
Such are the facts, and they explain all that followed (see Map, next page).
But it has rightly proved of considerable interest to historians to attempt to discover the human motives and the personal accidents of temperament and misunderstanding which led to so extraordinary a blunder as the utter waste of a whole army corps during a whole day, within an area not five miles by four.
It is for the purpose of considering these human motives and personal accidents that I offer these pages; for if we can comprehend Erlon’s error, we shall fill the only remaining historical gap in the story of Waterloo, and determine the true causes of that action’s result.
There are two ways of appreciating historical evidence. The first is the lawyer’s way: to establish the pieces of evidence as a series of disconnected units, to docket them, and then to see that they are mechanically pieced together; admitting, the while, only such evidence as would pass the strict and fossil rules of our particular procedure in the courts. This way, as might be inferred from its forensic origin, is particularly adapted to arriving at a foregone conclusion. It is useless or worse in an attempt to establish a doubtful truth.
The second way is that by which we continually judge all real evidence upon matters that are of importance to us in our ordinary lives: the way in which we invest money, defend our reputation, and judge of personal risk or personal advantage in every grave case.
This fashion consists in admitting every kind of evidence, first hand, second hand, third hand, documentary, verbal, traditional, and judging the general effect of the whole, not according to set legal categories, but according to our general experience of life, and in particular of human psychology. We chiefly depend upon the way in which we know that men conduct themselves under the influence of such and such emotions, of the kind of truth and untruth which we know they will tell; and to this we add a consideration of physical circumstance, of the laws of nature, and hence of the degrees of probability attaching to the events which all this mass of evidence relates.
It is only by this second method, which is the method of common-sense, that anything can be made of a doubtful historical point. The legal method would make of history what it makes of justice. Which God forbid!
Historical points are doubtful precisely because there is conflict of evidence; and conflict of evidence is only properly resolved by a consideration of the psychology of witnesses, coupled with a consideration of the physical circumstances which limited the matter of their testimony.
Judged by these standards, the fatal march and countermarch of Erlon become plain enough.
His failure to help either Ney or Napoleon was not treason, simply because the man was not a traitor. It proceeded solely from obedience to orders; but these orders were fatal because Ney made an error of judgment both as to the real state of the double struggle — Quatre Bras, Ligny — and as to the time required for the countermarch. This I shall now show.
Briefly, then: —
Erlon, as he was leading his army corps up to help Ney, his immediate superior, turned it off the road before he reached Ney and led it away towards Napoleon.
Why did he do this?
It was because he had received, not indeed from his immediate superior, Ney himself, but through a command of Napoleon’s, which he knew to be addressed to Ney, the order to do so.
When Erlon had almost reached Napoleon he turned his army corps right about face and led it off back again towards Ney.
Why did he do that?
It was because he had received at that moment a further peremptory order from Ney, his direct superior, to act in this fashion.
Such is the simple and common-sense explanation of the motives under which this fatal move and countermove, with its futile going and coming, with its apparent indecision, with its real strictness of military discipline, was conducted. As far as Erlon is concerned, it was no more than the continual obedience of orders, or supposed orders, to which a soldier is bound. With Ney’s responsibility I shall deal in a moment.
Let me first make the matter plainer, if I can, by an illustration.
Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer’s house and at the same time in a barn half a mile away. The farmer sends ten men with water-buckets and an engine to put out the fire at the barn, while he himself, with another ten men, but without an engine, attends to the rick. He gives to his foreman, who is looking after the barn fire, the task of giving orders to the engine, and the man at the engine is told to look to the foreman and no one else for his orders. The foreman is known to be of the greatest authority with his master. Hardly has the farmer given all these instructions when he finds that the fire in the rick has spread to his house. He lets the barn go hang, and sends a messenger to the foreman with an urgent note to send back the engine at once to the house and rick. The messenger finds the man with the engine on his way to the barn, intercepts him, and tells him that the farmer has sent orders to the foreman that the engine is to go back at once to the house. The fellow turns round with his engine and is making his way towards the house when another messenger comes posthaste from the foreman direct, telling him at all costs to bring the engine back to the barn. The man with the engine turns once more, abandons the house, but cannot reach the barn in time to save it. The result of the shilly-shally is that the barn is burnt down, and the fire at the farmer’s house only put out after it has done grave damage.
The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney, and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man with the engine is Erlon, and the engine is Erlon’s command — the First Corps d’Armée.
There was no question of contradictory orders in Erlon’s mind, as many historians seem to imagine; there was simply, from Erlon’s standpoint, a countermanded order.
He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with Ney’s knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order as exactly as he had obeyed the first.
Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney’s is the mind, the person, historically responsible for the whole business.
Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion. The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to countermand an order of Napoleon’s. Those who argue thus neither know the character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare. Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon’s order to abandon his own business (a course which was, so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men — Erlon, who had distinctly been placed under his orders — was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras.
Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a commander, if no latitude of judgment were understood in the very nature of a great independent command such as Ney’s was upon that day, if there were always present before every independent commander’s mental vision an exact map of the operations, and, at the same time, a plan of the exact position of all the troops upon it at any given moment — if all these armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney’s order would have been as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was disastrous in effect.
But such conceptions are not true. Great generals entrusted with separate forces, and told off to engage in a great action at a distance from the supreme command, have, by the very nature of their mission, the widest latitude of judgment left to them. They are perfectly free to decide, in some desperate circumstance, that if their superior knew of that circumstance, he would understand why an afterorder of his was not obeyed, or was even directly countermanded. That Ney should have sent this furious counterorder, therefore, to Erlon, telling him to come back instantly, in spite of Napoleon’s first note, though it was a grievous error, is one perfectly explicable, and parallel to many other similar incidents that diversify the history of war. In effect, Ney said to himself: “The Emperor has no idea of the grave crisis at my end of the struggle or he wouldn’t have sent that order. He is winning, anyhow; I am actually in danger of defeat; and if I am defeated, Wellington’s troops will pour through and come up on the Emperor’s army from the rear and destroy it. I have a right, therefore, to summon Erlon back.” Such was the rationale of Ney’s decision. His passionate mood did the rest.
A second and graver difficulty is this: By the time Erlon got the message to come back, it was so late that he could not possibly bring his 20,000 up in time to be of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They could only arrive on the field, as they did in fact arrive, when darkness had already set in. It is argued that a general in Ney’s position would have rapidly calculated the distance involved, and would have seen that it was useless to send for his subordinate at such an hour.
The answer to this suggestion is twofold. In the first place, a man under hot fire is capable of making mistakes; and Ney was, at the moment when he gave that order, under the hottest fire of the whole action. In the second place, he could not have any very exact idea of where in all those four miles of open fields behind him the head of Erlon’s column might be, still less where exactly Delcambre would find it by the time he had ridden back. A mile either way would have made all the difference; if Erlon was anywhere fairly close; if Delcambre knew exactly where to find him, and galloped by the shortest route — if this and if that, it might still be that Erlon would turn up just before darkness and decide the field in Ney’s favour.
Considerable discussion has turned on whether, as the best authorities believe, Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled note written personally to him by the Emperor, telling him to turn at once and come to his, Napoleon’s, aid, and by his unexpected advent upon its flank destroy the Prussian army.
As an explanation of the false move of Erlon back and forth, the existence of this note is immaterial. The weight of evidence is in its favour, and men will believe or disbelieve it according to the way in which they judge human character and motive. For the purposes of a dramatic story the incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is very valuable, but as an elucidation of the historical problem it has no importance, for, even if he got such a note, Erlon only got it in connection with general orders, which, he knew, were on their way to Ney, his superior.
The point for military history is that —
(a) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his way up to Quatre Bras that afternoon, was intercepted by a messenger, who told him that the Emperor wanted him to turn off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to Quatre Bras; while —
(b) He also knew that that message was intended also to be delivered, and either had been or was about to be delivered, to his superior officer, Ney. Therefore he went eastward as he had been told, believing that Ney knew all about it; and therefore, also, on receiving a further direct order from Ney to turn back again westward, he did turn back.
If we proceed to apportion the blame for that disastrous episode, which, by permitting Blucher to escape, was the plain cause of Napoleon’s subsequent defeat at Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must fall upon Ney, who could not believe, in the heat of the violent action in which he was involved, that Napoleon’s contemporary action against Ligny could be more decisive or more important than his own. It was a question of exercising judgment, and of deciding whether Napoleon had justly judged the proportion between his chances of a great victory and Ney’s chances; and further, whether a great victory at Ligny would have been of more effect than a great victory or the prevention of a bad defeat at Quatre Bras. Napoleon was right and Ney was wrong.
I have heard or read the further suggestion that Napoleon, on seeing Erlon, or having him reported, not two miles away, should have sent him further peremptory orders to continue his march and to come on to Ligny.
This is bad history. Erlon, as it was, was heading a trifle too much to the south, so that Napoleon, who thought the whole of Ney’s command to be somewhat further up the Brussels road northward than it was, did not guess at first what the new troops coming up might be, and even feared they might be a detachment of Wellington’s, who might have defeated Ney, and now be coming in from the west to attack him.
He sent an orderly to find out what the newcomers were. The orderly returned to report that the troops were Erlon’s, but that they had turned back. Had Napoleon sent again, after this, to find Erlon, and to make him for a third time change his direction, it would have been altogether too late to have used Erlon’s corps d’armée at Ligny by the time it should have come up. Napoleon had, therefore, no course before him but to do as he did, namely, give up all hope of help from the west, and defeat the Prussians at Ligny before him, if not decisively, at least to the best of his ability, with the troops immediately to his hand.
So much for Erlon.
Now for the second point: the way in which the units of Wellington’s forces dribbled in all day haphazard upon the position of Quatre Bras.
Wellington, as we saw on an earlier page, was both misinformed and confused as to the nature and rapidity of the French advance into Belgium. He did not appreciate, until too late, the importance of the position of Quatre Bras, nor the intention of the French to march along the great northern road. Even upon the field of Waterloo itself he was haunted by the odd misconception that Napoleon’s army would try and get across his communications with the sea, and he left, while Waterloo was actually being fought, a considerable force useless, far off upon his right, on that same account.
The extent of Wellington’s misjudgment we can easily perceive and understand. Every general must, in the nature of war, misjudge to some extent the nature of his opponent’s movements, but the shocking errors into which bad staff work led him in this his last campaign are quite exceptional.
Wellington wrote to Blucher, on his arrival at the field of Quatre Bras, at about half-past ten in the morning, a note which distinctly left Blucher to understand that he might expect English aid during his forthcoming battle with Napoleon at Ligny. He did not say so in so many words, but he said: “My forces are at such and such places,” equivalent, that is, to saying, “My forces can come up quite easily, for they are close by you,” adding: “I do not see any large force of the enemy in front of us; and I await news from your Highness, and the arrival of troops, in order to determine my operations for the day.”
In this letter, moreover, he said in so many words that his reserve, the large body upon which he mainly depended, would be within three miles of him by noon, the British cavalry within seven miles of him at the same hour.
Then he rode over to see Blucher on the field of Ligny before Napoleon’s attack on that general had begun. He got there at about one o’clock.
An acrimonious discussion has arisen as to whether he promised to come up and help Blucher shortly afterwards or not, but it is a discussion beside the mark, for, in the first place, Wellington quite certainly intended to come up and help the Prussians; and in the second place, he was quite as certainly unable to do so, for the French opposition under Ney which he had under-estimated, turned out to be a serious thing.
But his letter, and his undoubted intention to come up and help Blucher, depended upon his belief that the units of his army were all fairly close, and that by, say, half-past one he would have the whole lot occupying the heights of Quatre Bras.
Now, as a fact, the units of Wellington’s command were scattered all over the place, and it is astonishing to note the discrepancy between his idea of their position and their real position on the morning of the day when Quatre Bras was fought. When one appreciates what that discrepancy was, one has a measure of the bad staff work that was being done under Wellington at the moment.
The plan () distinguishes between the real positions of Wellington’s command on the morning of the 16th when he was writing his letter to Blucher and the positions which Wellington, in that letter, erroneously ascribes to them. It will show the reader the wide difference there was between Wellington’s idea of where his troops were and their actual position on that morning. It needs no comment. It is sufficient in itself to explain why the action at Quatre Bras consisted not in a set army meeting and repelling the French (it could have destroyed them as things turned out, seeing Erlon’s absence), but in the perpetual arrival of separate and hurried units, which went on from midday almost until nightfall.
IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE
WHEN THE PRUSSIANS had concentrated to meet Napoleon at Ligny they had managed to collect, in time for the battle, three out of their four army corps.
These three army corps were the First, the Second, and the Third, and, as we have just seen, they were defeated.
But, as we have also seen, they were not thoroughly defeated. They were not disorganised, still less were the bulk of them captured and disarmed. Most important of all, they were free to retreat by any road that did not bring them against their victorious enemy. In other words, they were free to retreat to the north as well as to the east.
The full importance of this choice will, after the constant reiteration of it in the preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A retreat towards the east, and upon the line of communications which fed the Prussian army, would have had these two effects: First, it would have involved in the retirement that fresh Fourth Army Corps under Bulow which had not yet come into action, and which numbered no less than 32,000 men. For it lay to the east of the battlefield. In other words, that army corps would have been wasted, and the whole of the Prussian forces would have been forced out of the remainder of the campaign. Secondly, it would have finally separated Blucher and his Prussians from Wellington’s command. The Duke, with his western half of the allied forces, would have had to stand up alone to the mass of Napoleon’s army, which would, after the defeat of the Prussians at Ligny, naturally turn to the task of defeating the English General.
Now the fact of capital importance upon which the reader must concentrate if he is to grasp the issue of the campaign is the fact that the French staff fell into an error as to the true direction of the Prussian retreat.
Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of the French army were convinced that the Prussian retreat was being made by that eastern road.
As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover of darkness, had retired not east but north.
The defeated army corps, the First, Second, and Third, did not fall back upon the fresh and unused Fourth Corps; they left it unhampered to march northward also; and all during the darkness the Prussian forces, as a whole, were marching in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre and its neighbourhood.
It was this escape to the north instead of the east that made it possible for the Prussians to effect their junction with Wellington upon the day of Waterloo; but it must not be imagined that this supremely fortunate decision to abandon the field of their defeat at Ligny in a northerly rather than an easterly direction was at first deliberately conceived by the Prussians with the particular object of effecting a junction with Wellington later on.
In the first place, the Prussians had no idea what line Wellington’s retreat would take. They knew that he was particularly anxious about his communications with the sea, and quite as likely to move westward as northward when Napoleon should come against him.
The full historical truth, accurately stated, cannot be put into the formula, “The Prussians retreated northward in order to be able to join Wellington two days later at Waterloo.” To state it so would be to read history backwards, and to presuppose in the Prussian staff a knowledge of the future. The true formula is rather as follows:— “The Prussians retired northward, and not eastward, because the incompleteness of their defeat permitted them to do so, and thus at once to avoid the waste of their Fourth Army Corps and to gain positions where they would be able, if necessity arose, to get news of what had happened to Wellington.”
In other words, to retreat northwards, though the decision to do so depended only upon considerations of the most general kind, was wise strategy, and the opportunity for that piece of strategy was seized; but the retreat northwards was not undertaken with the specific object of at once rejoining Wellington.
It must further be pointed out that this retreat northwards, though it abandoned the fixed line of communications leading through Namur and Liège to Aix la Chapelle, would pick up in a very few miles another line of communications through Louvain, Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian commanders, in determining upon this northward march, were in no way risking their supply nor hazarding the existence of their army upon a great chance. They were taking advantage of one of two courses left open to them, and that one the wiser of the two.
This retreat upon Wavre was conducted with a precision and an endurance most remarkable when we consider the fact that it took place just after a severe, though not a decisive, defeat.
Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians engaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had fallen, killed or wounded. When the Prussian centre broke, many units became totally disorganised; and, counting the prisoners and runaways who failed to rejoin the colours, we must accept as certainly not exaggerated the Prussian official report of a loss of 15,000.
In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the order of the retreat was well maintained, and was rewarded by an exceptional rapidity.
The First Corps marched along the westerly route that lay directly before them by Tilly and Mont St Guibert. They marched past Wavre itself, and bivouacked about midday of Saturday the 17th, round about the village of Bierges, on the other side of the river Dyle.
The Second Corps followed the First, and ended its march on the southern side of Wavre, round about the village of St Anne.
The Third Corps did not complete the retreat until the end of daylight upon the 17th, and then marched through Wavre, across the river to the north, and bivouacked around La Bavette.
Finally, still later on the same evening, the Fourth Corps, that of Bulow, which had come to Ligny too late for the action, marching by the eastward lanes, through Sart and Corry, lay round Dion Le Mont.
By nightfall, therefore, on Saturday the 17th of June, we have the mass of the Prussian army safe round Wavre, and duly disposed all round that town in perfect order.
With the exception of a rearguard, which did not come up until the morning of the Sunday, all had been safely withdrawn in the twenty-four hours that followed the defeat at Ligny.
It may be asked why this great movement had been permitted to take place without molestation from the victors.
Napoleon would naturally, of course, after his defeat of the Prussians, withdraw to the west the greater part of the forces he had used against Blucher at Ligny and direct them towards the Brussels road in order to use them next against Wellington. But Napoleon had left behind him Grouchy in supreme command over a great body of troops, some 33,000 in all, whose business it was to follow up the Prussians, to find out what road they had taken; at the least to watch their movements, and at the best to cut off any isolated bodies or to give battle to any disjointed parts which the retreat might have separated from support. In general, Grouchy was to see to it that the Prussians did not return.
In this task Grouchy failed. True, he was not given his final instructions by the Emperor until nearly midday of the 17th, but a man up to his work would have discovered the line of the Prussian retreat and have hung on to it. Grouchy failed, partly because he was insufficiently provided with cavalry, partly because he was a man excellent only in a sudden tactical dilemma, incompetent in large strategical problems, partly because he mistrusted his subordinates, and they him; but most of all because of an original prepossession (under which, it is but fair to him to add, all the French leaders lay) that the Prussian retreat had taken the form of a flight towards Namur, along the eastern line of communications, while, as a fact, it had taken the form of a disciplined retreat upon Wavre and the north.
At ten o’clock in the evening of Saturday the 17th, twenty-four hours after the battle of Ligny, and at the moment when the whole body of the Prussian forces was already reunited in an orderly circle round Wavre, Grouchy, twelve miles to the south of them, was beginning — but only beginning — to discover the truth. He wrote at that hour to the Emperor that “the Prussians had retired in several directions,” one body towards Namur, another with Blucher the Commander-in-chief towards Liège, and a third body apparently towards Wavre. He even added that he was going to find out whether it might not be the larger of the three bodies which had gone towards Wavre, and he appreciated that whoever had gone towards Wavre intended keeping in touch with the rest of the Allies under Wellington. But all that Grouchy did after writing this letter proves how little he, as yet, really believed that any great body of the enemy had marched on Wavre. He anxiously sent out, not northward, but eastward and north-eastward, to feel for what he believed to be the main body of the retreating foe.
During the night he did become finally convinced by the mass of evidence brought in by his scouts that round Wavre was the whole Prussian force, and the conclusion that he came to was singular! He took it for granted that through Wavre the Prussians certainly intended a full retreat on Brussels. He wrote at daybreak of the 18th of June that he was about to pursue them.
That Blucher could dream of taking a short cut westward, thus effecting an immediate junction with Wellington, never entered Grouchy’s head. He did not put his army in motion until after having written this letter. He advanced his troops in a decent and leisurely manner up the Wavre road through the mid hours of the day, and himself, just before noon, wrote a dispatch to the Emperor; he wrote it from Sart, a point ten miles south of Wavre. In that letter he announced “his intention to be massed at Wavre that night,” and begging for “orders as to how he should begin his attack of the next day.”
The next day! Monday!
Already, hours before — by midnight of Saturday — Blucher had sent his message to Wellington assuring him that the Prussians would come to his assistance upon Sunday, the morrow.
Even as Grouchy was writing, the Prussian Corps were streaming westward across country to appear upon Napoleon’s flank four hours later and decide the campaign.
Having written his letter, Grouchy sat down to lunch. As he sat there at meat, far off, the first shots of the battle of Waterloo were fired.
So far, we have followed the retreat of the Prussians northwards from their defeat at Ligny. With the exception of the rearguard, they were all disposed by the evening of Saturday the 17th in an orderly fashion round the little town of Wavre. We have also followed the methodical but tardy and ill-conceived pursuit in which Grouchy felt out with his cavalry to discover the line of the Prussian retreat, and continued to be in doubt of its nature at least until midnight, and probably until even later than midnight, in that night between Saturday the 17th, evening, and Sunday the 18th of June.
We have further seen that during the morning of Sunday the 18th of June he was taking no dispositions for a rapid pursuit, but, being now convinced that the Prussians merely intended a general retreat upon Brussels, proposed to follow them in order to watch that retreat, and, if possible, to shepherd them eastwards. He wrote, as we have just said, to the Emperor in the course of that morning of the Sunday, announcing that he meant to mass his troops at Wavre by nightfall, and asking for orders for the next day.
What the Prussians were doing during that Sunday morning when Grouchy was so quietly and soberly taking for granted that they could not or would not rejoin Wellington, and was so quietly shielding his own responsibility behind the Emperor’s orders, we shall see when we come to talk of the action itself — the battle of Waterloo.
Meanwhile we must return to the second half of the great strategic move, and watch the retreat of the Duke of Wellington during that same Saturday, and the stand which he made on the ridge called “the Mont St Jean” by the nightfall of that day, in order to accept battle on the Sunday morning.
An observer watching the whole business of that Saturday from some height in the air above the valley of the Sambre, and looking northwards, would have seen on the landscape below, to his right, the Prussians streaming in great parallel columns upon Wavre from the battlefield of Ligny. He would have seen, scattered upon the roads, small groups of mounted men, here in touch with the last files of a Prussian column, there lost and wandering forward into empty spaces where no soldiers were. These were the cavalry scouts of Grouchy. South of these, and far behind the Prussian rear, separated from them by a gap of ten miles, a dense body of infantry, drawn up in heavy columns of route, was the corps commanded by Grouchy.
What would such an observer have seen upon the landscape below and before him to his left? He would have seen an interminable line of men streaming northward also, all afternoon, up the Brussels road from Quatre Bras; and behind them, treading upon their heels, another column, miles in length, pressing the pursuit. The retreating column, as it hurried off, he would see screened on its rear by a mass of cavalry, that from time to time charged and checked the pursuers, and sometimes put guns in line to hold them back. The pursuers, after each such check, would still press on. The first, the thousands in retreat, were Wellington’s command retiring from Quatre Bras; the second, the pursuers, were a body some 74,000 strong formed by the junction of Ney and Napoleon, and pressing forward to bring Wellington to battle.
At Quatre Bras, Wellington had not been able, as he had hoped, to join the Prussians and save them from defeat. The French, under Ney, had held him up. He would even have suffered a reverse had Ney attacked promptly and strongly earlier in the day of Friday the 16th, but Ney had not acted promptly and strongly.
All day long reinforcements had come in one after the other, much later than the Duke intended, but in a sufficient measure to meet the tardy and too cautious development of Ney’s attack. Finally, the real peril under which the Duke lay (though he did not know it) — the junction of Erlon and his forces with Ney — had not taken place until darkness fell, and Erlon’s 20,000 had been wasted in the futile fashion which has been described and analysed.
The upshot, therefore, of the whole business at Quatre Bras was, that during the night between Friday and Saturday the 16th and the 17th the English and the French lay upon their positions, neither seriously incommoding the other.
During that night further reinforcements reached Wellington where his troops had bivouacked upon the positions they had held so well. Lord Uxbridge, in command of the British cavalry, and Ompteda’s brigade both came up with the morning, as did also Clinton’s division and Colville’s division, and so did the reserve artillery.
In spite of all these reinforcements, in spite even of the great mass of horse which Uxbridge had brought up, and of the new guns, Wellington’s position upon that morning of Saturday the 17th of June was, though he did not yet know it, very perilous.
He still believed that the Prussians were holding on to Ligny, and that they had kept their positions during the night, which night he had himself spent at Genappe, to the rear of the battlefield of Quatre Bras.
When Wellington awoke on the morning of Saturday in Genappe, there were rumours in the place that the Prussians had been defeated the day before at Ligny. The Duke went at once to Quatre Bras; sent Colonel Gordon off eastward with a detachment of the Tenth Hussars to find out what had happened, and that officer, finding the road from Ligny in the hands of the French, had the sense to scout up northwards, came upon the tail of the Prussian retreat, and returned to Wellington at Quatre Bras by half-past seven with the whole story: the Prussians had indeed been beaten; they were in full retreat; but a chance of retreat had lain open towards the north, and that was the road they had taken.
Wellington knew, therefore, before eight o’clock on that Saturday morning, that his whole left or eastern flank was exposed, and it was common-sense to expect that Napoleon, with the main body of the French, having defeated the Prussians at Ligny, would now march against himself, come up upon that exposed flank (while Ney held the front), and so outnumber the Anglo-Dutch under the Duke’s command. At the worst that command would be destroyed; at the best it could only hope, if it gave time for Napoleon to come up, to have to retreat westward, and to lose touch, for good, with the Prussians.
In such a plight it was Wellington’s business to retreat towards the north, so as to remain in touch with his Prussian allies, while yet that line of retreat was open to him, and before Napoleon should have forced a battle.
Sketch showing the situation in which Wellington was
at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th.
The Duke was in no hurry to undertake this movement, for as yet there was no sign of Napoleon’s arrival. The men breakfasted, and it was not until ten o’clock that the retreat began. He sent word back up the road to stop the reinforcements that were still upon their way to join him at Quatre Bras, and to turn them round again up the Brussels road, the way they had come, until they should reach the ridge of the Mont St Jean, just in front of the village of Waterloo, where he had determined to stand. This done, he made his dispositions for retirement, and a little after ten o’clock the retreat upon Waterloo began. His English infantry led the retreat, the Netherland troops following, then the Brunswickers, and the last files of that whole great body of men were marching up the Brussels road northward before noon. Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very considerable force of cavalry and the guns necessary to support it, deployed to cover the retreat, and watched the enemy.
That enemy was motionless. Ney did not propose to attack until Napoleon should come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriving from the battlefield of Ligny, were not visible until within the neighbourhood of two o’clock. As he came near the Emperor was perceived, his memorable form distinguished in the midst of a small escorting body, urging the march; and the English guns, during one of those rare moments in which war discovers something of drama, fired upon the man who was the incarnation of all that furious generation of arms. In a military study, this moment, valuable to civilian history, may be neglected.
The flood of French troops arriving made it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of his very numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to cover Wellington’s retreat.
The task was, however, not only successfully but nobly accomplished. Just as the French came up the sky had darkened and a furious storm had broken from the north-west upon the opposing forces. It was in the midst of a rain so violent that friend could be hardly distinguished from foe at thirty yards distance that the pursuit began, and to the noise of limbers galloped furiously to avoid capture, and of all those squadrons pursuing and pursued, was joined an incessant thunder.
Things are accomplished in war which do not fit into the framework of its largest stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost. Overshadowed by the great story of Waterloo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and his Horse did on that afternoon of Saturday the 17th of June is too often forgotten.
The ability and the energy displayed were equal.
The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the retirement of Wellington’s main body, the continual appreciation of ground during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the choice of occasional artillery positions — all these showed mastery, and secured the complete order of Wellington’s retreat.
The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the First Life Guards.
These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.
Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of Wellington’s army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the Mont St Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit were at an end.
Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon and through the evening, Wellington’s troops were already taking up their positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon its crest, the “Belle Alliance.” This ridge formed the natural halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array of either force, the weather will provide that reason.
The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort, almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road, forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that “fifth element in war” (as Napoleon himself called it), Wellington’s troops — the mass of them at least — had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington’s command bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.
With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril, and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business, form the soul of an army.
Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo, about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St Jean.
In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the day.
There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He, incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted upon success.
Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.
To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow undulation of land.
But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the battlefield.
In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the 120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.
The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.
Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and west — perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.
Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a “saddle,” a belt of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road, lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the western end of Wellington’s line. The whole position, therefore, if it were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as does the accompanying plan.
In such a model the northern ridge P — Q some two miles in length is that held by Wellington. The southern one M — N is that held by Napoleon. Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High Road. The subsidiary ridge O — O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye Sainte.
Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon needs less careful study for the comprehension of the battle than that held by Wellington.
The latter is known as the Ridge of the Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a little below its highest point and a little behind its central axis. This ridge Wellington had carefully studied the year before, and that great master of defence had noted and admired the excellence of its defensive character. Not only does the land rise towards the ridge through the whole length of the couple of miles his troops occupied, not only is it almost free of “dead” ground, but there lie before it two walled enclosures, the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large one of Hougomont, which, properly prepared and loopholed as they were, were equivalent to a couple of forts standing out to break the attack. There is, again, behind the whole line of the ridge, lower ground upon which the Duke could and did conceal troops, and along which he could and did move them safely during the course of the action.
Anyone acquainted with Wellington’s various actions and their terrains will recognise a common quality in them: they were all chosen by an eye unequalled for seizing, even in where an immediate decision was necessary, all the capabilities of a defensive position. That taken up on the 18th of June 1815, in the Duke’s last battle, had been chosen, not under the exigencies of immediate combat, but with full leisure and after a complete study. It is little wonder, then, that it is the best example of all. Of all the defensive positions which the genius of Wellington has made famous in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.
V. THE ACTION
IN APPROACHING THIS famous action, it is essential to recapitulate the strategical conditions which determined its result.
I have mentioned them at the outset and again in the middle of this study; I must repeat them here.
The only chance Napoleon had when he set forward in early June to attack the allies in Belgium, the vanguard of his enemies (who were all Europe), was a chance of surprising that vanguard, of striking in suddenly between its two halves, of thoroughly defeating one or the other, and then turning to defeat as thoroughly its colleague.
Other chances than this desperate chance he had none; for he was fighting against odds of very nearly two to one even in his attack upon this mere vanguard of the armed kings; their total forces were, of course, overwhelmingly superior.
He did succeed, as we have seen, in striking suddenly in between the two halves of the allied army in Belgium. He was not as quick as he had intended to be. There were faults and delays, but he managed, mainly through the malinformation and misjudgment of Wellington, to deal with the Prussians unsupported by Wellington’s western wing.
He attacked those Prussians with the bulk of his forces; and although he was outnumbered even upon that field, he defeated the Prussians at Ligny. But the defeat was not complete. The Prussians were free to retire northward, and so ultimately to rejoin Wellington. They took that opportunity, and from the moment they had taken it Napoleon was doomed.
We have further seen that Grouchy, who had been sent after the Prussian retreat, might, if he had seen all the possibilities of that retreat, and had seen them in time, have stepped in between the Prussians and Wellington, and have prevented the appearance of the former upon the field of Waterloo.
Had Grouchy done so, Waterloo would not have been the crushing defeat it was for Napoleon. It would very probably have been a tactical success for Napoleon.
But, on the other hand, we have no ground for thinking that it would have been a final and determining success for the Emperor. For if Wellington had not known quite early in the action that he could count upon the arrival of the Prussians, he would not have accepted battle. If, as a fact, he had found the Prussians intercepted, he could have broken contact and retreated before it was too late.
Had he done so, it would simply have meant that he would later have effected a junction with his allies, and that in the long-run Napoleon would still have had to fight an allied army immensely superior to his own.
All this is as much as to say once more what has been insisted upon throughout these pages; Waterloo was lost, not upon Sunday, June 18th, but two days before, when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and drove back the 80,000 of Blucher but failed to contain them, failed to drive them eastward, away from Wellington, or to cause a general surrender, and failed because the First French Army Corps, under Erlon, a matter of 20,000 men, failed to come up in flank at the critical moment.
We have seen what the effect of that failure was; we have discussed its causes, and we must repeat the main fact for military history of all those four days: the breakdown of Napoleon’s last desperate venture turned upon Erlon’s useless marching and countermarching between Quatre Bras and Ligny, two days before the final action of Waterloo was fought.
This being so, the battle of Waterloo must resolve itself into two main phases: the first, the beginning of the struggle with Wellington before the Prussians come up; the second, the main and decisive part of the action, in which both Prussians and English are combined against the French army.
This second phase develops continually as the numbers of the arriving Prussians increase, until it is clinched by the appearance of Ziethen’s corps at the very end of the day, and the break-up of the French army; this second part is therefore itself capable of considerable subdivision. But in any large and general view of the whole action, we must regard it as divided into these two great chapters, during the first of which is engaged the doubtful struggle between Napoleon and Wellington; during the second of which the struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined by the arrival of the Prussians in flank upon the field.
Elements of Waterloo.
The First Part of the Action
BEFORE THE ARRIVAL of the Prussians
The action was to take the form of an assault by Napoleon’s forces against this defensive position held by Wellington. It was the business of Wellington, although his total force was slightly inferior to the enemy in numbers, and considerably inferior in guns, to hold that defensive position until the Prussians should come up in flank. This he had had word would take place at latest by one or two o’clock. It was the business of Napoleon to capture the strong outworks, Hougomont and La Haye Sainte; and, that done, to hammer the enemy’s line until he broke it. That delay in beginning this hammering would be fatal; that the Prussians were present upon his flank, could arrive in the midst of the battle, and were both confidently and necessarily expected by his enemy; that his simple single battle would turn into two increasingly complex ones, Napoleon could have no idea. Napoleon could see no need for haste. A long daylight was before him. It was necessary to let the ground dry somewhat after the terrible rain of the day before if artillery was to be used effectively; nor did he press his columns, which were moving into position all through the morning, and which had not completely deployed even by eleven o’clock.
It was a little after that hour that he dictated to Soult the order of battle. Its first and effective phrases run as follows: —
“Once the whole army is deployed, that is, at about half-past one, at the moment when the Emperor shall send the order to Marshal Ney, the attack is to be delivered. It will have for its object the capture of the village of Mont St Jean and the cross-roads…”
The remainder of the order sets out forces to be engaged in this first attack.
The French forces consisted in the IInd Army Corps deployed to the left or west of the road, the Ist to the right or east of it, and behind Napoleon, in the centre and in reserve, the VIth Corps and the Guard.
The plan in the Emperor’s mind was perfectly simple. There was to be no turning of the right nor of the left flank of the enemy, which would only have the effect of throwing back that enemy east or west. His line was to be pierced, the village of Mont St Jean which lay on the ridge of Wellington’s position and which overlooks the plateau on every side was to be carried, and this done Napoleon would be free to decide upon his next action, according to the nature and extent of the disorder into which he had thrown the enemy’s broken line.
As a fact, Napoleon made a movement before that hour of half-past one which he had set down in his order for the beginning of the assault. That movement was a movement against the advanced and fortified position of Hougomont.
He sent orders to his left, to the body on the east of the high road, the Second Army Corps, under Reille, to send troops to occupy the outer gardens, wood, and orchards of the country-house, and at twenty-five minutes to twelve the first gun fired in support of that movement was also the first cannonshot of Waterloo.
After a brief artillery duel and exchange of cannonshots between the height on the French left, which overlooks Hougomont, and the corresponding height upon the English right, the French infantry began to march down the slope to occupy the little wood which stands to the south of the chateau. These four regiments were commanded by the Emperor’s brother Jerome, who was — as we have seen at Quatre Bras — under the orders of Reille. The clearing of the wood was no very desperate affair, but it was a difficult one, and it took an hour. The Germans of Nassau and Hanover, who were charged with the defence of Hougomont and its approaches, stubbornly contested the standing trees and the cut-clearing which lay between them and the garden wall of the chateau.
It must be clearly seized, at this early and even premature point in the action, that Napoleon’s object in making this attack upon Hougomont was only to weaken Wellington’s centre.
Hougomont lay upon Wellington’s right. Wellington had always been nervous of his right, and feared the turning of his line there, because, should he have to retreat, his communications would ultimately lie in that direction. It was for this reason that he had set right off at Braine l’Alleud, nearly a mile to the west of his line, the Dutch-Belgian Division of Chassé and sixteen guns, which force he connected with a reserve body at Hal, much further to the west.
Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougomont before the action proper was begun, coming thus upon Wellington’s right, would make him attempt to reinforce the place and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor intended the brunt of the attack to fall.
Napoleon had no other intention that history can discover in pressing the attack against Hougomont so early. It was almost in the nature of a “feint.” But when, towards half-past twelve, his brother’s division had cleared the wood and come up against the high garden wall of the farm, for some reason which cannot be determined, whether the eagerness of the troops, the impulsiveness of Jerome himself, or whatever cause, instead of being contented with holding the wood according to orders, the French furiously attacked the loopholed and defended wall. They attempted to break in the great door, which was recessed, and therefore protected by a murderous cross-fire. They were beaten back into the wood, leaving a heap of dead. At this point Reille, according to his own account (which may well enough be accurate), sent orders for the division to remain in the wood, and not to waste itself against so strong an outpost. But Jerome and his men were not to be denied. They marched round the chateau, under a heavy artillery fire from the English batteries above, and attempted to carry the north wall. As they were so doing, four companies of the Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which Wellington could be tempted to part with from his main line, came in reinforcement to the defence, and, after a sharp struggle, the French were thrust back once more.
It was by that time past one o’clock, and this first furious attempt upon Hougomont, unintended by the Emperor, and a sheer waste, had doubly failed. It had failed in itself — the house and garden still remained untaken, the post was still held. It had failed in its object, which had been to draw Wellington, and to get him to send numerous troops from his centre to his right in defence of the threatened place.
Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this diversion of a few regiments against Hougomont was but a small matter, had prepared and was about to deliver his main attack.
The reader will see upon the contours of the coloured map a definite spur of land marked with a broad green band in front of the French order of battle, and further marked by the green letter “B” in the very centre of the map. It was along this spur and at about one o’clock that the Emperor drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in order to prepare the assault upon the opposing ridge, which was to be delivered the moment their fire had ceased. Napoleon at that moment was watching his army and its approaching engagement from that summit upon the great road marked “A” in green upon my coloured map, whence the whole landscape to the north and west lies open.
There he received the report of Ney that the guns were ready, and only waiting for the order.
A little while before the guns were ready and Ney had reported to that effect, Napoleon had received Grouchy’s letter, in which it was announced that the mass of the Prussian army had retreated on Wavre. He had replied to it with instructions to Grouchy so to act that no Prussian corps at Wavre could come and join Wellington. Hardly had the Emperor dictated this reply when, looking northward and then eastward over the great view, he saw, somewhat over four miles away, a shadow, or a movement, or a stain upon the bare uplands towards Wavre; he thought that appearance to be companies of men. A few moments later a sergeant of Silesian Hussars, taken prisoner by certain cavalry detachments far out to the east, was brought in. He had upon him a letter sent from Bulow to Wellington announcing that the Prussians were at hand, and the prisoner further told the Emperor that the troops just perceived were the vanguard of the Prussian reinforcement. Thus informed, the Emperor caused a postscript to be added to his dictated letter, and bade Grouchy march at once towards this Prussian column, fall upon it while it was still upon the march and defenceless and destroy it.
Such an order presupposed Grouchy’s ability to act upon it; Napoleon took that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon’s note to Grouchy’s quarters within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in what state Grouchy’s forces might be, nor what direction they might already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon’s evident hope at the moment of things going well, that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he had kept in reserve behind his line, to march down the hill to the village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which Wellington’s troops held.
That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and Erlon’s First Corps d’Armée, fresh to the combat, because it had so unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered each other from height to height.
The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as effective for defence as a regular trench.
Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan, for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he had put Pack’s brigade and Kemp’s, both British; to the left of it, but also behind the road, Best’s Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held with Perponcher’s Belgians.
It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians, standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800 yards. At the French charge, though that was delivered through high standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope, Bijlandt’s brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded, and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard. Anyhow, Kemp’s brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.
Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King’s Dragoons, had broken the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven back to the English positions with bad loss.
When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been put out of action; it had lost two colours.
Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather over two hours.
The Second Part of the Action
THE SECOND AND decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington’s command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly. The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French, got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.
This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle, as I have described.
The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what were essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only against Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right and almost behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering with the whole force of the French army at the British and their allies upon the ridge in front, but of desperately attempting to break the Anglo-Dutch line against time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced forces; with forces perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending more and more men off to the right to resist, if it were possible, the increasing pressure of the accumulating Prussian forces upon the right flank of the French.
This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of four o’clock.
It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from the screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east, but at that hour (four o’clock) the heads of their columns were all ready to debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon the field and the beginning of the second half of the battle was not material to the result.
That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he watched them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the history of modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously erroneous.
Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily open to Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no sight of Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand upon the defensive along the height which he commanded, there to await Grouchy, and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances of an issue which might at least be negative, if he could prevent its being decisively disastrous.
But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor’s mind, military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement of Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might say his necessary, plan was to break Wellington’s line, if still it could be broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians should be felt. Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or ultimate disaster.
We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity for breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for retreating, was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.
But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the day, his advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between this hour of half-past three and four o’clock, when he determined to renew the combat.
He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault upon the centre, and then to renew the general attack.
La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by mounting the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after this unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon to prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more furious than the one which had opened the action at one o’clock. Men trained in a generation’s experience of war called it the most furious artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better served him.
Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington’s command was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that the enemy’s line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the cavalry to charge.
Wellington’s line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is useless against a front still solid.
It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted men which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite slope.
I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes’ command, which was drawn up behind Milhaud’s, followed Milhaud’s, under the impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of land.
There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the full gravity of Ney’s error.
To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The 5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered — with a moment’s wavering — the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.
It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as the famous metaphor of that field goes, “like angry waves round rocks”; they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied infantry had formed. The squares stood.
Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained, indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry, charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge’s cleared the plateau. The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again, and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the thing had failed.
But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once more.
Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of Wellington’s line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock, himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the charge.
He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he knew how ill-judged had been Ney’s first launching of that great mass of horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward, acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may be lost.
A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance, and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington’s line before the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank and rear.
Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at this moment — nearly half-past five o’clock — had accomplished their purpose.
Of the four Prussian corps d’armée bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow, which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the east of all the Prussian army, but it was fresh to the fight, for it had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well commanded.
The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher’s energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont (or Paris) before four o’clock, and ready to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o’clock at latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this country.
The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liège when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre. Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than three miles from Liège city.
Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny, was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early afternoon of Friday the 16th.
It is from this point — Hannut — that the great effort begins.
Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.
During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday afternoon.
Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell back upon Wavre.
That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the early morning of the Saturday Bulow’s 32,000 fell back along a line parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le Mont.
This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those whom the accident of position had most spared.
The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon the third day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no fighting and is supposed to be “fresh.” On the daybreak, therefore, after bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow’s force is again upon the move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o’clock, and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact that its centre did not reach St Lambert until one o’clock, nor did the last brigade pass through that spot until three o’clock. Down the steep ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from the woods at the summit until after four o’clock. It was not until after five o’clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.
In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the average of the corps — certainly more than sixty for those who had marched furthest — broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.
Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which decided Waterloo.
There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and organisation so excellent in the moving so large a body under such conditions in the whole history of war.
When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of Fischermont and began its two-mile approach towards his flank, Napoleon, who had already had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered Lobau with the Sixth French Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept with him of the Sixth Army Corps, to go forward and check it.
It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against the 30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as would permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was his most desperate need. Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit, was turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.
All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that enemy’s reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army and to the Emperor’s own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent action of the French cavalry was continuing against Wellington’s right centre, west of the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third time; the plateau was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares formed. For the third time that furious seething of horse against foot was seen from the distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third time the sight carried with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For the third time the cavalry charge broke back again, spent, into the valley below. Ney, wild as he had been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in judgment as he had failed then, shouted for the last reserve of horse, and forgot to call for that 6000 untouched infantry, the bulk of Reille’s Second Corps, which watched from the height of the French ridge the futile efforts of their mounted comrades.
Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone, the charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, immediately supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of Reille’s, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have snatched victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet in military history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken Wellington’s line before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right and behind him should have completed his destruction.
But the moment was missed. Reille’s infantry was not ordered forward until the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence; until the English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the English squares once more deployed and holding the whole line of their height.
It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances upon a map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear at all in the history of armies. Those who have experience of active service will tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges meant, of what blood Ney’s brain was full, and why that order for the infantry came too late. Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated a charge, a quarter was broken before the British line was reached, and that assault, in its turn, failed.
At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o’clock, two successes on the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their last disastrous effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.
The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the recapture of Plancenoit.
La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken before the very front of Wellington’s line, must be captured if yet a further effort was to be attempted by Napoleon. Major Baring had held it with his small body of Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust back a general assault, and throughout more than five hours he had resisted partial and equally unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney, ordered to carry it at whatever cost, brought up against it a division, and more than a division. The French climbed upon their heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the walls, and, at the end of the butchery, Baring with forty-two men — all that was left him out of nine companies — cut his way back through to the main line, and the farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left, round which so meaningless a struggle had raged all day long, was never wholly cleared of its defenders, but the main body of it was in flames, and with the capture of La Haye Sainte the whole front was free for a final attack at the moment which Napoleon should decide.
Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French reinforcements had recaptured the village and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had given way before the Prussian advance, as we have seen. The next French reinforcements, though they had at first thrust the Prussians back, in turn gave way as the last units of the enemy arrived, and the Prussian batteries were dropping shot right on to the fields which bordered the Brussels road.
Napoleon took eleven battalions of the Guard (the Imperial Guard was his reserve, and had not yet come into action) and drew them up upon his flank to defend the Brussels road; with two more battalions he reinforced the wavering troops in Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy out of the village with the bayonet, and for the moment checked that pressure upon the flank and rear which could not but ultimately return.
It was somewhat past seven by the time all this was accomplished. Napoleon surveyed a field over which it was still just possible (in his judgment at least) to strike a blow that might save him. He saw, far upon the left, Hougomont in flames; in the centre, La Haye Sainte captured; on the right, the skirmishers advancing upon the slope before the English line; his eastern flank for the moment free of the Prussians, who had retired before the sudden charge of the Guard. He heard far off a cannonade which might be that of Grouchy.
But even as he looked upon his opportunity he saw one further thing that goaded him to an immediate hazard. Upon the north-eastern corner of his strained and bent-back line of battle, against the far, perilous, exposed angle of it, he saw new, quite unexpected hordes of men advancing. It was Ziethen debouching with the head of his First Prussian Army Corps at this latest hour — and Napoleon saw those most distant of his troops ready to yield to the new torrent.
The sun, now within an hour of setting, had shone out again. Its light came level down the shallow valley, but all that hollow was so filled with the smoke of recent discharges that the last stroke which Napoleon was now preparing was in part hidden from the Allies upon the hill. That final stake, the only venture left, was to be use of his last reserve and the charge of the Guard.
No combat in history, perhaps, had seen a situation so desperate maintained without the order for retreat. Wellington’s front, which the French were attacking, was still held unbroken; upon the French flank and rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army Corps were for the moment held, they must inevitably return; more remained to come: they were in the act of pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat, and now here came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.
If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had been possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art demanded it. He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were strained up to and beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too far means in all things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.
But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was impossible as a political one.
Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made any rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear, now suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.
Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when Bülow’s 30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction certain; though he had then, while yet he could, organised a retirement, abandoned the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it was successful, and covered with his best troops an immediate retreat, that retreat would not have availed his cause.
The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the nature of his doom. Grouchy — a quarter of his forces — was cut off from him altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and pursued by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy and himself. Now Ziethen too was here.
Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large again as his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few hours. His retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.
Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would re-enter France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had crossed the frontier three days before. He would so re-enter France — the wealthier classes of which watched his power, nearly all of them with jealousy, most with active hate — surrounded by general officers not ten of whom, perhaps, he could sincerely trust, and by a whole society which supported him only upon the doubtful condition of victory.
Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than it was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field. Therefore it was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle lost if ever battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw, and in this half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.
In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat of arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the far corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the Mont St Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest reinforcement of the Emperor’s foes had emerged from the walls and thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in the weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was not enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the day already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were appearing to clinch the matter altogether.
It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the head of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final attack against Wellington’s line which still held the opposing slope.
It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First Prussian Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the fight, and were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began its ponderous thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the west of the Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four great cavalry charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second Corps, the tall men, taller for the bearskins and the shouldered musket, the inheritors of twenty-two victorious and now immortal years, leant forward, advancing. To the hanging smoke of the cannon in the vale was added the rising mist of evening; and when the furious cannonade which was to support their attack had ceased with their approach to the enemy’s line, a sort of silence fell upon the spectators of that great event.
The event was brief.
It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped unharmed from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced to the enemy the approaching movement of the Guard. He was a hater of the flag and of the Revolution, and of its soldier: he was for the old Kings.
There was no need for this dramatic aid. The lull in the action, Napoleon’s necessity for a last stroke, possibly through the mist and smoke the actual movement of the Guard, were apparent. The infantry whom Wellington had retired behind the ridge during the worst of the artillery preparation was now set forward again. It was the strongest and the most trusted of his troops whom Wellington posted to receive the shock — Adams’ brigade and the brigade of Guards. Three batteries of the reserve were brought forward, with orders not to reply to the French cannon, but to fire at the advancing columns of the charge.
As the Guard went upward, the whole French front to the right moved forward and supported the attack. But upon the left, the Second Army Corps, Reille’s recently broken 6000, could not yet move. They came far behind and to the west of the Brussels road; the Guard went up the slope alone.
At two hundred yards from the English line the grape began to mow through them. They closed up after each discharge. Their advance continued unchecked.
Of the four columns, that nearest to the Brussels road reached, touched, and broke the line of the defenders. Its strength was one battalion, yet it took the two English batteries, and, in charging Halkett’s brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into confusion. It might have been imagined for one moment that the line had here been pierced, but this first and greatest chance of success was defeated, and with it all chances, for it is the head of a charge that tells.
The reader will have seen upon the map, far off to the west or left, at Braine l’Alleud, a body of reserve, Belgian, which Wellington had put so far off in the mistaken notion that the French would try to turn him in that direction. This force of 3000 men with sixteen guns Wellington had recalled in the last phases of the battle. It was their action, and especially that of their artillery, that broke this first success of the Guard. The Netherlanders charged with the bayonet to drive home the effect of their cannon, and the westernmost column of the French attack was ruined.
As the four columns were not all abreast, but the head of the first a little more forward than that of the second, the head of the second than that of the third, and so forth, the shock of the French guard upon the British came in four separate blows, each delivered a few moments later than the last.
We have seen how the Dutch broke the first column.
The second column, which attacked the right of Halkett’s brigade, failed also. The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but recovered, and their recovery was largely due to the personal courage of their chief.
The next column, again, the third, came upon the British Guards; and the Guards, reserving their fire until the enemy were at a stone’s-throw, fired point-blank and threw the French into confusion. During that confusion the brigade of Guards charged, pursued the enemy part of the way down the slope, were closed upon by the enemy and driven back again to the ridge.
The fourth column of the French was now all but striking the extremity of the British line. Here Adams’ brigade, a battalion of the 95th, the 71st, and the 52nd regiments, awaited the blow.
The 52nd was the inmost of the three.
It stood just where the confusion of the Guards as they were thrown back up the hill joined the still unbroken ranks of Adams’ extremity of the British line.
The 52nd determined the crisis of that day. And it was then precisely that the battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to be more accurate, this was the moment when the inevitable breaking-point appeared.
Colborne was its commander. Instead of waiting in the line, he determined to run the very grave risk of leaving it upon his own initiative, and of playing a tremendous hazard; he took it upon himself to bring the 52nd out, forward in advance of and perpendicular to the defending line, and so to bring a flank fire upon the last French charge.
The peril was very great indeed. It left a gap in the English line; the possibility, even the chance, of a French advance to the left against that gap and behind the 52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of thing which, when men do it and fail, is quite the end of them. Colborne did it and succeeded. No French effort was made to the left of the 52nd. It had therefore but its front to consider; it wheeled round, left that dangerous gap in the English line, and poured its fire in flank upon the last charge of the fourth French column. That fire was successful. The assault halted, wavered, and began to break.
The French line to the right, advancing in support of the efforts of the Guard, saw that backward movement, and even as they saw it there came the news of Ziethen’s unchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the north-east of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken the French formation.
The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search or argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the French west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved together and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army Corps to the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen they also broke. At which point the first flexion occurred will never be determined.
The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond, snapped with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a complete confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and scattered units.
Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and secondly, Lobau’s troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.
Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of the panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The pursuit still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge shouted to these veterans, and of Cambronne’s disputed reply just before the musket ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian advance, perpetually increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of the Sixth Army Corps, thrust into the great river of fugitives that was now pouring southward in panic down the Brussels road, were swept away by it and were lost; and at last, as darkness fell, the first ranks also were mixed into the mass of panic, and the Imperial army had ceased to exist.
There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian cavalry, to whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring, pressing, urging the rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras itself, where the corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay stark after those two days, the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers before fear had given way to fatigue with the pursued; and when the remnants of Napoleon’s army were past the Sambre again, not 30,000 disjointed, unorganised, dispersed, and broken men had survived the disaster.
FINIS
MALPLAQUET
Malplaquet.
I. THE POLITICAL MEANING OF MALPLAQUET
THAT POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE which we must seek in all military history, and without which that history cannot be accurate even upon its technical side, may be stated for the battle of Malplaquet in the following terms.
Louis XIV. succeeding to a cautious and constructive period in the national life of France, this in its turn succeeding to the long impotence of the religious wars, found at his orders when his long minority was ended a society not only eager and united, but beginning also to give forth the fruit due to three active generations of discussion and combat.
Every department of the national life manifested an extreme vitality, and, while the orderly and therefore convincing scheme of French culture imposed itself upon Western Europe, there followed in its wake the triumph of French arms; the king in that triumph nearly perfected a realm which would have had for its limits those of ancient Gaul.
It would be too long a matter to describe, even in general terms, the major issues depending upon Louis XIV.’s national ambitions and their success or failure.
In one aspect he stands for the maintenance of Catholic civilisation against the Separatist and dissolving forces of the Protestant North; in another he is the permanent antagonist of the Holy Roman Empire, or rather of the House of Austria, which had attained to a permanent hegemony therein. An extravagant judgment conceives his great successes as a menace to the corporate independence of Europe, or — upon the other view — as the opportunity for the founding of a real European unity.
But all these general considerations may, for the purposes of military history, be regarded in the single light of the final and decisive action which Louis XIV. took when he determined in the year 1701 to support the claims of his young grandson to the throne of Spain. This it was which excited against him a universal coalition, and acts following upon that main decision drew into the coalition the deciding factor of Great Britain.
The supremacy of French arms had endured in Europe for forty years when the Spanish policy was decided on. Louis was growing old. That financial exhaustion which almost invariably follows a generation of high national activity, and which is almost invariably masked by pompous outward state, was a reality already present though as yet undiscovered in the condition of France.
It was at the close of that year 1701 that the French king had determined upon a union of the two crowns of France and Spain in his own family. His forces occupied the Spanish Netherlands, which we now call the Kingdom of Belgium; others of his armies were spread along the Rhine, or were acting in Northern Italy — for the coalition at once began to make itself felt. Two men of genius combined in an exact agreement, the qualities of each complementing the defects of the other, to lead the main armies that were operating against the French. These men were Prince Eugene of Savoy (French by birth and training, a voluntary exile, and inspired throughout his life by a determination to avenge himself upon Louis XIV.), and the Englishman John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
The combination of such a pair was irresistible. Its fruit appeared almost at the inception of the new situation in the great victory of Blenheim.
This action, fought in August 1704, was the first great defeat French arms had registered in that generation. Henceforward the forces commanded from Versailles were compelled to stand upon the defensive.
To Blenheim succeeded one blow after another. In 1706 the great battle of Ramillies, in 1708 the crushing action of Oudenarde, confirmed the supremacy of the allies and the abasement of France. By the opening of 1709 the final defeat of Louis and his readiness to sue for peace were taken for granted.
The financial exhaustion which I have said was already present, though hardly suspected, in 1701, was grown by 1709 acute. The ordinary methods of recruitment for the French army — which nominally, of course, was upon a voluntary basis — had long reached and passed their limit. The failure of the harvest in 1708, followed by a winter of terrible severity, had completed the catastrophe, and with the ensuing spring of 1709 Louis had no alternative but to approach the allies with terms of surrender.
It seemed as though at last the way to Paris lay open. The forces of the allies in the Netherlands were not only numerically greatly superior to any which the exhausted French could now set against them, but in their equipment, in their supplies, the nourishment of the men, and every material detail, they were upon a footing wholly superior to the corresponding units of the enemy, man for man. They had further the incalculable advantage of prestige. Victory seemed normal to them, defeat to their opponents; and so overwhelming were the chances of the coalition against Louis that its leaders determined with judgment to demand from that monarch the very fullest and most humiliating terms.
Though various sections of the allies differed severally as to their objects and requirements, their general purpose of completely destroying the power of France for offence, of recapturing all her conquests, and in particular of driving the Bourbons from the throne of Spain, was held in common, and vigorously pursued.
Marlborough was as active as any in pushing the demands to the furthest possible point; Eugene, the ruling politicians of the English, the Dutch, and the German princes were agreed.
Louis naturally made every effort to lessen the blow, though he regarded his acceptance of grave and permanent humiliation as inevitable. The negotiations were undertaken at the Hague, and were protracted. They occupied the late spring of 1709 and stretched into the beginning of summer. The French king was prepared (as his instructions to his negotiators show) to give up every point, though he strove to bargain for what remained after each concession. He would lose the frontier fortresses, which were the barrier of his kingdom in the north-east. He would even consent to the abandonment of Spain to Austria.
Had that peace been declared for which the captains of Europe were confidently preparing, the future history of our civilisation would have proved materially different from what it has become. It is to be presumed that a complete breakdown of the strength of France would have followed; that the monarchy at Versailles would have sunk immediately into such disrepute that the eighteenth century would have seen France divided and possibly a prey to civil war, and one may even conclude that the great events of a century later, the Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon, could not have sprung from so enfeebled a society.
It so happened, however, that one of those slight miscalculations which are productive in history of its chief consequences, prevented the complete humiliation of Louis XIV. The demands of the allies were pushed in one last respect just beyond the line which it was worth the while of the defeated party to accept, for it was required of the old king not only that he should yield in every point, not only that he should abandon the claims of his own grandson to the throne of Spain (which throne Louis himself had now, after eight years of wise administration, singularly strengthened), but himself take arms against that grandson and co-operate in his proper shame by helping to oust him from it. It was stipulated that Louis should so act (if his grandson should show resistance and still clung to his throne) in company with those who had been for so many years his bitter and successful foes.
This last small item in the programme of the victors changed all. It destroyed in the mind of Louis and of his subjects the advantages of the disgraceful peace which they had thought themselves compelled to accept; and, as Louis himself well put it, if he were still compelled to carry on the war, it was better to fail in pursuing it against his enemies than against his own household.
The king issued to the authorities of his kingdom and to his people a circular letter, which remains a model of statesmanlike appeal. Grave, brief, and resolute, it exactly expressed the common mood of the moment. It met with an enthusiastic response. The depleted countrysides just managed to furnish the armies with a bare pittance of oats and rye (for wheat was unobtainable). Recruits appeared in unexpected numbers; and though none could believe that the issue could be other than disastrous, the campaign of 1709 was undertaken by a united nation.
Of French offensive action against the overwhelming forces of their enemies there could be no question. Villars, who commanded the armies of Louis XIV. upon the north-eastern frontier, opposing Marlborough and Eugene, drew up a line of defence consisting of entrenchments, flooded land, and the use of existing watercourses, a line running from the neighbourhood of Douai away eastward to the Belgian frontier. Behind this line, with his headquarters at La Bassée, he waited the fatal assault.
It was at the close of June that the enemy’s great forces moved. Their first action was not an attempt to penetrate the line but to take the fortresses upon its right, which taken, the defence might be turned. They therefore laid siege to Tournai, the first of the two fortresses guarding the right of the French line. (Mons was the second.)
Here the first material point in the campaign showed the power of resistance that tradition and discipline yet maintained in the French army. The long resistance of Tournai and its small garrison largely determined what was to follow. Its siege had been undertaken in the hope of its rapid termination, which the exiguity of its garrison and the impossibility of its succour rendered probable. But though Marlborough had established his headquarters before the place by the evening of the 27th of June, and Eugene upon the next day, the 28th, though trenches were opened in the first week of July and the first of the heavy fighting began upon the 8th of that month, though the town itself was occupied after a fortnight’s struggle, yet it was not until the 3rd of September that the citadel surrendered.
This protracted resistance largely determined what was to follow. While it lasted no action could be undertaken against Villars. Meanwhile the French forces were growing stronger, and, most important of all, the first results of the harvest began to be felt.
Tournai once taken, it was the business of the allies to pierce the French line of defence as soon as possible, and with that object to bring Villars to battle and to defeat him.
The plan chosen for this object was as follows: —
The allied army to march to the extreme right of the positions which the French could hope to defend. There the allies would contain the little garrison of Mons. Thither the mass of the French forces must march in order to bar the enemy’s advance upon Paris, and upon some point near Mons the whole weight of the allies could fall upon them, destroy them, and leave the way to the capital open.
Sketch Map showing how the Lines of La Bassée blocked the advance of the Allies on Paris,
and Marlborough’s plan for turning them by the successive capture of Tournai and Mons.
The plan was strategically wise. The lines of La Bassée proper could not be pierced, but this right extremity of the French positions was backed by easy country; the swamps, canals, and entrenchments of the main line to the north and west were absent. With the defeat of the inferior French forces at this point all obstacle to an advance into the heart of France would be removed.
The plan was as rapidly executed as it was skilfully devised. Actually before the capitulation of the citadel of Tournai, but when it was perceived that that capitulation could only be a matter of hours, Lord Orkney had begun to advance upon the neighbourhood of Mons. Upon the day of the capitulation of Tournai, the Prince of Hesse-Cassel had started for Mons, Cadogan following him with the cavalry. Less than twenty-four hours after Tournai had yielded, the whole allied army was on the march throughout the night. Never was a military operation performed with organisation more exact, or with obedience more prompt. Three days later Mons was contained, and by Monday the 9th of September Villars awaited, some few miles to the west of that fortress, the assault of the allies.
There followed two days of delay, which will be discussed in detail later. For the purposes of this introductory survey of the political meaning of the battle, it is enough to fix the date, Wednesday, 11th September 1709. A little before eight o’clock on the morning of that day the first cannon-shot of the battle of Malplaquet was fired. To the numerical superiority of the allies the French could oppose entrenchment and that character in the locality of the fight, or “terrain,” which will be fully described on a later page. To the superior moral, equipment, and subsistence of the allies, however, it was doubtful whether any factor could be discovered on the French side.
An unexpected enthusiasm lent something to the French resistance; the delay of two days lent something more to their defensive power. As will be seen in the sequel, certain errors (notably upon the left of Marlborough’s line) also contributed to the result, and the whole day was passed in a series of attacks and counter-attacks which left the French forces intact, and permitted them in the early afternoon to rely upon the exhaustion of the enemy and to leave, in order and without loss, the field to the enemy.
Marlborough’s victory at Malplaquet was both honourable and great. The French were compelled to withdraw; the allies occupied upon the evening of the battle the ground upon which the struggle had taken place. It is with justice that Malplaquet is counted as the fourth of those great successful actions which distinguish the name of Marlborough, and it is reckoned with justice the conclusion of the series whose three other terms are Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde. So much might suffice did war consist in scoring points as one does in a game. But when we consider war as alone it should be considered for the serious purposes of history — that is, in its political aspect; and when we ask what Malplaquet was in the political sequence of European events, the withdrawal of the French from the field in the early afternoon of September 11, 1709, has no significance comparable to the fact that the allies could not pursue.
Strategically the victory meant that an army which it was intended to destroy had maintained itself intact; morally, the battle left the defeated more elated than the victors; and for this reason, that the result was so much more in their favour than the expectation had been. In what is most important of all, the general fortunes of the campaign, the victory of the allies at Malplaquet was as sure a signal that the advance on Paris could not be made, and as sure a prevention of that advance as though Marlborough and Eugene had registered, not a success, but a defeat.
Situations of this sort, which render victories barren or actually negative, paradoxical to the general reader, simple enough in their military aspect, abound in the history of war. It is perhaps more important to explain them if one is to make military history intelligible than to describe the preliminaries and movements of the great decisive action.
The “block” of Malplaquet (to use the metaphor which is common in French history), the unexpected power of resistance which this last of the French armies displayed, and the moral effect of that resistance upon the allies, have an historical meaning almost as high as that of Blenheim upon the other side. It has been well said that one may win every battle and yet lose a campaign; there is a sense in which it may be said that one may win a campaign and suffer political loss as the result.
Malplaquet was the turning-point after which it was evident that the decline of the French position in Europe would go no further. As Blenheim had marked the turn of the tide against Louis, so Malplaquet marked the slack water when the tide was ready to turn in his favour. After Blenheim it was certain that the ambition of Louis XIV. was checked, and probable that it would wholly fail. After Malplaquet it was equally certain that the total destruction of Louis’ power was impossible, that the project of a march on Paris might be abandoned, and that the last phases of the great war would diminish the chances of the allies.
The Dutch (whose troops in particular had been annihilated upon the left of the field) did indeed maintain their uncompromising attitude, but no longer with the old certitude of success; Austria also and her allies did continue the war, but a war doomed to puerility, to a sort of stale-mate bound to end in compromise. But it was in England that the effect of the battle was most remarkable.
In England, where opinion had but tardily accepted the necessity for war nine years before, and where the fruits of that war were now regarded as quite sufficient for the satisfaction of English demands, this negative action, followed by no greater fruit than the capitulation of the little garrison at Mons, began the agitation for peace. Look closely at that agitation through its details, and personal motives will confuse you; the motives of the queen, of Harley, of Marlborough’s enemies. Look at it in the general light of the national history and you will perceive that the winter following Malplaquet, a winter of disillusionment and discontent, bred in England an opinion that made peace certain at last. The accusation against Marlborough that he fought the battle with an eye to his failing political position is probably unjust. The accusation that he fought it from a lust of bloodshed is certainly a stupid calumny. But the unpopularity of so great a man succeeding upon so considerable a technical success sufficiently proves at what a price the barrenness of that success was estimated in England. It was the English Government that first opened secret negotiations with Louis for peace in the following year; and when the great instrument which closed the war was signed at Utrecht in 1713, it was after the English troops had been withdrawn from their allies, after Eugene, acting single-handed, had suffered serious check, and in general the Peace of Utrecht was concluded under conditions far more favourable to Louis than would have been any peace signed at the Hague in 1709. The Spanish Netherlands were ceded to Austria, but France kept intact what is still her Belgian frontier. She preserved what she has since lost on the frontier of the Rhine, and (most remarkable of all!) the grandson of Louis was permitted to remain upon the Spanish throne.
Such is the general political setting of this fierce action, one of the most determined known in the history of European arms, and therefore one of the most legitimately glorious; one in which men were most ready at the call of duty and under the influences of discipline to sacrifice their lives in the defence of a common cause; and one which, as all such sacrifices must, illumines the history of the several national traditions concerned, of the English as of the Dutch, of the German principalities as of the French.
No action better proves the historical worth of valour.
II. THE SIEGE OF TOURNAI
WHEN THE NEGOTIATIONS for peace had failed, that is, with the opening of June 1709, the King of France and his forces had particularly to dread an invasion of the country and the march on Paris.
The accompanying sketch map will show under what preoccupations the French commander upon the north-eastern frontier lay.
Lille was in the hands of the enemy. There was still a small French garrison in Ypres, another in Tournai, and a third in Mons. These of themselves (considering that Lille, the great town, was now occupied by the allies, and considering also the width of the gap between Ypres and Tournai) could not prevent the invasion and the advance on the capital.
It was necessary to oppose some more formidable barrier to the line of advance which topography marked out for the allies into the heart of France.
Sketch Map showing how the Allies holding Lille thrust the French back
on to the defensive line St Venant-Valenciennes, and thus cut off the
French garrisons of Ypres, Tournai, and Mons.
Some fear was indeed expressed lest a descent should be made on the coasts and an advance attempted along the valley of the Somme. The fear was groundless. To organise the transportation of troops thus by sea, to disembark them, to bring and continue the enormous supply of provisions and ammunition they would require, was far less practical than to use the great forces already drawn up under Marlborough and Eugene in the Low Countries. Of what size these forces were we shall see in a moment.
The barrier, then, which Villars at the head of the French forces proceeded to erect, and which is known in history as “The Lines of La Bassée,” are the first point upon which we must fix our attention in order to understand the campaign of Malplaquet, and why that battle took place where it did.
It was upon the 3rd of June that Louis XIV. had written to Villars telling him that a renewal of the war would now be undertaken. On the 14th, Villars began to throw up earth for the formation of an entrenched camp between the marshy ground of Hulluch and that of Cuinchy. Here he proposed to concentrate the mass of his forces, with La Bassée just before him, the town of Lens behind. He used the waterways and the swamped ground in front and to the right for the formation of his defensive lines. These followed the upper valley of the Deule, the line of its canal, and finally reposed their right upon the river Scarpe. Though the regularly fortified line went no further than the camp near La Bassée, he also threw up a couple of entrenchments in front of Bethune and St Venant in order to cover any march he might have to make towards his left should the enemy attempt to turn him in that direction.
It must further be noted that from the Scarpe eastward went the old “lines of La Trouille” thrown up in a former campaign, and now largely useless, but still covering, after a fashion, the neighbourhood of Mons.
Toward the end of the month of June Villars awaited the advance of the allies. His forces were inferior by 40,000 to those of his enemy. He had but eight men to their twelve. The season of the year, immediately preceding the harvest, made the victualling of his troops exceedingly difficult, nor was it until the day before the final assault was expected that the moneys necessary to their pay, and to the other purposes of the army, reached him; but he had done what he could, and, acting upon a national tradition which is as old as Rome, he had very wisely depended upon fortification.
The same conditions of the season which produced something like famine in the French camp, though they did not press equally severely upon that of the allies, rendered difficult the provisioning of their vast army also.
It was the first intention of Marlborough and Eugene to attack the lines at once, to force them, and to destroy the command of Villars. But these lines had been carefully reconnoitred, notably by Cadogan, who, with a party of English officers, and under a disguise, had made himself acquainted with their strength. It was determined, therefore, at the last moment, partly also from the fears of the Dutch, to whom the possession of every fortress upon the frontier was of paramount importance, to make but a “feint” upon Villars’ lines and to direct the army upon Tournai as its true object. The feint took the form of Eugene’s marching towards the left or western extremity of the line, Marlborough towards the eastern or right extremity near Douai, and this general movement was effected on the night of the 26th and 27th of June. In the midst of its execution, the feint (which for the moment deceived Villars) was arrested.
The 27th was passed without a movement, Villars refusing to leave his entrenchments, and the commanders of the allies giving no hint of their next intention. But during that same day Tilly with the Dutch had appeared before Tournai. On the evening of the day Marlborough himself was before the town. On the 28th Prince Eugene joined both the Dutch and Marlborough before the town, taking up his headquarters at Froyennes, Marlborough being at Willemeau, and the Dutch, under Tilly, already established on the east of Tournai from Antoing to Constantin, just opposite Eugene, where they threw a bridge across the Scheldt. By the evening of the 28th, therefore, Tournai was invested on every side, and the great allied armies of between 110,000 and 120,000 men had abandoned all hope of carrying Villars’ lines, and had sat down to the capture of the frontier fortress.
A comprehension of this siege of Tournai, which so largely determined the fortunes of the campaign of Malplaquet, will be aided by the accompanying sketch map. Here it is apparent that Marlborough with his headquarters at Willemeau, Eugene with his at Froyennes, the Dutch under Tilly in a semicircle from Antoing to Constantin, completed the investment of the fortress, and that the existing bridge at Antoing which the Dutch commanded, the bridge at Constantin which they had constructed, giving access over the river to the north and to the south, made the circle complete.
Sketch Map showing complete investment of Tournai.
The fortifications of Tournai were excellent. Vauban had superintended that piece of engineering in person, and the scheme of the fortifications was remarkable from the strength of the citadel which lay apart from the town (though within its ring of earthworks) to the south. The traveller can still recognise in its abandonment this enormous achievement of Louis XIV.’s sappers, and the opposition it was about to offer to the great hosts of Marlborough and Eugene does almost as much honour to the genius of the French engineer as to the tenacity of the little garrison then defending it.
Two factors in the situation must first be appreciated by the reader.
The first is that the inferiority of Villars’ force made it impossible for him to do more than demonstrate against the army of observation. He was compelled to leave Tournai to its fate, and, indeed, the king in his first instructions, Villars in his reply, had taken it for granted that either that town or Ypres would be besieged and must fall. But the value of a fortress depends not upon its inviolability (for that can never be reckoned with), but upon the length of time during which it can hold out, and in this respect Tournai was to give full measure.
Secondly, it must be set down for the allies that their unexpectedly long task was hampered by exceptional weather. Rain fell continually, and though their command of the Scheldt lessened in some degree the problem of transport, rain in those days upon such roads as the allies drew their supplies by was a heavy handicap. The garrison of Tournai numbered thirteen and a half battalions, five detached companies, the complement of gunners necessary for the artillery, and a couple of Irish brigades — in all, counting the depleted condition of the French units at the moment, some six to seven thousand men. Perhaps, counting every combatant and non-combatant attached to the garrison, a full seven thousand men.
The command of this force was under Surville, in rank a lieutenant-general. Ravignon and Dolet were his subordinates. There was no lack of wheat for so small a force. Rationed, it was sufficient for four months. Meat made default, and, what was important with a large civil population encumbering the little garrison, money. Surville, the bishop, and others melted down their plate; even that of the altars in the town was sacrificed.
The first trench was opened on the night of the 7th of July, and three first attacks were delivered: one by the gate called Marvis, which looks eastward, another by the gate of Valenciennes, the third at the gate known as that of the Seven Springs. A sortie of the second of these was fairly successful, and upon this model the operations continued for five days.
By the end of that time a hundred heavy pieces had come up the Scheldt from Ghent, and sixty mortars as well. Four great batteries were formed. That to the south opened fire upon the 13th of July, and on the 14th the three others joined it.
The discipline maintained in the great camps of the besiegers was severe, and the besieged experienced the unusual recruitment of five hundred to six hundred deserters who penetrated within their lines. A considerable body of deserters also betook themselves to Villars’ lines, and the operations in these first days were sufficiently violent to account for some four thousand killed and wounded upon the side of the allies. Villars, meanwhile, could do no more than demonstrate without effect. Apart from the inferiority of his force, it was still impossible for him, until the harvest was gathered, to establish a sufficient accumulation of wheat to permit a forward movement. He never had four days’ provision of bread at any one time, nor, considering the length of his line, could he concentrate it upon any one place. He was fed by driblets from day to day, and lived from hand to mouth while the siege of Tournai proceeded to the east of him.
That siege was entering, with the close of the month, upon the end of its first phase.
It had been a desperate combat of mine and counter-mine even where the general circumvallation of the town was concerned, though the worst, of course, was to come when the citadel should be attacked. The batteries against the place had been increased until they counted one hundred and twelve heavy pieces and seventy mortars. On the night of the 24th of July the covered way on the right of the Scheldt was taken at heavy loss; forty-eight hours later the covered way on the left between the river and the citadel. The horn work in front of the Gate of the Seven Springs was carried on the 27th, and the isolated work between this point and the Gate of Lille upon the following day. Surville in his report, in the true French spirit of self-criticism, ascribed to the culpable failure of their defenders the loss of these outworks. But the loss, whatever its cause, determined the loss of the town. A few hours later practicable breaches had been made in the walls, ways were filled in over the ditches, and on the imminence of a general assault Surville upon the 28th demanded terms. The capitulation was signed on the 29th, and with it the commander sent a letter to Versailles detailing his motives for demanding terms for the civilian population. Finally, upon the 30th, Surville with 4000 men, all that was left of his original force of 7000, retired into the citadel and there disposed himself for as a long a resistance as might be. As his good fortune decided, he was to be able to hold with this small force for five full weeks.
To Marlborough is due the honour of the capitulation. The besieging troops were under his command, while Eugene directed the army of observation to the west. Marlborough put some eight thousand men into the town under Albemarle. A verbal understanding was given on both sides that the citadel would not fire upon the civilian part, nor the allies make an attack from it upon the citadel, and the siege of that stronghold began upon the following day, the 21st, towards evening. The operations against the citadel proved far more severe and a far greater trial to Marlborough’s troops than those against the general circumvallation of the town. The subterranean struggle of mine and counter-mine particularly affected the moral of the allies, and after a week a proposal appeared that the active fighting should cease, the siege be converted into a blockade, and only the small number of men sufficient for such a blockade be left before the citadel until the 5th of September, up to which date, a month ahead, at the utmost, it was believed the garrison could hold out. Louis was willing to accept the terms upon the condition that this month should be one of general truce. The allies refused this condition, and hostilities were resumed.
The force employed for containing the citadel and for prosecuting its siege had no necessity to be very large.
It was warfare of a terrible kind. Men met underground in the mines, were burned alive when these were sprung, were exhausted, sometimes to death, in the subterranean and perilous labour. The mass of the army was free to menace Villars and his main body.
But the admirable engineering which had instructed and completed the lines of La Bassée still checked the allies, in spite of superior numbers and provisionment still superior.
The effect of the harvest was indeed just beginning to be felt, and the French general was beginning to have a little more elbow-room, so to speak, for the disposition of his men through the gradual replenishment of his stores. But even so, Marlborough and Eugene had very greatly the advantage of him in this respect.
When the siege of the citadel of Tournai had been proceeding a little more than a week, upon the 8th of August the main body of the allies fell suddenly upon Marchiennes. Here the river Scarpe defended the main French positions. The town itself lay upon the further bank like a bastion. The attack was made under Tilly, and, consonantly to the strength of all Villars’ defensive positions, that attack failed. On the night of the 9th Tilly retired from before Marchiennes, after having suffered the loss of but a few of his men.
This action, though but a detail in the campaign, is well worth noting, because it exhibits in a sort of section, as it were, the causes of Malplaquet.
Malplaquet, as we shall see in a moment, was fought simply because it had been impossible to pierce Villars’ line, and Malplaquet, though a victory, was a sterile victory, more useful to the defeated than to the victors, because the defence had been kept up for such a length of time and was able to choose its own terrain.
Now all this character in the campaign preceding the battle is exemplified in the attempt upon Marchiennes upon August 8th and 9th and its failure. Had it succeeded, had the line been pierced, there would have been no “block” at Malplaquet but an immediate invasion of France, just as there would have been had the line been pierced in the first attempt of five weeks before.
In the next week and the next, Villars continually extended that line. He brought it up solidly as far as St Venant on his left, as far as Valenciennes on his right. He continually strengthened it, so that at no one place should it need any considerable body of men to hold it, and that the mass of the army should be free to move at will behind this strong entrenchment and dyke, fortified as it was with careful inundation and the use of two large rivers.
Though the body of the allies again appeared in the neighbourhood of the lines, no general attack was delivered, but on the 30th of August Villars heard from deserters and spies that the citadel of Tournai was at the end of its provisions. Though but a certain minority of the allied army was necessary to contain that citadel, yet once it had fallen the whole of the allied forces would be much freer to act.
It was upon the 31st of August that Surville, finding himself at the end of his provisionment of food, proposed capitulation. At first no capitulation could be arrived at. Marlborough insisted upon the garrison’s complete surrender; Surville replied by threatening a destruction of the place. It was not until the morning of the 3rd September that a capitulation was signed in the form that the officers and soldiers of the garrison should not be free to serve the king until after they had been exchanged. The troops should march out with arms and colours, and should have safe escort through the French lines to Douai. They reached that town and camp upon the 4th, and an exchange of prisoners against their numbers was soon effected.
Thus after two months ended the siege of Tournai, a piece of resistance which, as the reader will soon see, determined all that was to follow. Six thousand four hundred men had held the place when it was first invested. Of these, 1709 (nearly a third) had been killed; a number approximately equal had been wounded. The figures are sufficient to show the desperate character of the fighting, and how worthy this episode of war was on both sides of the legends that arose from it.
III. THE MANŒUVRING FOR POSITION
WITH THE END of the siege of Tournai both armies were free, the one for unfettered assault, the other to defend itself behind the lines as best it might.
To make a frontal attack upon Villars’ lines at any point was justly thought impossible after the past experience which Eugene and Marlborough had of their strength. A different plan was determined on. Mons, with its little garrison, should be invested, and the mass of the army should, on that extreme right of the French position, attempt to break through the old lines of the Trouille and invade France.
Coincidently with the first negotiations for the capitulation of the citadel of Tournai, this new plan was entered upon. Lord Orkney, with the grenadiers of the army and between 2000 and 3000 mounted men, was sent off on the march to the south-east just as the first negotiations of Marlborough with Surville were opened. With this mobile force Orkney attempted to pass the Haine at St Ghislain. He all but surprised that point at one o’clock of the dark September night, but the French posts were just in time. He was beaten off, and had to cross the river higher up upon the eastern side of Mons, at Havre.
The little check was not without its importance. It meant that the rapid forward march of his vanguard had failed to force that extreme extension of the French line, which was called “The Line of the Trouille” from the name of the small river that falls into the Haine near Mons. In point of time — which is everything in defensive warfare — the success of the defence at St Ghislain meant that all action by the allies was retarded for pretty well a week. Meanwhile, the weather had turned to persistent and harassing rain, the allied army, “toiling through a sea of mud,” had not invested Mons even upon the eastern side until the evening of the 7th of September. On the same day Villars took advantage of a natural feature, stronger for purposes of defence than the line of the Trouille. This feature was the belt of forest-land which lies south and a little west of Mons, between that town and Bavai. He strengthened such forces as he had on the line of the Trouille (the little posts which had checked the first advance upon Mons, as I have said), concentrated the whole army just behind and west of the forest barrier, and watching the two gaps of that barrier, whose importance will be explained in a moment, he lay, upon the morning of Sunday, September the 8th, in a line which stretched from the river Haine at Montreuil to the bridge of Athis behind the woods; keeping watch upon his right in case he should have to move the line down south suddenly to meet an attack. As Villars so lay, he was in the position of a man who may be attacked through one of two doors in a wall. Such a man would stand between the two doors, watching both, and ready to spring upon that one which might be attacked, and attempt to defend it. The wall was the wall of wood, the two doors were the opening by Boussu and the other narrow opening which is distinguished by the name of Aulnois, the principal village at its mouth. It was this last which was to prove in the event the battlefield.
All this I must make plainer and elaborate in what follows, and close this section by a mere statement of the manœuvring for position.
Sketch Map showing the Lines of Woods behind Mons,
with the two gaps of Boussu and Aulnois.
Villars lying, as I have said, with his right at Athis, his left on the river Haine at Montreuil, Marlborough countered him by bringing the main of his forces over the Trouille so that they lay from Quevy to Quaregnon.
Eugene brought up his half, and drew it up as an extension of the Duke of Marlborough’s line, and by the evening of the Sunday and on the morning of the Monday, all the troops who were at Tournai having been meanwhile called up, the allied army lay opposite the second or southern of the two openings in the forest wall. Villars during the Sunday shifted somewhat to the left or the south in the course of the day to face the new position of his enemy. It was evident upon that Monday morning the 9th of September that the action, when it was forced, would be in the second and southernmost of the two gaps. On that same Monday morning Villars brought the whole of his army still further south and was now right in front of the allies and barring the gap of Aulnois. By ten o’clock the centre of the French forces was drawn up in front of the hamlet of Malplaquet, by noon it had marched forward not quite a mile, stretched from wood to wood, and awaited the onslaught. A few ineffective cannon-shots were exchanged, but the expected attack was not delivered. Vastly to the advantage of the French and to the inexplicable prejudice of the allies Marlborough and Eugene wasted all that Monday and all the Tuesday following: the result we shall see when we come to the battle, for Villars used every moment of his respite to entrench and fortify without ceasing.
With the drawing up of the French army across the gap, however, ends the manœuvring for position, and under the title of “The Preliminaries of the Battle” I will next describe the arrival of Boufflers — a moral advantage not to be despised — the terrain, the French defences, and the full effect of the unexpected delay upon the part of the allies.
IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
THE ARRIVAL OF Louis Francis, Duke of Boufflers, peer and marshal of France, upon the frontier and before the army of defence, was one of those intangible advantages which the civilian historian will tend to exaggerate and the military to belittle, but which, though not susceptible of calculation or measurement, may always prove of vast consequence to a force, and have sometimes decided between victory and defeat. This advantage did not lie in Boufflers’ singular capacity for command, nor, as will presently be seen, was he entrusted with the supreme direction of the action that was to follow. He was a great general. His service under arms had occupied the whole of his life and energies; he was to have a high and worthy reputation in the particular province of his career. But much more than this, the magic of his name and the just prestige which attached to the integrity and valour of the man went before him with a spiritual influence which every soldier felt, and which reanimated the whole body of the defence. His record was peculiarly suited for the confirmation of men who were fighting against odds, under disappointment, at the end of a long series of defeats, and on a last line to which the national arms had been thrust back after five years of almost uninterrupted failure.
Boufflers at this moment was in his 66th year, and seemed older. His masterful, prominent face, large, direct, humorous in expression, full of command, was an index of a life well lived in the business of organisation, of obedience, and at last of supreme direction. Years ago at Namur his tenacity, under the pressure of a superior offensive, had earned him the particular character which he now bore. Only the year before, his conduct of the siege of Lille, when he had determinedly held out against the certitude of ultimate surrender, had refused to yield the place even after receiving orders from his sovereign, and had finally obtained, by his unshakable determination, a capitulation of the most honourable kind, was fresh in the minds of all. There is a story that on his arrival in the French camp the cheers with which he was greeted reached the opposing line, and that the allies were moved by the enormous rumour to expect an instant assault. He was one of those leaders who, partly through their legend, more through their real virtue, are a sort of flag and symbol to the soldiery who have the good fortune to receive their command.
Nine years the senior in age of Villars, of a military experience far superior, in rank again possessed of the right to supreme command (for he had received the grade of marshal long before), he none the less determined to put himself wholly at Villars’ orders, for he knew of what importance was continuity of direction in the face of the enemy. At the end of the last campaign, when he had expected peace, he had honourably retired. His life was nearing its close; in two years he was to die. He sacrificed both the pretension and the fact of superiority so dear to the commander, and told Villars that he came simply as a volunteer to aid as best he might, and to support the supreme command in the coming fight.
He had arrived at Arras on the same day that Tournai had surrendered. Upon the morrow he had reached Villars’ headquarters near Douai, Sin le Noble, in the centre of the defensive line. He had followed the easterly movement of the mass of the French army along that line to their present establishment between the two woods and to the terrain whereupon the action would be decided. In that action he was set at the head of the troops on the right, while Villars, attending in particular to the left, retained the general command and ordered all the disposition of the French force.
The landscape which lay before the French commanders when upon the Monday morning their line was drawn up and immediate battle expected, has changed hardly at all in the two hundred years between their day and ours. I will describe it.
From the valley of the Sambre (which great river lies a day’s march to the south of the French position) the land rises gradually upward in long rolls of bare fields. At the head of this slope is a typical watershed country, a country that is typical of watersheds in land neither hilly nor mountainous; small, sluggish streams, lessening to mere trickles of water as you rise, cut the clay; and the landscape, though at the watershed itself one is standing at a height of 500 feet above the sea, has the appearance of a plain. It is indeed difficult, without the aid of a map, to decide when one has passed from the one to the other side of the water parting, and the actual summit is, at this season of the year, a confused, flat stretch of open stubble fallow, and here and there coarse, heathy, untilled land. For two or three miles every way this level stretches, hummocked by slight rolls between stream and stream, and upon the actual watershed marked by one or two stagnant ponds. Seven miles behind you as you stand upon the battlefield lies the little French market town of Bavai, which was for centuries one of the great centres of Roman rule. It was the capital of the Nervii. Seven great Roman roads still strike out from it, to Rheims, to Cologne, to Utrecht, to Amiens, to the sea. Two in particular, that to Treves and that to Cologne, spreading gradually apart like the two neighbouring fingers of a hand, are the natural ways by which an army advancing to such a field or retreating from it would communicate with Bavai as a base.
The outstanding feature of this terrain is not that it is the summit of a watershed; indeed, as I have said, but for a map one would not guess that it bore this character, and to the eye it presents the appearance of a plain; it is rather the symmetrical arrangement of it as a broad belt of open land, flanked upon either side north and south by two great woods. That upon the right is known as the wood of Lanière, that upon the left bears several names in its various parts, and is easiest to remember under the general title of “The Forest of Sars.” The gap between these two woods narrows to a line which is precisely 2000 yards in extent and runs from north-west to south-east, the two nearest points where either wood approaches the other being distant one from another by that distance and bearing one to the other upon those points of the compass. The French army, therefore, drawn up on the open land and stretching from wood to wood, faced somewhat north of east. The allies, drawn up a mile and a half away on the broad beginning of that gap, looked somewhat south of west. Behind the latter at a day’s march was Mons; behind the former some seven miles was Bavai; and the modern frontier as well as the natural topographical frontier of the watershed runs just in front of what was then the emplacement of the French line.
Upon the French side the bare fields are marked by no more than a few hamlets, the chief of which is the little village of Malplaquet, a few houses built along what is now the main road to Brussels. Certain of the French reserve were posted in this village, accompanied by a few sections of artillery, but the fields before it lay completely open to the action.
Upon the Belgian side a string of considerable villages stretched; three of them from right to left marked the principal position of the allies. Their names from north to south, that is, from the left of the allies to the right, are Aulnois, Blaregnies, and Sars. The first of these lies right under the wood of Lanière; the second faces the gap between the woods; the third lies behind the left-hand wood, and takes its name from it, and is, as we have seen, called the forest of Sars.
The dispositions which the French army would take in such a defensive position were evident enough. It must defend the gap by entrenchment; it must put considerable forces into the woods upon the right and to the left of the gap to prevent the entrenchments being turned. The character of Villars and the French tradition of depending upon earth wherever that be possible, was bound, if time were accorded, to make the entrenchment of the open gap formidable. The large numbers engaged upon either side left a considerable number at the disposal of either commander, to be used by the one in holding the woods, by the other in attempting to force them; not much more than half of the French force need stand to the defence of the open gap. This gap was so suitable, with its bare fields after harvest, the absence of hedges, the insignificance of the rivulets, for the action of cavalry, that gates or gaps would be left in the French entrenchment for the use of that arm in order to allow the mounted men to pass through and charge as the necessity for such action might arise. In general, therefore, we must conceive of the French position as strong entrenchments thrown across the gap and lined with infantry, the cavalry drawn up behind to pass through the infantry when occasion might demand, through the line of entrenchment, and so to charge; the two woods upon either side thickly filled with men, and the position taken up by these defended by felled tree trunks and such earthwork as could be thrown up with difficulty in the dense undergrowth.
It would be the business of the allies to try and force this line, either by carrying the central entrenchments across the gap or by turning the French left flank in the forest of Sars or the French right flank in the wood of Lanière, or by both of these attempts combined; for it must be remembered that the numerical superiority of the allies gave them a choice of action. Should either the stand on the left or that on the right be forced, the French line would be turned and the destruction of the army completed. Should the centre be pierced effectively and in time, the Northern half of the army so severed would certainly be destroyed, for there was no effective line of retreat; the Southern half might or might not escape towards the valley of the Sambre. In either case a decisive victory would destroy the last of the French bodies of defence and would open the way for an almost uninterrupted march upon Paris.
It will be self-evident to the reader that what with Villars’ known methods, his dependence upon his engineers, the tradition of the French service in this respect, the inferior numbers of the French forces, and the glaring necessities of the position, earthworks would be a deciding factor in the result.
Now the value of entrenchment is a matter of time, and before proceeding to a description of the action we must, if we are to understand its result, appreciate how great an advantage was conferred upon the French by the delay in the attack of the allies.
As I have said, it was upon the morning of Monday, September 9th, that the two armies were drawn up facing each other, and there is no apparent reason why the assault should not have been delivered upon that day. Had it been delivered we can hardly doubt that a decisive defeat of the French would have resulted, that the way to Paris would have been thrown open, and that the ruin of the French monarchy would have immediately followed. As it was, no attack was delivered upon that Monday. The whole of Tuesday was allowed to pass without a movement. It was not until the Wednesday morning that the allies moved.
The problem of this delay is one which the historian must anxiously consider, for the answer to it explains the barrenness and political failure associated with the name of Malplaquet. But it is one which the historian will not succeed in answering unless indeed further documents should come to light. All that we now know is that in a council of war held upon the Monday on the side of the allies, it was thought well to wait until all the troops from Tournai should have come up (though these were few in number), and necessary to send 9000 men to hold the bridge across the Haine at St Ghislain in order to secure retreat in case of disaster.
The English historians blame the Dutch, the Dutch the English, and the Austrians and Prussians blame both.
Perhaps there would have been an attack upon the Tuesday at least had not Villars spent all the Monday and all the Monday night in exacting from his men the most unexpected labours in constructing entrenchments of the most formidable character. Marlborough and Eugene, riding out before their lines to judge their chances on the Tuesday, were astonished at the work that had been done in those twenty-four hours. Nine redans, that is, openworks of peculiar strength, stretched across the gap to within about 600 yards of the wood of Lanière, and the remainder of the space was one continuous line of entrenchment. What had been done in the woods could not be judged from such a survey, but it might be guessed, and the forcing of these became a very different problem from what it would have been had an attack been delivered on the Monday. Behind this main line Villars drew up another and yet another series of earthworks; even Malplaquet itself, with the reserve in the rear, was defended, and the work was continued without interruption even throughout the Tuesday night with relays of men.
When at last, upon the Wednesday morning, the allies had arrived at their tardy agreement and determined to force an action, their superiority in numbers, such as it was (and this disputed point must be later discussed), was quite negatived by having to meet fortifications so formidable as to be called, in the exaggerated phrase of a witness, “a citadel.”
One last point must be mentioned before the action itself is described: the open gap across which the centre of the allies must advance to break the French centre and encapture the entrenchments was cut in two by a large copse or small wood, called “The Wood of Tiry.” It was not defended, lying too far in front of the French line, and was of no great consequence save in this: that when the advance of the allies against the French defence should begin, it was bound to canalise and cut off from support for a moment the extreme left of that advance through the channel marked A upon the map over page. As will be seen, the Dutch advanced too early and in too great strength through this narrow gap, and the check they suffered, which was of such effect upon the battle, would not have been nearly so severe had not the little wood cut them off from the support of the centre.
V. THE ACTION
ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, the 11th of September, the allied army was afoot long before dawn, and was ranged in order of battle earlier than four o’clock. But a dense mist covered the ground, and nothing was done until at about half-past seven this lifted and enabled the artillery of the opposing forces to estimate the range and to open fire. In order to understand what was to follow, the reader may, so to speak, utilise this empty period of the early morning before the action joined, to grasp the respective positions of the two hosts.
The Elements of the Action of Malplaquet, September 11th, 1709.
The nature of the terrain has already been described. The plan upon the part of the allies would naturally consist in an attempt to force both woods which covered the French flank, and, while the pressure upon these was at its strongest, the entrenched and fortified centre. Of course, if either of the woods was forced before the French centre should break, there would be no need to continue the central attack, for one or other of the French flanks would then be turned. But the woods were so well garnished by this time, and so strongly lined with fallen tree-trunks and such entrenchments as the undergrowth permitted, that it seemed to both Eugene and Marlborough more probable that the centre should be forced than that either of the two flanks should first be turned, and the general plan of the battle depended rather upon the holding and heavy engagement of the forces in the two woods to the north and south than in any hope to clear them out, and the final success was expected rather to take the form of piercing the central line while the flanks were thus held and engaged. The barren issue of the engagement led the commanders of the allies to excuse themselves, of course, and the peculiar ill-success of their left against the French right, which we shall detail in a moment, gave rise to the thesis that only a “feint” was intended in that quarter. The thesis may readily be dismissed. The left was intended to do serious work quite as much as the right. The theory that it was intended to “feint” was only produced after the action, and in order to explain its incomplete results.
Upon the French side the plan was purely defensive, as their inferior numbers and their reliance upon earthworks both necessitated and proved. It was Villars’ plan to hold every part of his line with a force proportionate to its strength; to furnish the woods a little more heavily than the entrenchments of the open gap, but everywhere to rely upon the steadiness of his infantry and their artificial protections in the repelling of the assault. His cavalry he drew up behind this long line of infantry defence, prepared, as has already been said, to charge through gaps whenever such action on their part might seem effective.
It will be perceived that the plan upon either side was of a very simple sort, and one easily grasped. On the side of the allies it was little more than a “hammer-and-tongs” assault upon a difficult and well-guarded position; on the side of the French, little more than a defence of the same.
Next must be described the nature of the troops engaged in the various parts of the field.
Upon the side of the allies we have: —
On their left — that is, to the south of their lines and over against the wood of Lanière — one-third of the army under the Prince of Orange. The bulk of this body consisted in Dutch troops, of whom thirty-one battalions of infantry were present, and behind the infantry thus drawn up under the Dutch commander were his cavalry, instructed to keep out of range during the attack of the infantry upon the wood, and to charge and complete it when it should be successful. Embodied among these troops the British reader should note a corps of Highlanders, known as the Scottish Brigade. These did not form part of the British army, but were specially enrolled in the Dutch service. The cavalry of this left wing was under the command of the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, who was mentioned a few pages back in the advance upon Mons. It numbered somewhat over 10,000 sabres.
The other end of the allied position consisted in two great forces of infantry acting separately, and in the following fashion: —
First, a force under Schulemberg, which attacked the salient angle of the forest of Sars on its northern face, and another body attacking the other side of the same angle, to wit, its eastern face. In the first of these great masses, that under Schulemberg, there were no English troops. In strength it amounted alone to nearly 20,000 men. The second part, which was to attack the eastern face, was commanded by Lottum, and was only about half as strong, contained a certain small proportion of English.
It may be asked when once these two great bodies of the left and the right (each of which was to concern itself with one of the two woods in front of the gap) are disposed of, what remained to furnish the centre of the allies? To this the curious answer must be afforded that in the arrangements of the allies at Malplaquet no true centre existed. The battle must be regarded from their side as a battle fought by two isolated wings, left and right, and ending in a central attack composed of men drawn from either wing. If upon the following sketch map the section from A to B be regarded as the special province of the Dutch or left wing, and the section from C to D be regarded as the special province of the Austro-Prussian or right wing, then the mid-section between B and C has no large body of troops corresponding to it. When the time came for acting in that mid-section, the troops necessary for the work were drawn from either end of the line. There were, however, two elements in connection with this mid-section which must be considered.
First, a great battery of forty guns ready to support an attack upon the entrenchments of the gap, whenever that time should come; and secondly, far in the rear, about 6000 British troops under Lord Orkney were spread out and linked the massed right of the army to its massed left. One further corps must be mentioned. Quite separate from the rest of the army, and right away on the left on the French side of the forest of Sars, was the small isolated corps under Withers, which was to hold and embarrass the French rear near the group of farmsteads called La Folie, and when the forest of Sars was forced was to join hands with the successful assault of the Prussians and Austrians who should have forced it.
The general command of the left, including Lord Orkney’s battalions, also including (though tactically they formed part of the right wing) the force under Lottum, lay with the Duke of Marlborough. The command of the right — that is, Schulemberg and the cavalry behind him — lay with Prince Eugene.
The French line of defence is, from its simplicity, quite easy to describe. In the wood of Lanière, and in the open space just outside it, as far as the fields in front of Malplaquet village, were the troops under command of the French general D’Artagnan. Among the regiments holding this part was that of the Bourbonnais, the famous brigade of Navarre (the best in the service), and certain of the Swiss mercenaries. The last of this body on the left was formed by the French Guards. The entrenchments in the centre were held by the Irish Brigades of Lee and O’Brien, and by the German mercenaries and allies of Bavaria and Cologne. These guarded the redans which defended the left or northern part of the open gap. The remainder of this gap, right up to the forest of Sars, was held by Alsatians and by the Brigade of Laon, and the chief command in this part lay with Steckenberg. The forest of Sars was full of French troops, Picardy, the Marines, the Regiment of Champagne, and many others, with a strong reserve of similar troops just behind the wood. The cavalry of the army formed a long line behind this body of entrenched infantry; the Household Cavalry being on the right near the wood of Lanière, the Gens d’armes being in the centre, and the Carabiniers upon the left. These last stretched so far northward and westward as to come at last opposite to Withers.
Such was the disposition of the two armies when at half-past seven the sun pierced the mist and the first cannon-shots were exchanged. Marlborough and Eugene had decided that they would begin by pressing, as hard as might be, the assault upon the forest of Sars. When this assault should have proceeded for half an hour, the opposite end of the line, the left, under the Prince of Orange, should engage the French troops holding the wood of Lanière. It was expected that the forest of Sars would be forced early in the action; that the troops in the wood of Lanière would at least be held fast by the attack of the Prince of Orange, and that the weakened French centre could then be taken by assault with the use of the reserves, of Orkney’s men, and of detachments drawn from the two great masses upon the wings.
The reader may here pause to consider the excellence of this plan — very probably Marlborough’s own, and one the comparative ill-success of which was due to the unexpected power of resistance displayed by the French infantry upon that day.
It was wise to put the greater part of the force into a double attack upon the forest of Sars, for this forest, with its thick woods and heavy entrenchments, was at once the strongest part of the French position in its garnishing and artificial enforcement, yet weak in that the salient angle it presented was one that could not, from the thickness of the trees, be watched from any central point, as can the salient angle of a fortification. Lottum on the one side, Schulemberg on the other, were attacking forces numerically weaker than their own, and separate fronts which could not support each other under the pressure of the attack.
It was wise to engage the forces upon the French side opposite the allied left in the wood of Lanière half an hour after the assault had begun upon the forest of Sars, for it was legitimate to expect that at the end of that half hour the pressure upon the forest of Sars would begin to be felt by the French, and that they would call for troops from the right unless the right were very busily occupied at that moment.
Finally, it was wise not to burden the centre with any great body of troops until one of the two flanks should be pressed or broken, for the centre might, in this case, be compared to a funnel in which too great a body of troops would be caught at a disadvantage against the strong entrenchments which closed the mouth of the funnel. An historical discussion has arisen upon the true rôle of the left in this plan. The commander of the allies gave it out after the action (as we have seen above) that the left had only been intended to “feint.” The better conclusion is that they were intended to do their worst against the wood of Lanière, although of course this “worst” could not be expected to compare with the fundamental attack upon the forest of Sars, where all the chief forces of the battle were concentrated.
If by a “feint” is meant a subsidiary part of the general plan, the expression might be allowed to pass, but it is not a legitimate use of that expression, and if, as occurred at Malplaquet with the Dutch troops, a subsidiary body in the general plan is badly commanded, the temptation to call the original movement a “feint,” which developed from breach of orders into a true attack, though strong for the disappointed commanders, must not be admitted by the accurate historian. In general, we may be certain that the Dutch troops and their neighbours on the allied left were intended to do all they could against the wood of Lanière, did all they could, but suffered in the process a great deal more than Marlborough had allowed for.
These dispositions once grasped, we may proceed to the nature and development of the general attack which followed that opening cannonade of half-past seven, which has already been described.
The first movement of the allies was an advance of the left under the Prince of Orange and of the right under Lottum. The first was halted out of range; the second, after getting up as far as the eastern flank of the forest of Sars, wheeled round so as to face the hedge lining that forest, and formed into three lines. It was nine o’clock before the signal for the attack was given by a general discharge of the great battery in the centre opposite the French entrenchments in the gap. Coincidently with that signal Schulemberg attacked the forest of Sars from his side, the northern face, and he and Lottum pressed each upon that side of the salient angle which faced him. Schulemberg’s large force got into the fringe of the wood, but no further. The resistance was furious; the thickness of the trees aided it. Eugene was present upon this side; meanwhile Marlborough himself was leading the troops of Lottum. He advanced with them against a hot fire, passed the swampy rivulet which here flanks the wood, and reached the entrenchments which had been drawn up just within the outer boundary of it.
This attack failed. Villars was present in person with the French troops and directed the repulse. Almost at the same time the advance of Schulemberg upon the other side of the wood, which Eugene was superintending, suffered a check. Its reserves were called up. The intervals of the first line were filled up from the second. One French brigade lining the wood was beaten back, but the Picardy Regiment and the Marines stood out against a mixed force of Danes, Saxons, and Hessians opposing them. Schulemberg, therefore, in this second attack had failed again, but Marlborough, leading Lottum’s men upon the other side of the wood to a second charge in his turn, had somewhat greater success. He had by this time been joined by a British brigade under the Duke of Argyle from the second line, and he did so far succeed with this extension of his men as to get round the edge of the French entrenchments in the wood.
The French began to be pressed from this eastern side of their salient angle, right in among the trees. Schulemberg’s command felt the advantage of the pressure being exercised on the other side. The French weakened before it, and in the neighbourhood of eleven o’clock a great part of the forest of Sars was already filled with the allies, who were beating back the French in individual combats from tree to tree. Close on noon the battle upon this side stood much as the sketch map upon the opposite page shows, and was as good as won, for it seemed to need only a continuation of this victorious effort to clear the whole wood at last and to turn the French line.
This is undoubtedly the form which the battle would have taken — a complete victory for the allied forces by their right turning the French left — and the destruction of the French army would have followed, had not the allied left been getting into grave difficulty at the other end of the field of battle.
Sketch Map showing the peril the French centre ran towards
noon of being turned on its left.
The plan of the allied generals, it will be remembered, was that the left of their army under the Prince of Orange should attack the wood of Lanière about half an hour after the right had begun to effect an entrance into the opposing forest of Sars. When that half hour had elapsed, that is, about half-past nine, the Prince of Orange, without receiving special orders, it is true, but acting rightly enough upon his general orders, advanced against the French right. Tullibardine with his Scottish brigade took the worst of the fighting on the extreme left against the extreme of the French right, and was the first to get engaged among the trees. The great mass of the force advanced up the opening between the coppice called the wood of Tiry and the main wood, with the object of carrying the entrenchments which ran from the corner of the wood in front of Malplaquet and covered this edge of the open gap. The nine foremost battalions were led by the Prince of Orange in person; his courage and their tenacity, though fatal to the issue of the fight, form perhaps the finest part of our story. As they came near the French earthworks, a French battery right upon their flank at the edge of the wood opened upon them, enfilading whole ranks and doing, in the shortest time, terrible execution. The young leader managed to reach the earthworks. The breastwork was forced, but Boufflers brought up men from his left, that is, from the centre of the gap, drove the Dutch back, and checked, at the height of its success, this determined assault. Had not the wood of Tiry been there to separate the main part of the Prince of Orange’s command from its right, reinforcements might have reached him and have saved the disaster. As it was, the wood of Tiry had cut the advance into two streams, and neither could help the other. The Dutch troops and the Highlanders rallied; the Prince of Orange charged again with a personal bravery that made him conspicuous before the whole field, and should make him famous in history, but the task was more than men could accomplish. The best brigade at the disposal of the French, that of Navarre, was brought up to meet this second onslaught, broke it, and the French leapt from the earthworks to pursue the flight of their assailants. Many of Orange’s colours were taken in that rout, and the guns of his advanced battery fell into French hands. Beyond the wood of Tiry the extreme right of the Dutch charge had suffered no better fate. It had carried the central entrenchment of the French, only to be beaten back as the main body between the wood of Tiry and the wood of Lanière opened.
At this moment, then, after eleven o’clock, which was coincident with the success of Lottum and Schulemberg in the forest of Sars, upon the right, the allied left had been hopelessly beaten back from the entrenchments in the gap, and from the edge of the wood of Lanière.
Marlborough was hurriedly summoned away from his personal command of Lottum’s victorious troops, and begged to do what he could for the broken regiments of Orange. He galloped back over the battlefield, a mile or so of open fields, and was appalled to see the havoc. Of the great force that had advanced an hour and a half before against Boufflers and the French right, fully a third was struck, and 2000 or more lay dead upon the stubble and the coarse heath of that upland. The scattered corpses strewn over half a mile of flight from the French entrenchments, almost back to their original position, largely showed the severity of the blow. It was impossible to attempt another attack upon the French right with any hope of success.
Marlborough, trusting that the forest of Sars would soon be finally cleared, determined upon a change of plan. He ordered the advance upon the centre of the position of Lord Orkney’s fifteen battalions, reinforced that advance by drafts of men from the shattered Dutch left, and prepared with some deliberation to charge the line of earthworks which ran across the open and the nine redans which we have seen were held by the French allies and mercenaries from Bavaria and Cologne, and await his moment. That moment came at about one o’clock; at this point in the action the opposing forces stood somewhat as they are sketched on the map over page.
The pressure upon the French in the wood of Sars, perpetually increasing, had already caused Villars, who commanded there in person, to beg Boufflers for aid; but the demand came when Boufflers was fighting his hardest against the last Dutch attack, and no aid could be sent.
Somewhat reluctantly, Villars had weakened his centre by withdrawing from it the two Irish regiments, and continued to dispute foot by foot the forest of Sars. But foot by foot and tree by tree, in a series of individual engagements, his men were pressed back, and a larger area of the woodland was held by the troops of Schulemberg and Lottum. Eugene was wounded, but refused to leave the field. The loss had been appalling upon either side, but especially severe (as might have been expected) among the assailants, when, just before one o’clock, the last of the French soldiers were driven from the wood.
Sketch Map showing Marlborough bringing up troops to the centre for the
final and successful attack upon the entrenchments about one o’clock.
All that main defence which the forest of Sars formed upon the French left flank was lost, but the fight had been so exhausting to the assailants in the confusion of the underwood, and the difficulty of forming them in the trees was so great, that the French forces once outside the wood could rally at leisure and draw up in line to receive any further movement on the part of their opponents. It was while the French left were thus drawn up in line behind the wood of Sars, with their redans at the centre weakened by the withdrawal of the Irish brigade, that Marlborough ordered the final central attack against those redans. The honour of carrying them fell to Lord Orkney and his British battalions. His men flooded over the earthworks at the first rush, breaking the depleted infantry behind them (for these, after the withdrawal of the Irish, were no more than the men of Bavaria and Cologne), and held the parapet.
The French earthworks thus carried by the infantry in the centre, the modern reader might well premise that a complete rout of the French forces should have followed. But he would make this premise without counting for the preponderant rôle that cavalry played in the wars of Marlborough.
Facing the victorious English battalions of Orkney, now in possession of the redans, stood the mile-long unbroken squadrons of the French horse.
The allied cavalry, passing between gaps in its infantry line, began to deploy for the charge, but even as they deployed they were charged by the French mounted men, thrust back, and thrown into confusion. The short remainder of the battle is no more than a mêlée of sabres, but the nature of that mêlée must be clearly grasped, and the character of the French cavalry resistance understood, for this it was which determined the issue of the combat and saved the army of Louis XIV.
A detailed account of the charges and counter-charges of the opposing horse would be confusing to the reader, and is, as a fact, impossible of narration, for no contemporary record of it remains in any form which can be lucidly set forth.
A rough outline of what happened is this: —
The first counter-charge of the French was successful, and the allied cavalry, caught in the act of deployment, was thrust back in confusion, as I have said, upon the British infantry who lined the captured earthworks.
The great central battery of forty guns which Marlborough had kept all day in the centre of the gap, split to the right and left, and, once clear of its own troops, fired from either side upon the French horse. Shaken, confused, and almost broken by this fire, the French horse were charged by a new body of the allied horse led by Marlborough in person, composed of British and Prussian units. But, just as Marlborough’s charge was succeeding, old Boufflers, bringing up the French Household Cavalry from in front of Malplaquet village, charged right home into the flank of Marlborough’s mounted troops, bore back their first and second lines, and destroyed the order of their third.
Thereupon Eugene, with yet another body of fresh horse (of the Imperial Service), charged in his turn, and the battle of Malplaquet ends in a furious mix-up of mounted men, which gradually separated into two undefeated lines, each retiring from the contest.
It will be wondered why a conclusion so curiously impotent was permitted to close the fighting of so famous a field.
The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action. Any attempt of the French to advance in force after two o’clock would have led to their certain disaster, for the allies were now in possession of their long line of earthworks.
On the other hand, the allies could not advance, because the men upon whom they could still count for action were reduced to insufficient numbers. Something like one-third of their vast host had fallen in this most murderous of battles; from an eighth to a sixth were dead. Of the remainder, the great proportion suffered at this hour from an exhaustion that forbade all effective effort.
The horse upon either side might indeed have continued charge and counter-charge to no purpose and with no final effect, but the action of the cavalry in the repeated and abortive shocks, of which a list has just been detailed, could lead neither commander to hope for any final result. Boufflers ordered a retreat, screened by his yet unbroken lines of horse. The infantry were withdrawn from the wood of Lanière, which they still held, and from their positions behind the forest of Sars. They were directed in two columns towards Bavai in their rear, and as that orderly and unhurried retreat was accomplished, the cavalry filed in to follow the line, and the French host, leaving the field in the possession of the victors, marched back westward by the two Roman roads in as regular a formation as though they had been advancing to action rather than retreating from an abandoned position.
It was not quite three o’clock in the afternoon.
There was no pursuit, and there could be none. The allied army slept upon the ground it had gained; rested, evacuated its wounded, and restored its broken ranks through the whole of the morrow, Thursday. It was not until the Friday that it was able to march back again from the field in which it had triumphed at so terrible an expense of numbers, guns, and colours, and with so null a strategic result, and to take up once more the siege of Mons. Upon the 9th of October Mons capitulated, furnishing the sole fruit of this most arduous of all the great series of Marlborough’s campaigns.
No battle has been contested with more valour or tenacity than the battle of Malplaquet. The nature of the woodland fighting contributed to the enormous losses sustained upon either side. The delay during which the French had been permitted to entrench themselves so thoroughly naturally threw the great balance of the loss upon the assailants. In no battle, free, as Malplaquet was free, from all pursuit or a rout, or even the breaking of any considerable body of troops (save the Dutch troops and Highlanders on the left in the earlier part of the battle, and the Bavarians and Cologne men in the redans at the close of it), has the proportion of the killed and wounded been anything like so high. In none, perhaps, were casualties so heavy accompanied by so small a proportion of prisoners.
The action will remain throughout history a standing example of the pitch of excellence to which those highly trained professional armies of the eighteenth century, with their savage discipline, their aristocratic command, their close formations, and their extraordinary reliance upon human daring, could arrive.
FINIS
POITIERS
INTRODUCTION
THE BATTLE OF Poitiers was fought ten years and four weeks after that of Crécy.
The singular similarity between the two actions will be pointed out upon a later page. For the moment it must suffice to point out that Poitiers and Crécy form unique historical parallels, distinguishing like double summits the English successes of Edward III.’s army upon the Continent and of the first part of the Hundred Years’ War.
For the political situation which had produced that conflict, and for the objects which Edward III. had in provoking it, I must refer my reader to the first section of my little book upon Crécy in this series; as also for the armament and organisation of the forces that served the English crown. There remain to be added, however, for the understanding of Poitiers and its campaign, two features which differentiate the fighting of 1356 from that of ten years before. These two features are: first, the character of the commander; and secondly, the nature of the regions from which he started and through which he proceeded, coupled with the political character of the English rule in the South of France. I will take these points in inverse order.
When Calais had fallen and had become an English possession in the summer of 1347 no peace followed. A truce was patched up for some months, followed by further truces. Through the mediation of the Pope a final and definite treaty was sketched, which should terminate the war upon the cession of Aquitaine to Edward III. in full sovereignty. The French Valois king would perhaps have agreed to a settlement which would have preserved his feudal headship, though it would have put the Plantagenets in virtual possession of half France (as France was then defined). But Edward III. would not accept the terms. He had claimed the crown of France. He had won his great victory at Crécy still claiming that crown. He would not be content with adding to his feudal tenures under the French crown. He would add to his sovereignty at least, to his absolute sovereignty, or continue the war. In 1354 (the Black Death intervening) the war was renewed. Edward would have been content, not with the whole of Aquitaine, but with complete sovereignty over the triangle between the Garonne and the Pyrenees in the south, coupled with complete sovereignty over the north-eastern seaboard of France from the Somme to Calais, and inland as far as Arras, and its territory, the Artois. But the French monarchy, though ready to admit feudal encroachments, would not dismember the nominal unity of the kingdom: just as a stickler in our north will grant a 999-year lease, but will not sell.
The result of this breach in the negotiations was that Edward, and his son the Black Prince, entered upon the renewal of the war with a vague claim to Aquitaine as a whole, with an active claim upon Guienne — that is, the territory just north of the Garonne — and a real hold upon Gascony; and still preserving at the back of the whole scheme of operations that half-earnest, half-theatrical plan for an Anglo-French monarchy under the house of Plantagenet which had been formulated twenty-five years before.
It must be clearly grasped by the general reader how natural was both the real and the fantastic side of that pursuit. It involved no question of nationality as we should now understand it. It was based upon still living traditions of feudal connections which were personal and not racial; the chivalry of France and England was a French-speaking society based upon common ideals and fed with common memories. Gascony was in favour of the Plantagenets. Further, Guienne — the district north of Gascony beyond the Garonne — was Edward’s feudal own. He was not king of it, but he was feudal lord of it, and had done homage for it in 1331 to the Valois. It was not a new or distant tie. For the rest of the quarrel my first section in the essay on Crécy already alluded to must suffice, but for the link with Gascony a more particular emphasis is needed. The trade of Bordeaux, its great town, was principally with British ports. Its export of wine was a trade with Britain. It lay far from the centre of the French monarchy. It had counted in its Basque population an element indifferent for hundreds of years to the national unity of Gaul. The moneyed interests of its great commercial centres, of the western ones, at least (which were by far the richest), were closely bound up with England, with English trade. Add to this his actual feudal tenure of Guienne, and we can see how the feeling that all the south-west corner of France was his grew to be a very real feeling in Edward’s mind, and was shared by his son.
When, therefore, upon the 20th September 1355, Edward, the Black Prince, landed at Bordeaux, it was to find a province the nobles of which were honestly attached to his cause and the greater townsmen as well; while in the mass of the people there was no disaffection to the idea of this one out of the vague, many, French-speaking feudal lords whom they knew to be their masters, being the actual governor of the land. There was no conquest, nor any need for it, so far as Gascony was concerned; and in any expedition the Prince might make he was as certain of a regular following from the towns and estates that lay between the mountains and the Garonne as the King of France was certain of his own feudal levies in the north. But expeditions and fighting there would be because the Black Prince came with a commission not only to govern Gascony, but to establish himself in the more doubtful Guienne, and even to be — if he could conquer it — the lieutenant of his father, Edward, in all Aquitaine. He was to recover the districts immediately north of the Garonne, and even (in theory, at least) right up to the neighbourhood of the Loire; and (in theory, again) he was to regard those who might resist his administration of all these “lost” countries of the Central and Southern West of France as “rebels.”
It was thought certain at first, of course, that the whole claim could never be pushed home; but the Black Prince might well hope so to harry the districts which were claimed — and the neighbouring county of Toulouse to the east, which was admittedly feudatory to the King of Paris — as to compel that sovereign to recognise at last his father’s absolute sovereignty over Gascony certainly, and perhaps over Guienne, or even somewhat more than Guienne.
The remainder of that year, 1355, therefore — the autumn and the winter — were spent in striking at the sole portion of Gascony that was disaffected (that of Armagnac), and pushing eastward to ravage Toulouse and Carcassonne; for though these towns were admittedly outside Edward’s land, the wasting of their territory was a depletion of the King of France’s revenue.
The Black Prince did more. In the early part of the next year, 1356, he set up his flag upon Perigueux, some days’ march to the north of his father’s real boundary; and, as the year proceeded, he planned an advance far to the northward of that, which advance was to be taken in co-operation with a descent of the Plantagenet forces upon the other extremity of the French kingdom.
As to the character of the Black Prince, which so largely determined what is to follow, and especially his character in command, nothing is more conspicuous in the history of the Middle Ages. He was, partly from the influence of models, partly from personal force, the mirror of what the fighting, French-speaking nobility of that century took for its ideal conception of a captain. Far the first thing for him was the trade and the profession of arms, and the appetite for combat which this career satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more certainly in its nobler, effects in the mind of a virile youth. He had gone through the great experience of Crécy as a boy of sixteen. He was now, upon the eve of the Campaign of Poitiers, a man in his twenty-sixth year, thoroughly avid not only of honour but of capture, thoroughly contemptuous of gain, generous with a mad magnificence, always in debt, and always utterly careless of it. His courage was of the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger, and particularly in danger accompanied by strong action; he was an intense and a variable lover of women, an unwearied rider, of some (but no conspicuous) ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field, not cruel as yet (but already violent to an excess which later years, alas! refined into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and strung every way for command. He could and did inspire a force, especially a small force, in the fashion which it was his chief desire to achieve. He was a great soldier; but his sins doomed him to an unhappy failure and to the wasting of his life at last.
PART I. THE CAMPAIGN
AS THE FIRST of the great raids, that of Crécy, had been designed to draw off the pressure from Edward III.’s troops in the South of France, and to bring the French levies northward away from them, so the second great raid ten years later, which may be called by courtesy the “Campaign” of Poitiers, was designed to call pressure off the English troops in the north and to bring the French levies down southward away from them. As Edward’s march through Normandy had been a daring ride for booty, so was the Black Prince’s ride northward from Aquitaine; and as Edward from the neighbourhood of Paris turned and retreated at top speed from before the French host, so did the Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood of the Loire and retreat at speed from before the pursuit of the bodies which the King of France had gathered. And as the one great raid ended in the signal victory of Crécy, so did the other end in the signal victory of Poitiers.
But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest: each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Crécy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the excellence of a missile weapon — the long-bow. Each shows also a striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.
Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with the details of Crécy must expect a repetition of much the same sort of incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the mass of contemporary mediæval warfare.
In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.
I have said that the Black Prince’s object (apart from booty, which was a main business in all these rapid darts of the time) was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.
As a fact, the effort was wasted for any such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded in the north, was already in retreat before the Black Prince had started, but that commander in the south could not, under the conditions of the time, learn the fact until he had set off. Further, the Black Prince hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the south through the centre of France, to make it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross over and prosecute the war in Normandy. As a fact, the King of England never started upon that expedition, but his son thought he was about to do so, and said as much in a letter to the Mayor of London.
The point of departure which the Black Prince chose for this dash to the north was Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date upon which he broke camp was Thursday, the 4th August 1356.
His force was an extremely small and a very mobile one; 3500 men-at-arms — that is, fully armoured gentlemen — were the nucleus of it; 2500 archers accompanied them, and it is remarkable that these archers he mounted. Besides these 6000 riding men, he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no more than 7000 combatants all told, he began the adventure. He had no intention of risking action. It was his desire to take booty, to harry, to compel the French king to come south in his pursuit, and when that enemy should be close upon him, at whatever stage this might be in his own northern progress, to turn and ride back south as rapidly as he had ridden north. Thus he would draw the French feudal levies after him, and render what he had been told was the forthcoming English expedition to Normandy an easy matter, free from opposition. As things turned out, he was able to ride north as far as the Loire before his enemy was upon him, and it gives one an idea of the scale on which this great raid was planned, that from the point on the Dordogne whence he started, to the point on the Loire where he turned southward, was in a straight line no less than a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred miles of road.
Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure. Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English.
Raid though it was, the Black Prince’s advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy’s forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure (though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.
The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through Périgueux to Brantôme. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a little north of east, to Argenton.
It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps, a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for plunder.
The pace and method with which all this early part of the business was conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot without fatiguing his horses or his men.
From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of August, he made Châteauroux (rather more than eighteen miles off, but not nineteen by the great road) in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence he turned still more to the eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards Bourges. This last excursion or “elbow” in the road was less strategically motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Châteauroux the regulation ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.
This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a district called the “Sologne,” that is, the “Solitarium” or “Desert.” For a space of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.
It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know, another object: that of drawing the French forces southward. And, with the characteristic indecision of feudal strategic aims, it occurred to the Black Prince at this stage to immix with that object an alternative, and to see whether he could not get across the Loire to join Lancaster’s force, which was campaigning in the West of France on the other side of that river.
At Vierzon Edward’s men came across the first resistance. A handful of John’s forces, irregulars hired by the French king under a leader most charmingly named “Grey Mutton,” skirmished to their disadvantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.
The Black Prince made back westward after “Grey Mutton,” thinking, perhaps, to cross the Loire at Blois, and two days out from Vierzon (rather over twenty miles) he made the only assault upon fortifications which he permitted his men in the whole campaign. This was an attack upon the Castle of Romorantin, in which “Grey Mutton” had taken refuge.
It was not the moment for delay. Edward knew that the French army must now be somewhere in the neighbourhood; he had already touched lance with one small French force; but he had his teeth into the business and would not let go his hold. The outworks were taken early in the affair. The keep held out for four days more, surrendering at last to fire upon the 3rd of September.
The season was now full late if the Black Prince intended a return to the south. But, as we have seen, he no longer entirely intended such a retreat. He had already begun to consider the alternative of crossing the Loire and joining his brother’s force beyond it. He had information, however, that the bridges directly in front of him were cut. It is not easy to reconcile this with the passage immediately afterwards of the French army. But the most vivid, and perhaps the most accurate, account we have of this march not only tells us that the bridges were cut, but particularly alludes to the high water in the Loire at that moment. It is a significant piece of information, because no river in Europe north of the Pyrenees differs so much in its volume from day to day as does the Loire, which is sometimes a trickle of water in the midst of sandbanks, and at other times a great flood a quarter of a mile across, and twenty feet deep, like the Thames at London.
At any rate, from Romorantin, Prince Edward made for Tours, a distance of fifty miles as the crow flies, and a march of precisely five days. It will be observed that his plotted rate of marching at ten miles a day was most accurately maintained.
Now from his camp in front of Tours, Edward behaved in a fashion singular even for the unbusinesslike warfare of that somewhat theatrical generation. He sat down, apparently undecided which way to turn, and remained in that posture during the remainder of September the 8th, all the next day, September 9th, and all the next day again, the 10th. There could be no question of attacking Tours. It was a strong, large, and well-defended town, and quite beyond the power of the Black Prince’s force, which was by this time encumbered with a very heavy train of waggons carrying his booty. But while he was waiting there (and he could see, says one account, the fires of his brother’s army by night beyond the Loire), his enemy, with such forces as he had been able to collect, was marching down upon him.
The King of France had begun to get men together at Chartres upon the same day that his rival had reached Vierzon, the 28th of August. Five days later, just when Romorantin Castle was surrendering, he had broken up and was marching to the Loire. And upon the same 8th of September which saw the Black Prince pitch his tents under the walls of Tours, the first bodies of the French command were beginning to cross the Loire at the two upper points of Meung and Blois, while some of them were preparing to cross at Tours itself.
Yet so defective was Edward’s information that it was not until Sunday, September 11th, that news reached him of King John’s movements. He heard upon that day that the French king himself had crossed at Blois, thirty miles up river behind him. Edward at once broke camp and started on his retreat to the south. After him as he went followed the French host, which had combined its forces after its separate passages of the river.
It is important, if we are to understand what follows, to appreciate both the quality and the numbers of those whom the King of France had been able to gather. He had with him, by the still necessary and fatal military weakness of French society, only those loose feudal levies whose lack of cohesion had accounted ten years before for the disaster of Crécy. But John commanded no such host as Philip had nominally led in the Picardy Campaign against Edward III. At the most, and counting all his command, it was little if at all superior in numbers to that of the Black Prince. He hoped, indeed, to increase it somewhat with further levies as his progress southward advanced, and we shall see that his ultimate entry into the town of Poitiers did considerably reinforce him. But at no time before the battle which decided this campaign was John in any important numerical superiority over his enemy, and even in that battle the superiority had nothing of the dramatic disproportion which has rendered the field of Crécy famous.
John marched down the Loire straight on Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles off, in two days, coming under that town and castle upon Monday the 12th of September, twenty-four hours after the Black Prince had broken up his camp in front of Tours. As it was now useless to go on to Tours, John turned and marched due south, reaching Loches, another twenty miles away, not in two days but in one. It was a fine forced march; and if the Black Prince had appreciated the mobility of the foe, he would not have committed the blunder which will be described in the next section. He himself was marching well, but, encumbered as he was by his heavy baggage train, he covered on the 12th and 13th just less than thirty miles, and reached the town of La Haye des Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into Loches, twenty miles away.
On the next day, Wednesday the 14th, John made yet another of those astonishing marches which merited a better fate than the disaster that was to conclude them, covered the twenty miles between Loches and La Haye, and entered the latter town just as the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, only fifteen miles in front of him. Both the commanders, pursuing and pursued, had been getting remarkable work out of their men; for even the Black Prince, though the slower of the two, had covered forty-five miles in three days. But John in that determined advance after him had covered forty miles in two days.
With John’s entry into La Haye des Cartes and Edward’s leaving that town twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching and conflicting purposes which may properly be called “The Preliminaries” of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal with them in the next section.
Sketch Map of operations preceding the Battle
PART II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION
IT WAS, AS we have seen, on the evening of Tuesday, September the 13th, that the Black Prince with his 7000 men and his heavy train of booty had marched into La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the right bank of the Creuse, somewhat above the place where that river falls into the Vienne.
His confidence that his well-mounted and light-armed troops could outmarch his pursuers was not yet shaken; he was even prepared to imagine that he had already shaken them off; but anyone who could have taken a general survey of all that countryside would have discovered how ill-founded was his belief. The great forces of the French king, coming down slantways from the north and east, had had nearly four miles to march to his three. Yet they were gaining on him. Edward had given the French king a day’s advance by his hesitation before Tours, and the tardiness with which he had received news of John’s crossing the Loire was another point in favour of the French.
It was the Black Prince’s business to get down on to the great road which has been the trunk road of Western France for two thousand years, and which leads from Paris through Châtellerault and Poitiers to Angoulême, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped) he could advance so quickly as to get rid of the pursuit, so much the better. If he were still pressed he must continue his rapid marching, but, at any rate, that was the road he must take.
To the simple plan, however, of reaching Châtellerault and then merely following the great road on through Poitiers, he must make a local exception, for Poitiers itself contained a large population, with plenty of trained men, munitions, and arms; and it was further, from its position as well as from its walls, altogether too strong a place for him to think of taking it.
The town had been from immemorial time a fortress: first tribal (and the rallying point of the Gaulish Picts under the name of Limon); later, Roman and Frankish. The traveller notes to-day its singular strength, standing on the flat top and sides of its precipitous peninsula, isolated from its plateau on every side save where a narrow neck joins it to the higher land; it is impregnable to mere assault, half surrounded by the Clain to the east, and on the west protected by a deep and formidable ravine.
It was absolutely necessary for the Prince not only to avoid Poitiers, but not to pass so close to it as to give the alarm. What he proposed to do, therefore, was to strike the great Bordeaux road at a point well south of the city, called Les Roches, and to do this he must engage himself within the broadening triangle which lies between the Clain and the Vienne: these rivers join their waters just above Châtellerault itself.
The main road from Châtellerault to Poitiers runs on the further side of the Clain from this triangle, and the Black Prince, by engaging himself in the wedge between the rivers, would thus have a stream between his column and the natural marching route of any force which might approach him from the fortified city which he feared.
Further, he was well provided for part of this march through the triangle between the rivers by the existence of a straight way formed by the old Roman road which runs through it, and may still be followed. He could not pursue this road all the way to Poitiers (which town it ultimately reaches by a bridge over the Clain), but somewhere half-way between Châtellerault and Poitiers he would diverge from it towards the east, and so avoid the latter stronghold and make a straight line for Les Roches. This it would be the easier for him to do because the soil in that countryside is light and firm and traversed by very numerous cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous farms. Only one considerable obstacle interrupts a passage southward through the triangle between the rivers. It is the forest of Moulière. But the Black Prince’s march along the Roman road would skirt this wood to the west, and by the time his approach to Poitiers compelled him to diverge from the Roman road eastward, the boundary of the forest also sloped eastward away from it.
His first day’s march upon this last lap, as it were, of his escape was a long one. By the road he took it was no less than fifteen miles, and at the end of it he gathered his column into Châtellerault, a couple of miles from the place where the Clain and the Vienne meet, and where the triangle between the two streams through which he proposed to retreat begins. At the same hour that the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, John was leading the head of his column into La Haye. He was just one day’s march behind the Plantagenet.
There followed an unsoldierly and uncharacteristic blunder on the part of the Black Prince which determined all the strange cross-purposes of that week.
The Black Prince having made Châtellerault, believed that he had shaken off the pursuit.
In explanation of this error, it must be remembered that the population so far north as this was universally hostile to the southern cause and to the claim of the Plantagenets. Whether news of the ravaging and burning to the eastward had affected these peasants or no, we are certain that they would give the Anglo-Gascon force nothing but misleading information. The scouting, a perpetual weakness in mediæval warfare, was imperfect; and even had it been better organised, to scout rearwards is not the same thing as scouting on an advance or on the flanks. At any rate, he took it for granted that there was no further need for haste, that he had outmarched the French king, and that the remainder of the retreat might be taken at his own pleasure. It must further be noted that there was a frailty in the Black Prince’s leading which was more than once discovered in his various campaigns, and which he only retrieved by his admirable tactical sense whenever he was compelled to a decision. This frailty consisted, as might be guessed of so headstrong a rider, in trying to get too much out of his troops in a forced march, and paying for it upon the morrow of such efforts by expensive delays which more than counterbalanced its value. He relied too much upon the very large proportion of mounted men which formed the bulk of his small force. He forgot the limitations of his few foot-soldiers and the strain that a too-rapid advance put upon his heavy and cumbersome train of waggons, laden with a heavier and heavier booty as his raid proceeded.
He stayed in Châtellerault recruiting the strength of his mounts and men for two whole days. He passed the Thursday and the Friday there without moving, and it was not until the Saturday morning that he set out from the town, crossed the Clain, and engaged himself within the triangle between the two rivers.
The land through which he marched upon that Saturday morning had been the scene of a much more famous and more decisive feat of arms; for it was there, just north of the forest of Moulière, that Charles Martel six hundred years before had overthrown the Mahommedans and saved Europe for ever.
So he went forward under the morning, making south in a retreat which he believed to be unthreatened.
Meanwhile, John, at the head of the French army, was pursuing a better-thought-out strategical plan, whose complexity has only puzzled historians because they have not weighed all the factors of the military situation.
We do not know what numbers the King of France disposed of during this, the first part of the pursuit, but we must presume that he could not yet risk an engagement. The town of Poitiers was everything to him. There he would find provisions and munition, some considerable body of trained men, and the possibility of levying many thousands more. It was a secure rallying point upon which to block the Black Prince’s march to the south, or from which to sally out and intercept his march. But when John found himself in La Haye upon Wednesday the 14th, a day’s march behind Edward’s command, he could not take the direct line for Poitiers because that very command intercepted him. He knew that it had taken the road for Châtellerault. He determined, therefore, by an exceptionally rapid progress, to march round his enemy by the east, to get down to Chauvigny, and from that point to turn westward and reach Poitiers. It was a risk, but it was the only course open to him. Had the Black Prince pursued his march instead of waiting at Châtellerault, John’s plan would have failed, prompt as its execution was; but the Black Prince’s delay gave him his opportunity.
From La Haye to Chauvigny by the crossroads that lead directly southward is a matter of thirty miles. John covered this in two days. Leaving La Haye upon the morning of Thursday the 15th, he brought his force into Chauvigny upon the 16th, Friday. He left, no doubt, a certain proportion delayed upon the road, but he himself, with the bulk of the army, completed the distance.
While, therefore, the Black Prince was delaying all that Thursday and Friday in Châtellerault, John was passing right in front and beyond him some eight miles to the eastward; and on the Saturday, the 17th, while the Black Prince was leading his column through the triangle between the rivers, John was marching due west from Chauvigny to Poitiers by the great road through St Julien, yet another fifteen miles and more, in the third day of his great effort. The head of the column, with the king himself, we must presume to have ridden through the gate of Poitiers before or about noon, but the last contingents were spread out along the road behind him when, in that same morning or early afternoon of Saturday, the outriders of the Anglo-Gascon force appeared upon the fields to the north.
It was an encounter as sudden as it was dramatic. The countryside at this point consists in wide, open fields, the plough-lands of a plateau which rises about one hundred feet above the level of the rivers. To the east of this open country a line of wood marks the outlying fragments of the forest of Moulière; to the west, five miles away, and out of sight of these farms, stands upon its slope above the Clain the town of Poitiers. The lane by which the Black Prince was advancing was that which passes through the hamlet of Le Breuil. It is possible that he intended to camp there; he had covered sixteen miles. But if that was his intention, the accident which followed changed it altogether. A mile beyond the village there is a roll of rising land, itself a mile short of the great road which joins Poitiers and Chauvigny. It was from this slight eminence that scouts riding out in front of Edward’s army saw, massed upon that road and advancing westward across their view, a considerable body of vehicles escorted by armed men. It was the rearguard and the train of King John.
A man following to-day that great road between Poitiers and Chauvigny eastward, notes a spinney and a farm lying respectively to the right and to the left of his way, some four kilometres from the gate of Poitiers, and not quite three from the famous megalith of the “Lifted Stone,” which is a matter of immemorial reverence for the townsfolk. That farm is known as La Chaboterie, and it marks the spot upon the high road where John’s rearguard first caught sight of Edward’s scouts upon the sky-line to the north.
The mounted men of this force turned northward off the high road, and pursued the scouts to the main body near Le Breuil; then a sharp skirmish ensued, and the French were driven off. This mêlée was the first news the Black Prince had that the French army, so far from having abandoned the pursuit, had marched right round him, and that his column was actually in the gravest peril. It warned him that though he had already covered those sixteen miles, he must press on further before he could dare to camp for the night. His column was already weary, but there was no alternative.
The army reached the high road, and crossed it long after the French rearguard had disappeared to the west. Exhausted as it was, it pushed on another mile or two southward by the lanes that lead across the fields to the neighbourhood of Mignaloux, and there it camped. The men had covered that day close on twenty miles! But before settling for the evening, the Black Prince sent out the Captal de Buch north-westward over the rolling plateau in reconnaissance. When this commander and his body reached the heights which overlook the Clain, and faced the houses of Poitiers upon the hill beyond, they saw in the valley beneath them, and on the slopes of the river bank, the encampment of the French army; and reported, upon their return, “that all the plain was covered with men-at-arms.”
Upon the next morning, that of Sunday the 18th of September, broken as the force was with fatigue, it was marshalled again for the march — but no more than a mile or two was asked of it.
Edward had scouted forward upon the morning, and discovered, just in front of the little town of Nouaillé and to the northward of the wood that covers that little town, a position which, if it were necessary to stand, would give him the opportunity for a defensive action.
That he intended any such action we may doubt in the light of what followed. It was certainly not to his advantage to do so. The French by occupying Poitiers had left his way to the south free, but the extreme weariness of his force and the possibility that the French might strike suddenly were both present in his mind. He wisely prepared for either alternative of action or retreat, and carefully prepared the position he had chosen. For its exact nature, I must refer my reader to the next section, but the general conditions of the place are proper to the interest of our present matter.
The main business, it must be remembered, upon which the Prince’s mind was concentrated was still his escape to the south. He must expect the French advance upon him to come down by the shortest road to any position he had prepared, even if he did not intend, or only half intended, to stand there: and that position was therefore fixed astraddle of the road which leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé.
Now, just behind — that is, to the south of — this position runs in a tortuous course through a fairly sharp little valley a stream called the Miosson. It formed a sufficient obstacle to check pursuit for some appreciable time. There was only one bridge across it, at Nouaillé itself, which he could destroy when his army had passed; and the line of it was strengthened by woods upon either side of the stream.
The Black Prince, therefore, must be judged (if we collate all the evidence) to have looked forward to a general plan offering him two alternatives.
Either the French would advance at once and press him. In which case he would be compelled to take his chance of an action against what were by this time far superior numbers; and in that case he had a good prepared position, which will shortly be described, upon which to meet them.
Or they would give him time to file away southward, in which case the neighbouring Miosson, with its ravine and its woods, would immediately, at the very beginning of the march, put an obstacle between him and his pursuer; especially as he had two crossings, a ford, and a bridge some way above it, and he could cut the bridge the moment he had crossed it.
Finally, if (as was possible) a combination of these two alternatives should present itself, he had but to depend upon his prepared position for its rearguard to hold during just the time that would permit the main force to make the passage of the Miosson, not two miles away.
With this plan clearly developed he advanced upon the Sunday morning no more than a mile or two to the position in question, fortified it after the fashion which I shall later describe, and camped immediately behind it to see what that Sunday might bring. He could not make off at once, because his horses and his marching men were worn out with the fatigue of the previous day’s great march.
PART III. THE TERRAIN
THE DEFENSIVE POSITION taken up by Edward, the Black Prince, upon Sunday the 18th of September 1356, and used by him in the decisive action of the following day, is composed of very simple elements; which are essentially a shallow dip (about thirty feet only in depth), bounded by two slight parallel slopes, the one of which the Anglo-Gascon force held against the advance of the King of France’s cosmopolitan troops from the other.
We can include all the business of that Monday’s battle in a parallelogram lying true to the points of the compass, and measuring three miles and six furlongs from north to south, by exactly two and a half miles from east to west; while the actual fighting is confined to an inner parallelogram no more than two thousand yards from east to west, by three thousand from north to south. The first of these areas is that given upon the coloured map which forms the frontispiece of this little book. The second is marked by a black frame within that coloured map, the main features of which are reproduced in line upon a larger scale on the page opposite this.
I have said that the essentials of the Black Prince’s defensive plan were:
(1) A prepared defensive position, which it might or might not be necessary to hold, coupled with
(2) an obstacle, the Miosson River, which (when he should retreat) he could count upon to check pursuit; especially as its little valley was (a) fairly deeply cut, (b) encumbered by wood, and (c) passable for troops only at the bridge of Nouaillé, which he was free to cut when it had served him, and at a somewhat hidden ford which I will later describe.
I must here interpose the comment that the bridge of Nouaillé, being of stone, would not have been destroyable during a very active and pressed retreat under the conditions of those times; that is, without the use of high explosives. But it must be remembered that such a narrow passage would in any case check the pursuit, that half an hour’s work would suffice to make a breach in the roadway, and perhaps to get rid of the keystones, that a few planks thrown over the gap so formed would be enough to permit archers defending the rear to cross over, that these planks could then be immediately withdrawn, and that the crush of a hurried pursuit, which would certainly be of heavily armed and mounted knights, would be badly stopped by a gap of the kind. I therefore take it for granted that the bridge of Nouaillé was a capital point in Edward’s plan.
The line along which the Black Prince threw up entrenchments was the head of the slight slope upon the Nouaillé or eastern side of the depression I have mentioned. It ran from the farm Maupertuis (now called La Cardinerie) to the site of those out-buildings which surround the modern steadings of Les Bordes, and to-day bear the name of La Dolerie. The length of that line was, almost to a foot, one thousand English yards, and it will easily be perceived that even with his small force only a portion of his men were necessary to hold it. Its strength and weakness I shall discuss in a moment. This line faces not quite due west, indeed nearly twenty degrees north of west. Its distance as the crow flies from the Watergate of Poitiers is just under seven kilometres, or, as nearly as possible, four miles and six hundred and fifty English yards. While its bearings from the town of Poitiers, or the central part thereof, is a trifle south of due south-east.
The line thus taken up, and the depression in front of it, are both singularly straight, and the slope before the entrenchments, like its counterpart opposite, is regular, increasing in depth as the depression proceeds down towards the Miosson, which, at this point, makes a bend upward to meet, as it were, the little valley. A trifle to the south of the centre of the line there is a break in the uniformity of the ridge, which comes in the shape of a little dip now occupied by some tile-works; and on the further, or French, side a corresponding and rather larger cleft faces it; so that the whole depression has the shape of a long cross with short arms rather nearer its base than its summit. Just at the end of the depression, before the ground sinks abruptly down to the river, the soil is marshy.
Leading towards this position from Poitiers there was and is but one road, a winding country lane, now in good repair, but until modern times of a poor surface, and never forming one of the great high roads. The importance of this unique road will be seen in a moment.
There had once existed, five hundred yards from the right of the Black Prince’s entrenched line, a Roman road, the traces of which can still be discovered at various parts of its course, but which, even by the time of Poitiers, had disappeared as a passable way. The only approach remaining, as I have said, was that irregular lane which formed the connection between Poitiers and Nouaillé.
Now in most terrains where feudal cavalry was concerned, the existence or non-existence of a road, and its character, would be of little moment in the immediate neighbourhood of the action: for though a feudal army depended (as all armies always must) upon roads for its strategics, it was almost independent of them in its tactics upon those open fields which were characteristic of mediæval agriculture. The mounted and armoured men deployed and charged across the stubble. Those who have read the essay upon the Terrain of Crécy, which preceded this in the present series, will appreciate that the absence of a road uniting the English and French positions in that battle was of no significance to the result.
But in the particular case of Poitiers this road, and a certain cart-track leading off it, must be carefully noted, because between them they determine all that happened; and the reason of this is that the front of the English position was covered with vines.
The French method of cultivating the vine, and the condition of that cultivation in the middle of September (in all but a quite exceptionally early year so far north as Poitou), makes of a vineyard the most complete natural obstacle conceivable against the use of cavalry, and at the same time a most formidable entanglement to the advance of infantry, and a tolerable cover for missile weapons at short range.
The vine is cultivated in France upon short stakes of varying height with varying districts, but usually in this neighbourhood somewhat over four feet above the ground; that is, covering most of a man’s figure, even as he would stand to arms with a long-bow, yet affording space above for the discharge of the weapon. These stakes are set at such distances apart as allow ordered and careful movement between them, but close enough together to break and interfere with a pressed advance: their distances being determined by the fulness of the plant before the grapes are gathered, a harvest which falls in that region somewhat later than the date of the action.
Wherever a belt of vineyard is found, cultivated after this fashion, the public ways through it are the only opportunities for advance; for land is so valuable under the grape that various allotments or properties are cultivated to their outermost limit. The vineyards (which have now disappeared, but which then stood upon the battlefield) could only be pierced by the roads I have mentioned.
This line, then, already well protected by the vineyards, was further strengthened by the presence of a hedge which bounded them and ran along their eastern edge upon the flat land above the depression.
I have mentioned a cart-track, which branched off on the main lane, and which is marked upon my map with the letters “A-A.” It formed, alongside with the lane, a second approach through the English line, and it must be noticed that, like the main lane, a portion of it, where it breasted the slope, was sunk in those times below the level of the land on either side.
The first thought that will strike the modern student of such a position is that a larger force, such as the one commanded by the King of France, should have been able easily to turn the defensive upon its right.
Now, first, a feudal army rarely manœuvred. For that matter, the situation was such that if John had avoided a fight altogether, and had merely marched down the great south-western road to block Prince Edward’s retreat, the move would have had a more complete effect than winning a pitched battle. The reader has also heard how the Black Prince’s sense of his peril was such that he had been prepared to treat upon any but the most shameful terms. It is evident, therefore, that if the French fought at all it was because they wanted to fight, and that they approached the conflict in the spirit (which was that of all their time) disdainful of manœuvring and bound in honour to a frontal attack. A modern force as superior in numbers as was John’s to the Black Prince’s would have “held” the front of the defensive with one portion of its effectives, while another portion marched round that defensive’s right flank. But it is impossible to establish a comparison between developed tactics and the absolutely simple plan of feudal warfare. It is equally impossible to compare a modern force with a feudal force of that date. It had not the unity of command and the elasticity of organisation which are necessary to divided and synchronous action. It had no method of attack but to push forward successive bodies of men in the hope that the weight of the column would tell.
Secondly, Edward defended that right flank from attack by establishing there his park of waggons.
None the less, the Black Prince could not fail to see the obvious danger of the open right upon the plateau beyond the Roman road; even in the absence of any manœuvring, the mere superior length of the French line might suffice to envelop him there. It was presumably upon this account that he stationed a small body of horse upon that slightly higher piece of land, five hundred yards behind Maupertuis and a little to the right of it, which is now the site of the railway station; and this mounted force which he kept in reserve was to prove an excellent point of observation during the battle. It was the view over towards the French position obtained from it which led, as will be seen in the next section, to the flank charge of the Captal de Buch.
There remains to be considered such environments of the position as would affect the results of the battle. I have already spoken of the obstacle of the Miosson, of Nouaillé, of the passages of the river, and of the woods which would further check a pursuit if the pressure following upon a partial defeat, or upon a determination to retire without accepting action, should prove serious. I must now speak of these in a little more detail.
The depression, which was the main feature of the battlefield, is carved like its fellows out of a general and very level plateau of a height some four hundred to four hundred and fifty feet above the sea. This formation is so even that all the higher rolls of the land are within ten or twenty feet of the same height. They are, further, about one hundred feet, or a little more, higher than the water level of the local streams. This tableland, and particularly the ravine of the Miosson, nourishes a number of woods. One such wood, not more than a mile long by perhaps a quarter broad, covers Nouaillé, and intervenes between that town and the battlefield. On the other side of the Miosson there is a continuous belt of wood five miles long, with only one gap through it, which gap is used by the road leading from Nouaillé to Roches and to the great south-western road to Bordeaux.
In other words, the Black Prince had prepared his position just in front of a screen of further defensible woodland.
I have mentioned one last element in the tactical situation of which I have spoken, and which needs careful consideration.
Over and above the passage of the Miosson by a regular bridge and a proper road at Nouaillé, the water is fordable in ordinary weather at a spot corresponding to the gap between the woods, and called “Man’s Ford” or “Le Gué d’Homme.” Now, of the several accounts of the action, one, the Latin chronicler Baker, mentions the ford, while another, the rhymed French story of the Chandos Herald, speaks of Edward’s having begun to retire, and of part of his forces having already crossed the river before contact took place. I will deal later with this version; but in connection with the ford and whether Edward either did or intended to cross by it, it is worthy of remark that the only suggestion of his actually having crossed it, and of his intention to do so in any case, is to be found in the rhymed chronicle of the Chandos Herald; and the question arises — what reliance should be placed on that document?
It is evident on the face of it that the detail of the retreat was not invented. Everyone is agreed that the rhymed chronicle of the Chandos Herald does not carry the same authority as prose contemporary work. It is not meant to. It is a literary effort rather than a record. But there would be no reason for inventing such a point as the beginning of a retreat before an action — not a very glorious or dramatic proceeding — and the mere mention of such a local feature as the ford in Baker is clear proof that what we can put together from the two accounts is based upon an historical event and the memory of witnesses.
On the other hand, the road proper ran through Nouaillé, and when you are cumbered with a number of heavy-wheeled vehicles, to avoid a road and a regular bridge and to take a bye-track across fields down a steep bank and through water would seem a very singular proceeding. Further, this track would lose all the advantages which the wood of Nouaillé gave against pursuit, and, finally, would mean the use of a passage that could not be cut, rather than one that could.
Again, we know that the Black Prince when he was preparing the position on Sunday morning, covered its left flank, exactly as his father had done at Crécy ten years before, with what the Tudors called a “leaguer,” or park of waggons.
Further, we have a discrepancy between the story of this retreat by the ford and the known order of battle arranged the day before. In that order of battle he put in the first line, just behind his archers, who lined the hedge bounding the vineyards, a group of men-at-arms under Warwick and Oxford. He himself commanded the body just behind these, and the third or rearmost line was under the command of Salisbury and Suffolk.
How are these contemporary and yet contradictory accounts to be reconciled? What was the real meaning of movement on the ford?
I beg the reader to pay a very particular attention to the mechanical detail which I am here examining, because it is by criticism such as this that the truth is established in military history between vague and apparently inconsistent accounts.
If you are in command of a force such as that indicated upon the following plan, in which A and B together form your front line, C your second, and D your third, all three facing in the direction of the arrow, and expecting an attack from that direction; and if, after having drawn up your men so, you decide there is to be no attack, and determine to retreat in the direction of X, your most natural plan will be to file off down the line towards X, first with your column D, to be followed by your column C, with A and B bringing up the rear. And this would be all the more consonant with your position, from the fact that the very men A and B, whom you had picked out as best suited to take the first shock of an action, had an action occurred, would also in the retreat form your rearguard, and be ready to fight pursuers should a pursuit develop and press you. That is quite clear.
Now, if, for reasons of internal organisation or what not, you desired to keep your vanguard still your vanguard in retreat, as it was on the field, your middle body still your middle body on the march, and what was your rearguard on the field still your rearguard in the long column whereby you would leave that field, the manœuvre by which you would maintain this order would be filing off by the left; that is, ordering A to form fours and turn from a line into a column, facing towards the point E, and, having done so, to march off in the direction of X. You would order B to act in the same fashion next. When A and B had got clear of you and had reached, say, F, you would make C form fours and follow after; and when C had marched away so far as to leave things clear for D, the last remaining line, you would make D in its turn form fours and close up the column.
Now, suppose the Black Prince had been certain on that Monday morning that there would be no attack, nor even any pursuit. Suppose that he were so absolutely certain as to let him dispense with a rearguard — then he might have drawn off in the second of the two fashions I have mentioned. Warwick and Oxford (A and B) would have gone first, C (the Black Prince, in the centre) would have gone next, and Salisbury, D, would have closed the line of the retreat. This would have been the slowest method he could have chosen for getting off the field, it would have had no local tactical advantage whatsoever, and to adopt such a method in a hurried departure at dawn from the neighbourhood of a larger force with whom one had been treating for capitulation the day before, would be a singular waste of time in any case. But, at any rate, it would be physically possible.
What is quite impossible is that such a conversion and retirement should have been attempted; for we know that a strong rearguard was left, and held the entrenchments continuously.
To leave the field in the second fashion I have described is mathematically equivalent to breaking up your rearguard and ceasing to maintain it for the covering of your retreat. It is possible only if you do not intend to have a rearguard at all to cover your retirement, because you think you do not need it. As a fact, we know that all during the movement, whatever it was, a great body of troops remained on the field not moving, and watching the direction from which the French might attack. So even if there was a beginning of retirement, a strong rearguard was maintained to cover that movement. We further know that the Black Prince and the man who may be called chief of his staff, Chandos, planned to keep that very strong force in position in any case, until the retirement (if retirement it were) was completed; and we further know that the fight began with a very stout and completely successful resistance by what must have been a large body posted along the ridge, and what even the one account which speaks of the retirement describes as the bulk of the army.
To believe, then, that Warwick filed off by the left, followed by the vehicles, and then by the main command under the Prince, and that all this larger part of the army, including its wheeled vehicles, had got across the ford before contact took place and an action developed, is impossible. It is not only opposed to any sound judgment, it is mathematically impossible. It also conflicts with the use of a park of vehicles to defend the left of the entrenched line, and with the natural use of the line of retreat by Nouaillé. I can only conclude that what really happened was something of this sort:
Edward intended to retreat if he were left unmolested. He intended to retreat through Nouaillé and by its bridge, but for safety and to disencumber the road he sent the more valuable of the loot-waggons by the short cut over the ford.
The Prince had got the bulk of his force standing on the entrenched position upon that Monday morning, and bidden it wait and see whether the enemy would attempt to force them or no. As there was no sign of the enemy’s approach from the northwest, and as he was not even watched by any scout of the enemy’s, he next put Salisbury in command of the main force along the hedge, put Warwick and Oxford at the head of a strong escort for leading off the more valuable of the booty — which would presumably be in few waggons — and began to get these waggons away down the hill towards the ford. They would thus be taking a short cut to join the road between Nouaillé and Roches later on, and they would relieve the congestion upon the main road of retreat through Nouaillé. It is possible that the Black Prince oversaw this operation himself upon the dawn of that day, involving, as it did, the negotiation of a steep bank with cumbersome vehicles, and those vehicles carrying the more precious and portable loot of his raid. This would give rise to the memory of his having crossed the stream. But, meanwhile, the mass of army was still standing where it was posted, prepared for retreat on the bridge of Nouaillé if it were not molested, or for action if it were. Just as this minor detachment of the more valuable vehicles, with its escort, had got across the water, messengers told Edward that there were signs of a French advance. He at once came back, countermanded all provisional orders for the retirement, and recalled the escort, save perhaps some small party to watch the waggons which had got beyond the river. Thus, returning immediately, Edward was ready to instruct and fight the action in the fashion described in all the other accounts.
This, I think, is the rational reconciliation of several stories which are only in apparent contradiction, and which are rather confusing than antagonistic.
PART IV. THE ACTION
THOUGH THE ACCOUNTS of the Battle of Poitiers, both contemporary with and subsequent to it, show, like most mediæval chronicling, considerable discrepancies, it is possible by comparing the various accounts and carefully studying the ground to present a collected picture of that victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the position, character, and numbers of Edward’s force as it lay upon the early morning of Monday the 19th of September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged in dense formation, faced west by a little north upon the level which intervenes between the modern farm of Cardinerie and the wood of Nouaillé. These three bodies of men stood armed, one rank behind the other, and all three parallel. The first was commanded by Salisbury. It was drawn up along the hedge that bounded the vineyards, and it stretched upon either side of the lane which led and leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé. With Salisbury was Suffolk; and this first line, thus facing the hedge, the depression, and the fields beyond, from whence a French attack might develop, was certainly the largest of the three lines. The reader must conceive of the road astraddle of which this command of Salisbury’s and Suffolk’s stood as lying flush with the fields around, until the edge of the depression was reached, and there forming for some yards a sunken road between the vines that stood on either side of it. The reader should also remember that further to the left, and covered by the last extension of this line of men, was the second diverging lane, crossing through vineyards precisely as did the other, and sunk as the other was sunk for some yards at the crest of the little depression. It is this lane which now passes by the tile-works and leads later to the ford over the river in the valley beyond. The line thus holding the hedge, and commanded by Suffolk and Salisbury, contained the greater number of the archers, and also a large proportion of men-at-arms, dismounted, and ready to repel any French attack, should such an attack develop in the course of the morning to interfere with the retirement which Edward had planned; but as yet, in the neighbourhood of six o’clock, there was no sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon the west beyond the depression. The King of France’s camp was more than two miles away, and it looked as though Edward would be able to get his whole force beyond the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first line, for the position of which, as for that of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer to the coloured map forming the frontispiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn up came a second line, under the command of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much smaller body, because it had a very different task to perform. Its business was to act as an escort for certain of the waggon-loads which Edward, both on account of their value and of the difficulty of getting them up and down the banks of the steep ravine of the river behind them, had determined to send forward at the head of his retirement. This escort, then, we may call the second line. Before the retiring movement began it stood parallel to and immediately in the rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat larger command, principally of Gascon men-at-arms under the direct leadership of the Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing one behind the other and facing away from the sunrise of that Monday morning, we must add a great body of waggons, parked together, upon the right of the first line and defending it from any turning movement that might be attempted upon that flank, should a French advance develop after all. We must suppose some few of the more valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best booty of the raid, to have been put last in this park, so that their drivers should have the opportunity of filing off first when the middle or second line, which was to be their escort, began the retirement. Further, we must remark teams harnessed and drivers mounted in front of those special waggons, while the mass of the wheeled vehicles still lay closely packed together for the purposes of defence against a possible attack, their teams standing to the rear, ready to harness up only when the retirement was in full swing, and to come last in the retreating column, saving perhaps for a small rearguard that might be left to watch the extremity of the line after everyone else had got safely off the field. We must see the Black Prince’s command, such of it as was mounted, all on horseback already, and the men-at-arms of the second line or escort under Warwick similarly in the saddle; but the first line, which formed the bulk of the whole force, we must picture to ourselves all on foot, the mounted men as well as the small proportion of foot-sergeants: for if there should be occasion to repel some attack developing during the retirement, it was in the essence of the Plantagenet tactics to dismount the men-at-arms during the defensive, and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy appeared upon the empty fields to the west beyond the depression while these dispositions were being made; and, when all was ready, perhaps between seven and eight o’clock, the order for the first movement of the retirement was given. Warwick and the escort he commanded turned from line to column and began to file off by the left, down towards the ford. The special waggons, whose safety was thus being first anxiously provided for, followed, and the whole of the second line thus got clear of the space between the first and the third. It marched south towards the river, with its little body of wheeled vehicles following up its mounted men.
When the second line had thus got clear of the original formation, Edward, preceded by his banner and accompanied by a certain number of men from the third line (how many we cannot tell, but presumably no great force), rode off over the fields to the left of Warwick’s string of cavalry and waggons, to superintend the difficult passage of the Miosson. He left behind him, standing to arms at the hedge, the whole of the strong first line under Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of his own third line marshalled in parallel behind this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere between seven and eight o’clock, the situation is thus: the Prince and the band with him are riding off towards the edge where the land falls somewhat steeply towards the Miosson. He and his men have their backs turned to the bulk of the army, which, in two bodies, the larger one lining the hedge and a smaller one behind it, are holding the chosen defensive position in case there should be any sign of a French pursuit. We must presume that if no such pursuit appeared to be developing it was Edward’s intention, when he had got the special waggons and their escort safely across the ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force thus left behind by the road through Nouaillé and across its bridge. The smaller body would go first; then, section by section, the first line would fall into column and retire by the Nouaillé road, leaving at last no more than a small rearguard at the hedge, which, when all the waggons of the park had been harnessed up and were filing down the Nouaillé road, would itself fall into column and bring up the extreme end of the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads with their escort, which had crossed at the ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say, an hour or an hour and a half by the bulk of the army, which would have rejoined by the Nouaillé road, and the junction would be effected at the spot where, at the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line passing the ford reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command, with its heavy and cumbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on the heights there called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in safety, with the obstacle of the Miosson behind them, the great south-western road to Bordeaux, along which the rest of the retreat would take place.
This plan would have every advantage, always supposing that there was no French pursuit, or that that pursuit should develop too late to interfere with the Black Prince’s scheme. The more valuable of the booty would have been got clean away by a side track which was also a short cut, and which would put it, when the whole retirement was effected, ahead of the column, that is upon the safe side of the force, furthest from an enemy’s attack. It would have got away early without suggesting to the enemy the line of its escape or the opportunity of using the ford. The retirement of the mass of the army by the Nouaillé road would lead the pursuit, if any, along that road and towards the bridge, the cutting of which after the Anglo-Gascon force had passed would leave that force with the obstacle of the river between it and its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did develop, and, luckily for the Black Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off to superintend Warwick’s passage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when the mass of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaillé, he might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away from the defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay on all that open land which now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the south-west of that steading, between the great Lussac road and that country road to Nouaillé along which the march of the French army had proceeded, and across which, further along, the Black Prince’s command lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy’s dispositions. In spite of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more than the fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road, and between him and Nouaillé, the Black Prince’s force was gathered. He appears to have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon that Monday morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it was with the intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until he found the enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four bodies; three main “battles” or lines, comparable to the English three lines — it was the universal formation of a mediæval army — were brought up in column for the advance, to deploy when the field should be reached. The first was commanded by the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of Normandy; the second by the Duke of Orleans, the king’s brother; the third was commanded by the king himself, and was the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against his enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with difficulties, but must nevertheless be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful) romantic pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not without some value, because, like so many of Froissart’s statements, it mirrors the tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If we had no other figures than Froissart’s we should not accept them, but we should accept, and rightly, an impression of great superiority in numbers on the part of the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the field itself, and who wrote from the English side — Burghersh. If anything, he would exaggerate, of course; but he was a soldier (and Froissart was at the other psychological pole!). He actually wrote from the spot, and he thought that everything mounted in front of him came to about 8000, to which he added 3000 men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may have been, and probably was, concerned to mention no more than what he regarded as fighting units worth mentioning: infantry more or less trained and properly accoutred men-at-arms. For these latter, and their number of 8000, we have plenty of independent testimony, and especially Baker’s. Baker gives the same number. As regards the trained infantry, we know that John had 2000 men armed with the arbalest (a mechanical cross-bow worked with a ratchet), and we know that he also had, besides these cross-bowmen, a number of trained mercenaries armed with javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits to the numbers somewhat as follows: the French host included 8000 fully-armed mounted men; that is, not quite double the Gascon and English units of the same rank and equipment. It had somewhat less than the English contingent of missile-armed soldiers, and these armed with a weapon inferior to their opponents. Count these two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-Gascon 7000 or 8000. There you have an inferior limit which was certainly exceeded, for John’s command included a number of other rougher mounted levies and other less trained or untrained infantry. Above that minimum we may add anything we like up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we get a superior limit for the total of 20,000 men all told. Averaging the probabilities from the various accounts, we are fairly safe in setting this addition at 5000, and perhaps a little over. So that the whole force which John could have brought into the field, and which, had it been properly led and organised, he might have used to full effect in that field, was about double the numbers which the Black Prince could oppose to him. The Anglo-Gascons, standing on the defensive, had from 7000 to 8000 men, and the force marching against them on the offensive was presumably in the neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000; while an analysis of the armament gives you, in the capital factors of it, an inferior number of French missile weapons to the missile weapons of the English prince, but double the number of fully-armed knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two sides offered a more striking contrast than the contrast in their numbers. The Plantagenet force worked together and was one well-handled command. The Valois force was in separate commands, so little cohesive that one of them, as we shall see, abandoned the struggle without orders. For the other causes of the defeat I must ask the reader to wait until we come to the actual engagement.
To the three “battles” thus marshalled and advancing along the road, John added a special vanguard, the constitution of which must be carefully noted. It was sent forward under the two marshals, Audrehen and Clermont. They commanded: first, 300 fully-armoured and mounted men-at-arms, who rode at the head; next, and following immediately behind these, certain German auxiliaries, also mounted, in what precise numbers we do not know, but few; thirdly, 2000 spearmen on foot, and with them the whole 2000 cross-bowmen using the only missile weapons at John’s disposal.
It will be seen that something like a third of John’s whole force, and nearly half the trained part, was thus detached to form the vanguard in front of the three marching columns. Its function and mishap we shall gather when we come to the contact between them and Edward’s force. Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French army as breaking camp some time between six and seven o’clock of the Monday, forming in three columns upon the Nouaillé road, with the king commanding the largest rear column, his brother, the Duke of Orleans, the column immediately in front, and the King’s son and heir, the Duke of Normandy, in front of Orleans; while ahead of all these three columns marched the 4000 or 5000 men of the vanguard under the marshals, with their 300 picked knights leading the whole.
It must have been at about eight o’clock that the men thus riding with the marshals in front of the French advance came up the slight slope near La Moudurerie, topped the hill, and saw, six or seven hundred yards in front of them, beyond the little depression, the vineyards and the hedge behind the vineyards, and behind that hedge again the massed first line of the Black Prince’s force. Off in the rear to the right they could see the Black Prince’s banner, making away down towards the river, and soon dropping out of sight behind the shoulder of the hill. The special waggons of booty, with Warwick and their escort, must already have disappeared when the French thus had their first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince’s banner disappearing down into the valley on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that their enemy had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it. The force in front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they rightly conceived to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat. They determined to attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which had carefully been planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was fighting on King John’s side, and who had experience of the new Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crécy ten years before had left with the Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and overwhelming superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by the old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack the front of a line sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this fashion meant disaster, many horses would be shot long before their riders could come within lance thrust, the dense packed line of feudal knights, thousands in number, would be thrown into confusion by the maddened and fallen animals, the weight of the remainder as they pressed forward would only add to that confusion, and the first “battle,” delivering the regular traditional first-charge with which every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle of welter and carnage stretched in front of the defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I have spoken was formed. Its orders were these: — The picked three hundred knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English archers, and almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as their numbers were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to follow. It was their business in this immolation of their bodies to make it possible for the mass of infantry, especially those armed with missile weapons, to come close in behind and tackle the English line. That infantry, aided by the mounted German mercenaries and meeting missile with missile by getting hand to hand with the English bowmen at last, would prevent those English bowmen from effective action against the next phase of the offensive. This next phase was to be the advance of the first “battle,” that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His men-at-arms were to go forward dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were: —
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick’s men having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of the English line, and the consequent “bunching” of the attack on to the lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers themselves did not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped — nor did anyone in Europe for some time to come — the remarkable superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to suit a damp string, for instance, and if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed, the complicated thing held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was, from the hands of the strong and trained man, the simplest and most calculable of shots, variable to every condition of the moment. Its elasticity of aim was far superior, and, most important of all, its rate of fire was something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided, upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on foot. But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour upon foot tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the defensive, and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its armoured knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another thing for such armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of half a mile or more on foot, and to engage with the sword or the shortened lance at the end of it. Armour was at that moment in transition. To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite ponderous enough to burden a man on foot, there had been added in that generation plate in various forms. Everyone had plate armour at least upon the elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all the front of the legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted it as a complete covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields for the matter of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact came. But of this men could not judge so early in the development of the new tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited the armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however well he might serve in a defensive “wall.”
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to follow.
It was a little before nine when the vanguard of the Valois advanced across the depression and began to approach the slight slope up towards the vineyards and the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon either side of the hollow road, stood, in the same “harrow” formation as at Crécy, the English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals spurred and charged. Small as their number was, it was crowded for the road into which the stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded them as they galloped forward, and, struggling to press on in that sunken way, either side of their little column was exposed to the first violent discharge of arrows from the vines. They were nearly all shot down, but that little force, whose task it had been, after all, to sacrifice their lives in making a way for their fellows, had permitted the rest of the vanguard to come to close quarters. The entanglement of the vineyard, the unexpected and overwhelming superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow, the superior numbers of the English archers over their enemies’ arbalests, made the attack a slow one, but it was pressed home. The trained infantry of the vanguard, the German mounted mercenaries, swarmed up the little slope. The front of them was already at the hedge, and was engaged in a furious hand to hand with the line defending it, the mass of the remainder were advancing up the rise, when a new turn was given to the affair by the unexpected arrival of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander had been escorting had been got safely across the Miosson; the Black Prince had overlooked their safe crossing, when there came news from the plateau above that the French had appeared, and that the main force which the Black Prince had left behind him was engaged. Edward rode back at once, and joined his own particular line, which we saw just before the battle to be drawn up immediately behind the first line which guarded the hedge and the vineyard. Warwick, with excellent promptitude, did not make for Salisbury and Suffolk to reinforce their struggling thousands with his men, but took the shorter and more useful course of moving by his own left to the southern extremity of his comrade’s fiercely pressed line (see frontispiece near the word “Hedge”; the curved red arrow lines indicate the return of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill, just before the mass of the French vanguard had got home, and when only the front of it had reached the hedge and was beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He put such archers as he had had with his escort somewhat in front of the line of the hedge, and with their fire unexpectedly and immediately enfiladed all that mass of the French infantry, which expected no danger from such a quarter, and was pressing forward through the vineyards to the summit of the little rise. This sharp and unlooked for flank fire turned the scale. The whole French vanguard was thrown into confusion, and broke down the side of the depression and up its opposing slope. As it so broke it interfered with and in part confused the first of the great French “battles,” that under the Dauphin, whose ordered task it was to follow up the vanguard and reinforce its pressure upon the English line. Though the vanguard had been broken, the Dauphin’s big, unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men managed to go forward through the shaken and flying infantry, and in their turn to attack the hedge and the vineyard before it. Against them, the flank fire from Warwick could do less than it had done against the unarmoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of the vanguard which it had just routed. The Dauphin’s cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the main English position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for the effort then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a weight of iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come back, the full weight of his command — every man of it except a reserve of four hundred — was massed to meet the Dauphin’s attack. Warwick’s men hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the mêlée was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which should, by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten o’clock, which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the fight, the Dauphin’s unequal struggle was one of the finest feats of arms in all the Hundred Years’ War. Nothing but a miracle could have made it succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in which the English defending line had itself suffered heavily and the Dauphin’s attack had been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a third phase in the battle which quite cancelled not only the advantage (for that was slight) but also the glory gained by the Dauphin’s great effort.
Next behind the Dauphin’s line, the second “battle,” that of the Duke of Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and to have launched yet another wave of men against the hedge which had been with such difficulty held. Had it done so, the battle would have been decided against Edward. The Dauphin’s force, though it was now broken and the remnants of it were scattering back across the depression, had hit the Anglo-Gascon corps very hard indeed. Edward had lost heavily, his missile weapon was hampered and for the moment useless, many of his men were occupied in an attempt to save the wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from the train to replace those which had been broken or lost in the struggle. What seems to have struck most those who were present at the action upon the English side was the exhaustion from which their men were suffering just after the Dauphin’s unsuccessful attempt to pierce the line. If Orleans had come up then, he could have determined the day. But Orleans failed to come into action at all, and the whole of his “battle,” the second, was thrown away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly difficult to infer from the short and confused accounts that have reached us. It is certain that the whole of Orleans’ command left the field without actually coming into contact with the enemy. The incident left a profound impression upon the legend and traditions of the French masses, and was a basis of that angry contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the populace against the declining claims of the feudal nobility. It may almost be said that the French monarchy would not have conquered that nobility with the aid of the French peasantry and townsmen had not the knights of the second “battle” fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this. The remnant of the Dauphin’s force, falling back in confusion down the slight slope, mixed into and disarrayed the advancing “battle” of Orleans. These, again, were apparently not all of them, nor most of them, dismounted as they should have been, and, in any case, their horses were near at hand. The ebb tide of the Dauphin’s retirement may have destroyed the loose organisation and discipline of that feudal force, must have stampeded some horses, probably left dismounted knights in peril of losing their chargers, and filled them with the first instinct of the feudal soldier, which was to mount. We may well believe that to all this scrimmage of men backing from a broken attack, men mounting in defiance of the unfamiliar and unpopular orders which had put them on foot, here riderless horses breaking through the ranks, there knots of men stampeded, the whole body was borne back, first in confusion, afterwards in flight. So slight are the inequalities of the ground, that anyone watching from the midst of that crest could have made nothing of the battle to the eastward, save that it was a surging mass of the French king’s men defeated, and followed (it might erroneously have been thought) by the Black Prince and his victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second “battle,” mixed with the debris of the first, broke from the field and rode off, scattered to the north. It is upon Orleans himself that the chief blame must fall. Whatever error, confusion, stampede, or even panic had destroyed the ordering of his line, it was his business to rally his men and bring them back. Whether from personal cowardice, from inaptitude for command, or from political calculation, Orleans failed in his duty, and his failure determined the action.
The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central French force, or second “battle,” under Orleans gave Edward’s army the breathing space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the vanguard and the cutting to pieces of the Dauphin’s “battle,” the permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that the French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was lost from that moment, between ten and eleven o’clock, when Orleans’ confused column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap open between King John and the lead of his third battle and the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never did), John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was still intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third “battle,” would have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically far less disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he now made. He had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five, perhaps six thousand men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy’s archers he had none. What number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the attempt upon which he had decided. The rest of the large force that was with him was of less considerable military value; but, on the other hand, he could calculate not unjustly upon the fact that all his men were fresh, and that he was leading them against a body that had struggled for two hours against two fierce assaults, and one that has but just emerged — unbroken, it is true — from a particularly severe hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last reserve to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and wished all his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last body of knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large, fresh body of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its further side, there were those in the Black Prince’s force who began to doubt the issue. A picturesque story remains to us of Edward’s overhearing a despairing phrase, and casting at its author the retort that he had lied damnably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body and had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The exact spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by the railway station. It overlooks (if anything can be said to “overlook” in that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet higher than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away, the long defence had held its own throughout that morning. The Black Prince recalled them to the main body. Having done so, he formed into one closely ordered force all the now mixed men of the three lines who were still able to go forward. John was coming on with his armoured knights on foot, their horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those men, embarrassed and weighted by their metal under the growing heat of the day, nearly double the distance which his son’s men had found too much for them). Edward bade his men-at-arms mount, and his archers mounted too. It will be remembered that six men out of seven were mounted originally for the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting on foot had spared the horses. They were all available. And the teams and sumpter animals were available as well in so far as he had need of them. John’s men, just coming up on foot to the opposite edge of the little dip, saw the low foot line of the Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of command into a high mounted line. But before that mounted line moved forward, Edward had a last command to give. He called for the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks’ course of the raid. He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer — an Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland — set him, with the great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John’s corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John’s knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal’s charge drove home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen, later most properly to be called “The Bold.” And this lad fought side by side with his father, calling to the king: “Father, guard to the right! Father, guard to the left!” as the lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed them. The lessening and lessening group of French lords that could still hold their own in the contracting circle was doomed, and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of the Plantagenet’s men galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub around some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making eastward to where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to ask what this might be, and was told that it was the King of France who had been taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were disputing. John, pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to one of Edward’s knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had said to the Valois, his lawful king, “Sir, I am serving against you, for I have lost my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became the man of the King of England.”
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the Battle of Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided. It was mid-afternoon when the last of the pursuers had been called back into the English camp.
PART V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES
IN CLOSING THE coupled and twin stories of Crécy and Poitiers it is not without advantage to describe the aspect which they would have presented to an onlooker of their time; and in doing this I must not only describe the general armament of Western European men in the middle of the fourteenth century, but that contrast between weapons and methods which gave the Plantagenets for more than a generation so permanent an advantage over their opponents.
You would have seen a force such as that of the Black Prince or of King John camped before a battle, a white town of tents crossing the fields, with here and there a vivid patch of colour where some great leader’s pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The billeting of men upon householders was a necessary feature of a long march, or of the occupation of a town. But when there was question of occupying a position, or when an army was too large to lodge under roof, it depended upon canvas. But it must be remembered that not the whole of a force by any means enjoyed that advantage; a large portion, especially in a considerable body, was often compelled to bivouac.
Further, the reader must represent to himself a heavier impediment of vehicles than a corresponding force would burden itself with to-day: a far heavier impediment than a quite modern army would think tolerable. There were no aids whatsoever to progress, save those which the armed body carried with it. No commandeering of horses upon any considerable scale; no mechanical traffic, of course; and, save under special circumstances where water carriage could relieve the congestion, no chances of carrying one’s booty (then a principal concern), one’s munitions, and one’s supplies, save in waggons.
On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern missile warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three hundred years, was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived not entirely off the country, for it always began with a reserve of provisions, but without any calculated reserve for a whole campaign, and necessarily in such times without any power of keeping essential nourishment for more than a few days.
Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the march by far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern force, and you have the truth.
You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will usually consist of waggons.
The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column would be the large proportion of mounted men.
Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important fighting units, mounted.
Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things. From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of warfare.
The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the year’s rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one. He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these “men-at-arms” (the term is a translation of the French “gensdarmes,” which means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.
Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a fourteenth-century force.
When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crécy and to Poitiers — though it is truer of Crécy than of Poitiers — that the number of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.’s army in 1346 as only 24,000, or the Black Prince’s ten years later as only 7000. The actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied. Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their inferiors were of value in a defensive position, however useless for offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B was “three times as strong” as A, we must remember that this means only that the counting combating units on B’s side were three times A’s. If A was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense mass of humanity much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break, the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics of A’s army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost legendary figures following Crécy and Poitiers.
The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of mediæval accoutrement. From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected the armed man, and our word mail is French for links, and nothing else. In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.
But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side.
We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great blazonry.
The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and in their dependants the appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers. But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends. Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that shields, even the horses’ armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.
Now to the feudal cavalry with their domestics, to the gentry so armed whose tradition was the soul and whose numbers the nucleus of a fourteenth-century army, one must add, quite separate from their domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and these were trained and untrained.
At this point a capital distinction must be made. Armies defending a whole countryside, notably the French armies defending French territory during the Hundred Years’ War, levied, swept up, or got as volunteers masses of untrained men. Expeditions abroad had none such: they had no use for them. Edward had none at Crécy and his son had none at Poitiers; and what was true of these two Plantagenet raids was true of every organised expedition made with small numbers from one centre to a distant spot, throughout the Middle Ages. It is important to remember this, for it accounts for much of the great discrepancies in numbers always observable between an expeditionary force and its opponents, as it does for the superior excellence of the raiding tens against the raided hundreds.
But if we consider only the trained force of foot-men in an army of the fourteenth century, we discover that contrast between the Plantagenet and the Valois equipment with which I desire to conclude. England had developed the long-bow. It is a point which has been vastly overemphasised, but which it would be unscholarly and uncritical to pass over in silence. A missile weapon had been produced and perfected by the Welsh, the art of it had spread over the west country; and it was to prove itself of value superior to any other missile weapon in the field throughout the fourteenth and even into the early fifteenth centuries. Outside these islands it was imperfectly understood as a weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly learnt. When it was replaced by firearms, the British Islands and their population dropped out of the running in land armament for two hundred years. The long-bow was not sufficiently superior to other weapons to impress itself dramatically and at once upon the consciousness of Europe. It remained special, local, national, but, if men could only have known it, a decisive element of superiority up to the breakdown of the Plantagenet tradition of government and of Plantagenet society.
I have described in the writing of Crécy how superior was its rate of delivery always, and often its range, to other missile weapons of the time. We must also remember that capital factor in warfare, lost with the Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages, which may be called the instruction of infantry.
The strength of an armed body consists in its cohesion. When the whole body is in peril, each individual member of it wants to get away. To prevent him from getting away is the whole object of discipline and military training. Each standing firm (or falling where he stands) preserves the unity, and therefore the efficacy, of the whole. A few yielding at the critical point (and the critical point is usually also the point where men most desire to yield) destroy the efficacy of nine times their number. Now, one of the things that frighten an individual man on foot most is another man galloping at him upon a horse. If many men gallop upon him so bunched on many horses, the effect is, to say the least of it, striking. If any one doubts this, let him try. If the men upon the horses are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on foot some feet ahead (such as is the lance), the threat is more efficacious still, and no single man (save here and there a fellow full of some religion) will meet it.
But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the individual man would never guess, and which is none the less experimentally certain — which is this: that if a certain number of men on foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will swerve or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between the nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the rider’s desire that his horse should go forward and the horse’s training, which teaches him that not only his rider, but men in general, are his masters. What is true here of horses is not true of dogs, who think all men not their masters, but their enemies, and desire to kill them, and what is more, can do so, which a horse cannot. A charge of large mounted dogs against unshaken infantry would succeed. A charge of mounted horses against unshaken infantry, if that infantry be sufficiently dense, will fail.
To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction is the instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and hammer it into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all will be well. This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only with staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they are possessed of missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is impossible from charging riders, and an infantry force armed with missile weapons, and unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and still more by experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern conditions, where missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this goes without saying; but even with a range of from fifty to eighty yards of a missile that will bring down a horse or stop him, infantry can easily be made sufficiently confident if it is unshaken. Now, to shake it, there is nothing available (or was nothing before the art of flying was developed) save other men, equally stationary, armed with other missiles. The long-bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he had a missile weapon superior to anything that his enemy could bring against him. He therefore stood upon the defensive against a feudal cavalry charge unshaken, and he was trained by his experience and instruction to know that if he kept his line unbroken, the cavalry charge would never get home. That is the supreme tactical factor of the Plantagenet successes of the Hundred Years’ War.
PART VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE
THE IMMEDIATE RESULTS of the victory of Poitiers consisted, first, in the immensely increased prestige which it gave to the House of Plantagenet throughout Europe.
Next, we must reckon the local, though ephemeral, effect upon the opinion of Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince was now free to retreat at his ease towards Bordeaux and the secure territories of Gascony.
But though these results were the most immediate, and though the victory of one monarch over the other was the most salient aspect of the victory for contemporaries, as it is for us, there was another element which we must particularly consider because it illustrates the difference between the political conditions of the fourteenth century and of our own time.
The real point of the success was the capture of the king’s person. The importance of the action lay, of course, to some extent, in the prestige it gave to the Black Prince personally; though that point was lost a very few years afterwards in the subsequent decline of the Plantagenet power in the south. In so far as an action in those days could carry a national effect — that is, could be regarded by distant civilian populations as proof of strength or weakness in contrasting races and societies — Poitiers had not even the claim of Crécy; for it was not principally an archers’ but a knights’ battle, and the knights were mainly the gentry of the South of France, while those who had been broken by the only cavalry movement of the engagement were not even French knights, but levies of German, Spanish, and other origin. But the capture of the King of France at that particular moment of chivalry, that last fermentation of a feudal society which was reaching its term, had a vast positive effect, as well as an almost incalculable moral effect.
There is nothing in modern times to which such an accident can be accurately paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the capital city would be the nearest thing; but there is this grave difference between them, that the capture of the modern capital must mean prolonged and decisive success in war, whereas the capture of John was an accident of the field. The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king’s command had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.
A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital ships by contact mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind his lieges: “more doubtfully,” because the whole feudal system jealously regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in the shape of rents, not competitive, but fixed, which came to him as they did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord. The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.
The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result; it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would profit.
The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately) of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the nation. But these lengthy political consequences — followed by the further success of the Black Prince’s nephew at Agincourt, and again by his successor’s loss of all save Calais — do not concern this book.
PART VI. THE ACTION
SUMMARY OF SITUATION ON THE SOUTH BY THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, MAY 17th.
CLERFAYT’S COLUMN.
SUNDAY, MAY the 18th, 1794.
WATERLOO
I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
The Advance
III. THE DECISIVE DAY
IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE
V. THE ACTION
The First Part of the Action
The Second Part of the Action
MALPLAQUET
I. THE POLITICAL MEANING OF MALPLAQUET
II. THE SIEGE OF TOURNAI
III. THE MANŒUVRING FOR POSITION
IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
V. THE ACTION
POITIERS
INTRODUCTION
PART I. THE CAMPAIGN PART II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION
PART III. THE TERRAIN PART IV. THE ACTION PART V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES
PART VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE
Title page and frontispiece of the Blenheim volume
Plate I. The Battle of Blenheim.
BLENHEIM
PART I. THE POLITICAL OBJECTIVE
THE PROPER UNDERSTANDING of a battle and of its historical significance is only possible in connection with the campaign of which it forms a part; and the campaign can only be understood when we know the political object which it was designed to serve.
A battle is no more than an incident in a campaign. However decisive in its immediate result upon the field, its value to the general conducting it depends on its effect upon the whole of his operations, that is, upon the campaign in which he is engaged.
A campaign, again, is but the armed effort of one society to impose its will in some particular upon another society. Every such effort must have a definite political object. If this object is served the campaign is successful. If it is not served the campaign is a failure. Many a campaign which began or even concluded with a decisive action in favour of one of the two belligerents has failed because, in the result, the political object which the victory was attempting was not reached. Conversely, many a campaign, the individual actions of which were tactical defeats, terminated in favour of the defeated party, upon whom the armed effort was not sufficient to impose the will of his adversary, or to compel him to that political object which the adversary was seeking. In other words, military success can be measured only in terms of civil policy.
It is therefore essential, before approaching the study of any action, even of one so decisive and momentous as the Battle of Blenheim, to start with a general view of the political situation which brought about hostilities, and of the political object of those hostilities; only then, after grasping the measure in which the decisive action in question affected the whole campaign, can we judge how the campaign, in its turn, compassed the political end for which it was designed.
The war whose general name is that of the Spanish Succession was undertaken by certain combined powers against Louis XIV. of France (and such allies as that monarch could secure upon his side) in order to prevent the succession of his grandson to the crown of Spain.
With the various national objects which Holland, England, the Empire and certain of the German princes, as also Savoy and Portugal, may have had in view when they joined issue with the French monarch, military history is not concerned. It is enough to know that their objects, though combining them against a common foe, were not identical, and the degrees of interest with which they regarded the compulsion of Louis XIV. to forego the placing of his grandson upon the Spanish throne were very different. It is this which will largely explain the various conduct of the allies during the progress of the struggle; but all together sought the humiliation of Louis, and joined on the common ground of the Spanish Succession.
The particular object, then, of the campaign of Blenheim (and of those campaigns which immediately preceded and succeeded it) was the prevention of the unison of the crowns of France and Spain in the hands of two branches of the same family. Tested by this particular issue alone, the campaign of Blenheim, and the whole series of campaigns to which it belongs, failed. Louis XIV. maintained his grandson upon the throne of Spain; and the issue of the long war could not impose upon him the immediate political object of the allies.
But there was a much larger and more general object engaged, which was no less than the defence of Austria — more properly the Empire — and of certain minor States, against what had grown to be the overwhelming power of the French monarchy.
From this standpoint the whole period of Louis XIV.’s reign — all the last generation of the seventeenth century and the first decade and more of the eighteenth — may be regarded as a struggle between the soldiers of Louis XIV. (and their allies) upon the one hand, and Austria, with certain minor powers concerned in the defence of their independence or integrity, upon the other.
In this struggle Great Britain was neutral or benevolent in its sympathies in so far as those sympathies were Stuart; but all that part of English public life called Whig, all the group of English aristocrats who desired the abasement of the Crown, perhaps the mass of the nation also, was opposed, both in its interests and in its opinions, to the supremacy of Louis XIV. upon the Continent.
William of Orange, who had been called to the English throne by the Revolution of 1688, was the most determined opponent Louis had in Europe. Apart from him, the general interests of the London merchants, and the commercial interests of the nation as a whole, were in antagonism to the claims of the Bourbon monarchy. We therefore find the forces of Great Britain, in men, ships, guns, and money, arrayed against Louis throughout the end of his reign, and especially during this last great war.
Now, from this general standpoint — by far the most important — the war of the Spanish Succession is but part of the general struggle against Louis XIV.; and in that general struggle the campaign of 1704, and the battle of Blenheim which was its climax, are at once of the highest historical importance, and a singular example of military success.
For if the general political object be considered, which was the stemming of the French tide of victory and the checking of the Bourbon power, rather than the particular matter of the succession of the Spanish throne, then it was undoubtedly the campaign of 1704 which turned the tide; and Blenheim must always be remembered in history as the great defeat from which dates the retreat of the military power of the French in that epoch, and the gradual beating back of Louis XIV.’s forces to those frontiers which may be regarded as the natural boundaries of France.
Not all the French conquests were lost, nor by any means was the whole great effort of the reign destroyed. But the peril which the military aptitude of the French under so great a man as Louis XIV. presented to the minor States of Europe and to the Austrian empire was definitely checked when the campaign of Blenheim was brought to its successful conclusion. That battle was the first of the great defeats which exhausted the resources of Louis, put him, for the first time in his long reign, upon a close defensive, and restored the European balance which his years of unquestioned international power had disturbed.
Blenheim, then, may justly rank among the decisive actions of European history.
In connection with the campaign of which it formed a part, it gave to that campaign all its meaning and all its complete success.
In connection with the general struggle against Louis, that campaign formed the turning point between the flow and the ebb in the stream of military power which Louis XIV. commanded and had set in motion.
From the day of Blenheim, August 13th, 1704, onwards, the whole French effort was for seven years a desperate losing game, which, if its end was saved from disaster by the high statesmanship of the king and the devotion of his people, was none the less the ruin of that ambitious policy which had coincided with the great days of Versailles.
The war was conducted, as I have said, by various allies. Its success depended, therefore, upon various commanders regarded as coequal, acting as colleagues rather than as principals and subordinates. But the story of the great march to the Danube and its harvest at Blenheim, which we are about to review, sufficiently proves that the deciding genius in the whole affair was that of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. The plan was indeed Eugene’s; and in the battle itself he shared the glory with his English friend and colleague. Again, the British troops present were few indeed compared with the total of the allied forces. At Blenheim, in particular, they amounted to less than a third of the numbers present. The excellence of their material, however, their magnificent work at the Schellenberg and on Blenheim field itself, coupled with the fact that the general to whom the final success is chiefly due was the great military genius of this country, warrants the historian in classing this battle among British actions, and in treating its story as a national affair.
I will approach the story of the campaign and of the battle by a conspectus of the field of war in which Marlborough was so unexpectedly to show the military genius which remains his single title to respect and his chief claim to renown.
PART II. THE EARLY WAR
IN ORDER TO grasp the strategic problem presented to Marlborough and the allies in the spring of 1704, it is first necessary to understand the diplomatic position at the outbreak of the war, and the military disposition of the two years 1702 and 1703, and thus the general position of the armies which preceded Marlborough’s march to the Danube.
Louis XIV. recognised his grandson as king of Spain late in 1700. The coalition immediately formed against him was at first imperfect. Savoy, with its command of the passes over the Alps into Austrian territory, was in Louis’ favour. England, whose support of his enemies was (for reasons to be described) a capital factor in the issue, had not yet joined those enemies. But, from several causes, among the chief of which was Louis’ recognition of the Pretender as king of England after James the II.’s death, the opinion of the English aristocracy, and perhaps of the English people, was fixed, and in the last months of 1701 the weight of England was thrown into the balance against France.
Why have I called this — the decision of the English Parliament — a capital factor in the issue of the war?
Excepting for a moment the military genius of Marlborough — whose great capacity had not yet been tested in so large a field — two prime characters gave to Great Britain a deciding voice in what was to follow. The first of these was her wealth, the second that aristocratic constitution of her polity which was now definitely established, and which, for nearly a century and a half, was to make her strength unique in its quality among all the elements of European competition.
As to the first of these — the Wealth of England — it is a matter of such importance to the comprehension of all the eighteenth century and most of the nineteenth that it should merit a far longer analysis and affirmation than can be devoted to it in these few lines. It must be enough for our purpose to say that Great Britain, from about 1680 onwards, was not only wealthier (in proportion to her population) than the powers with whom she had to deal as enemies or allies, but was also proceeding to increase that wealth at a rate far exceeding that of her rivals. Again, what was perhaps, for the purposes of war, the chief point of all, England held that wealth in a mobile, fluid form, which could at once be translated into munitions, the wages of mercenaries, or the hire of transports, within the shortest time, and at almost any point in Western and Northern Europe.
Essentially commercial, already possessed of a solid line of enterprises beyond the seas, having defeated and passed the Dutch in the race for mercantile supremacy, England could afford or withhold at her choice the most valuable and rapid form of support — money.
How true this was, even those in Europe who had not appreciated the changed conditions of Great Britain immediately perceived when the determination of Parliament, at the end of 1701, to support the alliance against Louis XIV., took the form of voting 40,000 men, all of whom would be immediately supplied and paid with English money.
True, of the 40,000 not half were British; but (save for the excellent quality of the British troops), the point was more or less indifferent. The important thing was that England was able to provide and to maintain this immense accretion to the coalition against France, and to use it where she would. We shall see later how this power turned the fate of the war.
If I have insisted so strongly upon the financial factor, it is both because that factor is misappreciated in most purely military histories, and also because, in the changed circumstances of our own time, it is not easy for the reader to take for granted, as did his ancestors, the overwhelming superiority which England once enjoyed in mobilised wealth, usable after this kind. It can best be compared to the similar superiority enjoyed in the Middle Ages by the Republic of Venice, to whose fortunes, both good and ill, the story of modern England affords so strange a parallel.
The second factor I have mentioned — the aristocratic constitution of the country — though almost equally important, is somewhat more elusive, and might be more properly challenged by a critic.
England had not, in the first years of the eighteenth century, reached that calm and undisturbed solidity which is the mark of an aristocratic State at its zenith. Faction was bitter, the opposition between the old loyalty to the Crown and the new national régime was so determined as to make civil war possible at any moment. This condition of affairs was to last for a generation, and it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century was passed that it disappeared.
Nevertheless, compared with the Continental States, Great Britain already presented by 1701 that elasticity in substance and tenacity in policy which accompany aristocratic institutions. Corruption might be rife, but it was already growing difficult to purchase the services of a member of the governing class against the national interests. That knowledge of public affairs, diffused throughout a small and closely combined social class, which is the mark of an aristocracy, was already apparent. The power of choosing, from a narrow and well-known field, the best talents for any particular office (which is another mark of aristocracy), was already a power apparent in the government of this country. The solidarity which, in the face of a common enemy, an aristocracy always displays, the long-livedness, as of a corporate body, which an aristocracy enjoys, and which permits it to follow with such strict continuity whatever line of foreign policy it has undertaken, was clearly defining itself at the moment of which I write.
In a word, the new settlement of English life upon the basis of class government, the exclusion of the mass of the people from public affairs, the decay (if you will) of a lively public opinion, the presence of that hopeless disinherited class which now forms the majority of our industrial population; the organisation of the universities, of justice, of the legislature, of the executive, as parts of one social class; the close grasp which that class now had upon the land and capital of the whole country, which it could utilise immediately for interior development or for a war — all this marked the youth and vigour of an oligarchic England, which was for so long to be at once invulnerable and impregnable.
At what expense in morals, and therefore in ultimate strength and happiness, such experiments are played, is no matter for discussion in a military history. We must be content to remark what vigour her new constitution gave to the efforts of England in the field, while yet that constitution was young.
England, then, having thrown this great weight into the scale of the Empire, and against France, the campaign of 1702 was entered upon with the chances in favour of the former, and with the latter in an anxiety very different from the pride which Louis XIV. had taken for granted in the early part of his reign.
If the reader will consider the map of Western Europe, the effect of England’s joining the allies will be apparent.
The frontier between the Spanish Netherlands and Holland — that is, between modern Belgium and Holland — was the frontier between the forces of Louis XIV. and those of opponents upon the north. Thus Antwerp and Ostend were in the hands of the Bourbon, for the Spanish Netherlands had passed into the hands of the French king’s grandson, and the French and Spanish forces were combined. Further east, towards the Upper Rhine, a French force lay in the district of Cleves, and all the fortresses on the Meuse, running in a line south of that post, with the exception of Maestricht, were in French hands.
French armies held or threatened the Middle Rhine. Upon the Upper Rhine and upon the Danube an element of the highest moment in favour of France had appeared when the Elector of Bavaria had declared for Louis XIV., and against Austria.
Had not England intervened with the great weight of gold and that considerable contingent of men (in all, eighteen of the new forty thousand), France would have easily held her northern position upon the frontier of Holland and the Lower Rhine, while the Elector of Bavaria, joining forces with the French army upon the Upper Rhine, would have marched upon Vienna.
The Emperor was harried by the rising of the Hungarians behind him; and as the principal forces of the French king would not have been detained in the north, the whole weight of France, combined with her new ally the Elector of Bavaria, would have been thrown upon the Upper Danube.
As it was, this plan was, in its inception at least, partially successful, but only in its inception, and only partially.
For, with the summer of 1702, Marlborough, though hampered by the fears of the Dutch with whom he had to act in concert, cleared the French out of Cleves, caused them to retire southward in the face of the great accession of strength which he brought with the new troops in English pay and the English contingents. Following the French retirement, he swept the whole valley of the Meuse, and took its fastnesses from Liége downwards, all along the course of the stream.
By the end of the year this northern front of the French armies was imperilled, and Marlborough and his allies in that part hoped to undertake with the next season the reduction of the Spanish Netherlands.
It must be remembered, in connection with this plan, that France has always been nervous with regard to her north-eastern frontier; that the loss of this frontier leaves a way open to Paris: an advance from Belgium was to the French monarchy what an advance along the Danube was to Austria — the prime peril of all. As yet, France was nowhere near grave peril in this quarter, but pressure there marred her general plans upon the Danube.
Nevertheless, the march upon Vienna by the Upper Danube had been prepared with some success. While part of the northern frontier was thus being pressed and part menaced, while the Meuse was being cleared of French garrisons, and the French fortresses on it taken by Marlborough and his allies, the Elector of Bavaria had seized Ulm. The French upon the Upper Rhine, under Villars, defeated the Prince of Baden at Friedlingen, and established a road through the New Forest by which Louis XIV.’s forces, combined with those of the Elector of Bavaria, could advance eastward upon the Emperor’s capital. It was designed that in the next year, 1703, the troops of Savoy, in alliance with those of France, should march from North Italy through the passes of the Alps and the Tyrol upon Vienna, while at the same time the Franco-Bavarian forces should march down the Danube towards the same objective.
When the campaign of 1703 opened, however, two unexpected events determined what was to follow.
The first was the failure of Marlborough in the north to take Antwerp, and in general his inability to press France further at that point; the second, the defection of Savoy from the French alliance.
As to the first — Marlborough’s failure against Antwerp. The Spanish Netherlands were now solidly held; the forces of the allies were indeed increasing perpetually in this neighbourhood, but it appeared as though the attempt to reduce Brabant, Hainault, and Flanders, which are here the bulwark of France, would be tedious, and perhaps barren. A sort of “consolation” advance was indeed made upon the Rhine, and Bonn was captured; but no more was done in this quarter.
The General Situation in 1703.
As to the second point, the solid occupation of the Upper Danube by the Franco-Bavarians was indeed fully accomplished. The imperial forces were defeated upon the bank of that river at Hochstadt, but the advance upon Vienna failed, for the second half of the plan, the march from Northern Italy upon Austria, through the Tyrol, had come to nothing, through the defection of Savoy. The turning of the scale against Louis by the action of England was beginning to have its effect; Portugal had already joined the coalition, and now Savoy had refused to continue her help of the Bourbons.
The year 1704 opened, therefore, with this double situation: to the south Austria had been saved for the moment, but was open to immediate attack in the campaign to come; meanwhile, the French had proved so solidly seated in the Spanish Netherlands (or Belgium) that repeated attacks on them in this quarter would in all probability prove barren.
It was under these circumstances that Eugene of Savoy came to the great decision which marked the year of Blenheim. He determined that it was best — if he could persuade his colleagues — to carry the war into that territory which was particularly menaced. He conceived the plan of marching a great force from the Netherlands right down to the field of the Upper Danube. There could be checked the proposed march upon the heart of the coalition, which was Vienna. There, if fortune served the allies, they would by victory make all further chance of marching a Franco-Bavarian force down the Danube impossible; meanwhile, and at any rate, the new step would alarm all French effort towards the Upper Rhine, weaken the French organisation upon its northern frontier, and so permit of a return of the allies to an attack there at a later time.
Eugene of Savoy was a member of the cadet branch of that royal house. His grandfather, the younger son of Charles Emmanuel, had founded the family called Savoy Carignan. His father had been married to one of Mazarin’s nieces. Eugene was her fifth son, and at this moment not quite forty years of age.
His character, motives, and genius must be clearly seized if we are to appreciate the campaign and the battle of Blenheim.
It was the Italian blood which formed that character most, but he was thoroughly French by birth and training. Born in Paris, and desiring a career in the French army, it was a slight offered to his mother by the French king that gave his whole life a personal hatred of Louis XIV. for its motive. From boyhood till his death, between sixty and seventy, this great captain directed his energies uniquely against the fortunes of the French king. When, later in life, there was an attempt to acquire his talents for the French service, he replied that he hoped to re-enter France, but only as an invader. It has been complained that he lacked precision in detail, and that as an organiser he was somewhat at fault; but he had no equal for rapidity of vision, and for seizing the essential point in a strategic problem. From that day in his twentieth year when he had assisted at Sobiesky’s destruction of the Turks before Vienna, through his own great victory which crushed that same enemy somewhat later at Zenta, in all his career this quality of immediate perception had been supremely apparent.
He was at this moment — the end of the campaign of 1703 — the head of the imperial council of war; and he it was who first grasped the strategic necessity which 1703 had created. The determination to carry the defence of the empire into the valley of the Upper Danube was wholly his own. He wrote to Marlborough suggesting a withdrawal of forces as considerable as possible from the northern field to the southern.
By a happy accident, the judgment of the Englishman exactly coincided with his own, and indeed there was so precise a sympathy between these two very different men that when they met in the course of the ensuing campaign there sprang up between them not only a lasting friendship, but a mutual comprehension which made the combination of their talents invincible during those half dozen years of the war which all but destroyed the French power.
Such was the origin of Marlborough’s advance southward from the Netherlands in the early summer of 1704, an advance famous in history under the title of “the march to the Danube.”
PART III. THE MARCH TO THE DANUBE
THE POSITION OF the enemy at the moment when Marlborough’s march to the Danube from the Netherlands was conceived may be observed in the sketch map on page 59.
Under Villeroy, who must be regarded as the chief of the French commanders of the moment, lay the principal army of Louis XIV., with the duty of defending the northern front and of watching the Lower Rhine.
It was this main force which was expected to have to meet the attack of Marlborough and the Dutch in the same field of operations as had seen the troops in English pay at work during the two preceding years. But Villeroy was, of course, free to detach troops southwards somewhat towards the Middle Rhine, or the valley of the Moselle, if, as later seemed likely, an attack should be made in that direction.
On the Upper Rhine, and in Alsace generally, lay Tallard with his corps. This marshal had captured certain crossing-places over the Rhine, but had all his munitions and the mass of his strength permanently on the left bank.
Finally, Marcin, with his French contingent, and Max-Emanuel, the Elector of Bavaria, with the Bavarian army, held the whole of the Upper Danube, from Ulm right down to and past the Austrian frontier.
Over against these forces of the French and their Bavarian allies we must set, first, the Dutch forces in the north, including the garrisons of the towns on the Meuse which Marlborough had conquered and occupied; and, in the same field, the forces in the pay of England (including the English contingents). These amounted in early 1704 to 50,000 men, which Marlborough was to command.
Next, upon the Middle Rhine, and watching Tallard in Alsace, was Prince Eugene, who had been summoned from Hungary by the Imperial government to defend this bulwark of Germany, but his army was small compared to the forces in the north.
Finally, the Margrave of Baden, Louis, with another separate army, was free to act at will in Upper Germany, to occupy posts in the Black Forest, or to retire eastward into the heart of Germany or towards the Danube as circumstances might dictate. This force was also small. It was supplemented by local militia raised to defend particular passes in the Black Forest, and these, again, were supported by the armed peasantry.
It is essential to a comprehension of the whole scheme to understand that before the march to the Danube the whole weight of the alliance against the French lay in the north, upon the frontier of Holland, the valley of the Meuse, and the Lower Rhine. The successes of Bavaria in the previous year had given the Bavarian army, with its French contingent, a firm grip upon the Upper Danube, and the possibility of marching upon Vienna itself when the campaign of 1704 should open.
The great march upon the Danube which Eugene had conceived, and which Marlborough was to execute so triumphantly, was a plan to withdraw the weight of the allied forces suddenly from the north to the south; to transfer the main weapon acting against France from the Netherlands to Bavaria itself; to do this so rapidly and with so little leakage of information to the enemy as would prevent his heading off the advance by a parallel and faster movement upon his part, or his strengthening his forces upon the Danube before Marlborough’s should reach that river.
Such was the scheme of the march to the Danube which we are now about to follow; but before undertaking a description of the great and successful enterprise, the reader must permit me a word of distinction between a strategic move and that tactical accident which we call a battle. In the absence of such a distinction, the campaign of Blenheim and the battle which gives it its name would be wholly misread.
A great battle, especially if it be of a decisive character, not only changes history, but has a dramatic quality about it which fixes the attention of mankind.
The general reader, therefore, tends to regard the general movements of a campaign as mere preliminaries to, or explanations of, the decisive action which may conclude it.
This is particularly the case with the readers attached to the victorious side. The French layman, in the days before universal service in France, wrote and read his history of 1805 as though the march of the Grand Army were deliberately intended to conclude with Austerlitz. The English reader and writer still tends to read and write of Marlborough’s march to the Danube as though it were aimed at the field of Blenheim.
This error or illusion is part of that general deception so common to historical study which has been well called “reading history backwards.” We know the event; to the actors in it the future was veiled. Our knowledge of what is to come colours and distorts our judgment of the motive and design of a general.
The march to the Danube was, like all strategic movements, a general plan animated by a general objective. It was not a particular thrust at a particular point, destined to achieve a highly particular result at that point.
Armies are moved with the object of imposing political changes upon an opponent. If that opponent accepts these changes, not necessarily after a pitched battle, but in any other fashion, the strategical object of the march is achieved.
Though the march conclude in a defeat, it may be strategically sound; though it conclude in a victory, it may be strategically unsound. Napoleon’s march into Russia in 1812 was strategically sound. Had Russia risked a great battle and lost it, the historical illusion of which I speak would treat the campaign as a designed preface to the battle. Had Russia risked such a battle and been successful, the historical illusion of which I speak would call the strategy of the advance faulty.
As we know, the advance failed partly through the weather, partly through the spirit of the Russian people, not through a general action. But in conception and in execution the strategy of Napoleon in that disastrous year was just as excellent as though the great march had terminated not in disaster but in success.
Similarly, the reputation justly earned by Marlborough when he brought his troops from the Rhine to the Danube must be kept distinct from his tactical successes in the field at the conclusion of the effort. He was to run a grave risk at Donauwörth, he was to blunder badly in attacking the village of Blenheim, he was to be in grave peril even in the last phase of the battle, when Eugene just saved the centre with his cavalry.
Had chance, which is the major element in equal combats, foiled him at Donauwörth or broken his attempt at Blenheim, the march to the Danube would still remain a great thing in history. Had Tallard refused battle on that day, as he certainly should have done, the march to the Danube would still deserve its great place in the military records of Europe.
When we have seized the fact that Marlborough’s great march was but a general strategic movement of which the action at Blenheim was the happy but accidental close, we must next remark that the advance to the Danube was the more meritorious, and gives the higher lustre to Marlborough’s fame as a general, from the fact that it was an attempt involving a great military hazard, and that yet that attempt had to be made in the face of political difficulties of peculiar severity.
In other words, Marlborough was handicapped in a fashion which lends his success a character peculiar to itself, and worthy of an especial place in history.
This handicap may be stated by a consideration of three points which cover its whole character.
The first of these points concerns the physical conditions of the move; the other two are peculiar to the political differences of the allies.
It was in the nature of the move that a high hazard was involved in it. The general had calculated, as a general always must, the psychology of his opponent. If he were wrong in his calculation, the advance on the Danube could but lead to disaster. It was for him to judge whether the French were so nervous about the centre of their position upon the Rhine as to make them cling to it to the last moment, and tend to believe that it was either along the Moselle or (when he had left that behind) in Alsace that he intended to attack. In other words, it was for him to make the French a little too late in changing their dispositions, a little too late in discovering what his real plan was, and therefore a little too late in massing larger reinforcements upon the Upper Danube, where he designed to be before them.
Marlborough guessed his opponent’s psychology rightly; the French marshals hesitated just too long, their necessity of communicating with Louis at Versailles further delayed them, and the great hazard which he risked was therefore risked with judgment. But a hazard it remained until almost the last days of its fruition. The march must be rapid; it involved a thousand details, each requiring his supervision and his exact calculation, his knowledge of what could be expected of his troops, and his survey of daily supply.
There was another element of hazard.
Arrived at his destination upon the plains of the Danube, Marlborough would be very far from any good base of supply.
The country lying in the triangle between the Upper Danube and the Middle Rhine, especially that part of it which is within striking distance of the Danube, is mountainous and ill provided with those large towns, that mobilisable wealth, and those stores of vehicles, munitions, food, and remounts which are the indispensable sustenance of an army.
The industry of modern Germany has largely transformed this area, but even to-day it is one in which good depots would be rare to find. Two hundred years ago, the tangle of hills was far more deserted and far worse provided.
By the time Marlborough should have effected his junction with his ally in the upper valley of the Danube only two bases of supply would be within any useful distance of the new and distant place to which he was transferring his great force.
The most important of these, his chief base, and his only principal store of munitions and every other requisite, was Nuremberg; and that town was a good week from the plains upon the bank of the Danube where he proposed to act. As an advanced base nearer to the river, he could only count upon the lesser town of Nordlingen.
Therefore, even if he should successfully reach the field of action which he proposed, cross the hills between the two river basins without loss or delay, and be ready to act as he hoped upon the banks of the Danube before the end of June, his stay could not be indefinitely prolonged there, and his every movement would be undertaken under the anxiety which must ever haunt a commander dependent on an insufficient or too distant base of supply. This anxiety, be it noted, would rapidly increase with every march he might have to take southward of the Danube, and with every day’s advance into Bavaria itself, if, as he hoped, the possibility of such an advance should crown his efforts.
We have seen that the great hazard which Marlborough risked made it necessary, as he advanced southward up the Rhine during the first half of his march, to keep Villeroy and Tallard doubtful as to whether his objective was the Moselle or, later, Alsace; and while they were still in suspense, abruptly to leave the valley of the Rhine and make for the crossing of the hills towards the Danube. So long as the French marshals remained uncertain of his intentions, they would not dare to detach any very large body of troops from the Rhine valley to the Elector’s aid: under the conditions of the time, the clever handling of movement and information might create a gap of a week at least between his first divergence from the Rhine and his enemy’s full appreciation that he was heading for the south-east.
He so concealed his information and so ordered his baffling movements as to achieve that end.
So much for the general hazard which would have applied to any commander undertaking such an advance.
But, as I have said, there were two other points peculiar to Marlborough’s political position.
The first was, that he was not wholly free to act, as, for instance, Cæsar in Gaul was free, or Napoleon after 1799. He must perpetually arrange matters, in the first stages with the Dutch commissioner, later with the imperial general, Prince Louis of Baden, who was his equal in command. He must persuade and even trick certain of his allies in all the first steps of the great business; he must accommodate himself to others throughout the whole of it.
Secondly, the direction in which he took himself separated him from the possibility of rapidly communicating his designs, his necessities, his chances, or his perils to what may be called his moral base. This moral base, the seat both of his own Government and of the Dutch (his principal concern), lay, of course, near the North Sea, and under the immediate supervision of England and the Hague. This is a point which the modern reader may be inclined to ridicule until he remembers under what conditions the shortest message, let alone detailed plans and the execution of considerable orders, could alone be performed two hundred years ago. By a few bad roads, across a veritable dissected map of little independent or quasi-independent polities, each with its own frontier and prejudices and independent government, the messenger (often a single messenger) must pass through a space of time equivalent to the passage of a continent to-day, and through risks and difficulties such as would to-day be wholly eliminated by the telegraph. The messenger was further encumbered by every sort of change from town to town, in local opinion, and the opportunities for aid.
More than this, in marching to the Danube, Marlborough was putting between himself and that upon which he morally, and most of all upon which he physically, relied, a barrier of difficult mountain land.
Having mentioned this barrier, it is the place for me to describe the physical conditions of that piece of strategy, and I will beg the reader to pay particular attention to the accompanying map, and to read what follows closely in connection with it.
In all war, strategy considers routes, and routes are determined by obstacles.
Had the world one flat and uniform surface, the main problems of strategy would not exist.
The surface of the world is diversified by certain features — rivers, chains of hills, deserts, marshes, seas, etc. — the passage across which presents difficulties peculiar to an army, and it is essential to the reading of military history to appreciate these difficulties; for the degrees of impediment which natural features present to thousands upon the march are utterly different from those which they present to individuals or to civilian parties in time of peace. Since it is to difficulties of this latter sort that we are most accustomed by our experience, the student of a campaign will often ask himself (if he is new to his subject) why such and such an apparently insignificant stream or narrow river, such and such a range of hills over which he has walked on some holiday without the least embarrassment, have been treated by the great captains as obstacles of the first moment.
Map showing the peril of Marlborough’s march to the Danube,
beyond the hills which separate the Rhine from the Danube.
The reason that obstacles of any sort present the difficulty they do to an army, and present it in the high degree which military history discovers, is twofold.
First, an army consists in a great body of human beings, artificially gathered together under conditions which do not permit of men supplying their own wants by agriculture or other forms of labour. They are gathered together for the principal purpose of fighting. They must be fed; they must be provided with ammunition, usually with shelter and with firing, and if possible with remounts for their cavalry; reinforcements for every branch of their service must be able to reach them along known and friendly (or well-defended) roads, called their lines of communication. These must proceed from some base, that is from some secure place in which stores of men and material can be accumulated.
Next, it is important to notice that variations in speed between two opposed forces will nearly always put the slow at a disadvantage in the face of the more prompt. For just as in boxing the quicker man can stop one blow and get another in where the slower man would fail, or just as in football the faster runner can head off the man with the ball, so in war superior mobility is a fixed factor of advantage — but a factor far more serious than it is in any game. The force which moves most quickly can “walk round” its opponent, can choose its field for action, can strike in flank, can escape, can effect a junction where the slower force would fail.
It is these two causes, then — the artificial character of an army, with its vast numbers collected in one place and dependent for existence upon the labour of others and the supreme importance of rapidity — which between them render obstacles that seem indifferent to a civilian in time of peace so formidable to a General upon the march.
The heavy train, the artillery, the provisioning of the force, can in general only proceed upon good ways or by navigable rivers. At any rate, if the army departs from these, a rival army in possession of such means of progress will have the supreme advantage of mobility.
Again, upon the flat an army may proceed by many parallel roads, and thus in a number of comparatively short columns, marching upon one front towards a common rendezvous. But in hilly country it will be confined to certain defiles, sometimes very few, often reduced to one practicable pass. There is no possibility of an advance by many routes in short columns, each in touch with its neighbours; the whole advance resolves itself into one interminable file.
Now, in proportion to the length of a column, the units of which must each march one directly behind the other, do the mechanical difficulties of conducting such a column increase. Every accident or shock in the long line is aggravated in proportion to the length of the line. Finally, a force thus drawn out on the march in one exiguous and lengthy trail is in the worst possible disposition for meeting an attack delivered upon it from either side.
All this, which is true of the actual march of the army, is equally true of its power to maintain its supply over a line of hills (to take that example of an obstacle); and therefore a line of hills, especially if these hills be confused and steep, and especially if they be provided with but bad roads across them, will dangerously isolate an army whose general base lies upon the further side of them.
What the reader has just read explains the peculiar character which the valley of the Upper Danube has always had in the history of Western European war.
The Rhine and its tributaries form one great system of communications, diversified, indeed, by many local accidents of hill and marsh and forest, with which, for the purposes of this study, we need not concern ourselves.
In a lesser degree, the upper valley of the Danube and its tributaries, though these are largely in the nature of mountain torrents, forms another system of communications, nourishing considerable towns, drawing upon which communications, and relying upon which towns as centres of supply, an army may manœuvre.
But between the system of the Rhine and that of the Danube there runs a long sweep of very broken country, the Black Forest merging into the Swabian Jura, which in a military sense cuts off the one basin from the other.
At the opening of the eighteenth century, when that great stretch of hills had but a score of roads, none of them well kept up, when no town of any importance could be found in their valleys, and when no communication, even of a verbal message, could proceed faster than a mounted man, this sweep of hills was a very formidable obstacle indeed.
It was these hills, when Marlborough determined to strike across them, and to engage himself in the valley of the Upper Danube, which formed the chief physical factor of his hazard; for, once engaged in them, still more when he had crossed them, his appeals for aid, his reception of advice, perhaps eventually a reinforcement of men or supplies, must depend upon the Rhine valley.
True he had, the one within a week of the Danube, the other within two days of it, the couple of depots mentioned above, the principal one at Nuremberg, the advanced one at Nordlingen. Nevertheless, so long as he was upon the further or eastern side of the hills, his position would remain one of great risk, unless, indeed, or until, he had had the good fortune to destroy the forces of the enemy.
All this being before the reader, the progress of the great march may now be briefly described.
In the winter between 1703 and 1704 domestic irritation and home intrigues, with which we are not here concerned, almost persuaded Marlborough to give up his great rôle upon the Continent of Europe.
Luckily for the alliance against Louis and for the history of British arms, he returned upon this determination or phantasy, and with the very beginning of the year began his plans for the coming campaign.
He crossed first to Holland in the middle of January 1704, persuaded the Dutch Government to grant a subsidy to the German troops in the South, pretended (since he knew how nervous the Dutch would be if they heard of the plan for withdrawing a great army from their frontiers to the Danube) that he intended operating upon the Moselle, returned to England, saw with the utmost activity to the raising of recruits and to the domestic organisation of the expedition, and reached Holland again to undertake the most famous action of his life in the latter part of April.
It was upon the 5th of May that he left the Hague. He was at Maestricht till the 14th, superintending every detail and ordering the construction of bridges over the Meuse by which the advance was to begin. Upon the 16th he left by the southward road for Bedburg, and immediately his army broke winter quarters for the great march.
It was upon the 18th of May that the British regiments marched out of Ruremonde by the bridges constructed over the Meuse, aiming for the rendezvous at Bedburg.
The very beginning of the march was disturbed by the fears of the Dutch and of others, though Marlborough had carefully kept secret the design of marching to the Danube, and though all imagined that the valley of the Moselle was his objective.
Marlborough quieted these fears, and was in a better position to insist from the fact that he claimed control over the very large force which was directly in the pay of England.
He struck for the Rhine, up the valley of which he would receive further contingents, supplied by the minor members of the Grand Alliance, as he marched.
By the 23rd he was at Bonn with the cavalry, his brother Churchill following with the infantry. Thence the heavy baggage and the artillery proceeded by water up the river to Coblentz, and when Coblentz was reached (upon the 25th of May) it was apparent that the Moselle at least was not his objective, for on the next day, the 26th, he crossed both that river and the Rhine with his army, and continued his march up the right bank of the Rhine.
But this did not mean that he might not still intend to carry the war into Alsace. He was at Cassel, opposite Mayence, three days after leaving Coblentz; four days later the head of the column had reached the Neckar at Ladenberg, where bridges had already been built by Marlborough’s orders, and upon the 3rd of June the troops crossed over to the further bank.
Here was the decisive junction where Marlborough must show his hand: the first few miles of his progress south-eastward across the bend of the Neckar would make it clear that his object was not Alsace, but the Danube.
He had announced to the Dutch and all Europe an attack upon the valley of the Moselle; that this was a ruse all could see when he passed Coblentz without turning up the valley of that river. The whole week following, and until he reached the Neckar, it might still be imagined that he meditated an attack upon Alsace, for he was still following the course of the Rhine. Once he diverged from the valley of this river and struck across the bend of the Neckar to the south and east, the alternative he had chosen of making the Upper Danube the seat of war was apparent.
It is therefore at this point in his advance that we must consider the art by which he had put the enemy in suspense, and confused their judgment of his design.
The first point in the problem for a modern reader to appreciate is the average rate at which news would travel at that time and in that place. A very important dispatch could cover a hundred miles and more in the day with special organisation for its delivery, and with the certitude that it had gone from one particular place to another particular place. But general daily information as to the movements of a moving enemy could not be so organised.
We must take it that the French commanders upon the left bank of the Rhine at Landau, or upon the Meuse (where Villeroy was when Marlborough began his march), would require full forty-eight hours to be informed of the objective of each new move.
For instance, on the 25th of May Marlborough’s forces were approaching Coblentz. To find out what they were going to do next, the French would have to know whether they were beginning to turn up the valley of the Moselle, which begins at Coblentz, or to cross that river and be going on further south. A messenger might have been certain that the latter was their intention by midday of the 26th, but Tallard, right away on the Upper Rhine, would hardly have known this before the morning of the 29th, and by the morning of the 29th Marlborough was already opposite Mayence.
It is this gap of from one to three days in the passage of information which is so difficult for a modern man to seize, and which yet made possible all Marlborough’s manœuvres to confuse the French.
Villeroy was bound to watch until, at least, the 29th of May for the chance of a campaign upon the Moselle.
Meanwhile, Tallard was not only far off in the valley of the Upper Rhine, but occupied in a remarkable operation which, had he not subsequently suffered defeat at Blenheim, would have left him a high reputation as a general.
This operation was the reinforcement of the army under the Elector of Bavaria and Marcin by a dash right through the enemy’s country in the Black Forest.
Early in May the Elector of Bavaria had urgently demanded reinforcements of the French king.
The mountains between the Bavarian army and the French were held by the enemy, but the Elector hurried westward along the Danube, while Tallard, with exact synchrony and despatch, hurried eastward; each held out a hand to the other, as it were, for a rapid touch; the business of Tallard was to hand over the new troops and provisions at one exact moment, the business of the Elector was to catch the junction exactly. If it succeeded it was to be followed by a sharp retreat of either party, the one back upon the Danube eastward for his life, the other back westward upon the Rhine.
Tallard had crossed the Rhine on the 13th of May with a huge convoy of provisionment and over 7000 newly recruited troops. Within a week the thing was done. He had handed over in the nick of time the whole mass of men and things to the Elector. He had done this in the midst of the Black Forest and in the heart of the enemy’s country, and he immediately began his retirement upon the Rhine. Tallard was thus particularly delayed in receiving daily information of Marlborough’s march.
Let us take a typical date.
On the 29th of May Tallard, retiring from the dash to help Bavaria, was still at Altenheim, on the German bank of the Rhine. It was only on that day that he learnt from Villeroy that Marlborough had no idea of marching up the Moselle, but had gone on up the Rhine towards Mayence. Marlborough had crossed the Moselle and the Rhine on the 26th, but it took Tallard three days to know it. Tallard, knowing this, would not know whether Marlborough might not still be thinking of attacking Alsace: to make that alternative loom large in the mind of the French commanders, Marlborough had had bridges prepared in front of his advance at Philipsburg — though he had, of course, no intention at all of going as far up as Philipsburg.
It was on June 3rd, as we have seen, that the foremost of Marlborough’s forces were nearing the banks of the Neckar, and upon the 4th that anyone observing his troops would have clearly seen for the first time that they were striking for the Danube. But it was twenty-four hours before Tallard, who had by this time come down the Rhine as far as Lauterberg to defend a possible attack upon Alsace, knew certainly that the Danube, and not the Rhine, would be the field of war.
All this time it was guessed at Versailles, and thought possible by the French generals at the front, that the Danube was Marlborough’s aim. But a guess was not good enough to risk Alsace upon.
By the time it was certain Marlborough was marching for the Danube — June 4th and 5th — Tallard’s force was much further from the Elector of Bavaria than was Marlborough’s, as a glance at the map will show. There was no chance then for heading Marlborough off, and the chief object of the English commander’s strategy was accomplished. He had kept the enemy in doubt as to his intentions up to the moment when his forces were safe from interference, and he could strike for the Danube quite unmolested.
Map illustrating Marlborough’s march to the Danube.
Villeroy at once came south in person, and joined Tallard at Oberweidenthal. The two commanders met upon the 7th of June to confer upon the next move, but at this point appeared that capital element of delay which hampered the French forces throughout the campaign, namely, the necessity of consulting with the King at Versailles. The next day, the 8th, Tallard and Villeroy, who had gone back to their respective commands after their conference, sent separate reports to Versailles. It was not until the 12th that Louis answered, leaving the initiative with his generals at the front, but advising a strong offensive upon the Rhine in order to immobilise there a great portion of the enemy’s forces.
The advice was not unwise. It did, as a fact, immobilise Eugene for the moment, and kept him upon the Rhine for some weeks, but, as we shall see later, that General was able to escape when the worst pressure was put upon him, to cross the Black Forest with excellent secrecy and speed, and to effect his junction with Marlborough in time for the battle of Blenheim.
But, meanwhile, Baden had chased the Elector of Bavaria out of the Black Forest and down on to the Upper Danube. Marlborough might, at any moment, join hands with Baden. The Elector sent urgent requests for yet more reinforcements from the French, and Tallard, in a letter to Versailles of the 16th of June, advised the capture and possession of such points in the Black Forest as would give him free access across the mountains, the proper provisioning of his line of supply when he should cross them, and the accomplishment of full preparations for joining the Elector of Bavaria in a campaign upon the Upper Danube.
Let the day when the French court received this letter be noted, for the coincidence is curious. At the very moment when Tallard’s letter reached Versailles, the 22nd of June, Marlborough was effecting his junction with Baden outside the gates of Ulm at Ursprung. The decision of Louis XIV., that Tallard should advance beyond the hills in force to the aid of the Elector, exactly coincides with the appearance of the English General upon the Danube, and it was on the 23rd of June, the morrow, that the King wrote to Villeroy the decisive letter recommending Tallard to cross over from Alsace towards Bavaria with forty battalions and fifty squadrons, say 25,000 men.
But this advance of Tallard’s across the Black Forest and his final junction with the Elector and Marcin before the battle of Blenheim did not take place until after Marlborough had joined Baden and the march to the Danube was accomplished. It must therefore be dealt with in the next division, which is its proper place. For the moment we must return to Marlborough’s advance upon the Danube, which we left at the point where he crossed the Neckar upon the 3rd and 4th of June. He had, as we have just seen, and by methods which we have reviewed, completely succeeded in saving the rest of his advance from interference.
Safe from pursuit, and with no further need for concealing his plan, Marlborough lingered in the neighbourhood of the Neckar, partly to effect a full concentration of his forces, partly to rest his cavalry. It was a week before he found himself at Mundelsheim, between Heilbron and Stuttgart, and at the foot of the range which still divided him from the basin of the Danube. Here Eugene, the author of the whole business, met Marlborough; between them the two men drew up the plans which were to lead to so momentous a result, and knitted in that same interview a friendship based upon the mutual recognition of genius, which was to determine seven years of war.
Upon the 13th of June these great captains met and conferred also with the Margrave, Louis of Baden, who commanded all the troops in the hills, and who was to be the third party to their plan. He was a man, cautious, but able, easily ruffled in his dignity, often foolishly jealous of another’s power. He insisted that Marlborough and he should take command upon alternate days — he would not serve as second — and in all that followed, the personal relations between himself and Marlborough grew less and less cordial up to the eve of the great battle. His prudence and arrangement, however, his exact synchrony of movement and good hold over his troops, made Marlborough’s decisions fruitful.
Upon the 14th of June the passage of Marlborough’s column over the hills between the Rhine and the Danube began. Baden went back to the command of his army, which already lay in the plain of the Upper Danube, and awaited the arrival of Marlborough’s command, and the junction of it with his own force before Ulm.
A heavy rain, drenched and bad roads, marked Marlborough’s crossing of the range. It was not until the 20th that the cavalry reached the foot of the final ascent, but in two days the whole body had passed over. It was thus upon the 22nd of June that the junction between Marlborough and Baden was effected. From that day on their combined forces were prepared to operate as one army upon the plain of the Upper Danube. They stood joined at the gates of Ulm, and in their united force far superior to the Franco-Bavarians, who had but just escaped Baden’s army, and who lay in the neighbourhood watching this fatal junction of their rivals.
I say, “who had but just escaped Baden’s army,” for it was part of the general plan (and a part most ably executed) that not only should the seat of war be brought into the valley of the Upper Danube by Marlborough’s march to join Baden, but, as a preparation for this, that the army of the Elector, with his French allies under Marcin, should be driven eastward out of the mountains and cut off from the main French forces upon the Rhine.
This chasing of the Franco-Bavarians down on to the Danube and out of the Black Forest was begun just after the spirited piece of generalship by which Tallard had, as we have seen, reinforced the Elector of Bavaria in the middle of May. That rapid and brilliant piece of work had been effected only just in time. Hardly was it accomplished when Baden’s force in the mountains marched, as part of Marlborough’s general plan, against the Elector, with the object of forcing him back into the Danube valley at full speed.
It was on the 18th of May that the British regiments were crossing the Meuse, and the advance upon the Danube had begun.
It was on the 18th of May that Louis of Baden appeared at the head of his army in the Black Forest and initiated that separation of the Bavarian forces from the French which was a necessary part of the general plan we have spoken of. It was but a few hours since Tallard had stretched out his hand and passed the recruits and the provisions over to the Franco-Bavarian forces.
The Elector of Bavaria had with him certain French regiments, and Marshal Marcin was under his commands, while Marlborough’s plan was still quite unknown. Therefore no large French force could apparently be spared from the valley of the Rhine to help the Elector in that of the Danube; the Duke of Baden could have things his own way against the lesser force opposed to him.
On the 19th he was advancing on Ober and Neder Ersasch. The Duke of Bavaria had evacuated these villages upon the 20th, and on the same night the Duke of Baden reached Meidlingen. Pursuer and pursued were marching almost parallel, separated only by the little river of Villingen. Now and then they came so close that Baden’s artillery could drop a shot into the hurrying ranks of the Elector.
On the 21st Baden was at Geisingen, threatening Tuttlingen. On the 23rd he had reached Stockach, and was pressing so hard that his van had actually come in contact with the rear of the Bavarians, a situation reminiscent of the Esla Bridge in Moore’s retreat on Coruña.
The valley of the Danube opened out before the two opponents. The Elector found it possible to maintain his exhausted but rapid retreat, and, ten days later, he had escaped. For by the 3rd of June the Franco-Bavarian forces lay at Elchingen, the Duke of Baden was no nearer than Echingen, and the former was saved after a fortnight of very anxious going; but, though saved, they were now completely cut off for the moment from French reinforcement. Marlborough was approaching the hills; he would cross them in a few days. He would join Baden’s army; and the moment Marlborough should have joined Baden, the Elector would be in peril of overwhelming adversaries.
We have seen how the plan matured. Three weeks after the Bavarian army’s escape from the Black Forest, upon the 22nd of June, Marlborough’s force had crossed the range and made one with Baden’s before Ulm.
PART IV. THE SEVEN WEEKS — THE THREE PHASES
FROM THE DAY when the Duke had appeared upon the southern side of the mountains, and was debouching into the plains of the Danube, to the day when he broke the French line at Blenheim, is just over seven weeks; to be accurate, it is seven weeks and three days. It was on the last Sunday but one of the month of June that he passed the mountains; it was upon the second Wednesday of August that he won his great victory.
These seven weeks divide themselves into three clear phases.
The first is the march of Marlborough and Baden upon Donauwörth and the capture of that city, which was the gate of Bavaria.
The second is the consequent invasion and ravaging of Bavaria, the weakening of the Elector, and his proposal to capitulate; the consequent precipitate advance of Tallard to the aid of the Elector, and the corresponding secret march of Eugene to help Marlborough.
The third occupies the last few days only: it is concerned with the manœuvres immediately preceding the battle, and especially with the junction of Marlborough and Eugene, which made the victory possible.
The First Phase
FROM THE JUNCTION of Marlborough and Baden to the fall of Donauwörth
When the Duke of Marlborough had joined hands with the forces of Baden upon the 22nd of June 1704 his general plan was clear: the last of his infantry, under his brother Churchill, would at once effect their junction with the rest at Ursprung, and he and Baden had but to go forward.
His great march had been completely successful. He had eluded and confused his enemy. He was safe on the Danube watershed, and within a march of the river itself. The only enemies before him on this side of the hills were greatly inferior in number to his own and his ally’s. His determination to carry the war into Bavaria could at once be carried into effect.
With this junction the first chapter in that large piece of strategy which may be called “the campaign of Blenheim” comes to an end.
Between the successful termination of his first effort, which was accomplished when he joined forces with Baden upon the Danube side of the watershed in the village of Ursprung, and the great battle by which Marlborough is chiefly remembered, there elapsed, I say, seven summer weeks. These seven weeks are divided into the three parts just distinguished.
In order to understand the strategy of each part of those seven weeks, we must first clearly grasp the field.
The accompanying map shows the elements of the situation.
East of the Black Forest lay open that upper valley of the Danube and its tributaries which was so difficult of access from the valley of the Rhine. In the hills to the north of the Danube, and one day’s march from the town of Ulm, were now concentrated the forces of Marlborough and the Duke of Baden. They were advancing, ninety-six battalions strong, with two hundred and two squadrons and forty-eight guns: in all, say, somewhat less than 70,000 men.
Map illustrating the march of Marlborough and Baden across
Marcin’s front from the neighbourhood of Ulm to Donauwörth.
At Ulm lay Marcin, and in touch with him, forming part of the same army, the Elector of Bavaria was camped somewhat further down the river, near Lauingen.
The combined forces of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria numbered, all told, some 45,000 men, and their inferiority to the hostile armies, which had just effected their junction north of Ulm at Ursprung, was the determining factor in what immediately followed.
Marcin crossed the Danube to avoid so formidable a menace, and took up his next station behind the river at Leipheim, watching to see what Marlborough and the Duke of Baden would do. The Elector of Bavaria, in command of the bridge at Lauingen, stood fast, ready to retire behind the stream. The necessity of such a retreat was spared him. The object of his enemies was soon apparent by the direction their advance assumed.
For the immediate object of Marlborough and Baden was not an attack upon the inferior forces of the Elector and Marcin, but, for reasons that will presently be seen, the capture of Donauwörth, and their direct march upon Donauwörth took them well north of the Danube. On the 26th, therefore, Marcin thought it prudent to recross the Danube. He and the Elector joined forces on the north side of the Danube, and lay from Lauingen to Dillingen, commanding two bridges behind them for the crossing of the stream, and fairly entrenched upon their front. Meanwhile their enemies, the allies, passed north of them at Gingen. This situation endured for three days.
When it was apparent that the allied forces of the English general and the Duke of Baden intended to make themselves masters of Donauwörth (and the Elector of Bavaria could have no doubt of their intentions after the 29th of July, when their march eastward from Gingen was resumed), a Franco-Bavarian force was at once detached by him to defend that town, and it is necessary henceforward to understand why Donauwörth was of such importance to Marlborough’s plan.
It was his intention to enter Bavaria so as to put a pressure upon the Elector, whose immediate and personal interests were bound up with the villages and towns of his possessions. The Elector could not afford to neglect the misfortunes of its civilian inhabitants, even for the ends of his own general strategy; still less could he sacrifice those subjects of his for the strategic advantage of the King of France and his marshal.
This Marlborough knew. To enter Bavaria, to occupy its towns (only one of which, Ingolstadt, was tolerably fortified), and if possible to take its capital, Munich, had been from its inception the whole business and strategic motive of his march to the Danube.
But if Marlborough desired to enter Bavaria, Donauwörth was the key to Bavaria from the side upon which he was approaching.
This word “key” is so often used in military history, without any explanation of it which may render it significant to the reader, that I will pause a moment to show why Donauwörth might properly be called in metaphor the “key” of Bavaria to one advancing from the north and west.
Bavaria could only be reached by a general coming as Marlborough came, on condition of his possessing and holding some crossing-place over the Danube, for Marlborough’s supplies lay north of that river (principally at Nördlingen), and the passing of the enormous supply of an army over one narrow point, such as is a bridge over such an obstacle as a broad river, demands full security.
It will further be seen from the map that yet another obstacle, defending Southern Bavaria and its capital towards the west, as the Danube does towards the north, is the river Lech; a passage over this was therefore also of high importance to the Duke of Marlborough and his allies. Now, a man holding Donauwörth can cross both rivers at the same time unmolested, for they meet in its neighbourhood.
Further, Donauwörth was a town amply provisioned, full of warehouse room, and in general affording a good advanced base of supply for any army marching across the Danube. It afforded an opportunity for concentration of supplies, it contained waggons and horses and food. Supplies, it must be remembered, were the great difficulty of each of the two opposed forces, in this moving of great numbers of men east of the Black Forest, in a comparatively poor country, largely heath and forest, and ill populated.
Map showing how Donauwörth is the key of Bavaria from the North-West.
No serious permanent defences, such as could delay the capture of the town, surrounded Donauwörth; but up above it lies a hill, called from its shape “the Schellenberg” or “Bell Hill.” This hill is not isolated, but joins on the higher ground to its north by a sort of flat isthmus, which is level with the summit or nearly so.
The force which, on perceiving the Duke of Marlborough’s intention of capturing Donauwörth, the Elector of Bavaria very rapidly detached to defend that town, was under the command of Count d’Arco; it consisted of two regiments of cavalry and about 10,000 infantry (of whom a quarter were French). D’Arco had orders to entrench the hill above the town as rapidly as might be and to defend it from attack; for whoever held the Schellenberg was master of Donauwörth below. But the Elector could only spare eight guns for this purpose from his inferior forces.
Upon the 2nd of July, in the early morning, Marlborough, by one of those rapid movements which were a prime element in his continuous success, marched before dawn with something between seven and eight thousand infantry carefully chosen for the task and thirty-five squadrons of horse for the attack on the Schellenberg. It was Marlborough’s alternate day of command.
With all his despatch, he could not arrive on the height of the hill nor attack its imperfect but rapidly completing works until the late afternoon. It is characteristic of his generalship that he risked an assault with this advance body of his without waiting for the main part of the army under the Duke of Baden to come up. With sixteen battalions only, of whom a third were British, he attempted to carry works behind which a force equal to his own in strength was posted. The risk was high, for he could hardly hope to carry the works with such a force, and all depended upon the main body coming up in time. There was but an hour or two of daylight left.
The check which Marlborough necessarily received in such an attempt incidentally gave proof of the excellent material of his troops. More than a third of these fell in the first furious and undecided hour. They failed to carry the works. They had already once begun to break and once again rallied, but had suffered no final dissolution under the ordeal — though it was both the first to which the men were subjected during this campaign, and probably also the most severe of any they were to endure.
Whether they, or indeed any other troops, could long have survived such conditions as an attempt to storm works against equal numbers is not open to proof; for, while the issue was still doubtful (but the advantage naturally with the force behind the trenches), the mass of the army under the Duke of Baden came up in good time upon the right (that is, from the side of the town), poured almost unopposed over the deserted earthworks of that side, and, five to one, overwhelmed the 12,000 Franco-Bavarians upon the hill.
After one of those short stubborn and futile attempts at resistance which such situations discover in all wars, the inevitable dissolution of d’Arco’s command came before the darkness. It was utterly routed; and we may justly presume that not 4000 — more probably but 3000 — rejoined the army of Marcin and of the Elector of Bavaria.
The loss of the Schellenberg had cost Marlborough’s enemies, whose forces were already gravely inferior to his own, eight guns and close upon one-fifth of their effective numbers. The Franco-Bavarians hurried south to entrench themselves under Augsburg, while Donauwörth, and with it the passage of the two great rivers and the entry into Bavaria, lay in the possession of Marlborough and his ally.
The balance of military and historical opinion will decide that Marlborough played for too high stakes in beginning the assault so late in the evening and with so small a force. But he was playing for speed, and he won the hazard.
It was a further reward of his daring that he could point after this first engagement to the fine quality of his British contingent.
It was upon the evening of July the 2nd, then, that this capital position was stormed. It was upon the 5th that Marcin and the Elector lay hopeless and immobile before Augsburg, while their enemies entered a now defenceless Bavaria by its north-western gate. And this complete achievement of Marlborough’s plan was but the end of the first phase in the campaign upon the Danube.
Meanwhile, a large French reinforcement under Tallard was already far up on its way from the Rhine, across the Black Forest, to join Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria and set back the tide of war, and, when it should have effected its junction with those who awaited it at Augsburg, to oppose to Marlborough and the Duke of Baden a total force greater than their own.
The French marshal, Tallard, was in command of the army thus rapidly approaching in relief of the Franco-Bavarians. His arrival, if he came without loss, disease, or mishap, promised a complete superiority over the English and their allies, unless, indeed, by some accident or stroke of genius, reinforcement should reach them also before the day of the battle.
This reinforcement, in the event, Marlborough did receive. He owed it, as we shall see, to the high talents of Prince Eugene; and it is upon the successful march of this general, his junction with Marlborough, and the consequent success of Blenheim, that the rest of the campaign turns.
We turn next, then, to follow the second phase of the seven weeks, which consists in Tallard’s advance to join the Elector, and in Eugene’s rapid parallel march, which brought him, just in time, to Marlborough’s aid.
The Second Phase
THE ADVANCE OF Tallard
To follow the second phase of the seven weeks, that is, the phase subsequent to the capture of the Schellenberg and the retirement of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria on to Augsburg, it is necessary to hark back a little, and to trace from its origin that advance of Tallard’s reinforcements which was to find on the field of Blenheim so disastrous a termination.
We shall see that in this second phase Tallard did indeed manage to effect his junction with the Elector and Marcin with singular despatch; that this junction compelled Marlborough and Baden to cease the ravaging of Bavaria upon which they had been engaged, and to join in closely watching the movement of the Franco-Bavarian forces, lest their own retreat or their line of supplies should be cut off by that now large army.
The Schellenberg was stormed, as we have seen, on the 2nd of July.
Tallard, as we have also seen, had orders from Versailles, when Marlborough’s plan of reaching the Danube was clear, to put himself in motion for an advance to the Elector’s aid.
He moved at first with firmness and deliberation, determined to secure every post of his advance throughout the difficult hills, and thoroughly to provision his route. He crossed the Rhine upon July 1st, and during the very hours that, far to the east, the disaster of Donauwörth was in progress, he was assembling his forces upon the right bank of the river before beginning to secure his passage through the Black Forest. Upon the 4th he began his march over the hills.
A week later he was in the heart of the broken country at Hornberg, and on the 16th of July he had contained the garrison of Villingen, the principal stronghold which barred his route to the Danube, and which, did he leave it untaken, would jeopardise his provision and supply, the health and even the maintenance of his horses and men by the mountain road.
Upon the 18th he opened fire upon the town; but on the very day that the siege thus began he received from Marcin the whole story of the disaster of the Schellenberg, which had taken place a fortnight before, and a most urgent request for immediate reinforcement.
Tallard’s deliberation, his attempt to secure the enemy’s one stronghold upon the line of his passage across the hills, and amply to provision his advance, were fully justified. He knew nothing of the fall of Donauwörth. He believed himself to have full time for a properly organised march to join the Elector of Bavaria, and that meant the capture of Villingen. And the siege of that fortress had the further advantage that it compelled Eugene and his army to remain near the Rhine. Only at this late day, the 18th of July, did Tallard learn that the forces of Marlborough and of Baden had captured the crossing of the Danube and the Lech, and were pouring into Bavaria.
He should have known it earlier, but the despatch which bore him the information had miscarried.
Already, upon the 9th, Marcin had written from Augsburg a pressing letter to Tallard, bidding him neglect everything save an immediate march, and, ill provisioned as he was, and insecure as he would leave his communications, to hasten to the aid of the Elector. Marlborough and Baden (he wrote) had crossed the Danube and the Lech on the 5th and 6th of July. They were before Rhain; and when Rhain fell (as fall it must), all Bavaria would be at their mercy.
This letter Tallard never received.
Marcin was right. Rhain could not possibly hold out: none of the Bavarian strongholds except Ingolstadt were tolerably fortified. Rhain was destined to fall, and with its fall all Bavaria would be the prey of the allied generals.
The Elector, watching all this from just beyond the Lech, was in despair. He proposed to sue for terms unless immediate news of help from the French upon the Rhine should reach him. And if the Elector sued for terms and retired from the contest, France would be left alone to bear the whole weight of the European alliance: its forces would at once be released to act upon the Rhine, in Flanders, or wherever else they would.
When, upon the 14th, Marcin wrote that second letter to Tallard, telling him to neglect everything, to march forward at all costs, and to hasten to Bavaria’s relief — the letter which Tallard did receive, and which came to him on the 18th of July, just as he was beginning the siege of Villingen — Rhain still held out; but, even as Tallard read the letter, Rhain had fallen, and the terrible business of the harrying of Bavaria had begun. For Baden and Marlborough proceeded to ravage the country, a cruel piece of work, which Marlborough believed necessary, because it was his supreme intention to bring such pressure to bear upon the Elector as might dissuade him from taking further part in the war.
The villages began to burn (one hundred and twenty were destroyed), the crops to be razed. The country was laid waste to the very walls of Munich, and that capital itself would have fallen had the Englishman and his imperial ally possessed a sufficient train to besiege it.
Tallard was still hesitating to abandon the siege of Villingen when, upon the 21st of July, came yet a third message from Marcin, which there was no denying. Tallard learnt from it of the fall of Rhain, of the ravaging of Bavaria, of the march of Marlborough and Baden upon Munich, of the crucial danger in which France lay of seeing the Elector of Bavaria abandon her cause.
Wholly insufficient as the provisioning of the route was, Marcin assured Tallard it was just enough to feed his men and horses during the dash eastwards; and, with all the regret and foreboding necessarily attached to leaving in his rear an unconquered fortress and marching in haste upon an insufficiently provided route, Tallard, on the next day, the 22nd, raised the siege of Villingen and risked his way across the mountains down to the valley of the Danube.
The move was undoubtedly necessary if the Bavarian alliance was to be saved, but it had to be accomplished in fatal haste.
Sickness broke out among Tallard’s horses; his squadrons were reduced in a fashion that largely determined the ultimate issue at Blenheim.
His troops, ill fed and exhausted, marched upon wretched rations of bread and biscuit alone, and with that knowledge of insecurity behind them which the private soldier, though he can know so little of the general plan of any campaign, instinctively feels when he is taking part in an advance of doubtful omen.
A week later, upon the 29th of July, the army was in sight of Ulm. It found there but six thousand sacks of flour. It knew that it would find no sufficient provisionment in Augsburg at the end of its advance, yet advance it must unless the forces of Bavaria were to be lost to the cause of Louis XIV.
Five days later the junction was effected, and upon Monday the 4th of August the united armies of Tallard and the Elector of Bavaria faced, in the neighbourhood of Augsburg, the opposing armies of Marlborough and Baden upon the further side of the Lech.
In spite of the deplorable sickness and loss among his horse, the absence of remounts, the exhaustion of his men, the poor provisioning, and the insecurity of the line of supply behind him, Tallard could now present forces somewhat superior (counted by battalions and nominal squadrons) — far superior in artillery — to the forces of the allies.
Had this reluctant and tardy advance of Tallard’s on the one hand, the ravaging of Bavaria by Baden and Marlborough on the other, between them constituted the whole of the second phase in the preliminaries of Blenheim, the result of the campaign might have been very different, in spite of the impoverished condition of the Franco-Bavarian army.
But a third element, of the utmost importance, must be added: the rapid, the secret, and the successful march of Eugene during these same days across the northern part of these same hills which the French had just traversed by their southern passes, and the debouching of that formidable captain with his admirably disciplined force, especially strong in cavalry, upon the upper valley of the Danube to reinforce Marlborough and to decide the war.
So long as Tallard proceeded, with soldierly method, to the proper affirmation of his line of advance and to the reduction of Villingen, Eugene had been pinned to the neighbourhood of the Rhine.
Would Eugene, when the siege of Villingen was raised, and when Tallard had been persuaded to that precipitous eastern move, go back to hold the line of the Rhine against the French forces there situated, or would he decide for the risk of detaching a large command, perhaps of leading it himself, and of joining Marlborough? That was the doubtful factor in Tallard’s plans.
As in the case of Marlborough’s own march to the Danube, either alternative was possible. The safer course for Eugene, and that one therefore which seemed in the eyes of his enemies the more probable, was for him to remain on the Rhine. But it was conceivable that he would run the risk of leading a force to the Danube; and did he so decide, the whole business of the French remaining on the Rhine was to discover his intention, the whole business of Eugene to hide it.
As in the case of Marlborough’s march to the Danube, Eugene was led by a just instinct to gamble on the chance of the French army in Alsace not noting his move, and of the few troops he left opposite them upon the Rhine sufficing to screen his movements and to give the effect of much larger numbers. In other words, though his task in the coalition was to watch the central Rhine, he decided to take the risk of seeing the Rhine forced, and to march in aid of the English general whom he had himself summoned to Bavaria, with whose genius his own had such sympathy, and at whose side he was to accomplish the marvels of the next seven years.
Like Marlborough, he was successful in concealing his determination, but, with a smaller force than Marlborough’s had been, he was able to be more successful still.
Villeroy, who commanded the French upon the Middle Rhine, was informed by numerous deserters and spies that Eugene, after the fall of Villingen, was at Radstadt, and intended detaching but two or three battalions at most from his lines upon the right bank of the Rhine, and these not, of course, for work upon the Danube, but only to cover Wurtemburg by garrisoning Rottweil.
This information, coming though it did from many sources, was calculatedly false, and Eugene’s movements, after the siege of Villingen had been raised, were arranged with a masterly penetration of his enemy’s mind. A leisurely two days after the siege of Villingen was raised he entered that fortress, ordered the breaches to be repaired, and, in his every order and disposition, appeared determined to remain within the neighbourhood of the Upper Rhine. Nearly a week later he was careful to show himself at Rottweil, hardly a day’s march away, apparently doing no more than cover Wurtemburg against a possible French attack from beyond the Rhine; and, so far as such leisure and immobility could testify to his intentions, he proclaimed his determination to remain in that neighbourhood, and in no way to preoccupy himself with what might be going on in the valley of the Upper Danube.
With due deliberation, he left eight battalions in Rottweil to garrison that place, posted seventeen upon his lines upon the Rhine, and himself openly proceeded — and that at no great speed — to march for the valley of the Neckar with 15,000 men… Those 15,000 had been picked from his army with a particular care; nearly one-third were cavalry in the highest training, and the command, which seemed but one of three detachments all destined to operate upon the Rhine, was in fact a body specially chosen for a very different task. Eugene continued to proceed in this open fashion and slow as far as Tübingen…
Map showing Eugene’s march on the Danube from the Black Forest.
It was many days since Tallard had begun his advance; many days since Villeroy, on the Rhine, had been watching the movements of Eugene; and during all these days that great general had done no more than assure his original positions with ample leisure, and to begin, with what was apparently a gross lack of concealment, a return by the Neckar round the north of the Black Forest to the Rhine valley.
Suddenly, from the moment of his reaching Tübingen, all this slow and patient work ceases. Eugene and his 15,000 abruptly disappear.
In place of the open march which all might follow, friend and foe alike, there is a void; in place of clear and reiterated information upon his unhurried movements, there is nothing but a fog, contradictory rumours, fantastic and ill-credited.
Never was a design better kept or concealed to a moment so near its accomplishment. When that design was accomplished, it was to determine, as we shall see in what follows, the whole issue of the campaign of Blenheim.
The Third Phase
THE APPEARANCE OF Eugene
The third phase in the operations which led up to the battle of Blenheim is one of no more than nine days.
It stands distinct from all that went before, and must be regarded in history as a sort of little definite and enclosed preface to the great action. The distinctive character of this, the third phase, resides in the completion of the Franco-Bavarian force, its manœuvring in the presence of the enemy, and its finding itself unexpectedly confronted with the reinforcements of Eugene.
To seize the character of this third phase, the sketch map opposite must be referred to.
It is the 5th of August. Tallard has fully effected his junction with Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria, and the united Franco-Bavarian force lies in and to the east of Augsburg. On the opposite bank of the river Lech this force is watched by the army of Marlborough and Baden, which has been ravaging Bavaria. But Marlborough and Baden, though they have an advanced depot at Donauwörth, have their forward munitions and supplies far up northwards. Nördlingen is their advanced base, two days’ marching beyond the Danube. A week away to the north Nuremberg contains their only large and permanent collection of stores. Marlborough and Baden are in perpetual difficulty for food, for ammunition, and for forage — especially for ammunition.
Map showing the situation when Eugene suddenly appeared at Hochstadt, August 5-7, 1704.
Since the whole object of Marlborough in marching to the Upper Danube was to embarrass in this new seat of war the alliance of the French and Bavarian forces, it is, conversely, the business of the French commander to get him out of the valley of the Upper Danube and restore the liberty of action of the French monarch and of his ally the Elector of Bavaria.
The surest way of getting Marlborough out of the Upper Danube is to threaten his line of supply. He will then be compelled to fall back northward upon his base. Further (though Tallard did not know it at the moment), there is present the very real difficulty of friction between the two commanders of the army opposing him. Marlborough and Baden are not getting on well together. If it were possible for Marlborough to persuade Baden to go off on some little expedition of his own, withdrawing but a few soldiers, Marlborough would be well content, and Marlborough is by far the more formidable of the two men. But though the opportunity for such a riddance of divided command is open, for Prince Louis of Baden is anxious to besiege Ingolstadt, Marlborough dares not weaken the combined forces, even by a few battalions, now that Tallard has effected his junction with the Elector and with Marcin, and that a formidable force is opposed to him.
These elements in the situation, once clearly seized, the sequel follows from them logically enough.
The above describes the situation on the 5th of August.
On the 6th, Wednesday, the united Franco-Bavarian force began its march northward towards the Danube, a march parallel with Marlborough’s line of supply, and threatening that line all the way, ready to cut it when once the northern bank of the Danube was reached. Marlborough was compelled, in view of that march, to go back northward, step for step with his opponents. The artery that fed him was in danger, and everything else must be neglected.
In the evening of that Wednesday, August the 6th, Tallard and the Elector were at Biberach, Marlborough and Baden at Schobenhausen, which, as the map shows, lies also a day’s march to the north from the last position these troops had held, and was on the way to the crossing of the Danube at Neuburg, as the Franco-Bavarians were on the way to the crossing of the same great river at Dillingen.
On the 7th there was no movement, but on the 8th, the Friday, as the Franco-Bavarian host approached the crossing of the Danube at Dillingen, their leader (if Tallard may be regarded as their leader — he was nominally under the orders of the Elector, but he was the marshal of Louis XIV.) heard suddenly that Eugene had appeared at Hochstadt with thirty-nine squadrons and twenty battalions.
The trick was done. The rapid and secret march of Eugene had been accomplished with complete success, and his force was within speaking distance of Marlborough’s.
When the news came to the French camp, it was even there evident what a sudden transformation had come over the campaign; but to one who could see, as the historian sees, the moral condition of both forces, the event is more significant still.
A great commander, whose name was henceforth to be linked most closely with that of Marlborough’s himself, was present upon the Upper Danube. He brought with him troops not only equivalent in number to a third of his colleague’s existing forces, but trained under his high leadership, disciplined in his excellent school, and containing, what will prove essential to the fortunes of the coming battle, a very large proportion of cavalry. Further, the appearance of Eugene at this critical moment permitted Marlborough to rid himself of Louis of Baden, to despatch him to the siege of Ingolstadt in the heart of Bavaria, at once to be free of the clog which the slow decision and slow movements of that general burdened him with, to threaten the heart of the enemy’s country by that general’s departure on such a mission, and to unite himself and his forces with a man whose methods were after his own heart.
It is true that a minor problem lay before Eugene and Marlborough which must be solved before the great value of the junction they were about to effect could be taken advantage of. Their forces were still separated by the Danube: Marlborough lay a day’s march to the south of it, and were he to cross the Danube at Neuburg he would be two days’ march from Eugene. But each army was free to march towards the other, and all that their commanders had to decide was upon which side of the river the junction should be effected. Were the junction effected to the south — that is, were Eugene to cross the Danube and join Marlborough in Bavaria — Tallard, crossing the Danube at Dillingen, could strike at the great northern line of communications which conditioned all these movements. It was, therefore, the obvious move for Eugene and Marlborough to join upon the northern bank of the Danube, and to move upon and defend that all-important line of communications, point for point, as Tallard might threaten it.
It was on the 8th, the Friday, as I have said, that Eugene’s presence was known both to Tallard and to Marlborough, for Eugene had ridden forward and met his colleague.
Upon the 9th, the Saturday, the French marched towards the bridge of Dillingen. Eugene, who was already on the way back to his army, returned to inform Marlborough of this, then rode westward again to his forces, and, while the French made their arrangements for crossing the river on the morrow, he busied himself in conducting his 15,000 eastward down the north bank of the Danube. Three thousand of Marlborough’s cavalry went forward to meet him, and to begin that junction between the two forces which was to determine the day at Blenheim.
The next day, Sunday the 10th, the Franco-Bavarian army passed the river and lay in the position with which their forces had in the past been so familiar, the position from Lauingen to Dillingen which Marcin and the Elector had held when, six weeks before, Marlborough and Baden had passed across the Franco-Bavarian front to the north in their march upon Donauwörth and the Schellenberg.
On the same Sunday, the 10th, Marlborough had brought up his main force to Rhain, within an hour of the Danube, and Eugene was drawing up his force at a safe distance from the French position north of the village of Münster, and behind the brook of Kessel, where that watercourse joins the Danube.
But, though junction with Marlborough was virtually effected, it must be effected actually before Eugene could think himself safe from that Franco-Bavarian force a day’s march behind him, which was three times his own and more. His urgent messages to Marlborough led that commander to march up his men through the night. Before the dawn of August the 11th broke, Churchill, with twenty battalions, had crossed at Merxheim, and the whole army, marching in two columns, was upon the move — the right-hand column following Churchill to the bridge of Merxheim, the left-hand column crossing the Lech by the bridge of Rhain, to pass the Danube at Donauwörth. In the afternoon of that Monday the whole of Marlborough’s command was passing the Wornitz, and long after sunset, following upon a march which had kept the major part of the great host afoot for more than twenty hours, Eugene and Marlborough were together at the head of 52,000 men, established in unison, and defending, with now no possibility of its interruption, the line of communications from the north.
Every historian of this great business has justly remarked the organisation and the patient genius of the man who made such a concentration possible under such conditions and in such a time, without appreciable loss, at hurried notice, and with a complete success.
It is a permanent example and masterpiece in that inglorious part of war, the function of transport and of marching orders, upon which strategy depends as surely as an army depends on food.
Fully accompanied by his artillery, Marlborough’s force could not have accomplished the marvel that it did; yet even this arm was brought up, in the rear of the army, by the morning of Tuesday the 12th, and from that moment, given a sufficient repose, the whole great weapon under the two captains could act as one.
On that same morning, Tuesday the 12th, the Franco-Bavarian army under Tallard and the Elector were choosing out with some deliberation a camp so situated as to block any movement of their enemy up the valley of the Danube. The situation of the camp was designed to make this advance up the 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 imperial forces 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 have two 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 and remembered, 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 have effected the splendid concentration but a few hours since upon the Kessel — these formed a work sufficient to deserve the reward of victory, Marlborough had the fortune not only to deserve, but to achieve.
The night of that Tuesday fell with no alarm upon the one side or upon the other. In the camp of Marlborough and of Eugene was the knowledge that the twin commanders had determined upon an action; in that of Tallard and the Elector the belief that it was more probable their opponents would follow the general rules of war, and fall back to recruit their supplies by the one route that was widely open to them.
Midnight passed. It was already the morning of Wednesday the 13th before the one had moved, or the other had guessed the nature of his enemy’s plan.
It was moonless and pitch-dark, save for the dense white mist which, in the marshy lands of that river valley, accompanies the turn of the August night. This mist had risen and covered the plain. The little villages were asleep after their disturbance by the advent of so many armed men. The cockcrows of midnight were now well past when there was stir in Marlborough’s camp, and from this moment, somewhere about two of the morning of Wednesday, August the 13th, the action of Blenheim begins.
PART V. THE ACTION
THE FIELD OF Blenheim has changed in its physical aspect less than any other of the great battlefields of Europe during the two hundred years and more that have passed since Marlborough’s victory.
He who visits to-day this quiet Bavarian corn-land, with its pious and happy peasantry, its modest wealth, and its contempt for haste and greed, sees, if he come in the same late summer of the year, just what the mounted parties saw who rode out upon that Wednesday before the eight columns of Marlborough and Eugene under the early morning.
Thus, approaching the field of Blenheim from the east, the view consists in a low and strangely regular line of closely-wooded hills to the right and northwards; southwards, and to the left, a mass of undergrowth, the low trees of the marshes, occasional gaps of rank herbage which make bright green patches interspersing the woodland, mark the wide and marshy course of the Danube, with its belt of alluvial soil and swamp on either side.
Between this stretch of damp river-ground to the south and the regular low wooded hills to the north lies a plain just lifted above the level of the river by such few feet as are sufficient to drain it and no more. Crossing this plain transversely, on their way to the Danube, ooze and trickle rather than run certain insignificant streams; each rises in the wooded hills to the north, falls southward, and in the length of a very few miles reaches the main river. These streams are found, as one goes up the great valley, at every mile or so. With one, the Nebel, we shall be particularly concerned, for during the action at Blenheim it formed the only slight obstacle separating the two armies. This plain, which in August is all stubble, is some three miles across, such a space separates the hills from the river, and that distance, or a trifle more, is the full length of the little muddy brooks which thus occasionally intersect it.
To the eye which takes in that landscape at a first glance, bare of crops and under a late summer sun, the plain seems quite even and undisturbed by any hollows or rolls of land. It is, in fact, like most such apparently simple terrains, slightly diversified: its diversity is enough to affect in some degree the disposition of soldiers, to afford in certain places occasional cover, and to permit of opportunities for defence.
But these variations from the flat are exceedingly slight. The hollow which the Nebel has made, for instance, is not noticed on foot or even in mechanical traction as one follows the main road which runs the whole length of the plain, though if one goes across country on foot, one notices the slight bank of a few feet separating the cultivated land from a narrow belt of rough grass, which is boggy in wet weather, and which, in varying breadth, accompanies the course of the stream.
The plain also, as might be expected, rises slightly from its low shelf just above the Danube swamps and meadows, to the base of the hills. Its ascent in its whole three miles of breadth is but sixty feet.
Over this level sweep of tilled land rise at intervals the spires of rare villages, round which scattered houses and gardens of the Bavarian sort — broad-eaved, flat-roofed, gay with flowers — are gathered. But for these few human groups there is no break in the general aspect of the quite open fields.
As might be expected, an interrupted chain of such villages marks the line of the great river from Donauwörth to Ulm, each standing just on the bank and edge of what for long was the flood-ground of the Danube, and is still in part unreclaimed marsh and water meadow. Each is distant a mile or two from its next fellow. Thus, nearest Donauwörth we have Münster, upon which the left of the allied army reposed when it lay in camp before the battle. Next in order come Tapfheim and Schwenningen, through which that army marched to the field. Further up-stream another group stretches beyond the Nebel, the hamlet of Sonderheim, the little town of Hochstadt, the village of Steinheim, etc.; and, in the middle of this line, at the point where the Nebel falls into the old bed of the Danube, is built that large village of Blindheim, which, under its English form of Blenheim, has given the action the name it bears in this country.
I say “the old bed of the Danube,” for one feature, and one alone, in that countryside has changed in the two hundred years, though the change is not one which the eye can note as it surveys the plain, nor one which greatly affects the story of the action. This change is due to the straightening of the bed of the great river.
At the time when Blenheim was fought, the Danube wound in great loops, with numerous islands and backwaters complicating its course, and swung back and forth among the level swamps of its valley. It runs to-day in an artificial channel, which takes the average, as it were, of these variations, drains the flood-ground, and leaves the old bed in the form of stagnant, abandoned lengths of water or reeds, in which the traveller can trace the former vagaries of the river. Thus Blindheim, which stood just above the broad and hurrying water at the summit of one such loop, is now 800 yards away from the artificial trench which modern engineering has dug for the river. But the new channel has no effect upon the landscape to the eye. The floor on which the Danube runs is still a mass of undergrowth and weeds and grass, which marks off the cultivated land on the south, as it has been limited since men first ploughed.
I have said that the little slow and muddy streamlet called the Nebel must particularly meet with our attention, because it formed at the beginning of the action of Blenheim a central line dividing the two hosts, and round its course may be grouped the features of the terrain upon which the battle was contested.
Blindheim, or, as we always call it, Blenheim, lay, as we have seen, just above the bank of the Danube at the mouth of this stream. Following up the water (which is so insignificant that in most places a man can cross it unaided in summer), at the distance of about one mile, is the village of Unterglauheim, lying above the left bank, as Blenheim does above the right. Further on, another three-quarters of a mile up the right bank, is the village of Oberglauheim; and where the water dribbles in various small streams from the hills, and at their base, where the various tiny rivulets join to form the Nebel, at the edge of the woods, is Schwennenbach.
The tiny hamlet of Weilheim may be regarded as an appendix of this last or of Oberglauheim indifferently. It lies opposite the latter village, but on the further side of the stream, and about half a mile away.
Right behind Oberglauheim, at the base of the hills to the westward, and well away from the Nebel, is the larger village of Lutzingen.
These names, and that of the Nebel, are sufficient for us to retain as we follow the course of the battle, remembering as we do so that one good road, the road by which the allies marched in the morning to the field from Münster, and the road by which the Franco-Bavarian forces retreated after the defeat — the main road from Donauwörth to Ulm — traversed, and still traverses, the terrain in its whole length.
It was at two in the morning of Wednesday the 13th of August that the allies broke camp and began their march westward towards the field of Blenheim.
That they intended to reach that field was not at first apparent. They might equally well have designed a retirement upon Nördlingen, and it was this that the commanders of the Franco-Bavarian army believed them to intend. The dense mist which covered the marshes of the river and the plain above clung to the soil long after sunrise. It was not until seven o’clock that the advancing columns of the enemy were observed from the French camp, distant about a mile away, and beginning to deploy in order to set themselves in line of battle. But, though they were then first seen, their arrival had been appreciated two hours before, and the French line was already drawn up opposite them on the further bank of the Nebel as they deployed.
The French order of battle is no longer to be found in the archives, though we can reconstruct it fairly enough, and in parts quite accurately, from the separate accounts of the action given by Tallard, by Marcin himself, by Eugene, and from English sources. The line of battle of the allies we possess in detail; and the reader can approach with a fair accuracy the dispositions of the two armies at the moment when the action began, though it must be understood that the full deployment of Marlborough and Eugene was not accomplished until after midday on account of the difficulty the latter commander found in posting his extreme right at the foot of the hills and in the woods of Schwennenbach; while it must be further noted that the first shots of the battle sounded long before its main action began, that is, long before noon — for the French guns upon the front of their line opened at long range as early as nine o’clock, and continued a lively cannonade until, at half-past twelve, Eugene being at last ready, the first serious blows were delivered by the infantry.
All this we shall see in what followed. Meanwhile we must take a view of the two armies as they stood ranged for battle before linesman or cavalryman had moved.
The map on following page indicates in general terms the situation of the opposing forces.
The French stood upon the defensive upon the western bank of the Nebel. Their camp lay behind their line of battle, a stretch of tents nearly two miles long.
It is particularly to be noted that though, for the purpose of fighting this battle, they formed but one army, the two separate commands, that of the Elector (with Marcin) and that of Tallard, were separately treated and separately organised. The point is of importance if we are to understand the causes of their defeat, for it made reinforcement difficult, and put two loosely joined wings where a strong centre should have stood.
Tallard’s command, thirty-six battalions and (nominally) forty-four squadrons, extended from Blindheim to the neighbourhood of Oberglauheim. Its real strength may be taken at about 16,000 to 18,000 infantry, and at the most 5200 cavalry; but of these last a great number could not be used as mounted men.
The Elements of the Action of Blenheim.
The village of Oberglauheim itself, and all that stretched to the left of it up the Nebel as far as the base of the hills, was occupied by the army of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria. This force was forty-two battalions and eighty-three squadrons strong. The cavalry in this second army, the left of the whole force, had been less severely tried by disease, rapid marching, and ill provisionment than that of Tallard. We may reckon it, therefore, at its full or nearly its full strength, and say that Marcin and the Elector commanded over 20,000 men and close upon 10,000 horse. In a word, the total of the Franco-Bavarian forces, though we have no documents by which to estimate their exact numbers, may be regarded, from the indications we have of the losses of the cavalry, etc., as certainly more than fifty and certainly less than fifty-three thousand men, infantry and cavalry combined. To these we must add ninety guns, disposed along the whole front after the fashion of the time, and these under the general and separate command of Frézelière.
This disposition of the guns in a chain along the whole front of the line the reader is begged especially to note.
The particular dispositions of the Franco-Bavarian forces must now be seized, and to appreciate these let us first consider the importance of the village of Blenheim.
Blenheim, a large scattered village, with the characteristic Bavarian gardens round each house, lay so close to the course of the Danube as it then ran that there was no possibility of an enemy’s force passing between it and the river. It formed a position easy to be defended, lying as it did on a slight crest above the brook Nebel, where that brook joined the main river.
Blenheim, therefore, if it were soundly held, blocked any attempt to turn the French line upon that side; but if it were carried by the enemy, that enemy would then be able to enfilade the whole French line, to take it in flank and to roll it up. Tallard, therefore, with perfect judgment, posted in the village a very strong force of his infantry. This force consisted at first of nine battalions, shortly after, by reinforcement, of sixteen battalions of foot, and further of four regiments of dragoons dismounted.
Not content with throwing into Blenheim between 8000 and 10,000 men, Tallard placed behind the village and in its neighbourhood a further reserve of at least eleven battalions. Of his thirty-six battalions, therefore, only nine remained to support his cavalry over the whole of the open field between Blenheim and Oberglauheim, a distance of no less than 3500 yards. Consequently, this great gap had to be held in the main by his insufficient and depleted cavalry. Eight squadrons of these (of the red-coated sort called the Gendarmerie) formed the first section of this line, stretching from Blenheim to the neighbourhood of the main road and a little beyond it. Further along, towards Oberglauheim, another ten squadrons of cavalry were lined up to fill the rest of the gap. In a second line were ten more squadrons of cavalry under Silly; and the nine battalions of infantry remaining, when those in and near Blenheim had been subtracted, lay also in the second line, in support of the cavalry of the first line.
Such was Tallard’s disposition, of which it was complained both at the time and afterwards that in putting nearly the whole of his infantry upon his right in the village of Blenheim and behind it he far too greatly weakened the great open gap between Blenheim and Oberglauheim. His chief misfortune was not, however, lack of judgment in this, but the character of the man who commanded the troops in Blenheim. This general officer, whose name was Clérambault, was of the sort to be relied upon when orders are strict and plain in their accomplishment: useless in an emergency; but it is only an emergency that proves the uselessness of this kind of man. The army of the Elector and Marcin, which continued the line, similarly disposed their considerable force of cavalry in front, along the banks of the stream; their infantry lay, in the main, in support of this line of horse and behind it; they had also filled Oberglauheim with a mass of infantry; but the disposition of this left half of the French line is of less interest to the general reader, for it held its own, and contributed to the defeat only in this, that it did not at the critical moment send reinforcements to Tallard upon the right.
In general, then, we must see the long French line set out in two main bodies. That on the right, under Tallard, had far the greater part of its infantry within or in support of Blenheim, while the cavalry, for the most part, stretched out over the open centre of the field, with Silly’s ten squadrons and what was left of the infantry in reserve. That on the left, under Marcin and the Elector, had its far more numerous cavalry similarly disposed upon its front along the brook, most of its infantry behind, and a great number of these holding the village of Oberglauheim, with cavalry in front of them also. Along the whole line the ninety guns were disposed in a chain, as I have described.
Such being the disposition of the French troops, let us now turn to that of the Imperialists and their English and other allies under Eugene and Marlborough. These appeared within a mile of the French position by seven in the morning, and all that part of their left which lay between the river and the highroad was drawn up within long range of the French artillery somewhat before nine o’clock. But, as a glance at the map will show, their right had to march much further in order to come into line along the course of the Nebel, the course of which leans away from the line of Marlborough’s advance. The difficulty of swampy land under the hills and of woods made the final disposition of the extreme left particularly tardy and tedious, nor was it fully drawn up until just after midday. During all the interval of three hours a brisk cannonade at long range had been proceeding from the guns in front of the French line — and, as nearly always the case with artillery before the modern quick-firer, was doing less damage than the gunners imagined.
When the allied line was finally formed its disposition was as follows: —
On the extreme left six columns of infantry, half of which consisted of British regiments.
These stood immediately opposite the village of Blenheim, and were designed for that attack upon it which Marlborough, in his first intention, desired to make the decisive feature of the action.
Next, towards the main road, came four lines, two of infantry before and behind, and in the midst two parallel lines of cavalry, the foremost of which was British, and in which could be distinguished the mounting and horsemanship of the Scots Greys.
Next again, to the north, and astraddle of the great road, lay the main force; this it will be remarked was drawn up precisely in front of that part in the long French line which was the weakest, and which indeed consisted of little more than the ten squadrons of horse which filled the gap between the Gendarmerie and Oberglauheim. This main force was also drawn up in four great lines; the first of infantry, the two next of cavalry, the rear of infantry: it contained no British troops, and, with the others already mentioned, formed Marlborough’s command. All the rest, along the north and the east, along the left bank of the Nebel, from Willheim up into the woods, and the gorge at the source of the brook, was Eugene’s command — not a third of the whole.
As to the total strength of the allied forces which we must attempt to estimate as we estimated that of the Franco-Bavarians, we know it accurately enough — it was some 52,000 men. The opposing hosts were therefore little different in numbers. But it is of great importance to note the disproportion of cavalry. In that of the Imperialists under Marlborough and Eugene, not only was the cavalry better mounted and free from the fatigue and disease that had ravaged Tallard’s horses, but it was nearly double in number that of its opponents. On the other hand, the artillery of the allies was far inferior. Only sixty-six guns at the most were opposed to the French ninety.
Blenheim, in the issue, turned out to be a cavalry battle — a battle won by cavalry, and its effect clinched by cavalry. The poor rôle played by the guns and the inability of the French to make use of their numerical superiority in this arm was a characteristic of the time, which had not yet learnt to use the cannon as a mobile weapon.
A general action is best understood if the reader is first told the main event, and later observes how the details of its progress fit in with that chief character of it.
The main event of the battle of Blenheim was simply this: —
Marlborough first thought to carry Blenheim: he failed. Having failed before the village of Blenheim, he determined to break through Tallard’s left, which formed the centre of the French line, and was successful in doing so. By thus breaking through the centre of the French line, he isolated all Tallard’s army upon the right, except such small portion of it as broke and fled from the field. The remainder crowded into the village of Blenheim, was contained, surrounded, and compelled to surrender. The undefeated left half of the French line was therefore compelled to retire, and did so through Lutzingen upon the Danube, crossing which river in hurried retreat, it fell back upon Ulm. In one conspectus, the position at the beginning of the action was this: —
and at the end of it this: —
Now let us follow the details of the fight which brought about such a result.
First, at half-past twelve, when all was ready, came Marlborough’s attack upon Blenheim.
We have seen some pages back how well advised was Tallard to treat Blenheim as the key of his position, and how thoroughly that large village, once properly furnished with troops and fortified with palisades, would guarantee his right. On that very account, Marlborough was determined to storm it; for if it fell, there would instantly follow upon its fall a complete victory. The whole French line would be turned.
It may be argued that Marlborough here attempted the impossible, but it must be remembered, in the first place, that he was by temperament a man of the offensive and of great risks. His first outstanding action, that of the Schellenberg, proved this, and proved it in his favour. Five years later, in one of his last actions, that of Malplaquet, this characteristic of his was to appear in his disfavour. At any rate, risk was in the temperament of the man, and it is a temperament which in warfare accounts for the greatest things.
First and last, some 10,000 men were employed against the one point of Blenheim; and the assault upon the village, though a failure, forms one of the noblest chapters in the history of British arms.
It was one o’clock of the afternoon when the serious part of the action opened by the two first lines of Marlborough’s extreme left advancing under Lord Cutts to pass the Nebel, to cross the pasture beyond, and to force the palisades of the village. The movement across the stream was undertaken under a fire of grape from four guns posted upon a slight rise outside the village. Cutts’ body crossed the brook in face of this opposition, re-formed under the bank beyond, left their Hessian contingent in shelter there as a reserve, while the British, who were the remainder of the body, advanced against the palisades.
The distance is one of about 150 yards. The Guards and the four regiments with them came up through the long grass of the aftermath, Row at their head. Two-thirds of that short distance was passed in silence. The guns upon the slope beyond could not fire at a mark so close to their own troops behind the palisades. The English had orders not to waste a shot until they had carried the line of those palisades with the bayonet. The French behind the palisades reserved their fire.
It was one of those moments which the eighteenth century, with its amazingly disciplined professional armies, alone can furnish in all the history of war, an episode of which the Guards at Fontenoy were, a generation later, to afford the supreme example, and one depending on that perfection of restraint for which the English service was deservedly renowned. When a distance but a yard or two longer than a cricket pitch separated the advancing English from the palisades, the French volley crashed out. One man in three of the advancing line fell agonised or dead.
The British regiments, still obedient to Row’s instructions, reserved their fire until their leader touched the woodwork with his sword. Then they volleyed, and having fired, wrestled with the palisades as though to drag them down by sheer force. Perhaps some few parties here and there pressed in through a gap, but as the English soldiers struggled thus, gripped and checked by the obstacle, the French fire poured in again was deadly; the British assault was broken, and fled in disorder over the little field to the watercourse. As it fled, the Gendarmerie charged it in flank, captured the colours of the 21st, were repelled again by the Hessians in reserve (who recaptured the flag), and the first fierce moment of the battle was over.
One-third of Cutts’ command had been concerned in this first failure against Blenheim village. Two-thirds remained to turn that failure into a success. But before this second two-thirds was launched, there took place an episode in the battle, not conspicuously noted at the time, and given a minor importance in all accounts save Tallard’s own. It was significant in the extreme.
As Cutts’ broken first line was passing out of range and was effecting its retirement after the first disorder, and after the Hessians had repelled the first and partial cavalry charge of the French, the Gendarmerie, eight squadrons strong, prepared to charge again as a whole. They came upon the English before these had regained safety. Cutts naturally begged for cavalry to meet this cavalry danger, and Lumley sent five British squadrons to cross the stream and check the French charge. The English horse came to the further bank after some little difficulty with the mud of the sluggish stream, which difficulty has been exaggerated, and in no way affected the significance of what followed.
For what followed was the singular sight of eight French squadrons charging down a slope against only five, those five cramped in the hollow near a stream bed, and yet succeeding in receiving the shock of the charge of numbers so greatly superior, and, so far from yielding, breaking the offensive of their opponents into a confusion.
I repeat, it was but an episode, one that took place early in the day, and apparently of no weight. But, in a general historical view of the battle, it is of the first importance, for it showed what different stuff the opposed cavalries were made of, and that the allied army, which was already numerically the superior in cavalry — nearly double its opponents — had also better mounts, better riders, and a better discipline in that arm. A universal observer, seeing this one early detail in the battle of Blenheim, might have prophesied that the action would be a cavalry action as a whole, and that the cavalry of Marlborough would decide it.
I left Cutts prepared to launch the remaining two-thirds of his force at Blenheim village, in the hope of accomplishing what the first third had failed to do.
The whole combined body which the French had estimated at 10,000 men, and which seems to have been at least of some 8000, surged up in the second attempt against the palisades of the village. Part of that line and many of the outer gardens were carried, but the attack could not be driven home. It was, perhaps, at this moment that Tallard sent in those extra men which raised the French battalions in Blenheim from nine to sixteen, and gave the defenders, behind their walls, a force equal to the attackers. At any rate, the main attack was thrust back as the first had been, and the great corps of men, huddled, confused, rallied here and there as best they could be, broke from before the village.
The loss was terrible, and Marlborough having failed, not only failed, but saw that he had failed. It was his salvation. His subordinates would have returned to the fruitless attack with troops already shaken and dreading the ground. Marlborough ordered a false attack to be kept up from the further bank, upon the village, and, with that elasticity of command which is the prime factor of tactical success, and which commonly distinguishes youth rather than middle age in a general, turned all his efforts upon the centre.
Here the main road crosses the Nebel by a stone bridge. Four other bridges had been thrown across at other points between this stone bridge and Unterglauheim. By these the infantry were crossing, which infantry, it will be remembered (and my frontispiece shows it), stood as to their first line in front of the cavalry in the main central body. This almost undisputed passage of the Nebel would not have been possible had not the distance between Blenheim and Oberglauheim been what it was. The gap was great, the French line defending it too thin, and the possibility of a cross fire defending the centre was eliminated by the width of that centre.
Even as it was, the passage of the Nebel led to one very difficult moment which might by accident or genius have turned the whole action in favour of the French; and in connection with this episode it must be remembered that the French commanders asserted that the passage of the Nebel was no success on the part of their enemy, but was deliberately permitted to that enemy in order that he might be overwhelmed upon the opposing slope, with the marshy stream behind him, when the time for a counter-attack should come.
The moment came when the greater part of Marlborough’s cavalry had crossed, but before they had fully formed upon the further bank. While they were still in the disorder of forming, the French cavalry upon their left — that is, between the main road and Blenheim — charged down the slight slope, and something like a dismemberment of the whole of Marlborough’s mounted line began. It was checked for a moment by the fire of the British infantry, during which check Marlborough brought over certain Danish and Hanoverian squadrons which had remained upon the further bank. But the French charged again, and though infantry of Marlborough’s which was pouring over the stream up beyond the stone bridge came up in time to prevent a complete break down, the moment was critical in the extreme. All Marlborough’s centre was pressed and shaken; a further spurt against it and it would break.
It was such a moment as commanders of rapid decision and quick eye have always seized; and if it be asked how Tallard should have seized it, the answer is that there were French guns to mass, there was French infantry in Blenheim unused, and more in reserve behind Blenheim wholly useless. There were the ten squadrons of Tallard’s second line of cavalry under Silly, a couple of hundred yards away, to be summoned in a few moments.
Rapid decision and keen sight of this sort would have done the business; but Tallard was slow of perception; an excellent strategist, but short-sighted and a great gentleman; one, moreover, who had advanced by favour rather than by intrigue. He lost the moment.
Marlborough’s cavalry managed to form, struggling beyond the brook, and the last final phase of the action was at hand — for Marlborough’s cavalry would reiterate that general lesson which the whole battle teaches, to wit, that the horse of the allies was not only far stronger numerically, but far better trained than the French cavalry before them, and, with equal chances, must destroy it. Tallard, by missing his moment, had permitted those equal chances to be restored. Even so, yet one other last accident favoured the French. The hour was about five, or rather later in the mid-afternoon. In order to be able to form his cavalry beyond the Nebel, Marlborough wanted to have a clear right flank, and with that object he had launched from 6000 to 7000 Hanoverians against Oberglauheim. The excellent infantry of Blainville, less in numbers, emerged from the village, threw the Hanoverians into gross disorder, and captured their commander. At this point there was beginning to be a rout. This new French success, properly followed up, would again have had a chance to break the allied centre at its weakest point, just at the link where Marlborough joined on to Eugene.
Marcin, inferior as was his command, gripped the opportunity, sent cavalry at once to Oberglauheim, and that cavalry charged. But here the greatness of Marlborough as a personal commander suddenly appeared. He seized the whole character of the moment in a way that Tallard on his first chance had wholly failed to do. He put himself in person at the head of the Danish brigade that lay in reserve, brought it across the rivulet, and came just in time to take the charge of the French cavalry. Even as that charge was preparing, Marlborough sent to Eugene for cavalry at the gallop. He (Marlborough) must hold fast with his Danes against the French horse — five minutes, ten, fifteen at the most — till help should come from the right.
Here, again, another factor in the success of the day appeared — that Eugene and Marlborough understood each other.
Eugene had just suffered a sharp check upon the extreme right; he was re-forming for a new attack when he got Marlborough’s message. Without the loss of a moment in weighing his own immediate necessities, he sent Fugger thundering off, and Fugger, with the imperial cuirassiers, came galloping full speed upon Marlborough’s right flank just as the French charge was at its hardest pressure upon the Danish line. He took that French charge in flank, broke its impetus, permitted the Danish infantry to hold their own, and so compelled the French horse to fall back; within a quarter of an hour from its inception the peril of a breach in Marlborough and Eugene’s centre was thus dissolved.
Here, then, is yet another incident in the battle, which shows not only on which side rapidity of perception lay, but also on which side lay sympathy between commanders, and, most important of all, the discipline and material eminence of the dominating arm.
It was now nearly six o’clock, and the August sun was red and low in the face of the English General. The French line still stood intact before him.
Marlborough’s first great effort against Blenheim had disastrously failed all during the earlier afternoon; he had but just escaped a terrible danger, and had but barely been saved, by Eugene’s promptitude in reinforcement, from seeing his line cut in two. Nevertheless, he was the master of the little daylight that remained. His cavalry, and indeed nearly all his troops, were now formed beyond the Nebel; he had the mass of his forces now all gathered opposite the weakest part of the French line. It was his business to pierce that line and to conquer.
As he advanced upon it, the French infantry, then stationed over the long evening shadows of the slope, though there deplorably few in numbers, met his advance by so accurate a fire that his own line for a moment yielded. Even then the day might have been retrieved if the French cavalry under Tallard’s command had been capable of a charge. To charge — if we may trust the commander’s record — they received a clear order. As a point of fact, charge they did not. A failure to comprehend, a tardy delivery of the dispatch, fatigue, or error was to blame — we have no grounds on which to base a decision. There was a discharge of musketry from the saddle, an abortive attempt to go forward, which in a few minutes was no more an attempt but a complete failure, and in a few more minutes not a failure but a rout. The words of Tallard himself, who saw that almost incredible thing, and who writes as an eye-witness, are sufficiently poignant. They are these: —
“I saw one instant in which the battle was won if the cavalry had not turned and abandoned the Line.”
What happened was that the incipient, doubtful, and confused French charge had broken before a vigorous and united counter-charge of Marlborough’s cavalry: the French horse backed, turned, bunched, fell into a panic; and when the mass of their cavalry had fled in that panic, the French centre, that is, the thin line of infantry still standing there, were ridden through and destroyed.
They lay in heaps of dead or wounded, cut down with the sword, for the most part unbroken in formation, their feet eastward whence the charge had come, and their faces to the sky. Over and beyond those corpses rode the full weight of Marlborough’s cavalry, right through Tallard’s left, which was the centre of the French line, while Tallard vainly called for troops to come out of Blenheim and check the fury, and as vainly sent for reinforcements to come from Marcin on the left, which should try and dam the flood that was now pouring through the bulwark of his ranks. On the left, Marcin heard too late. As to the messenger to Blenheim on the right he was taken prisoner; Tallard himself, hastening to that village, was taken prisoner in turn.
What followed, at once something inevitable and picturesque, must not be too extended in description for the purpose of a purely military recital. The centre being pierced, while the left under Marcin and the Elector still held its own against Eugene, the right, that is, the huddled battalions — now twenty-seven — within Blenheim village, and the four mounted regiments of dragoons therein, were the necessary victims of the victory. The piercing of the centre had cut them off from all aid. They were surrounded and summoned to surrender.
Clérambault, their commander, had already drowned himself in despair, or had been drowned in a deplorable attempt at flight — at any rate, was dead.
Blausac, an honest man, the second in command, refused to surrender. British cavalry rode round to prevent all egress from the village upon its western side. Churchill brought up the mass of Marlborough’s infantry. Upon the side towards the Danube the churchyard was stormed and held. Still Blausac would not ask for terms.
It looked for a moment, under the setting sun of that fatal day, as though the 11,000 thus isolated within the streets of Blenheim would be massacred for mere glory, for Blausac was still obstinate. A subordinate officer, who saw that all was lost, harangued the troops into surrender, and the last business of the great battle was over.
Plate II. The Battle of Blenheim.
To face page 143.
As darkness gathered, the undefeated left under Marcin and the Elector — the half now alone surviving out of the whole host, the other half or limb being quite destroyed or surrendered — retreated with such few prisoners and such few colours as they had taken. They retreated hastily with all their train and their artillery, abandoning their camp, of course, and all through the night poured towards the Danube and built their bridges across the stream.
Darkness checked the pursuit. Some few remnants of Tallard’s escaped to join the retreat. The rest were prisoners or dead.
Of the fifty odd thousand men and ninety guns that had marshalled twelve hours before along the bank of the Nebel, 12,000 men had fallen, 11,000 had surrendered, and one-third of the pieces were in the hands of the enemy.
The political consequences of this great day were more considerable by far than was even its character of a military success. It was the first great defeat which marked the turn of the tide against Louis XIV. It was the first great victory which stamped upon the conscience of Europe the genius of Marlborough. It wholly destroyed all those plans, of which the last two years had been full, for an advance upon Vienna by the French and Bavarian forces. It utterly cleared the valley of the Danube; it began to throw the Bourbons upon the defensive at last. It crushed the hopes of the Hungarian insurrection. It opened that series of successes which we couple with the names of Marlborough and Eugene, and which were not to be checked until, five years later, the French defence recovered its stubbornness at Malplaquet.
FINIS
CRÉCY
INTRODUCTION
BETWEEN THOSE LAST precise accounts of military engagements which antiquity has left us in small number, and what may be called the modern history of war, there lies a period of many centuries — quite 1400 years — during which the details of an action and even the main features of a campaign are never given us by contemporary recorders.
Through all that vast stretch of time we are compelled, if we desire to describe with any accuracy, and at any length, the conduct of a battle, to “reconstitute” the same. In other words, we have to argue from known conditions to unknown. We have to establish by a comparison of texts and of traditions, and by other processes which will be dealt with in a moment, a number of elements which, where a modern action is concerned, numerous memoirs and official record often accompanied by elaborate maps can put clearly before us.
We should note that the line of division between what we will call a medieval battle and a modern one, though it cannot, of course, be precisely established, corresponds roughly to the sixteenth century. The battles of the seventeenth are for the most part open in detail to the historian, from copious evidence afforded by contemporary writers and by our considerable knowledge of the tactics and armament of the time. And this, of course, is still truer of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent to the wide employment of printing, and throughout the sixteenth century, the tendency shown by contemporaries to set down detail steadily increases, but the whole of that century is transitional in this matter.
The battles of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth, and earlier centuries, differ entirely as to their evidence. We must gather it from manuscript authorities, often rare, sometimes unique. Those authorities are, again, not always contemporary. They never by any chance give us a map, and rarely a definite topographical indication. They are summary, their motive is ecclesiastical or civil rather than military, they present at the best the picturesque side of an engagement, and at the worst they preserve a bare mention of its date, or the mere fact that it took place.
Even in the elementary point of numbers, without some knowledge of which it is so difficult to judge the nature of a field, we are commonly at a loss. Where a smaller force upon the defensive has discomfited a larger attacking force, the dramatic character of such a success (and Crécy was one of them) has naturally led to an exaggeration of the disproportion. The estimate of loss is very commonly magnified and untrustworthy, for that is an element which, in the absence of exact record, both victors and vanquished inevitably tend to enlarge. We are not as a rule given the hours, sometimes, but not often, the state of the weather, and, especially in the earlier cases, the local or tactical result is of so much greater importance to the chronicler than the strategical plan, that we are left with little more knowledge at first hand than the fact that A won and B lost.
So true is this, that with regard to the majority of the great actions of the Dark Ages no contemporary record even enables us to fix their site within a few miles. That is true, for instance, of the decisive defeat of Attila in 451, of the Mahommedans by Charles Martel in 732, and of the final victory of Alfred over the Danes in 878.
Scholarship has established, with infinite pains and within small limits of doubt, the second and the third. The first is still disputed. So it is with the victory of Clovis over the Visigoths, and with any number of minor actions. Even when we come to the later centuries, and to a more complete knowledge, we are pursued by this difficulty, though it is reduced. Thus we know the square mile within which the Battle of Hastings was fought, but the best authorities have disputed its most important movements and characters. Similarly we can judge the general terrain of most of the Crusading fights, but with no precision, and only at great pains of comparison and collation.
The battle which forms the object of this little monograph, late as was its date, was long the subject of debate during the nineteenth century, upon the elementary point of the English position and its aspect. And, though that and other matters may now be regarded as established, we owe our measure of certitude upon them not to any care upon the part of our earliest informers, but to lengthy and close argument conducted in our time.
There is no space in such a short book as this to discuss all the causes which combined to produce this negligence of military detail in the medieval historian: that he was usually not a soldier, that after the ninth century armies cannot be regarded as professional, and that the interest of the time lay for the mass of readers in the results rather than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.
But though we have no space for any full discussion, it is worth the reader’s while to be informed of the general process by which scholarship attempts to reconstitute an engagement, upon which it has such insufficient testimony; and as the Battle of Crécy is the first in this series which challenges this sort of research, I will beg leave to sketch briefly the process by which it proceeds.
The first thing to be done, then, in attempting to discover what exactly happened during such a battle as that of Crécy, is to tabulate our sources. These are of three kinds — tradition, monuments, and documents.
Of these three, tradition is by far the most valuable in most research upon affairs of the Dark or Middle Ages, and it is nothing but a silly intellectual prejudice, the fruit of a narrow religious scepticism, now fast upon the wane, which has offered to neglect it.
Unfortunately, however, tradition is a particularly weak guide in this one department of knowledge. In estimating the character of a great man it is invaluable. It plays a great part in deciding us upon the nature of social movements, in helping us to locate the sites of buildings that have disappeared, and particularly of shrines; it gives us ample testimony (too often neglected) to the authenticity of sacred documents, and to the origin of laws. It is even of some assistance in establishing certain main points upon a military action, if documents are in default. For instance, a firm tradition of the site of a battle is evidence not only in the absence of documents, but in negation of doubtful or vague ones, and so is a firm tradition concerning the respective strength of the parties, if that tradition can be stated in general terms. But for the particular interest of military history it is worthless because it is silent. Even the civilian to-day, and, for that matter, the soldier as well, who is not accustomed to this science, would find it tedious to note, and often impossible to recognise, those points which form the salient matters for military history. There can be no tradition of the exact moments in which such and such a development in a battle occurred, of contours, of range, etc., save where here and there some very striking event (as in the case of the projectile launched into the midst of Acre during the Third Crusade) startles the mind of the onlooker, and remains unforgotten.
In the particular case of Crécy, tradition fixes for us only two points — though these have proved of considerable importance in modern discussion — the point where the King of Bohemia fell, and the point from which Edward III. watched the battle.
Of monuments, again, we have a very insufficient supply, and in the case of Crécy, hardly any, unless the point already alluded to, where the blind king was struck down, and the cross marking it be counted, as also the foundations of the mill, which was the view-point of the English commander.
It is to documents, then, that we must look, and, unfortunately for this action, our principal document is not contemporary. It is from the pen of Froissart, who was but nine years old when the battle was fought, and who wrote many years after its occurrence. Even so, his earlier version does not seem to be familiar to the public of this country, though it is certainly the more accurate.
Froissart used a contemporary document proceeding from the pen of one “John the Fair,” a canon of Liége. Of the lesser authorities some are contemporary: notably Baker of Swynford, and Villani, who died shortly after the battle.
But the whole bulk of material at our disposal is pitifully small, and the greater part of what the reader will have set before him in what follows is the result of an expansion and criticism of the few details which writers of the period have bequeathed to us.
When the documentary evidence, contemporary, or as nearly contemporary as possible, has been tabulated, the historian of a medieval battle next proceeds to consider what may be called the “limiting circumstances” within which the action developed, and these have much more than a negative value. As he proceeds to examine and to compare them, they illuminate many a doubtful point and expand many an obscure allusion.
For instance, in the case of Crécy, we carefully consider the contours, upon the modern map, of a terrain which no considerable building operations or mining has disfigured. We mark the ascertainable point at which the Somme was crossed, and calculate the minimum time in which a host of the least size to which we can limit Edward’s force could have marched from that to the various points mentioned in the approach to the battle-field. We ascertain the distance from the scene of action to the forest boundary. We argue from the original royal possession and subsequent conservation of that forest its permanent limits. We can even establish with some accuracy the direction of the wind, knowing how the armies marched, how the sun stood relative to the advancing force, and their impression of the storm that broke upon them. We calculate, within certain limits of error, the distance necessary for deployment. We argue from the known character of the armour and weapons employed certain details of the attack and defence. We mark what were certainly the ancient roads, and we measure the permanent obstacles afforded by the physical nature of the field.
I give these few points as examples only. They are multiplied indefinitely as one’s study proceeds, and in the result a fairly accurate description of so famous, though so ill attested, an action as this of Crécy can be reconstituted.
With all this there remains a large margin which cannot be generally set down as certain, and which even in matters essential must be written tentatively, with such phrases as “it would seem,” or “probably” to excuse it. But history is consoled by the reflection that all these gaps may be filled by further research or further discovery, and that each new effort of scholarship bridges one and then another.
As to the critical power by which each individual writer will decide between conflicting statements, or apparently irreconcilable conditions, this must be left to his own power of discrimination and to the reader’s estimate of his ability to weigh evidence. He is in duty bound — as I have attempted to do very briefly in certain notes — to give the grounds of his decision, and, having done so, he admits his reader to be a judge over himself: with this warning, however, that historical judgment is based upon a vast accumulation of detail acquired in many fields besides those particularly under consideration, and that a competent historian generally claims an authority in his decisions superior to that reposing upon no more than a mere view of limited contemporary materials.
I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCES
THE BATTLE OF Crécy was the first important decisive action of what is called “The Hundred Years’ War.” This war figures in many history books as a continued struggle between two organised nations, “England” and “France.” To present it in its true historical character it must be stated in far different terms.
The Hundred Years’ War consisted in two groups of fighting widely distant in time and only connected by the fact that from first to last a Plantagenet king of England claimed the Crown of France against a Valois cousin. Of these two groups of fighting the first was conducted by Edward III., and covers about twenty years of his reign. It was magnificently successful in the field, and gave to the English story the names of Crécy and of Poitiers. So far as the main ostensible purpose of that first fighting was concerned, it was unsuccessful, for it did not result in placing Edward III. upon the French throne.
The second group of actions came fifty years later, and is remembered by the great name of Agincourt.
This latter part of the Hundred Years’ War was conducted by Henry V., the great-grandson of Edward III. and the son of the Lancastrian usurper. And Henry was successful, not only in the tactical results of his battles, but in obtaining the Crown of France for his house. After his death his success crumbled away; and a generation or so after Agincourt, rather more than one hundred years after the beginning of this long series of fights, the power of the kings of England upon the Continent had disappeared. As a visible result of all their efforts, nothing remained but the important bastion of Calais, the capture of which was among the earliest results of their invasions.
When we say that the ostensible object of all this conflict from first to last was the establishment of the Plantagenet kings of England as kings of France in the place of their cousins the Valois, we must remember what was meant by those terms in the fourteenth century, when Edward first engaged in the duel. There was no conception of the conquest of a foreign power such as would lie in the mind of a statesman of to-day. Society was still feudal. Allegiance lay from a man to his lord, not from a man to his central political government. Not only the religion, the thoughts, and the daily conduct of either party to the war were the same, but in the governing society of both camps the language and the very blood were the same. Edward was a Plantagenet. That is, his family tradition was that of one of the great French feudal nobles. It was little more than one hundred years before that his great-grandfather had been the actual and ruling Lord of Normandy, and of France to the west and the south-west, for the first Plantagenet, had though holding of the Crown at Paris, been the active monarch of Aquitaine, of Brittany, of Anjou, Normandy, and Maine.
So much for the general sentiment under which the war was engaged. As to its particular excuse, this was slight and hardly tenable, and we may doubt whether Edward intended to press it seriously. He engaged in the war from that spirit of chivalric adventure (a little unreal, but informed by an indubitable taste for arms) which was the mark of the fourteenth century, and which was at the same time a decline from the sincere knightly spirit of the thirteenth.
The excuse given was this. The French monarchy had descended, from its foundation in 987 right down to the death of Charles IV. in 1328, directly from father to son, but in that year, 1328, male issue failed the direct line. The obviously rightful claimant to the throne, according to the ideas of those times — and particularly of Northern France — was Philip of Valois, the first cousin of the king, Charles IV., who had just died.
Charles IV. had been the son of King Philip IV., and Philip of Valois was the son of Charles of Valois, Philip IV.’s brother. Philip of Valois was therefore the eldest in unbroken male descent of the house.
It might be claimed (and it was claimed by Edward III.) that the daughters of elder brothers and their issue should count before the sons of younger brothers. Now there were two female heiresses or their issue present as against Philip of Valois. Charles IV., the king just dead, had a sister Isabella, and Isabella was the mother of Edward III. of England.
But an elder brother to Charles IV., namely, Louis X., had himself left a daughter, who was now the Queen of Navarre.
If this principle that the daughter or the issue of the daughter of an elder brother should count before the male issue of a younger brother had been granted in its entirety, Edward would have had no claim, because this elder brother of Charles IV., Louis X., had had issue — that daughter, Joan, the wife of the King of Navarre. So Edward qualified this first general principle, that one could inherit through women, by another principle, to wit, that, though the claim to the throne should proceed through the daughters of elder brothers rather than through the sons of younger ones, yet the throne could itself only actually be held by a male!
By this tortuous combination Edward III. advanced his claim. His mother had been the grand-daughter of Philip III. of France, and he was a male. Her father was the elder brother of Philip of Valois’ father, so he claimed before Philip of Valois.
The whole scheme is apparent from the following table: —
But, I repeat, we must not take Edward’s political claim too seriously. His real object was not so much to establish himself upon the throne of France and to create a great French-speaking united monarchy of French and British under the single rule of the Plantagenets, as to try a great adventure and to see what would come of it.
It was this that gave to Edward’s wars the character not of campaigns with a fixed object, but Great Raids, the very successes of which were unexpected and only half fruitful. It was this, again, which made him so uncertain and vacillating as to how he should use those successes when they came; which made him suggest now this, now that basis for peace after each victory, but never to insist very particularly, however surprising and thorough his work in the field, upon the French throne.
It was this, again, which gave to the actual results of his battles haphazard consequences, as it were, the most notable and permanent of which was the English hold upon Calais. And it was this which always left so huge a disproportion between the object he in theory desired to obtain and the forces with which he set out to attain it. To sum up, we shall only understand the victory of Crécy and the succeeding twin victory of Poitiers ten years later, if we conceive of the whole business as something of a tournament rather than a true political or even dynastic struggle.
Further, we must always remember that the leaders upon both sides came of one society, were of one speech and of one manner, often closely related in blood. We must remember that it was no desertion for a French lord to serve the King of England, and that even brothers would be found (as were the two Harcourts) honourably attached, according to the ideas of the time, to opposing forces.
Beneath this social aspect of the wars there was, of course, the growing national sentiment of the French and of the English. Most of the men who fought against Edward at Crécy, especially of the obscure men, thought of Paris as the only possible seat of authority, and of the Valois as their only possible king. All the Archers at Crécy, and many of the squires there — and a good half even of the forces at Poitiers — were English-speaking, and had no experience of life save that confined to this island, up to the moment when they set out for the Great Raids upon the Continent.
As the Hundred Years’ War proceeded, as it approached its second phase in which Henry V. was actually successful in obtaining the Crown of France, or rather the reversion of it, the national feeling was growing rapidly upon either side, and by the time of Joan of Arc’s campaign and of the subsequent loss of Normandy by the Plantagenets, everyone outside the small governing class of either country had come to think of the business as a national one upon either side. But with Crécy it was not so, and we must approach the military problems of Crécy with the political provision in mind that the whole affair of that battle and of its immediate successors was a feudal occupation — one had almost said pastime — engaged within the circle of that widespread French-speaking nobility, common to and intermarried between Gaul and Britain, which, for three hundred years, ruled society from the Grampians to the Mediterranean.
II. THE CAMPAIGN OF CRÉCY
THE CAMPAIGN OF Crécy took place within a district of France contained by an east and west base 200 miles in length and an eastern border north and south 160 miles in length, and sketched in the map opposite.
The rectangular parallelogram so formed is nearly equally divided between land and sea, the south-eastern half being a portion of Northern France, and the north-western half the English Channel. The land half is thus roughly triangular, having Paris at its extreme south-eastern corner, Calais at its extreme north-eastern, the neighbourhood of Avranches with St Malo Bay at its south-western corner. It includes part of the provinces of Normandy, the Ile de France, Picardy and Artois, and part, or all, of the modern departments of the Manche, Orne, Calvados, Eure, Seine-et-Oise, Seine, Seine-Inférieure, Oise, Somme, and Pas-de-Calais.
It will be seen that this territory is nearly evenly divided by the River Seine, and the campaign of Crécy is also divided by that river in the sense that the English advance took place wholly to the west of it, and the English retreat wholly to the east of it.
The campaign, as a whole, resolves itself (up to and including the Battle of Crécy, which is the subject of this book, and excluding the continuation of the march after Crécy, and the capture of Calais) into an advance from the Channel coast to Paris, and a retreat from Paris to the Channel again, the two portions being divided by the crossing of the Seine at Poissy. The advance leaves the coast at the summit of that projection of Normandy called the Cotentin, and proceeds a little south of east towards Paris, the walls of which are reached by its outermost skirmishers, while the main army crosses the Seine at Poissy. The retreat is effected from Poissy northward to the victorious field of Crécy, and later from Crécy, on the same line, to the siege and capture of Calais.
The time occupied from the day of landing to the day of the Battle of Crécy inclusive, is but forty-six days, of which not quite two-thirds are taken up by advance, and rather more than a third by the retreat. The English troops landed on Wednesday, July 12th, 1346. They crossed the Seine at Poissy upon August 14th. They fought at Crécy upon Saturday, August 26th.
The total distance traversed by the main body in these two limbs of the campaign is instructive as showing the leisure of the first part, its advance, and the precipitancy of the second part, its retreat.
The distance by road as the army marched from St Vaast, where it landed, across the river at Poissy, and so to Crécy, was a total of 345 miles. Of this the first part, or advance, was 215, the second part, or retreat, 130. The first part occupied, counting the day of landing and the day of crossing at Poissy, not less than 34 days, while the latter portion or retreat of 130 miles, including the day of battle itself, took up not more than 12 days, or, excluding the battle, only 11. The average rate of the advance was not more than 6¼ miles a day, the average rate of the retreat very nearly double.
It must not be imagined, of course, that the advance took place in prompt and regular fashion. It was, as we shall see, irresolute for many days, and irregular throughout, while the retreat was a hurried one upon all but one day of which the troops were pressed to their uttermost. But the contrast is sufficient to show the difference between the frames of mind in which Edward III. took up the somewhat hazy plan of an “invasion,” which was really no more than a raid, and that in which he attempted to extricate himself from the consequences of his original vagueness of intent. In the first, he was as slow as he was uncertain; in the second, he was as precipitate as he was determined.
In the last days of June, 1346, Edward III. had gathered a force, small indeed for the purpose which he seems to have had in mind, but large under the conditions of transport which he could command. It was probably just under 20,000 actual fighting men. At this point, however, as it is of material interest to the rest of the story, we must pause to consider what these units meant. When we say a little less (or it may have been a little more) than 20,000 fighting men, we mean that the “men-at-arms” (that is, fully equipped, mounted men, for the most part gentlemen), together with not 4000 Welsh and Border Infantry, and approximately 10,000 Archers, bring us near to that total.
But an army of the fourteenth century was accompanied by a number of servants, at least equal to its mounted armed gentry: men who saw to the equipment and service of the knights. No man at arms was fit to pass through a campaign without at least one aide, if only for armouring; and for all the doubtfulness of the records, we know that the Yeoman Archers were also served by men who carried a portion of their equipment, and who saw to their supply in action. It is impossible to make any computation at all accurate of the extra rations this organisation involved, nor of what proportion of these uncounted units could be used in the fighting. We are perhaps safe in saying that the total number who landed were not double the fighting men actually counted, and that Edward’s whole force certainly was much more than 20,000 but almost as certainly not 40,000 men. We must imagine, all told, perhaps 5000 horses to have been assembled with the force for transport over sea: others would be seized for transport on the march. It is remarkable that Edward carefully organised certain small auxiliary bodies, smiths, artificers, etc., and took with him five cannon.
It was not until Tuesday, the 11th of July, that the very large fleet which the King had pressed for the service was able to sail from the Solent and Spithead. It crossed in the night with a northerly breeze, and appeared upon the following morning off St Vaast.
St Vaast lies in a little recess of the north-eastern coast of the Cotentin, protected from all winds blowing from the outer Channel, and only open to such seas as can be raised in the estuary of the Seine by a south-easterly breeze. It was therefore, seeing the direction of the wind under which they had sailed, upon a calm shore that this considerable expedition disembarked. We may presume, under such circumstances, that though Edward had announced his decision of sailing for southern France, the point of disembarkation had been carefully settled, and that a course had been laid for it.
A small force composed of local levies had been raised to resist the landing. It was able to effect nothing, and was easily dispersed by a body of the invaders under the Earl of Salisbury, to whom that duty had been assigned.
For nearly a week the army rested where it had landed, sending out detachments to pillage. Barfleur was sacked, Cherbourg was attacked, and the countryside was ravaged.
It was upon Tuesday, July the 18th, that the main body set out upon its march to the south and east.
No considerable body could meet them for weeks, and all the French Feudal Force was engaged near Paris or to south of it, and would take weeks to concentrate northward. Edward was free to raid.
The attempt to construct an accurate time-table of the march which Edward III. took through Normandy during his advance up the Seine as far as Poissy, and thence northward in retreat towards Picardy and the sea, has only recently been attempted.
Froissart, that vivid and picturesque writer who, both from his volume and his style, was long taken as the sole general authority for this war, is hopeless for the purpose of constructing a map or of setting down accurate military details. He had but the vaguest idea of how the march of an army should be organised, and he was profoundly indifferent to geography. He added to or subtracted from numbers with childlike simplicity, and in the honourable motive of pleasing his readers or patrons.
When, quite in the last few years, an attempt at accuracy in the plotting out of this march was first made, it was based upon not Froissart’s but contemporary records, and of these by far the most important are Baker’s Chronicle and the Accounts of the Kitchen, which happen to have been saved.
Baker’s Chronicle was finally edited by Professor Maunde Thompson in 1889. The work is a standard work and generally regarded as the best example of its kind. In making his notes upon that document, Professor Maunde Thompson compared the halting-places given by Baker and other authorities with those of the Accounts of the Kitchen, and established for the first time something like an exact record. But many apparent discrepancies still remained and several puzzling anomalies. I have attempted in what follows to reconstruct the whole accurately, and I think I have done so up to and including the passage of the Somme from Boismont, a point not hitherto established.
First, I would point out that of all the few bases of evidence from which we can work, that of the Clerk of the Kitchen’s accounts is by far the most valuable.
It should be a canon in all historical work that the unconscious witness is the most trustworthy.
I mean by “unconscious” evidence the evidence afforded by one who is not interested in the type of action which one is attempting to establish. Suppose, for instance, you wanted to know on exactly what day a Prime Minister of England left London for Paris upon some important mission. His biographer who sets out to write an interesting political life and to insist upon certain motives in him, will say it is the 20th of June, because Lady So-and-So mentions it in her diary, and because he finds a letter written by the Prime Minister in Paris on the 21st. Perhaps it is more important to the picturesqueness of the detail that the journey should be a hurried one, and without knowing it the biographer is biased in that direction. There may be twenty documents from the pens of people concerned with affairs of State which would lead us to infer that he left London on the 20th, and perhaps only five that would lead us to infer that he left on an earlier day, and, weighing the position and responsibility of the witnesses, the biographer will decide for the twenty.
But if we come across a postcard written from Calais by the Prime Minister’s valet to a fellow servant at home asking for the Prime Minister’s overcoat to be sent on, and if he mentions the weather which we find to correspond to the date, the 19th, and if further we have the postmark of the 19th on the postcard, then we can be absolutely certain that the majority of the fuller accounts were wrong, and that the Prime Minister crossed not on the 20th but on the 19th, for we have a converging set of independent witnesses none of whom have any reason to make the journey seem later than it was, all concerned with trivial duties, and each unconscious of the effect upon history of their evidence. It would be extraordinary if the servant had forged a date, and if we suppose him to have made a mistake, we are corrected by the equally trivial points of the postmark and the French stamp and the mention of the weather.
So it is with this manuscript record of the King’s Kitchen expenses and of the several halting-places at which they were incurred. Wherever there is conflict, it must override all other evidence.
The Clerk of the Kitchen, to whom we owe this very valuable testimony, was one William of Retford. His accounts were kept in a beautifully neat, but not very legible, fourteenth-century hand, upon long sheets of parchment, and are now luckily preserved for our inspection at the Record Office.
With every day’s halt the place where victuals were bought for the King, that is, where the King’s household lay, has its name marked upon these accounts; but unfortunately the abbreviations used in the MS., coupled with the difficulty of distinguishing the short strokes [e.g. m from ni, n from u, etc.] upon parchment which time has faded, and on the top of that the indifference of the scribe to the foreign names themselves, do not render the task particularly easy. The MS. has not, I believe, ever been published. I have spent a good deal of time over it, and I will give my conclusions as best I can.
The main army stayed at St Vaast, as I have said, for six days, that is, until Tuesday, July 18th, 1346. This was presumably done to recruit the horses and the men. Foraging parties went out in the interval, but the bulk of the force did not move.
On that Tuesday it struck inland for Valognes, a march of 10½ miles. No proper coast-road existed even as late as the eighteenth century, let alone in the Middle Ages, and an army making for Paris or for the crossing of the Seine could not choose but to go thus slightly out of its way.
From Valognes there is a two days’ march to Carentan, which town was the lowest crossing-place of the River Douves. We may naturally expect the halt between the two to have been about midway, and this would give us a town called Ste Mère l’Eglise, but the Clerk of the Kitchen puts down St Come du Mont. We conclude, therefore, that the King’s staff did not follow the great road which had existed from Roman times, but went by bypaths to the east of it where St Come du Mont lies. It was a long day’s march of over fourteen miles, but the next day’s march, that of Thursday the 20th, to Carentan was a short one of not more than eight or nine (allowing in both cases for the windings of the side-road). On Friday the 21st the King lay at Pont Hébert. This is another example of something very like a long march followed by a short one upon the morrow. St Lô was the halting-place of the Saturday, and Pont Hébert is but four miles from St Lô. Of a total, therefore, of nearly seventeen miles, over thirteen are covered upon one day, and but four upon the next.
At this point it is worth noticing the character of all the advance with which we are dealing. Edward had been blamed for sluggishness. He was not so much sluggish as apparently without plan. He did not know quite what he was going to do next. His general intention seems to have been to make sooner or later for his allies in Flanders, and meanwhile to take rich towns and loot them, and to bring pressure upon the King of France by ravaging distant and populous territories which the French army could not rapidly reach. He therefore often makes a good and steady marching in this advance, but he also lingers uselessly at towns, and intercalates very short marches between the long ones. Thus he deliberately struck inland to St Lô on his way to Caen, because St Lô was a fine fat booty, instead of making by the short road which runs from Carentan through Bayeux. The whole character of the advance clearly betrays the point I have already made, that this early part of the Hundred Years’ War was essentially a series of raids.
At this stage it is well to point out to the reader two difficulties which have confused historians. The first is the fact that the Clerk of the Kitchen often takes a shot at a French name which he has either heard inaccurately or which he attempts to spell phonetically, so that we have to interpret him not infrequently to make sense of his record.
The second is the fact that the chronicler will give some particular spot quite consonant with the marching powers of troops for one day, but different from that given by the Clerk of the Kitchen.
This apparent discrepancy is due to the fact that an army marches if it can upon parallel roads involving various halting-places for various sections of it on the same night. An army upon a raid such as this also throws out foraging parties and detachments, which leave its main body for the purposes of observation or of plunder.
Again, we must always regard the King’s household (and therefore the Kitchen Accounts) as moving with what may be called “the staff.” Often, therefore, it will go much faster than the rest of the army, while at other times it will lie behind or to one side of it. Thus, at the very end of this campaign you have a transference of the King’s quarters, twenty miles to the north in one day, which would be a terribly long march for the army as a whole, and which, as a fact, we can discover on other evidence the army as a whole did not take.
With so much said, we can proceed to build up an exact account of the advance and the retreat.
Upon Sunday the 23rd of August Edward advanced from St Lô to a place which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls “Sevances.” The spelling is inaccurate. The place intended is Sept Vents, twelve miles to the south and east of St Lô. But other portions of the army halted elsewhere in the neighbourhood, as we know from Baker. The next halt, that of the 24th, is at Torteval, only five miles away, but a portion of the army got south of Fontenay le Pesnel, which the King did not reach till the 25th, and which the Clerk calls “Funtenay Paynel.” Three days are thus taken between St Lô and Caen, and the whole army arrives before the latter large town, the capital of West Normandy, upon Wednesday, July 26th.
The town of Caen was not properly defended. It had no regular walls, and was a very rich prey indeed. The Constable of France and the Chamberlain were in the town, and the castle was held by a handful (300) of Genoese mercenaries. There was an armed force of militia and of knights in the streets of the town, of what exact size we do not know. The Prince of Wales with the advance guard occupied the outskirts of the city which lie beyond the branches of the Orne (the northern branch now runs mainly in sewers under the streets from the Hôtel de Ville to the Church of St Peter). There was sharp fighting at the bridge, at one moment of which the King ordered a retreat, but the Earl of Warwick disobeyed the order. The King followed him, and the bridge was taken. There was considerable slaughter in the streets of the city; the Constable and the Chamberlain were taken prisoners, and about one hundred of the wounded knights. The English loss, which was not heavy, fell mainly upon the Archers and Spearmen, and the total, including wounded, was but five hundred, and was mainly due to the resistance of the inhabitants of the houses. The town was given over to pillage, and Edward thought of burning it, but was restrained. It is characteristic of the march that a delay of four days from the morning of the 5th was occupied in the loot of Caen, from which town (in communication with the sea by its river) Edward sent back his plunder on board the Fleet which he dismissed.
The army marched out of Caen on Monday, the 31st of July, and undertook its three days’ march to Lisieux, the next rich town upon this random advance, now deprived of support from the sea. Edward probably intended to force some passage of the Seine, preferably, it may be surmised, at Rouen, or a little higher up, with the vague object of making for the north-east and Calais. We are not certain of this. It is more than possible that the capture of Calais later on in the campaign gave rise to the story that some such plan was intended. Anyhow, we get two halts and three marches between Caen and Lisieux, a distance of only twenty-five miles, which could easily have been accomplished in two days had there been a really definite plan in the commander’s head. We may be pretty certain that there was not.
The halts of the King himself on the 31st of July and the 1st of August were made at two places which read in the MS. as “Treward,” and an abbreviated name which stands for “Leopurtuis.” The first of these is Troarn at the crossing of the Dives river. Other forces halted on that night at Agences, four miles to the south. The second is Léaupartie, a mile or so from Rumenise, where one other column halted, while a second column camped about five miles to the south. Lisieux was entered upon the 2nd of August after a march of ten miles on the part of the King, and of eleven and twelve on the part of the other two bodies.
At Lisieux two Cardinals who were despatched to offer terms met King Edward and proposed this arrangement to complete the war: that he should have the Duchy of Aquitaine upon the same tenure as his ancestors had held it. He refused those terms, and, after wasting a day at Lisieux, continued his march eastward.
Leaving Lisieux on the morning of the 4th, he pitched his tent that evening at Duramelle, a march of nine miles, with at least one column a mile ahead at Le Teil. On Saturday the 5th he got something better out of his troops, or at any rate out of the vanguard, and made something like seventeen miles to Neubourg.
I confess here to a very considerable doubt. The entry in the Accounts of the Kitchen is hopelessly misspelt, but the “Lineubourg” does not correspond to any other possible place, and Le Neubourg would be a very convenient halting-place for the King himself, well provisioned and lodged. We cannot believe, of course, that the army covered the full distance, but there is no reason why the King and his household should not have pushed on ahead with mounted troops. What makes it more probable is that the King spent the whole day of Sunday the 6th at Le Neubourg, presumably for the bulk of the army to come up and make two days’ march of the twenty odd miles which the most distant contingents had to cover.
It was on the next day, Monday the 7th, that he reached the Seine, and approached that river, as we may presume, with the object of crossing it. It was a ten-mile march, and the whole force could be on the banks before evening at Elbœuf. But the bridges were broken and it was impossible. It was from this point of Elbœuf that the raid turned to follow the valley of the Seine up towards Paris, always seeking some crossing-place, and always finding the bridges broken. The nearer he got to Paris the more dangerous became Edward’s position, and the larger grew the forces of the French King in the neighbourhood of the capital which threatened him.
Tuesday the 8th was spent in ravaging the country. Pont de L’Arche was burnt in revenge for the destruction of its bridge; a detachment went round by Louviers, which was looted, but the King himself went forward by the river bank and lodged that night at Vaudreuil, ten miles on from Elbœuf (which the Clerk of the Kitchen calls “Pount-Vadreel”). The bulk of the force halted at Léry, a mile or two behind.
Upon Wednesday, August 9th, Edward lay at Angreville (the “Langville” of the accounts), just south of Gaillon, and on Thursday the 10th, having burnt Vernon, where again he found the bridge cut, at Jeufose, rather more than eleven miles march up the river. (“Frevose,” as I read it in the MS.) His next hope for a bridge was at Mantes, and he was getting perilously near the heart of the country and the gathering French forces. That bridge was nine or ten miles along the road. He found it cut like all the others.
He was already across the borders of Normandy, and anxiety must have been growing upon him. He seized Mantes after some resistance. It was useless to his purpose, and he hurried on another six miles to Epone (“Appone” in the Accounts), making that day a really long march in his natural haste and compelling his escort to the same — sixteen miles. But he both fatigued his main army in that attempt, and it also lost some time in storming a fortified house on “the White Rock,” because the next day he evidently had to wait for stragglers to come up, advancing but a couple of miles to Aubergenville, where we find him upon Saturday the 12th. Upon the 13th, the Sunday, he got his opportunity. A march of only eight miles brought the host to Poissy, and there, though the bridge was cut, the stone piles upon which its trestles had stood were uninjured. Edward at once began to take advantage of this and to put his artificers to work. All that Sunday and all the Monday the task proceeded, and during this delay parties were despatched to ravage. They burnt St Germain and St Cloud. An advance party entered the Bois de Boulogne. But there could, of course, be no thought of an attack on Paris with so small a force and without base or provision.
By Tuesday the 15th of August these ravaging parties were recalled, and the whole host was streaming across the repaired bridge at Poissy.
This day, Tuesday the 15th, is strategically the turning point of the campaign. In an attempt to note in history no more than the great raid of Edward up to the very walls of the Capital, and his rapid and successful retreat, the crossing of Poissy would form the central term of our story. As it happened, however, the great chance which occurred to Edward in that retreat upon the field of Crécy, and his magnificent use of it, has eclipsed the earlier story, and for many the interest of the campaign as a whole, and the importance of this rapid seizure and repair of Poissy, is missed.
While his army was crossing the river, Edward received the challenge of the King of France. It was native indeed to the time: a sort of tournament-challenge, offering the English monarch battle upon any one of five days, in that great plain between Paris and St Germains which the last siege of the French capital has rendered famous in military history. The French feudal levies for which Philip had been waiting were now fast gathering, especially those for which he had had to wait longest, the main forces which had been away down south in Guienne. Edward most wisely refused the challenge, for it would have been against great odds, and to accept, though consonant to the spirit of the time, would have been a ludicrously unmilitary proceeding. In place of such acceptation he sent back false news that he would meet Philip far to the south. He then proceeded to cross the river and make the best haste he could back northwards to the sea. The French King found out the trick; a day and a half late he started in pursuit with his large and increasing host. That host was gathered at St Denis when on the Wednesday night, the 16th, Edward had got his men to Grisy, well north of Pontoise, and something like seventeen miles by cross roads from his hastily repaired bridge across the Seine. What followed was a fine feat of marching.
On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days, by the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles further north as the crow flies (and more like thirty by the roads), at Sommereux. Edward halted at Troussures (of which the clerk makes “Trusserux”) to see it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the 20th, he was at Camps in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push of fifteen miles for mass of the force, and of more than twenty for himself and his staff.
At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that tremendous feat of marching (and what it meant anyone who has covered close on fifty miles in three days under military conditions will know — there are few such) the great host of Philip was pounding at his heels.
Now, if the reader will glance at the map at the beginning of this section, he will see that just as Edward had been under a necessity to cross the Seine in the first part of his raid, he was now under a still greater necessity of crossing the Somme. A force much larger than his own was pressing him against that river into a sort of corner, and his only chance of safety lay in reaching the Straits of Dover through the county of Ponthieu, which lay beyond the stream. Every effort had been made to press the march. The force appears to have been divided for this purpose and to have marched in parallel columns, and the single case of marauding (the burning of the Abbey of St Lucien outside Beauvais) had been punished with the death of twenty men.
To turn and meet his pursuers (who were evidently in contact with him through their scouts) would have meant, so long as he was on this side of the Somme, no chance of retreat in case of defeat.
Every mile he went to the north the Somme valley, already a broad expanse of marsh upon his flank, grew broader and more difficult. The decision, therefore, which Edward took at this critical moment, at once perilous and masterly, showed that rapid grasp of a situation which, for all his lack of a general plan during this campaign, this great soldier could boast. In the first place, he himself rides forward no less than twenty full miles to the village of Acheux. He has behind him the whole army strung out in separate bodies parallel to the Somme. Himself, from the head of that long line of twenty miles, commands all that should be done along it. He next orders separate bodies to approach the valley and seek a crossing, first, if possible, up river, then, as they fail, lower and lower down, and each to be ready as it is foiled at each bridge to fall back north in concentration, and to group in gathering numbers further and further down the stream, and near to his place at the head of the line, Acheux.
The whole thing is a fine piece of sudden decision, and is at once a combination of the rapidity of the retreat and of the attempt to force the river, in this the fourth week of August 1346, which so nearly brought disaster to the English force.
Three days, the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, were taken up in this manœuvre. The English flung themselves successively against the bridges: Picquigny, Long Pré, Pont Rémy. The hardest and first push was at Picquigny at the beginning or southernmost of the effort. The body detached for that effort was beaten back.
It was the same with the next blow lower down at Long Pré: the same lower down still at Pont Rémy. At no bridge were the English successful. Everywhere the valley was impassable to them, and as they attempted one place after another down the stream with its broadening marshland and now tidal water, to find a traverse seemed impossible.
At last, then, upon Wednesday the 23rd of August the whole host was gathered, foiled, round its King at Acheux. He marched on a few miles to Boismont, going on his way through Mons, and there, as it chanced, picking up a prisoner who proved invaluable: for that prisoner betrayed the ford.
As the English army lay at Boismont that night of the 23rd, the broad estuary of the Somme stretched to the north of them with no more bridges across it, cut or uncut, and apparently no fate but a choice between a desperate action against superior numbers (nor any retreat open) and surrender.
Edward’s only chance lay in the discovery across that mile of land (flooded at high tide, and at low tide a morass) of some kind of ford. Such a ford existed. With difficulty, but in the nick of time, it was discovered and used; the French force defending it upon the further side was overthrown, and the retreat and its dependent victory of Crécy were made possible.
Edward had had good faith that “God and Our Lady, and St George would find him a passage,” and a passage he found.
The crossing of that ford and the advance to Crécy field must form the matter of our next section, “The Preliminaries of the Action.”
The reader will note that in the latter part of the above I have wholly abandoned the more usual account of the last three days of the retreat from Poissy to the Somme, and that the reconstruction I have attempted includes several matters hitherto not suggested in any recent history, and is in contradiction with the view which has hitherto been most generally accepted.
The evidence upon which I rely for this description of the retreat on Acheux and subsequently on Boismont will I hope be found set out in detail in the number of the English Historical Review for October 1912. Meanwhile, I owe it to my readers, who may use this book for purposes of school or university work, to state briefly the way in which the matter has hitherto been set forth, and my reason for adopting this new version.
Most Froissart MSS., which have misled history in this regard, say that King Edward was at Oisemont upon the evening of the 23rd. Lingard, the father of all modern English historical writing, and a man whom every historian begins by reading (though very few go on by acknowledging him), expanded this mere reference into a whole phrase, and wrote that Edward “had the good fortune to capture the town of Oisemont, and so find a night’s lodging.” A neglect of military conditions, or of the map, or of both, has perpetuated the error. Edward was never at Oisemont. The argument against it, and in favour of Boismont, is dependent upon a number of converging proofs, which I will very briefly recapitulate.
(1) The MSS. of Froissart are none of them original.
(2) They vary among themselves with regard to this particular word, most of them giving “Oisemont,” but one giving “Nysemont.”
(3) Even where all the MSS. agree with regard to a place, and where Froissart certainly mentioned it, he is wildly inaccurate, evidently going by hearsay, and often by a doubtful memory: thus he has no idea on which side of the Seine the town of Gisors stands, and he calls the village of Fontaine a “strong town,” etc.
(4) Even were he an accurate, he is not a contemporary authority. He had to depend entirely upon older accounts which we can prove that he misread, or did not read at all, but only heard spoken of, and very often botched horribly.
(5) In this particular campaign he is particularly haphazard. Thus, upon the all-important point of the order in which the various crossings of the Somme were attempted, he gets them at sixes and sevens, describing the first last and the last first. He was a man always attending to picturesqueness of incident, and one who thought exactitude very negligible.
Those are the five points which weaken any positive evidence which Froissart may give. But it is the evidence independent of Froissart, and of his accuracy or inaccuracy, which is so overwhelming.
(1) Oisemont lies actually ten miles back from Abbeville upon the line of the retreat. To occupy Oisemont was to incur a deliberate running into that danger which it was all Edward’s effort to avoid.
(2) We know, as a matter of fact, that Philip, the King of France, was before the night of the 23rd abreast of Abbeville; a retreat upon Oisemont would therefore have been physically impossible to Edward.
(3) Oisemont would have involved keeping in touch with bodies ten, twelve, fifteen, and twenty miles distant, even if Oisemont had been occupied for two days, whereas the only mention we have of that occupation represents it as taking place on the 23rd.
These three points render it, as to two of them morally impossible, as to one of them physically, that Edward could have been at Oisemont upon that night. But they are negative: we have positive points which clinch the whole matter. These are: —
(1) Edward marched with his whole army to the ford or it could not all have crossed, therefore it was concentrated before he marched. The march was a very short one. Even Froissart says that “he started at the break of day” and reached the ford “a little after sunrise.” It must also have been short because we know as a matter of positive history that the soldiers who took that morning march waited some time for the tide to ebb, then fought a sharp and successful action upon the northern bank of the river, and again on the same day stormed certainly one and possibly two defended places: also that their total march before the night, and beyond the river, was quite ten miles, including the actions just mentioned.
(2) We also know that there was an assault on St Valery, which was actually twenty miles from Oisemont by the nearest roads!
(3) We know that the traitor was captured at Mons, which, if Edward had been at Oisemont, would have meant that someone had not only caught him at that great distance from Oisemont, but had brought him back (a total ride of twenty-four miles) without previous knowledge that he was capable of the valuable information he only gave later and after offers.
(4) There is no contemporary mention of Oisemont, but we do positively know from contemporary evidence that the King’s household was, and had been for three days, at Acheux.
Now all this combined is quite conclusive. Oisemont is impossible. Boismont satisfies every part of the evidence. An hour’s riding from it permits the attack on St Valery. Mons, where the traitor comes from, is only two miles off; the march from Boismont to the Ford is just such an advance as would take the dawn and sunrise of a day — whereas the advance from Oisemont, impossible for all those other reasons, would involve fourteen to fifteen miles of marching, and is utterly incompatible with the idea of two or possibly three heavy fights, and the long march succeeding it.
One last piece of evidence would be conclusive even if we had not all the rest. There is contemporary record of the Mayor of Abbeville watching from the heights of Caubert Hill the English army streaming northward to concentrate round the advanced position of the King. From that height such an advance could be discerned crossing the plateau which leads to Acheux, to Mons, and to Boismont. You could no more see a concentration on Oisemont from it than you could see a concentration on Greenwich from Camden Hill.
Sketch showing Estuary of the Somme at Blanchetaque in 1346
III. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
THE MANŒUVRES OF the French and English armies preliminary to the Battle of Crécy are so instructive upon many points, involved movements so hazardous and so complex, gave rise to so sharp a series of engagements, and form in general so large a part of our subject, that they merit a far larger study than do the approaches to most battles.
They illustrate the comparative lack of thought-out plan which characterised medieval warfare; they afford a contrast between the compact and fairly well organised command of Edward III., and the chaotic host of the King of France. They show the effect upon the military profession of a time without maps and without any properly managed system of intelligence; and, above all, they show the overwhelming part which chance plays in all armed conflict between forces of the same civilisation and approximately the same aptitudes.
The situation upon Wednesday the 23rd of August (at which point we concluded the survey of Edward III.’s great raid through Normandy, and of his retreat down the line of the Somme) is already known to the reader, and will be the clearer if he will look at the map upon page 28.
Edward had made a very fine march indeed, not only averaging something like twelve miles a day, or more, but arranging for expeditions to leave the main host during the latter part of this rapid retreat, and attempt to force, at various points, the passages of the River Somme. We have seen that he was compelled, if possible, to force a passage because he would otherwise find himself shut up between the Somme and the sea, with a much superior force cutting him off to the south. In case of defeat he would have no line of retreat, and even in case of success, unless that success were overwhelming, he would find himself strategically stalemated, still caught in a trap, and still doomed to await the next onslaught of the enemy. We have further seen that with every mile that he proceeded towards the sea his ability to cross the Somme decreased. The river runs through a marshy valley which, even to-day, is a mass of ponds and water meadows, and which then was a belt of marsh. It is bounded on either side by fairly steep banks, rising to heights of 60, 70, and 100 feet, and inland to 150, between which the flat swamped land grows broader and broader as one approaches the sea. At Picquigny this level belt of swamp through which the Somme twines is quite 500 yards across. At Long Pré it is nearer 800, below Abbeville it is 1000, and at the point whence Edward overlooked it when he was halted at bay on the evening of that 23rd of August, it is well over 2000 yards in width and nearer 2500.
Boismont, a village climbing the southern bank of the estuary, was the spot on which the King had gathered the army upon the evening of that Wednesday, and, not a day’s march behind him, the most advanced mounted men of his pursuers, with the King of France among them, were camping. The peril was extreme, and an issue from that peril as extremely doubtful.
It was hopeless for the army to attempt to retrace its steps to the upper river. To have done so would have been to march with the flank of its march exposed to an immediate advance of French forces, and almost certainly to be caught in column; and Edward had already suffered such repulses before Long Pré, Pont Rémy, and Picquigny as left him no hope for success should he attempt these bridges again. His only chance was to find, if it were possible, some practicable ford across the broad estuary itself that lay before him.
The moon was within a few hours of the full that night, the highest of the spring-tides was making — in the open sea they were at their full height of 25 feet, an hour before midnight, — and though where he would strike the estuary he might hope for a tide more tardy, Edward had before him as he watched, his only avenue of escape, a great flood that appeared to deny him all access to the further shore.
Every effort was made to discover from local knowledge whether any passage existed. The highest rewards were offered, in vain, for in all that countryside a feeling which if not national was at least strongly opposed to the invader, forbade treason, and the near presence of the French King’s great force was an active reminder of the punishment that would attend it. Late in this period of suspense a guide was found.
A man of the name of Gobin Agache, who had been taken prisoner by the army, was that guide. His was that “invaluable” capture which I mentioned in the last section. He was a peasant of those parts, and a native of Mons-en-Vimieux, through which the army had marched from Acheux to Boismont. He yielded to temptation when all others had refused. He was promised a hundred pieces of gold (say £500 of our money), his own liberty, and that of twenty of his companions. For that price he sold himself, and promised to discover to the King and to his army the only practicable ford across the estuary.
Just at the end of the night the host set out and marched during the first hours of the moonlit Wednesday morning along the old road which still leads over the hills that separate Boismont from Saigneville and marked the southern bank of the valley. The marshalling was long; the full ordering of the force, now that it was all gathered together and marching along one narrow way, inexpeditious; and the two miles that separated the head of its column from the neighbouring village were not traversed by its last units, nor was the whole body drawn up at the foot of the hills against the water until the sun of that late August day was beginning to rise, and to show more clearly the great sheet of flood-water and the steep distant bank beyond it.
The place to which their guide had led them was the entry to the ford of Blanchetaque, a name famous in the military history of this country. Hidden beneath the waters which, though now ebbing strongly, were still far too deep for any attempt at a crossing, ran the causeway. By it, upon the faith of the traitor, they could trust to gaining the opposite shore. As the racing ebb lowered more and more, the landward approaches of that causeway appeared in a lengthening white belt pointing right across towards the further bank, and assured them that they had not been betrayed. It was built of firm marl in the midst of that grassy slime which marks the edges of the Somme valley, and they had but to wait for low water to be certain that they could make the passage. Beyond, upon the northern shore which showed in a high, black band (for it was steep) against the broadening day, they could distinguish a force that had been gathered to oppose them.
It was mid-morning before the ebb was at its lowest, and they could begin to march “twelve abreast, and with the water no more than knee-high,” across the dwindled stream now at its lowermost of slack water, and running near the further bank with a breadth not a fifth of what it had been at the flood. But before proceeding further and describing the assault shore, I would lay before my readers the process by which I have established the exact locality of this famous ford. It has been a matter of considerable historical debate. It is and will always remain a matter of high historical interest, and this must be my excuse for digressing upon the evidence which, I think it will be admitted, finally establishes the exact trajectory of Blanchetaque.
The site of Blanchetaque is one which nature and art have combined to render obscure: nature, because a ford when its purpose disappears and it is no longer kept up, that is, an artificial ford, tends to disappear more rapidly than any other monument; art, because the old estuary of the Somme has of recent years been further and further reclaimed. It was, when I first began studying this district, already banked across below Boismont, and, if I am not mistaken, the great railway bridge right across the very mouth of the river has, in the last few months, been made the boundary of the reclaimed land.
Now, Blanchetaque was an artificial ford. We know this because there is no marl formation near by, and could be none forming a narrow rib across the deep alluvial mud of the estuary; the marl, then, can only have been brought from some little distance. It is not only an artificial hardening which we have to deal with, but one in the midst of a tidal estuary where a violent current swept the work for centuries. Finally, the cause for keeping the ford in some sort of repair early disappeared in modern times before the process of reclaiming the land of the estuary began. Numerous modern bridges, coupled with the great development of modern roads, permitted the crossing of the Somme at and below Abbeville: notably the Bridge of Cambron. The railway, the growth of the tonnage of steamers, and other causes, led to the decline of the little riverside town of Port — formerly the secure head of marine navigation upon the river and largely the cause that Blanchetaque was kept in repair.
Again, the reclamation of the land has been carried out with a French thoroughness only too successful in destroying the contours of the old river bed. In the sketch map on I have indicated to the best of my ability the channel of the river at low tide as it appears to have been before reclamation began, but even this can barely be traced upon the levelled, heightened, and now fruitful pastures.
It is all this which has made the exact emplacement of Blanchetaque so difficult to ascertain, and has led to the controversies upon its site.
Now, if we will proceed to gather all forms of evidence, we shall find that they converge upon one particular line of trajectory which in the end we can regard as completely established.
We have in the first place (and most valuable of all, of course) tradition. Local traditions luckily carefully gathered as late as 1840, but the indications of the peasants pointing out the traditional site of the then ruined way were, unfortunately, not marked on a map. What was done was to give an indication unfortunately not too precise, and to leave it on record that the northern end of the ford was “from 1200 to 1500 metres below Port.” This gives us a margin of possible error, not of 300 yards as might be supposed, but of more than double that distance, for Port itself is 500 yards in length from east to west. We can be certain, however, that so far as tradition goes we need not look more than a mile below Port for the ford, nor less than say half a mile from its last houses.
Fortunately, we have other convergent indications which can guide us with greater precision.
We must remember that, apart from the bringing of merchandise over to the neighbourhood of Port, the ford, which may, and most probably did, exist before Port became of any importance, led all the central traffic of the Vimieux country (which is the district on the left bank of the Somme) towards the Straits of Dover and their principal port at Boulogne.
Now, the way from the right bank of the Somme to Boulogne is interrupted by several streams, much the most marshy and broad of which is the Authie. The Romans bridged the Authie at Ad Pontes in the course of their great Trunk Road to Britain, and any way which led from the lowest ford over the Somme to Boulogne would have to join that great Trunk Road before or at the bridge if it were to take advantage, as commerce would have to do, of that sole passage of the very difficult and marshy Authie valley which can nowhere be crossed save upon a causeway. I have in a former page remarked upon the importance of Ad Pontes (the modern Ponches), and pointed out that it gives the whole county its name of Ponthieu. We must expect, therefore, any direct commercial way northward from the ford to make directly for Ponches. To strike the great Trunk Road higher up would be to go out of one’s way; to strike it lower down would be to strike the Authie Valley at an impassable point.
When an ancient way has disappeared, certain indications of its track, especially as that track may be presumed to be direct, survive, and among these are wayside tombs, parish boundaries, and mills or other places which, for the conveyance of heavy merchandise, are placed near such a road if possible. All these three kinds of indications are available in this particular case. The medieval mill which was so important a monopoly of the medieval community was not built in the most natural place for it, on the summit of the hill just above Port, but some thousand yards and more away down the river bank, and over against it is a group of tombs. Moreover, between the two runs the long north-western boundary of the parish or commune of Port which is prolonged in the boundary of the parish of Sailly. We have here, then, a convergence of proof which confirms the vaguer traditional site, for the end of this line upon the river, passing between the tombs and the old mill, strikes the bank within the limits of distance from Port which were set down in the local notes printed in 1840.
But there is more. The forming of successive embankments one below the other for the gradual reclamation of land in the Somme estuary was not an easy matter. They had to be strong to withstand a strong tide, and there was no good bottom to be found in the deep mud of the valley floor. It is a significant evidence of this difficulty that the embankments stand so far apart, and that the last has had to take advantage of the long-established work of the railway viaduct. It is therefore a legitimate conjecture that the hard bottom afforded by the old Blanchetaque would be made use of, and as a fact we find the principal embankment between Port and the sea coinciding exactly with the line established by the tombs, the parish boundaries, and the site of the mill.
There is even more than this. If we follow the present embankment across the estuary towards the southern bank, we find ourselves checked before reaching that bank by the now canalised and artificial straight ditch of the Somme. There is no bridge, but on the further side leading across the remaining 700 yards to the southern bank, a village road exactly continues the direction, and this road, older than the reclamation of the valley, is the last converging point clinching the argument.
It cannot be doubted that the road leading from Saigneville northward across the flat to the canal, and continued beyond the canal by the embankment, is the line of the old Blanchetaque.
Though the French army had been pursuing Edward during his march upon the left bank of the Somme, the possibility of his getting across the estuary had not been neglected, and a force had been detached to watch the right bank at the point where the only passage across the stream, Blanchetaque, touched that right bank.
Here one of Philip’s nobles, Godemard de Fay, was waiting with a considerable force to oppose the passage. The exact size of this force is not easy to determine, for it is variously stated, even by contemporary authorities, but we are fairly safe if we reckon it at more than 2000 and less than 4000 men, some hundreds of whom were mounted knights. In other words, it counted in “capital units” from one-sixth to one-eighth of Edward’s army, and, counting all fighting men against all fighting men, perhaps much the same proportion. There was sharp fighting, but it was defeated, principally through the action of the Archers. In Godemard’s command was a very considerable body of Genoese cross-bowmen. As we shall see when we come to the Battle of Crécy itself, this arm was gravely inferior in rapidity of fire, and possibly in range, to the English long-bow. The latter weapon could deliver three to the cross-bow’s one, and to this, coupled with the discipline of the English column, the success must be ascribed. Grave as was the balance of numbers against the French side, equal armament and equal discipline should have enabled it to prevail. The holding of a tête de pont with a smaller number properly deployed should always be possible against a larger column compelled to debouch from a narrow line, especially a line of such difficulty as a ford across a broad stream.
The action was a picturesque one, and the sight presented to a spectator watching it from the heights behind Godemard’s command must have been a picture vivid and well framed. One hundred mounted and armoured knights, carefully chosen, led the way across the ford. They were met actually in the water itself by mounted men advancing on to the causeway from Godemard’s side, and the twin banners of Edward’s two marshals and the cries of “God and St George!” with which the English vanguard met the enemy rose for a few moments from a confused mêlée of men and horses struggling in the stream. But the issue was decided by the comparative strength of missile weapons, and not by the sword. The Genoese cross-bowmen behind the French knights, and upon either side of their rear, shot into the English mounted ranks with some success, when the Archers of Edward, who were just behind the knights, and seem to have deployed somewhat over the marshy land on either side of the ford, returned their fire with that superiority of the long-bow which helped to decide this campaign. It was the regular fire of the Archers, the weight and the rapidity of it, which finally threw the supporting infantry of the French command into confusion, and permitted the mounted head of the English column to force its way over the landward end of the ford and through the now isolated body of French knights. Once the bank was gained, the English head of the column in its turn held the tête de pont, and the passage of the whole force was only a question of time.
But time was a factor of vast importance at this juncture: how important what immediately followed will show. A force of anything between twenty-four and thirty-nine thousand men, combatant and non-combatant, with its wagons and sumpter horses, the considerable booty of its raid, its tents, its reserve of armour and of weapons, we cannot reckon, even upon a front of twelve deep, at less than a couple of miles in length, even under the best and strictest conditions of marshalling. Indeed, that estimate is far too low and mechanical. It is more likely that by the time the head of the column was pouring from the causeway on to the right bank of the estuary, and there deploying, a good third of the armed men were still waiting upon the further shore to file over the narrow passage.
At any rate, before the great bulk of the train could have got upon the ford, the first horse of the King of France’s scouts and vanguard appeared upon the sky-line of the heights above Saigneville, and immediately a considerable force of the enemy were upon the English wagons with their insufficient rearguard. The King of France himself, following upon Edward’s track mile by mile, had reached Mons, had learnt that Edward had doubled back from Boismont, and had detached a body to cut across country to the ford on the chance of preventing Edward from crossing. He had not been quick enough to achieve this, but the French appeared in time, as I have said, to catch the wheeled vehicles behind the English army before they had got into line upon the causeway. Edward, with that good military head, which always seized immediate things upon a field, had stayed somewhat to the rear of the main body to watch for such an accident. He was not able to save the bulk of his train, but he saved his army. Much of the booty and of the provision fell to the French.
This mishap, which shows how close a chance permitted the safety of Edward’s fighting force, had no little effect upon the succeeding two days, for it left the English army in part without food. I say “in part,” because for some of them the defect was remedied, as we shall see, by the capture of Crotoy.
So the English army passed with the loss of some of its train, but with very little loss of men. Pursuit was impossible; the tide now rising forbade even the thought of it, and somewhere about noon the entire host was marshalled upon the northern bank of the river, and was safe. The whole story forms one of the most striking details in the history of medieval warfare.
What followed the discomfiture of Godemard’s command and Edward’s passage with his forces intact, is not easy to gather in the authorities themselves, though it is easy enough to reconstruct with the aid of the Kitchen Accounts, and by the help of the analogy of Edward’s action throughout the campaign. The King’s tent, his domesticity, and what we may by an anachronism call his staff, proceeded to the edge of the forest of Crécy, which lies upon the inland heights north-eastward of the ford, a distance of five miles. But it did not proceed there directly. In company with the whole army, it first turned north-westward down the bank of the estuary to the capture of the castle and town of Noyelles, rather more than two miles away. This castle it took, and it is characteristic of these wars that the mistress of it was English in sympathy, and, what is more, had married her daughter to the nephew of one of Edward’s principal generals. From Noyelles on the same day, Thursday, Edward and the staff turned back north-eastward towards the forest. There was a skirmish at Sailly Bray with Godemard’s command, which, though defeated, was not yet broken, and which had hung upon the flanks of the English army. But the belated struggle was of little importance, and Edward camped that night upon the edge of the forest in the neighbourhood of Forêt L’Abbye to the west of the little railway line and station which mark those fields to-day.
Meanwhile, during the remaining hours of that Thursday, the customary raiding and pillaging parties which had been characteristic of all this great raid were being sent out. The chief one under Hugh the Dispenser took Crotoy and thus provisioned his own force and perhaps some of the neighbouring detachments, but the bulk of Edward’s army “went famished that day,” and, for that matter, were insufficiently provided during the ensuing Friday as well.
The host camped upon that Thursday night somewhat widely spread around its King, with foraging parties still distant and appointed to return upon the morrow.
Upon that morrow, the Friday, the advance north-eastward was continued. It was organised in a fashion whose exactitude and forethought are worthy of note, considering the haphazard conditions of most medieval fighting, and of Edward’s own previous conduct of the earlier part of this campaign.
These were the conditions before him: he must get as best he might to the Straits of Dover, that is, up northward and north-eastward, and he may already have had a design upon Calais. The force which was pursuing him had been checked by the tide of the Somme. It was too large to use Blanchetaque with any rapidity. He knew that it must double back to Abbeville in order to cross the river before it could turn northward again and come up with him. From where it lay, or rather where its commander and staff had lain, between Mons and Saigneville, that morning and noon, back to Abbeville was a matter of seven or eight miles; a distance nearly as great separated him from Abbeville upon his side. He had gained a full day even if the French army had been collected, highly disciplined, and in column. Instead of that it was scattered over twenty miles of country. Many of its contingents were still following up, and it was under very various and loose commands. Even should a large body of French appear upon the next day, Friday, Edward had the forest at hand with which to cover his troops long before contact could be established. But good scouting informed Edward that there was no chance of such contact, at least before Saturday. The whole of the next day, Friday, would be at his disposal to bring his troops where he would, and he proposed to get them on the far side of the forest, that is, in the neighbourhood of Crécy town, during the interval.
Whether he had already decided on that Thursday to make a stand we cannot tell, but it is not probable, because he had as yet no knowledge of the positions beyond the forest, and of the chance the ground would afford him of meeting an attack. One thing he already knew, which was that his retreat was secure. The pace of the French pursuit might compel him to a decision on Saturday at earliest, but, short of complete disaster, he had a road open behind him across the Authie by the passage of Ponches and along the great Roman way which led from Picardy to the Straits of Dover.
What he did was this. He sent the bulk of the army round by the main road whose terminals are Abbeville and Hesdin, and which skirts the forest. His own household he accompanied through the wood, presumably with the object of keeping in touch with the foraging parties who would during that Friday be coming up along the southern edge of the woods to follow the main force along the high road. A further advantage of so moving through the wood himself was that he could thus lie upon the flank of his force and let it march round him until it got in front of him in the open country by Crécy. Then he could join it, coming up in its rear, that is, upon the side from which attack was expected, gather his information, study the positions, learn the approach of the French advance, and in general organise the coming action, if an action should prove necessary. Edward camped, therefore, in the forest upon that Friday night, and upon the further side of it, just above Crécy town; while the whole of his main body was marching up to the right or east of him by the high road that skirts the woods. That main force, joined by the foraging parties which had gone further westward on the day before, easily covered the few miles, and camped on the evening of the Friday upon the ridge which runs in a level line eastward and northward from just above the town of Crécy to the village of Wadicourt, for somewhat over a mile. Leaving his tents and domestics upon the edge of the wood, he spent the last hours of that day establishing his forces along the ridge for the night, for it was there that he had now determined to await the French army and to bring it to action.
The advantage of that position which upon emerging from the forest Edward had immediately seized, will be dealt with in the ensuing section; meanwhile we must return to inquire what was happening to the French pursuit.
We must not consider the French army as one united body. Had it been that, it would not have been defeated, and, what is more, the particular place of Crécy in military history, and its lesson of the contrast between the older feudal and the newer regular levies, would never have been taken; for Crécy, as we shall see, was largely a victory of things then new over things then old. No records give us precisely the positions, number, or routes of the King of France and his allies, but we know the following points, from which we can construct a general picture.
First: The commands were various and disunited. That personal system which had arisen five hundred years before, and more, when the old Roman tradition of the Frankish monarchy gradually transformed itself into a series of summonses to lords who should bring their vassals, was still the method by which a French host was tardily and irregularly summoned. For general and lengthy expeditions it was sufficient. For the prosecution of the innumerable local conflicts of the Middle Ages it was actually necessary. Upon occasion at long distances from home, and after long companionship in the field, if there were also present a very leading character among the feudal superiors, and especially if that character were clothed with titular rank, it could achieve something like unity of command. But Philip’s army, the last contingents of which were still in act of joining him, enjoyed no such advantages. At least five separate great bodies, four of which were largely subdivided, were loosely aggregated over miles of country, gathering as they went chance reinforcements, and losing by chance defections.
Secondly: A certain proportion of regular paid men, including the foreign mercenaries, accompanied the King of France. These were in part with the King himself, in part detached to watch the passages of the river.
Thirdly: The King, with a considerable personal force, and with some of his mercenaries as well, was up in the neighbourhood of Saigneville upon the noon and early afternoon of the Thursday. He retraced his steps towards Abbeville, and recrossed the river there himself either upon the Thursday evening, or more probably upon the Friday.
Fourthly: Round about Abbeville the bulk of the incongruous force was gathered when the King reached it, and very considerable bodies lay in the suburbs to the north of the town.
Finally, we know that on the Saturday morning the King heard Mass and took Communion at the Church of St Stephen (now demolished).
From all this we can construct a fairly accurate view of the French advance, especially when we consider where the French forces lay when they reached the field. From Abbeville to the field of Crécy is, as the crow flies, ten miles. A great main road (along the further part of which the English had marched on the Friday) led to the neighbourhood of the field and past it: the main road which goes from Abbeville to Hesdin. By this road, breaking up probably rather late upon the Saturday morning, the largest of the loosely gathered French contingents marched. Far to the right of them over the countryside would be advancing the other feudal levies under the King of Bohemia and John of Luxembourg, the exiled Count of Flanders, the ex-King of Majorca, and other friends, connections, and vassals whom Philip had summoned with their arrays. It is to be presumed that certain bodies on the extreme right went up by the Roman road which misses Abbeville coming from the south, and makes for Ponches, bounding the battlefield of Crécy on its extreme eastern side.
Following this chaotic advance of the dispersed host, gathered in a jumble, the wholly untrained peasant levies which had been swept up from the villages on the advance proceeded in disorder. And it was thus without regular formation, save among the Genoese mercenaries (some 15,000 in number at the outset of the campaign, though we do not know of what strength on the field itself), that the first lines of mounted men caught sight from the heights of Noyelles and Domvast of the English line on the ridge of Crécy three miles away.
It was early in the afternoon before that sight was seen. The wind was from the sea, and gathering clouds promising a storm were coming up before it, and hiding the sun.
Before these advance lines of the French army, and between it and Edward’s command, the ground fell gradually away in low, very gentle slopes of open field towards the shallow depression above which a somewhat steeper and shorter bank defended the line, a mile and a half long, upon which Edward had stretched his men.
There was an attempt at some sort of deployment, and the first of three main commands or “battles” were more or less formed under Alençon, the French King’s brother. Immediately before it were deployed the trained mercenaries, including the Italian cross-bowmen under their own leaders, Dorio and Grimaldi. Behind was a confused mass of arriving horse and foot, the King himself to the rear of it, and much of it German and Flemish separate commands. We do not know their composition at all. Still further to the rear, and stretched out for miles to the south, straggling up from Abbeville, came, that late afternoon, the rest of the ill-ordered host at random. Before the action was begun, the whole sky was darkened by the approaching storm, and violent pelting rain fell upon either host. The clouds passed, the sky cleared again, but it was nearly five o’clock before the first attack was ordered.
In order to explain what followed we must next grasp the nature of the terrain, and the value of the defensive position upon which Edward had determined to stand.
IV. THE TERRAIN OF CRÉCY
THE ACTION DECIDED upon the field of Crécy developed wholly within the central space shown in the frontispiece of this volume.
The general frame within which the battle took place must be regarded as a parallelogram corresponding to the exterior limits of that map, not quite four miles in length from east to west, and some 2½ miles in breadth from north to south, having the town of Crécy a little to the north of the medial line, and a good deal on the left or western side of the area. But the emplacement of the troops and the actual fighting, including the partial pursuit by the victors, is wholly contained within a smaller area, which lies aslant, with its major axis pointing north-west, its minor axis pointing north-east, and surrounding the dip called “the Val aux Clercs.”
The aspect of this countryside is that of so many in the north-east of France. The passage of six and a half centuries has not greatly modified it. The limits of the Royal Forest of Crécy are what they have been perhaps from Roman, certainly from early medieval, times. The characteristic hedgeless, rolling, ploughed land, which is the normal landscape of all French provinces and of many others, has been disturbed by no growth of modern industrialism, and its contours remain unmodified by any considerable excavations of the soil. The villages attaching to the battlefield, Estrées, Wadicourt, Fontaine, are in extent, and even in appearance, much what they were when the armies of the fourteenth century occupied them, and the little market-town of Crécy has not appreciably extended its limits.
Even minor features such as the small groups of woodland and the spinnies seem, judged by our remaining descriptions of the battle, to be much the same to-day as they were then.
The terrain of Crécy offers, therefore, an excellent opportunity for the reconstruction of the medieval scene, and I will attempt to bring it before the eyes of my readers.
Ponthieu is a district of low, open, and slightly undulating fertile lands, whose highest ridges touch such contours as 300 feet above the sea, and the depressions in which, very broad and easy, do not commonly fall more than a 100 feet or so below the higher rolls of land. In the particular case of the field of Crécy we shall have to deal with figures even less marked. The crests from which the opposing armies viewed each other before the action average full 200 feet above the sea; the broad, shallow depression between its confronting ridges descends to little more than sixty feet below them.
All this wide expanse of fertile land, affording from one lift of its undulations and another great even views for miles and miles, is cut by streams which run parallel to each other in trenches five to seven miles apart, and make their way by curiously straight courses north-westward to the neighbouring sea. These are the Conche, the Authie (the crossing of whose marshes by the great Roman road formed those pontes which, as we have seen, give the district its name of Ponthieu), and the Maye.
This last little river alone concerns us. We deal in the matter of the Battle of Crécy only with the first rising waters of the Maye. Its source springs just below the village which derives from that river-head its name of Fontaine, and the Church of Crécy stands not two miles down the young stream. These two miles of its course, and a slight depression tributary to this its upper basin, mould the battlefield.
For this shallow depression, called the “Val aux Clercs,” among the least of the many long waves and troughs of land upon which Ponthieu is modelled, was the centre of the engagement, and, though too short and shallow to develop the smaller stream, such water as it collects is tributary to the Maye. This depression runs up from the level exactly north-eastward, gradually rising until it fades, not quite two miles above the river, into the upper levels of the plateau.
On either side of this Val aux Clercs lift the soft and inconspicuous slopes that bound it. The one that bounds it on the north and west, and from which a man faces the south-east and the direction of Amiens, was the eminence occupied by the army of Edward III. At its southern end, where it overlooks the narrow rivulet of the Maye, it descends abruptly to the meadow level of the stream. The fall at this terminal of the bank is one of 100 feet. Its slope varies from one in ten to one in twelve, and on that slope and on the meadow level below it the little town of Crécy stands. There is the mouth of the Val aux Clercs, and the further one walks along the road which marks the position of the English line, and the nearer one approaches Wadicourt, the shallower and less conspicuous and flatter does the Val aux Clercs appear upon one’s right, as its depression rises towards the general level of the plateau. At last, in the neighbourhood of Wadicourt itself (the first houses of which stand 2000 yards from the last houses of Crécy) the depression has almost disappeared.
The bank or fall of land from this crest of the English position down to the lowest point of the trough, steeper towards its southern, or Crécy, easier towards its northern, or Wadicourt, end is, upon the average, a slope of one in thirty; just steep enough to produce its effect upon a charging crowd (especially over soil drenched by rain), and falling just sufficiently to give their maximum value to the arrow-shafts of the long-bow, which was the chief arm of Edward’s command.
The opposing slope, that which lies to the south and east of the vale, and from which the traveller faces the sea-breeze blowing from a shore not fifteen miles away, is much easier and more gentle even than its counterpart. The ridge of it stands above the lowest point of the Val aux Clercs no higher than the corresponding and opposite ridge which the English King occupied with his army, but the fall covers double the distance. It is not 400 yards, but more like a mile, and the average of the decline is one in fifty at the most.
Moreover, this opposing ridge is neither as cleanly marked as the Crécy-Wadicourt line nor parallel to it. It is impossible to fix upon it, with any definition, a true crest. The slope undulates very gradually into the general level of the plateau, and is so formed that the Val aux Clercs is funnel-shaped, much wider at the mouth on the Maye than towards its upper end.
The depression, therefore, which was the theatre of the action, is in the main V-shaped, and its mouth is a full mile in breadth, while its last faint upper portion is not half that width.
Such, in detail, is the field of Crécy.
I have attempted in the cut opposite to express graphically its main features as they would appear upon a model carved in wood and plotted to show the actual relief of the soil.
I will conclude by pointing out to the English reader a curious parallel. The field of Crécy has many analogies to the field of Waterloo. In both cases two opposing ridges roughly determine the general plan. In both a depression, double and complex in the modern, single in the medieval, instance, lies between the two lines. That of Crécy, as was suitable for a day in which no missiles of long range were available, is somewhat more marked and affords somewhat more of an obstacle to the offensive than that of Waterloo. In both the French formed the attacking force and in both the defensive position was chosen with singular mastery. Indeed, an eye for a defensive position marks Edward’s plan most strongly, and is, quite apart from the successful result of his action, his best title to repute in military history.
At the close of this section the plainest duty of an historian, as well as the satisfaction of common humour, compels me to allude to a characteristic production of the University of Oxford. There has proceeded from this university a school-book, perhaps the most universally used in the public schools of this country, known as Bright’s History of England. I was myself brought up on it. It is taken, I suppose (like much other Oxford matter), as something hall-marked and official. This text-book has upon page 226 of its first volume a full-page map of the Battle of Crécy. It is fair to say that such a production could not have proceeded, I do not say from any university upon the Continent of Europe, but from the humblest schoolmaster in a French, Swiss, or German village. The features marked upon it are wholly and unreservedly imaginary. There is not even the pretence of a remote similarity between this grotesque thing and the terrain of the famous battle: it is a pure invention. It is almost impossible to express in words the difference between this product of fancy, and even the most inaccurate map sketched from memory, or the merest jottings set down by someone who had no more to guide him than some vague recollection of an account of the battle. There is nothing in it bearing the remotest resemblance to any hill, river, road, wood, village, or point of the compass concerned with the field of Crécy, and to this astonishing abortion is modestly added in the left-hand bottom corner, “From Sprüner.” I have not by me as I write Sprüner’s collection of historical maps which were given us at the University, but if that eminent authority was the model for such a masterpiece, it is a sufficient commentary upon the rest of his work. I have before me as I write the flabbergasting plan in Bright’s History which I have treasured ever since my boyhood, and I trust that this note may be read by many who still believe that the function of our universities is to train the governing class of the nation, not so much in learning as in “character.”
Contrast the excellent and accurate little map in the first-rate manual which Mr Barnard published twelve years ago from the Clarendon Press. The whole of this book is to be most highly recommended. I believe that this map, the only doubtful features of which are the angular formation of the English Archers and the concentration of the French rear upon the Roman road, is from the pencil of Mr Oman.
V. THE ACTION
KING EDWARD, UPON that Saturday morning before he had yet caught sight of the French, of whose advance his scouts informed him, rode on a little horse slowly up and down the ranks encouraging his army, as it sat and lay at rest, with shield and helm and bow upon the grass before each man, along the crest of the slight hill.
In his hand the King bore a white wand and no weapon, and this visitation of his lasted until nearly ten o’clock. His last orders were that all his men should eat and drink heartily, and he himself conveyed that order to his own division, which lay behind the main line. He had organised the defence upon a very simple pattern.
That battalion which was called the First Battalion consisted of 1200 men-at-arms, that is, fully armoured knights upon horseback, with 4000 Archers and 4000 Welshmen. They occupied that turn or shoulder of the slope which runs round from the town of Crécy itself into the beginning of the Val aux Clercs, and were under the nominal command of the lad the Prince of Wales. But at his side the real orderers of that force were Warwick and Oxford. Such was the English right.
Next, in the centre, and back from the first battalion, was the line of English Archers. It was very carefully organised, with the object of a purely defensive action. Small pits were dug before each man’s station, and this infantry was arranged in “harrow” formation, much as trees are planted in an orchard in quincunx, so that any five of them formed a figure somewhat like the five in a pack of cards. It is evident that this formation, if the men were sufficiently dispersed, as they were, gave the freest play to their missiles, all of which could be shot through the intervals; and when we remember the rate of fire, three to one of the cross-bow, we shall understand how formidable was this infantry, and how well able it was to break any cavalry charge prepared by nothing more than the shots of the Genoese. All the tradition and sentiment of medieval warfare gave to the mounted knight the glory of battle, but, as I shall have occasion to remark in the sequel, the great feature of Crécy was the presence of an ordered, highly trained infantry, expected to await, and capable of awaiting, a rush of horse until that cavalry should receive at, say, fifty to eighty yards the whole weight of a furious and sustained discharge of missiles. Beyond the Archers, some 3000 in number at this point, were 1200 mounted knights, who, together with the Archers at the centre, were under the command of Northampton.
There may have been a certain number of Archers to the left again of these knights, but, at any rate, Northampton’s command covered the rest of the ridge and reposed upon Wadicourt. Here, lest it should be turned, the left flank of the English line was protected by a park of wagons drawn up close together, vehicles taken from such of the train as had been saved from the French attack upon the rearguard at the ford two days before.
The remainder of the wagons, provisions, and impedimenta were drawn up in the rear near the wood, and in front of them and between them and the defensive line upon the ridge was a strong reserve of over 10,000 men under Edward himself. Taking no account of non-combatants, we must reckon Archers, armoured men and spear-men together at perhaps 25,000 men, and certainly not more than 30,000; but we must remember, as I said upon a former page, that every Archer was served by aides, that a man-at-arms needed a squire, and that drivers and domestics of various kinds, and many recruits from Normandy, swelled the host.
The large force against which this defensive was drawn up has been variously estimated. Its dispersion over the countryside, the lack of any cohesive command, the absence of all precise figures, the considerable bodies of wholly untrained country folk who were straggling up behind the army, make an estimate of the actual forces engaged on the French side extremely difficult. We do not know how many Germans, Luxemburgians, and others had been brought up with the feudal levy. The rough guess of contemporaries at the whole numbers present and arriving during this confused marshalling of Philip’s host, calls it 100,000. A recent and very careful English authority has estimated the enemy actually in line at 60,000. If we say that Edward met forces more than double his own, but not three times his own, we are as near the truth as we can hope to get. But the right way to estimate the disproportion between the offensive and the defensive upon this famous day is to contrast the fully armoured mounted men of either side, and, further, to contrast
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The trained infantry, armed with missile weapons.
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The infantry, trained or untrained, armed only with spear, dagger, or sword.
Upon such an analysis we get some such result as follows: —
Some 4000 fully armoured mounted men in Edward’s command, of whom only 3000 or less were out of the reserve and in the line. Some 7000 Archers actually in the defensive line, with a much smaller number (unknown) in the reserve. Add 4000 Spearmen, for the most part Welsh. Against these on the offensive you may set, at the very least, quite four times their number of fully mounted armoured men and probably six times their number, or even more. As against the English Archers, we must count for the missile arm upon the French side somewhat less. The only contemporary authority, Villani, who gives us any exact figures, names 6000 as their number.
When we come to the few trained non-missile infantry of the English forces — some 4000 in the line, not counting the reserve, — and contrast them with the rabble of untrained and scattered French countrymen, most of whom were still coming up in the rear and did not take part in the action (save to suffer slaughter in the darkness after it was over), we can take any multiple we choose. They may have been five, six or eight times as numerous as the Welshmen with whom they did not come into contact at all.
It will be seen from the above that the real point of the battle, and that which decided it, was the power of the trained missile infantry of Edward (1) to await a charge of horse in no matter what numerical superiority it might arrive, confident that they could always check it before it reached their line or broke it; and inspired by that confidence, because (2) the only missile infantry that could be brought against them to prepare such a cavalry charge was armed with a weapon which delivered only one shot to their three. That was the deciding element of the Battle of Crécy: the power of the long-bow to stop horse upon any front equivalent to the front of the Archers, and the confidence of the bowman in that power.
The action opened regularly enough with the advance of the French missile infantry, the Genoese mercenaries, at the hour, as I have said, of about five o’clock. They proceeded down the slight slope into the Val aux Clercs, followed at a foot’s pace by a strong body of the first battalion of the French mounted knights under Alençon.
Advancing thus deployed, a body of 6000 men had difficulty in keeping its line, a thing essential to the simultaneous effect of short-range weapons. Twice they were halted to correct their alignment, and though perhaps at the second halt they were at the lowest point of the valley and just in extreme range of the English arrows from the height above, those arrows did not yet come. The English had been ordered to reserve their fire. They began to climb the opposing slope, shouting as was their custom, and after a third halt had been called, and a third strict alignment made so near to the English front as to be certainly in range for their cross-bows, the order to shoot was given. With the first flight of the Genoese bolts, the English Archers took each man his step forward and began pouring in that terrible fire, sustained, accurate, and rapid, to which they were so admirably trained, and of which hitherto, save in the fight at the ford, no example had been given in continental warfare.
Under that murderous and unceasing rain of missiles the Italian mercenaries, whose weapon compelled them to a complicated process of winding and ratcheting and laying, very ill-suited to such a strain, fell into disorder. A sufficient proportion of them broke, and their confusion at once angered and churned up the great body of mounted French knights, which awaited impatiently immediately behind their line. They were ridden down in the eagerness of these armoured horsemen to retrieve this first check by a charge, and Alençon’s men spurred hard (badly hampered by that obstacle of their own men fallen into confusion before them) upon the English right and the Prince of Wales’s battalion. Some of them got home, especially those who found themselves opposite the most advanced section of the Prince of Wales’s command, where it stood thrust forward in a semicircle upon the shoulder and last slopes of the hill. The boy himself was unhorsed, and for a moment the pressure was severe. But the effect of the arrow fire upon all the rest of the charging line told heavily. It never got home. Indeed, it must have been apparent to Edward at that moment that for all the fixed tradition of chivalry and that overwhelming atmosphere of military religion which in every age, according to its traditions, confuses the soldier, had he kept all his men at arms in reserve and put Archers only in the front line, they would have sufficed to win his battle.
There stands upon the Crécy end of the ridge a great mound to this day. It is the foundation of an old stone windmill which stood there for centuries, and which has been shamefully pulled down within living memory. From that mill it was that Edward watched the whole action proceeding upon the slope beneath him. He saw the head of the French charge get home but its extended line wavering, checked, and broken up on the Val aux Clercs as a continuous rain of arrows poured in. He saw all the front ranks of horses broken: the animals lashing out or fallen stampeding rearward, mounted or riderless: the heavily armoured knights fallen helpless and trampled, the whole thing a vast confusion.
It was near six o’clock. The westering sun was within an hour of its setting, and shone right up the vale, coming aslant upon the burnished armour of the charge. Had this kind of warfare already established a tradition, and had men learned by experience what unshaken infantry could do against horse, it would already have been apparent that the action was decided. But there was no such experience and no such knowledge. Over the long slopes of open field which fronted the English ridge, line after line of knights were coming forward in successive waves, as though mere weight of horses and men could win home in spite of the increasing welter of flying, dead, and maddened mounts, and of fallen men and iron that now lined all the front with a belt of obstacle more formidable than earth or wall. And of those, such few as could struggle through to within range might hope to escape the deadly and now converging fire which struck horse after horse as the foot of the ridge was reached. By gaps in the deadly confusion of the stampede and the corpses, round to their right further and further up the valley (upon their left the marshes of the Maye forbade a turning movement), the French charges followed and spread. A dozen or more were counted, and each as it came met the missile defence and was broken, with no counter missile offensive to tame that fire.
The sun was setting, but one effort was made which should have been made far earlier in the short crisis. It was an effort of the French right to turn the English left by Wadicourt.
Due, we may imagine, to no regular order, an occasion seized upon by some one commander who saw his chance, a charge of horse was led right up to that end of the English line, the barricade of wagons prevented its getting home, and, though the struggle was violent, the obstacle was never pierced or overcome. Well after sunset, and as the light was fading, the King of France himself led a great body to the centre, and seems to have come into range of the arrows, but he, no more than any of his lieges, could force horse against steady infantry and an unremitting fire. The darkness came, the late moon rose, and still were desultory and sporadic charges continued, haphazard and blindly. They had not even a hazard of success. These last efforts of the failing battle were repelled with ease, but even up to midnight the final pulses of the fight throbbed, with lesser and lesser pulsations; until after these seven hours of it — most of it by darkness, and all the while the line of Archers standing unbroken, and all the while supplied with their unexhausted ammunition, and finding strength to draw and to discharge — the thing was over.
Throughout that night great bodies of disordered peasantry, half-armed, the militia of the Communes, fled or wandered aimlessly southward over the bare, rolling land. The mounted knights had ridden away from a field where all was utterly lost, and the English line broke up to move forward by the light of lanterns over the face of the countryside, to despatch or to capture the wounded, to loot, to search for the faces and the ensigns of the greater dead. But in that darkness the magnitude of the result was not seen. The English army seems to have guessed the issue mainly by the dying down of the noise, and the ceasing of the cries of men rallying to their lords’ banners.
This was the end of the Battle of Crécy, in the night of Saturday the 26th of August, 1346.
Early upon the Sunday morning, Edward’s forces stood to arms again, not knowing whether even yet a new attack might not be made. Mist covered all the landscape, through which fog, dimly, bodies of men seemed to be advancing upon them from the south. They were reinforcements of Philip’s come up in ignorance of what had passed the day before, or at any rate not appreciating how decisive the day had been. Five hundred knights riding out easily dispersed them. Further bodies straggling up in similar fashion were dealt with in detail, and all that morning the English soldiers going at large over the fields found and put to the sword lost fragments of militia, came, as they tracked the flight, upon dead and wounded lords, and cut off bewildered remnants, making they knew not whither over the land.
The total French losses will never be known. The legend of disaster calls them now ten, now twenty thousand. Of the mounted and armoured men of rank the heralds made a precise account, and returned a list to King Edward of 1542 fallen and dead upon the front of the battle and in the first fields of the retreat. To these due sepulchre was given. The mass of the fallen were buried in common trenches, marks of which may be seen to this day; and it is said that fires were lit to rid the ground of the dead.
The English loss was wholly insignificant. Its exact amount, like that of its enemy, we cannot tell, because a list of but two knights, one squire, and forty of the rest, not counting a few Welsh, is all that we are given. But, even if this total (which hardly corresponds to the fierce mêlée at the beginning of the action on the right) be below the true number, we may be certain that that number was very small indeed. The line was never pierced; the English fight was wholly defensive, and a defensive maintained at range against troops which disposed, after the first rout of the Genoese, of no missiles upon their side.
Upon the Monday morning, the 28th of August, the host set forth upon its northern march, quite free now from any danger of pursuit. By the first days of September it had sat down before Calais. All winter and all the succeeding summer the blockade continued, and upon the 4th of August 1347, nearly a year after Crécy, the town was taken and the lasting fruit of that engagement was garnered. Calais remained an English bastion upon the Continent for more than two hundred years.
TOURCOING
PART I. THE POLITICAL CIRCUMSTANCE
THE BATTLE OF Tourcoing is one of those actions upon which European history in general is somewhat confused, and English history, in particular, ignorant.
That British troops formed part of those who suffered defeat, and that a British commander, the Duke of York, was the chief figure in the reverse, affords no explanation; for the almost exactly parallel case of Fontenoy — in which another royal duke, also the son of the reigning King of England, also very young, also an excellent general officer, and also in command was defeated — is among the most familiar of actions in this country. In both battles the posture of the British troops earned them as great and as deserved a fame as they had acquired in victory; in both was work done by the Guards in particular, which called forth the admiration of the enemy. Yet Tourcoing remains unknown to the English general reader of history, while Fontenoy is one of the few stock names of battles which he can at once recall.
The reason that British historians neglect this action is not, then, as foreign and rival historians are too inclined to pretend, due to the fact that among the forces that suffered disaster were present certain British contingents.
Again, as will be seen in the sequel, the overwhelming of the Duke of York’s forces at Tourcoing, by numbers so enormously superior to his own, was not due to any tactical fault of his, though it is possible that the faulty plan of the whole action may in some measure be ascribed to him.
Now Tourcoing is a battle which Englishmen should know, both for its importance in the military history of Europe, and for the not unworthy demeanour which the British troops, though defeated, maintained upon its field.
The true reason that Tourcoing is so little known in this country is to be discovered in that other historical fact attaching to the battle, which I have mentioned. It occupied but a confused and an uncertain place in the general history of Europe; though perhaps, were its military significance fully understood, it would stand out in sharper relief. For though the Battle of Tourcoing was not the beginning of any great military series, nor the end of one; though no very striking immediate political consequence followed upon it, yet it was Tourcoing which made Fleurus possible, and it was Fleurus that opened the victorious advancing march of the French which, looked at as a whole, proceeded triumphantly thenceforward for nearly eighteen years and achieved the transformation of European society.
What, then, was the political circumstance under which this action was fought?
The French Revolution, by the novelty of its doctrines, by the fierceness and rapidity of its action, and by that military character in it which was instinctively divined upon the part of its opponents, challenged, shortly after its inception, the armed interference of those ancient traditional governments, external to and neighbouring upon French territory, which felt themselves threatened by the rapid advance of democracy.
With the steps that led from the first peril of conflict to its actual outbreak, we are not concerned. That outbreak took place in April 1792, almost exactly three years after the meeting of the first Revolutionary Parliament in Versailles.
The first stages of the war (which was conducted by Austria and Prussia upon the one side, against the French forces upon the other) were singularly slow. No general action was engaged in until the month of September, and even then the struggle between the rival armies took the form not so much of a pitched battle as of an inconclusive cannonade known to history as that of Valmy. This inconclusive cannonade took place in the heart of French territory during the march of the invaders upon Paris. Disease, and the accident of weather, determined the retreat of the invaders immediately afterwards. In the autumn of the year, the French forces largely recruited by enthusiastic volunteer levies, but of low military value, poured over the country then called the Austrian Netherlands and now Belgium. But their success was shortlived. A mere efflux of numbers could not hold against the trained and increasing resistance of the Imperial soldiers. In the spring of 1793 the retreat began, and through the summer of that year the military position of Revolutionary France grew graver and graver. Internal rebellions of the most serious character broke out over the whole territory of the Republic. In Normandy, in the great town of Lyons, in Marseilles, and particularly in the Western districts surrounding the mouth of the Loire, these rebellions had each in turn their moment of success, while the great naval station of Toulon opened its port to the enemy, and received the combined English and Spanish Fleets.
Coincidently with the enormous task of suppressing this widespread domestic rebellion, the Revolutionary Government was compelled to meet the now fully organised advance of its foreign enemies. It was at war no longer with Austria and Prussia alone, but with England, with Holland, with Spain as well, and the foreign powers not only thrust back the incursion which the French had made beyond their frontiers, but proceeded to attack and to capture, one after the other, that barrier of fortresses in the north-east which guarded the advance on Paris.
The succession of misfortune after misfortune befalling the French arms was checked, and the tide turned by the victory won at Wattignies in October 1793. After that victory the immediate peril of a successful invasion, coupled with the capture of Paris, was dissipated. But it was yet uncertain for many months which way the tide would turn — whether the conflict would end in a sort of stale-mate by which the French should indeed be left independent for the moment, but the armed governments of Europe their enemies also left powerful to attack and in the end to ruin them; or whether (as was actually the case) the French should ultimately be able to take the offensive, to re-cross their frontiers, and to dictate to their foes a triumphant peace.
As I have said, the great action from which history must date the long series of French triumphs, bears the name of Fleurus; but before Fleurus there came that considerable success which made Fleurus possible, to which history gives the name of Tourcoing (from the town standing in the midst of the very large and uncertain area over which the struggle was maintained), and which provides the subject of these pages.
Fleurus was decided in June 1794. It was not a battle in which British troops were concerned, and therefore can form no part of this series. Tourcoing was decided in the preceding May, and though, I repeat, it cannot be made the fixed and striking starting-point from which to date the long years of the French advantages, yet it was, as it were, the seed of those advantages, and it was Tourcoing, in its incomplete and complicated success, which made possible all that was to follow.
Tourcoing, then, must be regarded as an unexpected, not wholly conclusive, but none the less fundamental phase in the development of political forces which led to the establishment of the modern world. Its immediate result, though not decisive, was appreciable. To use a metaphor, it was felt in Paris, and to a less extent in London, Berlin, and in Vienna, that the door against which the French were desperately pushing, though not fully open, was thrust ajar. The defeat of a portion of the allied forces in this general action, the inefficacy of the rest, the heartening which it put into the French defence, and the moral effect of such trophies gained, and such a rout inflicted, were of capital import to the whole story of the war.
This is the political aspect in which we must regard the Battle of Tourcoing, but its chief interest by far lies in its purely military aspect; in the indiscretion which so nearly led the French forces to annihilation; in the plan which was laid to surround and to destroy those forces by the convergence of the English, Prussian, and Austrian columns; in the way in which that plan came to nothing, and resulted only in a crushing disaster to one advanced portion of the forces so converging.
Tourcoing is rather a battle for military than for civilian historians, but those who find recreation in military problems upon their own account, apart from their political connection, will always discover the accidents of this engagement, its unexpected developments, and its final issue to be of surpassing interest.
PART II. THE GENERAL MILITARY SITUATION
IN ORDER TO understand what happened at the Battle of Tourcoing, it is first necessary to have in mind the general situation of the forces which opposed each other round and about what is now the Franco-Belgian frontier, in the spring of 1794.
These forces were, of course, those of the French Republic upon the one hand, upon the other the coalition with its varied troops furnished by Austria, by Prussia, by England, and some few by sundry of the small States which formed part of the general alliance for the destruction of the new democracy.
The whole campaign of 1794 stands apart from that of 1793. The intervening winter was a period during which, if we disregard a number of small actions in which the French took the offensive, nothing of moment was done upon either side, and we must begin our study with the preparations, originating in the month of February, for the active efforts which it was proposed to attempt when the spring should break.
In that month of February, Mack, recently promoted to the rank of Major-General in the Austrian army, met the Duke of York, the young soldier son of George III., in London, to concert the common plan. It was upon the 12th of that month that this meeting took place. Mack brought the news to the British Cabinet that the Emperor of Austria, his master, was prepared to act as Commander-in-Chief of the allied army in the coming campaign, proposed a general plan of advancing from the Belgian frontier upon Paris after the capture of the frontier fortresses, and negotiated for the largest possible British contingent.
Coburg, it was arranged, should be the General in practical command (under the nominal headship of the Emperor). Prussian troops, in excess of the twenty thousand which Prussia owed as a member of the Empire, were obtained upon the promise of a large subsidy from England and Holland, and with the month of April some 120,000 men were holding the line from Treves to the sea. This passed through and occupied Dinant, Bavai, Valenciennes, St Amand, Denain, Tournai, Ypres, and Nieuport. To this number must be added men in the garrisons, perhaps some 40,000 more. Of this long line the strength lay in the centre.
The central army, under the general command of Coburg, who had his headquarters at Valenciennes, was, if we exclude men in garrisons, somewhat over 65,000 in strength, or more than half the whole strength of the long line. With Coburg in the central army was the Duke of York with some 22,000, and the Prince of Orange with a rather smaller contingent of Dutch.
Over against this long line with its heavy central “knot” or bulk of men under Coburg, in the neighbourhood of Valenciennes, the genius of Carnot had mustered over 200,000 French troops, which, when we have deducted various items for garrisons and other services, counted as effective more than 150,000 but less than 160,000 men. This French line extended from the sea to Maubeuge, passing through Dunquerque, Cassel, Lille, Cambrai, and Bouchain.
It was as a fact a little before the opening of April that the French began the campaign by taking the offensive on a large scale upon the 29th of March.
Sketch Map showing the opposing French and Allied lines. April 1794
Pichegru, who was in command of that frontier army, attacked, with 30,000 men, the positions of the allies near Le Cateau, well to the right or south-east of their centre and his, and was beaten back.
It was upon the 14th of April that the Emperor of Austria joined Coburg at Valenciennes, held a review of his troops (including the British contingent, which will be given later in detail), fixed his headquarters in the French town of Le Cateau, and at once proceeded to the first operation of the campaign, which was the siege of the stronghold of Landrecies. The Dutch contingent of the allies drove in the French outposts and carried the main French position in front of the town within that week. By the 22nd of April the garrison of Landrecies was contained, the beleaguering troops had encircled it, and the siege was begun.
After certain actions (most of them partial, and one of peculiar brilliance in the history of the British cavalry), actions each of interest, and some upon a considerable scale, but serving only to confuse the reader if they were here detailed, Landrecies fell after eight days’ siege, upon the 30th of April. An advance of the Austrian centre, after this success, was naturally expected by the French.
That normal development of the campaign did not take place on account of a curious episode in the strategy of this moment to which I beg the reader to give a peculiar attention. It is necessary to grasp exactly the nature of that episode, for it determined all that was to follow.
While the fate of Landrecies still hung in the balance, and before the surrender of the town, Pichegru had, in another part of the long line, scored one of those successes which in any game or struggle are worse than losing a trick or suffering a defeat. It was one of those successes in which one gets the better of one’s opponent in one chance part of the general contest, but so triumphs without a set plan, with no calculation upon what should follow upon the achievement, and therefore with every prospect of finding oneself in a worse posture after it than before.
To take an analogy from chess: Pichegru’s error, which I will presently describe, might be compared to the action of a player who, taking a castle of his opponent’s with his queen, thereby leaves his king unguarded and open to check-mate.
Wherever men are opposed one to the other in lines, each line having the mission to advance against the other, it is a fatal move to get what footballers call “‘fore side”: to let a portion of your forces advance too far from the general line held by the whole, and to have the advanced part of that portion thus isolated from the support of its fellows. Such a formation invites a concentration of your opponents against the isolated body, and may lead to its destruction.
It was precisely in this position that Pichegru placed a portion of his forces by the ill-advised advance he made down the valley of the Lys to Courtrai.
Taking advantage of the way in which the main forces of the allies were tied to the siege of Landrecies, the French commander wisely moved forward the whole of his forces to the north and west, pushing the enemy back before him to the line Ypres-Menin, and besieging Menin itself. But most unwisely he not only permitted to advance, but himself directed and led, a body of 30,000 men (the command of General Souham) far forward of this general movement: he actually carried it on as far as the town of Courtrai.
The accompanying sketch map shows how much too far advanced this wedge of men (so large a contingent to imperil by isolation!) was beyond the general line, and, to repeat the phrase I have just used, a metaphor which best expresses my meaning, Souham and his division, by Pichegru’s direct orders, had got “‘fore side.”
The only excuse that can be pleaded for Pichegru’s folly in this matter, was the temptation presented by the weak garrison of Courtrai, and the bait which a facile temporary success always holds out for a man who has formed no consistent general plan. But that very excuse is the strongest condemnation of the inexcusable error, and this strategical fault of Pichegru’s was soon paid for by the imperilling of all the great body of French troops within that rashly projected triangle.
For the moment Pichegru may have foolishly congratulated himself that he had done something of military value, as he had certainly done something striking. Menin fell to the French on the same day that Landrecies did to the Austrians, and this further success doubtless tempted him to remain with the head of his wedge at Courtrai, when every consideration of strategy should have prompted him to retrace his steps and to recall the over-advanced division back into line.
This isolated position down the valley of the Lys, this wedge thrust out in front of Lille, positively asked the allies to attack it.
The enemy was a fortnight developing his plan, but his delay was equalled by Pichegru’s determination to hold the advanced post he had captured; and when the allies did finally close in upon that advanced post, nothing but a series of accidents, which we shall follow in detail when we come to the story of the action, saved Souham from annihilation. And the destruction of Souham’s division, considering its numbers and its central position, might have involved the whole French line in a general defeat.
As I have said, it was at the end of April that this false success of Pichegru’s was achieved, and a whole fortnight was to elapse before the allies concentrated to take advantage of that error, and to cut off Souham’s division.
That fortnight was full of minor actions, not a few of them interesting to the student of military history, and one again remarkable as a feat of English horse. I deliberately omit all mention of these lest I should confuse the reader and disturb his conception of the great battle that was to follow.
That battle proceeded upon a certain plan thought out in detail, perfectly simple in character, and united in conception. It failed, as we shall see; and by its failure turned what should have been the cutting-off and destruction of Souham’s command into a signal French victory. But before we can understand the causes of its failure, we must grasp the plan itself in its major lines, and with that object I shall discuss it in my next section under the title of “The Plan of the Allies.”
PART III. THE PLAN OF THE ALLIES
IF THE READER will look at the map opposite he will see in what disposition the armies of the allies were, at the end of April and the first days of May 1794, to carry into effect the plan which I proceed to describe.
There, in its triangle or advanced wedge, with a base stretching across Lille and an apex at Courtrai, lay the exposed French division, Souham’s.
Clerfayt was to the north of that wedge. The French, in pushing their wedge up to Courtrai, had thus separated him from the rest of the allies. Clerfayt lay with his command round about the district of Roulers; he attempted to return and oust Souham, but he failed, and to the north of the French wedge, and separated from the rest of the allies by its intervening thousands, he remained up to, throughout, and after the great battle that was to follow.
Right away down south, nearly sixty miles as the crow flies, lay the bulk of the Austrian army, Coburg’s command, round the town which it had just captured, Landrecies. The Duke of York’s command, detached from this main army of Coburg, had been ordered north, and was, by May 3rd, at Tournai. To the east lay the Prussian forces together with a small body of Hanoverians, about 4000 in number, which last could be brought up on to the Scheldt River when necessary.
It will thus be seen that the allies, at the moment when the plan was about to be formulated, lay on either side of the French wedge, and that any scheme for cutting off that wedge from the main French line must consist in causing a great force of the allies to appear rapidly and unexpectedly between Courtrai and Lille.
In order to do this, it was necessary to get Clerfayt to march down south to some point where he could cross the River Lys, while the rest of the allies were marching north from their southern positions to join hands with him.
When this larger mass of the allies coming up from the south and the east should have joined hands with Clerfayt, all the great French body lying advanced in the valley of the Lys round Menin and Courtrai would be cut off.
Now the success of such a plan obviously depended upon two factors: synchrony and surprise. That is, its success depended upon the accurate keeping of a time-table, and upon carrying it out too quickly and unexpectedly for Souham to fall back in time.
Clerfayt’s force coming down from the north, all the rest of the allies coming up from the east and the south must march with the common object of reaching “R,” a fixed rendezvous, agreed upon beforehand, and of meeting there together at some appointed time. If any considerable body lagged behind the rest, if part of the great force marching up from the south, for instance, failed to keep in line with the general advance, or if Clerfayt bungled or delayed, the junction would be imperfect or might even not take place at all, and the number of men present to cut off the French when a partial and imperfect junction had been effected, might be too small to maintain itself astraddle of the French communications, and to prevent the great French force from breaking its way through back to Lille.
So much for synchrony: and as for surprise, it is obvious that for the success of this plan it was necessary to work both rapidly and secretly.
Here was Souham with a body of men which recent reinforcement had raised to some 40,000, lying much too far ahead of the general French line and in peril of being cut off. Pichegru was foolish to maintain him in that advanced position, but, though that was an error, it was an error based upon a certain amount of calculation. Pichegru, and Souham under his orders, kept to their perilous position round Courtrai, because it did after all cut the allies in two, and because they knew that they could deal with Clerfayt’s force upon the north (which was only half their own), while they also knew that the bulk of their enemies were tied down, far away to the south, by the operations round Landrecies.
If Souham at Courtrai got news in time of the march northward of that main southern force, he had only to fall back upon Lille to be saved.
It was not until the 10th of May that the plan was elaborated whereby it was hoped to annihilate Souham’s command, and this plan seems to have occurred first to the Duke of York upon the evening of that day, after a successful minor action between his troops and the French just outside Tournai.
The Duke of York had been at Tournai a week, having come up there from Landrecies after the fall of that fortress, though the mass of the Austrian forces still remained away in the south. The week had been spent in “feeling” the south-eastern front of the French advanced “wedge,” and it was by the evening of the 10th that the Duke of York appears to have decided that the time was ripe for a general movement.
At any rate, it was upon the morrow, the 11th, that the English Prince sent word to Clerfayt that he intended to submit to the Emperor, who was the ultimate authority upon the side of the allies, a plan for the general and decisive action he desired to bring about. On the next day, the 12th, a Monday, the Duke of York wrote to Clerfayt that he hoped, “on the day after the morrow” (that is, upon the Wednesday, the 14th), “to take a decisive movement against the enemy.” And we may presume that the Duke had communicated to the Emperor the nature of his plan. For on the 13th, the Tuesday, the Emperor was in possession of it, and his orders, sent out upon that day, set out the plan in detail. That plan was as follows: —
Clerfayt, with his force, which was rather less than 20,000 all told, was to march south from Thielt, his headquarters for the moment, and advance upon the little town of Wervicq upon the River Lys. Here there was a bridge, and Clerfayt was also in possession of pontoons wherewith to pass the stream. Meanwhile, the southern mass of the allies was to concentrate upon the Scheldt in the following manner:
The few thousand Hanoverians, under Bussche, were to take up their position at Warcoing, just upon and across that river. Two miles further south, Otto, with a larger Austrian force accompanied by certain English cavalry (the numbers will follow), was to concentrate at Bailleul.
The Duke of York’s own large force, which had been at Tournai for over a week, was to go forward a little and concentrate at Templeuve. Five miles to the south of Templeuve, at Froidmont, a column, somewhat larger than the Duke of York’s, under Kinsky, was to concentrate.
There were thus to be concentrated upon the south of the French wedge four separate bodies under orders to advance northward together.
The first, under Bussche, was only about 4000 strong, the Hanoverians and Prussians; the second, under Otto, from about 10,000 strong; the third, under the Duke of York, of much the same strength, or a little less; and the fourth, under Kinsky, some 11,000.
These four numbered nearly, or quite, 35,000 men, less than the “nearly 40,000” at which certain French historians have estimated their strength.
To these four columns (which I will beg the reader to remember by their numbers of first, second, third, and fourth, as well as by the names of their commanders, Bussche, Otto, York, and Kinsky) a fifth must be added, the appreciation of whose movements and failure is the whole explanation of the coming battle.
The fifth column was a body of no less than 16,000 men coming from the main Austrian body far south, and ordered to be at St Amand upon the Scheldt somewhat before the concentration of the other four columns, and to advance from St Amand to Pont-à-Marcq. Upon reaching Pont-à-Marcq this fifth column would be in line with the other four at Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, and Froidmont, and ready to take its part in the great forward movement towards the north.
In order to appreciate the way in which the issue was bound to depend upon this fifth column, I must now detail the orders given to all six, the five columns in the valley of the Scheldt, and the sixth body, under Clerfayt, north of the Lys; for it is these orders which constitute the soul of the plan.
Bussche, with his small body of 4000 Hanoverians, the first column, had the task of “holding” the apex of the French wedge when the attack should begin. That is, it was his task to do no more with his inferior forces than send one portion up the road towards Courtrai, so that the advanced French troops there should be engaged while another part of his small command should attack the little town of Mouscron, which the French held, of course, for it was within their wedge of occupation. It was obviously not hoped that this little body could do more than keep the French occupied, prevent their falling back towards Lille, and perhaps make them believe that the main attack was coming from Bussche’s men.
The second column, under Otto, was to advance upon Tourcoing, in those days a little town, now a great manufacturing city.
The third column, that under the Duke of York, was to march side by side with Otto’s column, and to make for Mouveaux, a village upon a level with Tourcoing upon this line of advance, and to be reached by marching through Roubaix (now also a great manufacturing town, but then a small place).
None of these advances, Bussche’s, Otto’s, or York’s, was of any considerable length. The longest march through which any of these three columns had to fight its way was that of the Duke of York from Templeuve to Mouveaux, and even this was not eight miles.
The fourth column, under Kinsky, had a harder task and a longer march. It was to carry Bouvines, which was in the hands of the French and nearly seven miles from Froidmont (Kinsky’s point of departure), and when it had done this it was to turn to the north with one part of its force in order to shelter the march of the Duke of York from attacks by the French troops near Lille, while another part of its force was to join with the fifth column and march up with it until both came upon a level with York and Otto in the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
Now it was to this fifth column, the 16,000 men or more under the Arch-Duke Charles, that the great work of the day was assigned. From Pont-à-Marcq they must attack a great French body quite equal to their own in numbers, even when part of Kinsky’s force had joined them, which French force lay in the camp at Sainghin. They must thrust this force back towards Lille, pour up northward, and arrive in support of Otto and York by the time these two commanders were respectively at Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
In other words, the fifth column, that of the Arch-Duke Charles, was asked to make an advance of nearly fourteen miles, involving heavy fighting in its first part, and yet to synchronise with columns who had to advance no more than five miles or seven.
Supposing all went well, Clerfayt — crossing the Lys at Wervicq at the same hour which saw the departure of the five southern columns from Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq respectively, was to advance southward from the river towards Mouveaux and Tourcoing, a distance of some seven miles, while the others were advancing on the same points from the south.
If the time-table were accurately kept and this great combined movement all fitted in, Clerfayt would join hands with the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns somewhere in the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux, a great force of over 60,000 men would lie between the French troops at Lille and Souham’s 40,000 in the “advanced wedge,” and those 40,000 thus isolated were, in a military sense, destroyed.
Such being the mechanism or map of the scheme, we must next inquire the exact dates and hours upon which the working of the whole was planned.
The Duke of York, as we have seen when he was arranging the business and writing to Clerfayt and the Emperor, had talked of moving upon the 14th, by which presumably he meant organising the attack on the 14th, and setting the first columns in motion from their places of rendezvous in the early hours of that day, Wednesday, before dawn.
If that was in his mind, it shows him to have been a prompt and energetic man, and to have had a full appreciation of the place which surprise occupied in the chances of success. If, indeed, the Emperor got the Duke of York’s message in time on the 12th, if he had at once accepted the plan, and had with Napoleonic rapidity ordered the bulk of his forces (which were still right away south and east) to move, he might have had them by forced marches upon and across the Scheldt, and ready to execute the plan by the 14th, or at any rate by the morning of the 15th.
But from what we know of the family to which the Duke of York belonged, it is exceedingly improbable that this younger son of George III. had, on this one occasion only, any lightning in his brain; and even if he did appreciate more or less the importance of rapid action, the Emperor did not appreciate it. He committed the two contradictory faults of delaying the movement and of asking too much marching of his men, and it was not until the morning of the Wednesday, May the 14th, that the bulk of the Austrian army, which still lay in the Valenciennes and Landrecies district, broke up for its northward march, to arrive at the rendezvous beyond the Scheldt, and to carry out the plan.
It was not until Thursday the 15th of May that the Emperor joined the Duke of York at Tournai, and very late upon the same day the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up the main body of the Austrian forces from the south to the town of St Amand.
We shall see later what a grievous error it was to demand so violent an effort from the men of the Arch-Duke Charles’ command. From Landrecies itself to St Amand is 30 miles as the crow flies; and though, of course, the mass of the troops which the Arch-Duke Charles had been thus commanded to bring up northward in such haste were most of them well on the right side of Landrecies when the order to advance reached them, yet the average march undertaken by his men in little more than twenty-four hours was a full twenty miles, and some of his units must have covered nearer thirty. I will not delay further on this point here; its full importance will appear when we come to talk of the action itself.
The Arch-Duke Charles being only as far as St Amand on the evening of Thursday the 15th, and his rendezvous, that of the fifth column in the great plan, being Pont-à-Marcq, a further good sixteen miles north-westward, it was evident that the inception of that plan and the simultaneous advance of all the five columns from their five starting-points of Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq, could not begin even upon the 16th. It would take the best part of a day to bring the Arch-Duke Charles up to Pont-à-Marcq; his men were in imperative need of rest during a full night at St Amand, and it is probable, though I have no proof of it, that he had not even fully concentrated there by the evening of the 15th, and that his last units only joined him during the forenoon of the 16th.
The whole of that day, therefore, the 16th, was consumed so far as the first, second, third, and fourth columns were concerned, in merely gathering and marshalling their forces, and occupying, before nightfall, the points from which they were to depart simultaneously in the combined advance of the morrow. They had to wait thus for the dawn of the 17th, because they had to allow time for the fifth column to come up.
The time-table imposed upon the great plan by these delays is now apparent. The moment when all the strings of the net were to be pulled together round Souham was the space between midnight and dawn of Saturday the 17th of May. And the hour when all the six bodies of the allies were to join hands at “R” near Tourcoing was the noon of that day.
Before day broke upon the 17th, Clerfayt was to find himself at Wervicq upon the River Lys and across that stream, while of the five southern columns the Arch-Duke Charles was to be attacking the French troops just in front of Pont-à-Marcq with the fifth column at the same moment; Kinsky, with the fourth, was to be well on the way from Froidmont to Bouvines where he was to attack the French also and cross the bridge; the Duke of York, with the third, was to be well on the way from Templeuve to Lannoy; Otto, with the second, was to be equally advanced upon his line, somewhere by Wattrelos in his march upon Tourcoing; while Bussche, with his small first column, on the extreme north, was to be getting into contact with the French posts south of Courtrai, which it was his duty to “hold,” impressing upon Souham the idea that a main attack might develop in that quarter, and so deluding the French into maintaining their perilously advanced stations until they were cut off from Lille by the rest of the allies.
The morning would be filled by the advance of Clerfayt from Wervicq southward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing, while the corresponding fighting advance northward upon Mouveaux and Tourcoing also, of Otto, York, Kinsky, and the Arch-Duke Charles, should result somewhere about noon in their joining hands with Clerfayt and forming one great body: a body cutting off Courtrai from Lille, and the 40,000 under Souham from their fellows in the main French line.
With such a time-table properly observed, the plan should have succeeded, and between the noon and the evening of that Saturday, the great force which Souham commanded should have been at the mercy of the allies.
Such was the plan and such the time-table upon which it was schemed. Its success depended, of course, as I have said, upon an exact keeping of that time-table, and also upon the net being drawn round Souham before he had guessed what was happening. The second of these conditions, we shall see when we come to speak of “The Preliminaries of the Action,” was successfully accomplished. The first was not; and its failure is the story of the defeat suffered by the Duke of York in particular, and the consequent break-down of the whole strategical conception of the allies.
But before dealing with this it is necessary to establish a disputed point.
I have spoken throughout of the plan as the Duke of York’s. Because it failed, and because the Duke of York was an English prince, historians in this country have not only rejected this conclusion, but, as a rule, have not even mentioned it. The plan has been represented as Mack’s plan, as a typical example of Austrian pedantry and folly, the Duke of York as the victim of foolish foreigners who did not know their business, and it has even been hinted that the Austrians desired defeat! With the latter extravagant and even comic suggestion I will deal later in this study; for the moment I am only concerned with the responsibility of the Duke of York.
It must, in the first place, be clearly understood that the failure of the plan does not reflect upon the judgment of that commander. It failed because Clerfayt was not up to time, and because too much had been asked of the fifth column. The Duke came of a family not famous for genius; he was exceedingly young, and whatever part he may have had in the framing of this large conception ought surely to stand to his credit.
It is true that Mack, the Austrian General, drafted details of the plan immediately before it was carried into execution, and our principal military historian in this country tells us how “on the 16th, Mack prepared an elaborate plan which he designed.”
Well, the 16th was the Friday.
Now we know that on the 11th of May, the Sunday, the Emperor and his staff had no intention of making a combined attack to cut off Souham from Lille, for orders were given to Clerfayt on that day to engage Souham along the valley of the Lys for the purpose of holding the attention of the French, and in the hope of recovering Menin — the exact opposite of what would have been ordered if a secret and unexpected attempt to cut off Souham by crossing further up the river had been intended. It was at the same moment that the Duke of York was sending word to Clerfayt on his own account, to the effect that he intended to submit a plan to the Emperor, and it is worth noting that in the very order which was sent to Clerfayt by the Emperor he was told to refer to the Duke of York as to his future movements.
The archives of the Ministry of War at Vienna have it on record that the Duke of York made a definite statement of a plan to Clerfayt, which plan he intended to submit to the Emperor immediately, and a letter dated upon the Monday, the 12th — four days before there is any talk of Mack’s arranging details, — York writes to Clerfayt telling him that he hopes to make his decisive movement against the enemy on the Wednesday, the 14th.
On the 13th, Tuesday, the orders of the Emperor to both Clerfayt and the Duke of York (which are also on record) set down this plan in detail, mentioning the point Wervicq at which Clerfayt was expected to cross the river Lys, and at the same time directing the Duke of York to march northward with the object of joining Clerfayt, and thus cutting off the French forces massed round Courtrai from their base. Further, in this same despatch, the initiative is particularly left to the Duke of York, and it is once more from him that Clerfayt is to await decisions as to the moment and details of the operation.
The same archives record the Duke of York sending Lieut.-Colonel Calvert to Clerfayt upon the 14th, to tell him that he meant to attack upon the morrow, the 15th, and they further inform us that it was on the English Prince’s learning how scattered were Clerfayt’s units, and how long it would therefore take him to concentrate, that action was delayed by some thirty-six hours.
Evidence of this sort is absolutely conclusive. The plan was not Mack’s; it was York’s.
PART IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
TOURCOING IS AN action the preliminaries of which are easy to describe, and need occupy little of our space, because it was a battle in which the plan of one side was developed and prosecuted almost to its conclusion without a corresponding plan upon the other side.
As a rule, the preliminaries of a battle consist in the dispositions taken by each side for hours or for days — sometimes for weeks — beforehand, in order to be in a posture to receive or to attack the other side. These preliminaries include manœuvring for position, and sometimes in the fighting of minor subsidiary actions before the main action takes place.
Now, in the case of Tourcoing, there was none of this, for the French at Tourcoing were surprised.
The surprise was not complete, but it was sufficiently thorough to make the whole of the fighting during the first day, Saturday (at least, the whole of the fighting in the centre of the field), a triumph for the allied advance.
Let us first appreciate exactly how matters looked to Souham when, on the 15th, the Thursday, the blow was about to fall upon him.
He had under his orders, with headquarters now at Courtrai, now at Menin (see sketch map on ), rather less than 40,000. In that dash upon Courtrai a fortnight before, which had led to the dangerous establishment of so large an advanced body in front of the main French line, one main effect of that advance had been to push back, away to the left beyond the Lys, more than 16,000, but less than 20,000 men under the Austrian General, Clerfayt. With that army, Clerfayt’s body, Souham had remained continually in touch. Detachments of it were continually returning to the valley of the Lys to harass his posts, and, in a word, Clerfayt’s was the only force of the enemy which Souham thought he had need to bear in mind.
The bulk of the Austrian army he knew to be quite four days’ march away to the south, at first occupied in the siege of Landrecies, and later stationed in the vicinity of that fortress.
Of course, lying in his exposed position, Souham knew that a general attack upon him from the south was one of the possibilities of the situation, but it was not a thing which he thought could come unexpectedly: at any rate he thought himself prepared, by the use of his scouts and his spies, to hear of any such advance in ample time.
In case he should be attacked, the attack might take one of many forms. It might try to drive him over the Lys, where Clerfayt would be ready to meet him; or it might be a general attack upon Courtrai as a centre; or it might be (what had, as we have seen, been actually determined) an attempt to cut him and all his 40,000 off from the main French line.
This main French line ran through the town of Lille, and Lille not only had its garrison, but also at Sainghin, outside the fortifications to the south-east, a camp, under Bonnaud, of 20,000 men. If the attack from the south or from the north, or from both, managed to cut Souham off from Bonnaud’s camp, and from the garrison at Lille, he was ruined, and his 40,000 were lost; but he hoped to be kept sufficiently informed of the enemy’s movements to fall back in time, should such an attempt be made, and to provide for it by effecting a junction with Bonnaud before it was delivered.
Pichegru, the Commander of the whole French army of the north, who had ordered the advance on Courtrai, happened to be absent upon a visit to the posts away south upon the Sambre River. Souham was therefore temporarily in full command of all the troops which were to be concerned in the coming battle. But the position was only a temporary one, and that must account for the deference he paid to the advice of the four generals subordinate to him, and for the council which he called at Menin on the critical Saturday night which decided the issue. He himself quotes his commission in the following terms:— “Commander-in-Chief of all the troops from the camp at Sainghin to Courtrai inclusive.”
From the beginning of the week, when a detachment of his troops had but just recovered from a sharp action with the Duke of York’s men towards Tournai, Souham appreciated that the forces of the enemy were gradually increasing to the south of him, and that the posts upon the Scheldt were receiving additional enforcements of men. But neither his judgment nor the reports that came in to him led him to believe that the mass of the Austrian army was coming north to attack him. And in this he was right, for, as we have seen, the Emperor did not make up his mind until Wednesday the 14th, which was the day when orders were sent to the Arch-Duke Charles to march northward.
Souham’s attitude of mind up to, say, the Thursday may be fairly described in some such terms as follows: —
“I know that a concentration is going on in the valley of the Scheldt to the south and east of me; it is pretty big, but not yet exactly dangerous, though I shouldn’t wonder if I were attacked in a few days from that quarter. What I am much more certain of is that active and mobile force which I beat off the other day, but which is still intact under the best General opposed to me, Clerfayt. I hear that it is marching south again, and my best troops and my offensive must be directed against that. I am far superior in numbers to Clerfayt, and if I can bring him to an action and break him, I can then turn to the others at my leisure: for the moment I have only one front to think of — that on the north.”
But the negligence which he or his informants were guilty of — a negligence that was to prove so nearly fatal to all those 40,000 French troops — consisted in the failure to discover what was up upon Friday the 16th.
During those twenty-four hours the Arch-Duke Charles had brought up his column to St Amand; the other four columns upon the Scheldt were concentrated, and upon the north of the Lys, Clerfayt had got orders to move upon Wervicq, and was, during the middle hours of Friday, actually upon the march. Yet, during all that day, Friday the 16th, Souham remained ignorant of the extremity of his peril.
The orders which he dictated upon the Friday night, and largely repeated upon the following morning of Saturday the 17th of May, show how little he expected the general action that was upon him. He arranged, indeed, for a cordon of troops to be watching, in insufficient numbers, the side towards the Scheldt, and he sent to Bonnaud and the camp at Sainghin, outside Lille, orders to keep more or less in touch with that cordon. The instructions to this cordon of troops along the eastern side of the French position is no more than one of general vigilance. It is still to Clerfayt and towards the north alone that he directs an offensive and vigorous movement.
In a word, he was a good twenty-four hours behind with his information. He was wasting troops north of the Lys in looking for Clerfayt at a time when that General was already on the march to Wervicq, and he was leaving a scattered line of insufficient bodies to meet what he did not in the least expect, the rapid advance of Bussche, Otto, and York during that Saturday upon Mouscron, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.
Therefore it was that although Bussche’s insufficient force was driven out of Mouscron at last by superior numbers, Otto and York succeeded in sweeping all the resistance before them, and, in the course of that Saturday, reached the first Tourcoing, the second Roubaix, and even Mouveaux.
The whole problem of warfare consists in a comparison between the information that each side has of the movements of the other. The whole art of success in war pivots upon the using of your enemy’s ignorance. Had the allies upon this occasion been more accurate in keeping to their time-table, and somewhat more rapid in their movements, they would have caught the French commander still under the illusion that there was no danger, save from the north, and would have succeeded in cutting off and destroying the main French force by getting in all together between Courtrai and Lille. For at that same moment, the early hours before daybreak of the 17th, the allies had begun their movement.
PART V. THE TERRAIN
THE TERRAIN OVER which the plan of the allies was to be tested must next be grasped if we are to understand the causes which led to its ultimate failure.
That terrain is most conveniently described as an oblong standing up lengthways north and south, and corresponding to the sketch map overleaf. That oblong has a base of twenty miles from east to west, a length from north to south of thirty-five.
These dimensions are sufficient to show upon what a scale the great plan of the allies for cutting off Souham at Courtrai was designed.
At its south-eastern corner the reader will perceive the town of St Amand, the furthest point south from which the combined movements of the allies began; while somewhat to the left of its top or northern edge, at the point marked “A,” the northern-most body connected with that plan, the body commanded by Clerfayt, was posted at the origin of the movement.
The object of the whole convergence from the Scheldt on one hand, and from Clerfayt’s northern position upon the other, being to cut off the French forces which lay at and south of Courtrai from Lille, and the main line of the French army, it is evident that the actual fighting and the chances of success or disaster would take place within a smaller interior oblong, which I have also marked upon the sketch map. This smaller or interior oblong measures about sixteen miles at its base by about twenty-five miles in length, and includes all the significant points of the action.
The points marked 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 respectively are the points at which the five columns advancing from the Scheldt valley northward were to find themselves before dawn on the morning of Saturday the 17th of May. We are already acquainted with them. They are Warcoing, Bailleul, Templeuve, Froidmont, and Pont-à-Marcq respectively; while the point marked 6 is Wervicq, from which Clerfayt was to start simultaneously with the five southern columns with the object of meeting his fellows round Tourcoing.
The town of Courtrai will be perceived to lie in the north-eastern angle of this inner oblong, the town of Lille rather below the middle of its western side. In all the country round Courtrai, and especially to the south of it, within the triangle X Y Z, lay the mass of Souham’s command of 40,000 men. There were many posts, of course, scattered outside that triangle, and connecting Courtrai with Lille; but the links were weak, and the main force was where I have indicated it to be.
A large body of French troops being encamped just under the walls of Lille at B (by which letter I mark Sainghin camp), and that fortress also possessing a garrison, the plan of cutting both these off from the 40,000 French that lay in the country near Courtrai involved getting the main part of the allies up from these points of departure on the south, and Clerfayt’s body down from its point of departure on the north to meet upon the line drawn between Lille and Courtrai. Upon this line (which also roughly corresponds to the only main road between the two cities) may be perceived, lying nearer Lille than the centre of such line, the small town of Tourcoing and the village of Mouveaux. It was upon these two points that four of the five southern columns were to converge northward, the second and third column reaching them first, the fourth and fifth marching up from the left in aid; and it was also, of course, upon these two points that Clerfayt was to march southward from the post at Wervicq, that had been given him as his point of departure before dawn upon that Saturday morning. If everything went perfectly, the great mass of the allied army should have found itself, by noon of Saturday the 17th, as I have said, astraddle of the Lille-Courtrai road, and effectively cutting off the French troops to the north.
What was the nature of the wide countryside over which these various movements were to take place?
It was part of that great plain of Flanders which stretches from the River Scheldt almost unbroken to the Straits of Dover and the North Sea. In the whole of the great oblong represented by my sketch map there is hardly a point 150 feet above the water level of the main river valleys, while the great mass of that territory is diversified by no more than very broad and very shallow rolls of land, the crests of which are sometimes and exceptionally as much as fifty feet above the troughs, but the greater part thirty, twenty, or even less. Here and there an isolated hummock shows upon the landscape, but the general impression of one who walks across from the valley of the Lys to that of the Scheldt is of a flat, monotonous land in which one retains no memory of ascent or descent, and in which the eye but rarely perceives, and that only from specially chosen points, any wide horizon.
To-day the greater part of this country suffers from the curse of industrialism and repeats — of course, with far less degradation — the terrible aspect of our own manufacturing towns. Roubaix and Tourcoing in particular are huge straggling agglomerations of cotton-spinners and their hands. A mass of railways and tramways cut the countryside, and the evil presence of coal-smoke mars it everywhere: at least within the region of Lille, Tourcoing, and Roubaix.
In May 1794, though a considerable industry had begun to grow up in Lille itself, the wide, open countryside round the town was entirely agricultural. Much of it was what soldiers call “blind” country: that is, it was cut up into fields with numerous hedges; there were long farm walls and a great number of small watercourses fringed with trees. But, on the other hand, there was very little wood. Moreover, though there were few places from which one could overlook any considerable view, the “blindness” of the field, as a whole, has been much exaggerated in the attempt to excuse or explain the disaster of which it was the theatre. The southern part of it is open enough, and so is the north-eastern portion, in which the first column operated. Of the soil no particular mention is needed; most of the great roads were paved; the weather had created no difficulty in the going, and the only trouble in this respect lay in the northern part, where Clerfayt’s command was condemned to advance over patches of loose and difficult sand, which made the road, or rather rare lanes, very heavy.
It will at once be perceived that, in view of the operations planned, one principal obstacle exists in the terrain, the River Lys. Few bridges crossed this stream, and for the purpose of turning the French position and coming across the Lys from the north to the neighbourhood of Mouveaux, there was in those days no bridge save the bridge at Wervicq (at the point marked 6 on the plan at the beginning of this section); but this difficulty we have seen to be lessened by the presence in Clerfayt’s command of a section of pontoons.
At first sight one might perceive no other considerable obstacle save the Lys to the general movement of the allied army. But when the peculiar course of the little River Marque is pointed out, and the nature of its stream described, the reader will perceive that it exercised some little effect upon the fortunes of the battle, and might have exercised a much greater one to the advantage of the British troops had not the Duke of York blundered in a fashion which will be later described.
In the first place, it should be noted that this little stream (it is no wider than a canal, will barely allow two barges to pass in its lower course, and will not float one to the southward of Lille) turns up quite close to Roubaix, and at the nearest point is not a mile from the market-place of that town.
Now the significance of such a conformation to the battlefield of Tourcoing lay in the fact that it was impossible for any considerable force to manœuvre between the third column (which was marching upon Roubaix) and the Marque River. Had the Marque not existed, Kinsky, with the fourth column, would have been free to march parallel with York, just as York marched parallel with Otto, while the Arch-Duke with his fifth column, instead of having been given a rendezvous right down south at Pont-à-Marcq (the point marked 5 on my sketch), would have gone up the main road from St Amand to Lille, and have marched parallel with Kinsky, just as Kinsky would have marched parallel with York. In other words, the fourth and the fifth columns, instead of being ordered along the dotted lines marked upon my sketch (the elbows in which lines correspond to the crossing places of the Marque), would have proceeded along the uninterrupted arrow lines which I have put by the side of them.
The Marque made all the difference. It compelled the fifth column to take its roundabout road, and the fourth, detained by the delay of the fifth, was held, as we shall see in what follows, for a whole day at one of the crossings of the river.
The little stream has a deep and muddy bottom, and the fields upon its banks are occasionally marshy. This feature has been exaggerated, as have the other features I have mentioned, in order to explain or excuse the defeat, but, at any rate, it prevented the use of crossing places other than bridges. The Marque has no true fords, and there is no taking an army across it, narrow as it is, save by the few bridges which then existed. These bridges I have marked upon the sketch.
So far as the terrain is concerned, then, what we have to consider is country, flat, but containing low defensive positions, largely cut up, especially between the Scheldt and Roubaix, by hedges and walls, though more open elsewhere, and particularly open towards the north: a serious obstacle to the advance of one body in the shape of the River Lys; and another obstacle, irritating rather than formidable in character, but sufficient both by its course and its marshy soil to complicate the advance, namely, the little River Marque.
As to the weather, it was misty but fine. The nights in bivouac were passed without too much discomfort, and the only physical condition which oppressed portions of the allied army consisted in the error of its commanders, and proceeded from fatigue.
PART VI. THE ACTION
AT ABOUT TEN o’clock in the morning of Friday the 16th of May, Clerfayt, in his positions right up north beyond the Lys — positions which lay at and in front of the town of Thielt, with outposts well to the south and west of that town, — received the orders of the Emperor.
These orders were what we know them to be: he was to march southward and westward and strike the Lys at Wervicq. He was to arrive at that point at or before nightfall, for in the very first hours of the morrow, Saturday, and coincidently with the beginning of the advance of the five columns from their southern posts, he was to cross the Lys and to proceed to join hands with those columns in the following forenoon, when the heads of them would have reached the neighbourhood of Tourcoing and Mouveaux.
Bussche, with the first column, his 4000 Hanoverians, had no task during that day but to proceed the mile and a half which separated Warcoing from the little village of St Leger, and, with the head of his column in that village, prepare to pass the night and be ready to march forward long before dawn the next day.
Field-Marshal Otto, with the second column, was similarly and leisurely occupied marshalling his 10,000 Austrians and his contingent of British cavalry, so that the head of his column was at Bailleul ready also to advance with the early, dark, small hours of the ensuing morning.
The Duke of York, with his third column of similar numbers, or somewhat less, was performing a precisely similar task, and ordering his men so that the head of that column should reach Templeuve by evening and be ready to march at the same moment as the others did, shortly after midnight.
All these three, then, were absolutely ready, fresh from fatigue and in good order, upon that Friday evening at their appointed posts.
It is here necessary, as we are chiefly concerned with the British forces, to detail the composition of this third column which the Duke of York commanded.
It consisted of twelve battalions and ten squadrons, with a further reserve of sixteen British squadrons under General Erskine, which cavalry lay somewhat south of Templeuve, but ready to follow up the advance when it should begin. It was made of two portions, about equal in numbers, British and foreign. The foreign half was composed of four squadrons of Austrian Hussars and seven battalions of infantry, two Hessian and five Austrian. The British half was composed of a Brigade of Guards counting four battalions, with portions of the 14th, 37th, and 53rd Foot, while the British cavalry accompanying it (apart from the squadrons under Erskine) were six squadrons drawn from the 7th, 15th, and 16th Light Dragoons. It is to the credit of the young commander that this third column was the best organised, the most prompt, and, as the event proved, the most successful during the advance and the most tenacious in the subsequent defeat.
The fourth column, under Kinsky, about 11,000 strong, was also ready on that Friday, the 16th of May, concentrated at its point of departure, Froidmont, and ready to move at the same moment as all the others, shortly after midnight. But unlike the other three commanders upon his right, Kinsky was unfortunately handicapped by the position of the fifth column, that great body of 18,000 to 20,000 men, under the Arch-Duke Charles, which lay at St Amand, which was to advance next day parallel with Kinsky and upon his left, and which it was his duty to keep in touch with, and to link up with the Duke of York’s upon the other side. He was handicapped, I say, by the situation of the fifth column, under the Arch-Duke Charles, the heavy strain already imposed upon which, and the accumulating difficulties it was about to encounter, largely determining the unfortunate issue of the battle.
Kinsky got news on that Friday from the Arch-Duke at St Amand that it was hardly possible for his great body of men to reach the appointed post of Pont-à-Marcq at the arranged hour of daybreak the next morning. I have already suggested that this delay cannot only have been due to the very long march which had been imposed upon the Arch-Duke’s command when it had been hurriedly summoned up from the south to St Amand, forty-eight hours before. It must also have been due to the fact that not all its units reached St Amand by the evening of Thursday the 15th. It seemed certain that there must have been stragglers or bad delays on the morning of the 16th, for it was not until long after nightfall — indeed not until ten o’clock in the evening — of Friday the 16th that the Arch-Duke was able to set out from St Amand and take the Pont-à-Marcq road. This unfortunate body, therefore, the fifth column, which had all the hardest work before it, which had but one road by which to march (although it was double any of the others in size), was compelled, after the terrible fatigue of the preceding days, to push forward sixteen miles through the night in a vain attempt to reach Pont-à-Marcq, not indeed by daybreak, for that was obviously impossible, but as soon after as haste and anxiety could command. Kinsky was tied to Froidmont and unable to move forward until that fifth column upon his left was at least approaching its goal. For he had Bonnaud’s 20,000 Frenchmen at Sainghin right in front of him, and further, if he had moved, his left flank would have been exposed, and, what is more, he would have failed in his purpose, which was to link up the Arch-Duke on one side with the Duke of York upon the other.
This first mishap, then, must be carefully noted as one prime lack of synchrony in the origins of the combined movement, and a first clear cause of the misfortune that was to attend the whole affair. The delay of the fifth column was the chief cause of the disaster.
Meanwhile, another failure to synchronise, and that a most grave one, was taking place miles away in the north with Clerfayt’s command beyond the Lys.
It is self-evident that where one isolated and distant body is being asked to co-operate with comrades who are in touch with the commander-in-chief, and with each other, the exact observation of orders on the part of that isolated body is of supreme importance to the success of the combination. They, all lying in much the same region and able to receive and transmit orders with rapidity, may correct an error before it has developed evil consequences. But the isolated commander co-operating from a distance, and receiving orders from headquarters only after a long delay, is under no such advantage. Thus the tardiness of the fifth column was, as we have seen, communicated to the fourth, and the third, second, and first, all in one line, could or should have easily appreciated the general situation along the Scheldt. But the sixth body, under Clerfayt, which formed the keystone of the whole plan, and without whose exact co-operation that plan must necessarily fail, enjoyed no such advantage, and, if it indulged in the luxuries of delay or misdirection, could not have its errors corrected in useful time. A despatch, to reach Clerfayt from headquarters and from the five columns that were advancing northward from the valley of the Scheldt, must make a circuit round eastward to the back of Courtrai, and it was a matter of nearly half a day to convey information from the Emperor or his neighbouring subordinates in the region of Tournai to this sixth corps which lay north of the Lys.
Now it so happened that Clerfayt, though a most able man, and one who had proved himself a prompt and active general, woefully miscalculated the time-table of his march and the difficulties before him.
He got his orders, as I have said, at ten o’clock on the Friday morning. Whether to give his men a meal, or for whatever other reason, he did not break up until between one and two. He then began ploughing forward with his sixteen thousand men and more, in two huge columns, through the sandy country that forms the plain north of the River Lys. He ought to have known the difficulty of rapid advance over such a terrain, but he does not seem to have provided for it with any care, and when night fell, so far from finding himself in possession of Wervicq and master of the crossing of the river there, the heads of his columns had only reached the great highway between Menin and Ypres, nearly three miles short of his goal. Three miles may sound a short distance to the civilian reader, but if he will consider the efforts of a great body of men and vehicles, pushing forward through the late hours of an afternoon by wretched lanes full of loose sand, and finding the darkness upon them with that distance still to do, he would perceive the importance of the gap. If he further considers that it was only the heads of the columns that had reached the high road by dark, and that two great bodies of men were stretched out two miles and more behind, and if he will add to all this the fact that fighting would have to be done before Wervicq, three miles away, could be occupied, let alone the river crossed, he will discover that Clerfayt had missed his appointment not by three miles only in space, but by the equivalent of half a day in time.
Even so he should have pushed on and have found himself at least in contact with the French posts before his advance was halted. He did not do so. He passed the night in bivouac with the heads of his columns no further south than the great high road.
So much for Clerfayt. The Republic would have cut off his head.
While Clerfayt was thus mishandling his distant and all-important department of the combined scheme, the corresponding advance from the valley of the Scheldt northward was proceeding in a manner which is best appreciated by taking the five columns seriatim and in three groups: the first group consisting of the first column (Bussche), the second group of the second and third columns (Otto and York), the third group of the fourth and fifth (Kinsky and the Arch-Duke).
I
THE FIRST COLUMN UNDER BUSSCHE
This column, as we have seen, consisted of only 4000 men, Hanoverians. Its function and general plan was to give the French the impression that they were being attacked by considerable forces at the very extremity of their advanced wedge, and thus to “hold” them there while the great bulk of the allies were really encircling them to the south and cutting them off from Lille.
When we bear this object in view, we shall see that Bussche with his little force did not do so badly. His orders were to advance with two-thirds of his men against Mouscron, a little place about five miles in front of the village of St Leger where he was concentrated; the remaining third going up the high road towards Courtrai. This last decision, namely, to detach a third of his troops, has been severely criticised, especially by English authorities, but the criticism is hardly just if we consider what Bussche had been sent out to do. He was, of course, to take Mouscron if he could and hold it, and if that had been the main object of the orders given him, it would indeed have been folly to weaken his already weak body by the detaching of a whole third of it four miles away upon the high road to the eastward. But the capture of Mouscron was not the main object set before Bussche. The main object was to “hold” the large French forces in the Courtrai district and to give them the impression of a main attack coming in that direction, and with that object in view it was very wise so to separate his force as to give Souham the idea that the French northern extremity was being attacked in several places at once.
With the early morning, then, of Saturday the 17th, Bussche sent rather less than 1500 men up the high road towards Courtrai, and, with rather more than 2500, marched boldly up against Mouscron, where, considering the immensely superior forces that the French could bring against him, it is not surprising that he was badly hammered. Indeed, but for the fact that the French were unprepared (as we saw in the section “The Preliminaries of the Battle”), he could not have done as much as he did, which was, at the first onslaught, to rush Mouscron and to hold it in the forenoon of that day. But the French, thoroughly alarmed by the event (which was precisely what the plan of the allies intended they should be), easily brought up overwhelming reinforcements, and Bussche’s little force was driven out of the town. It was not only driven out of the town, it was pressed hard down the road as far as Dottignies within a mile or two of the place from which it had started; but there it rallied and stood, and for the rest of the day kept the French engaged without further misfortune. A student of the whole action, careful to keep its proportions in mind and not to exaggerate a single instance, will not regard Bussche’s gallant attempt and failure before Mouscron as any part of the general breakdown. On the contrary, the stand which his little force made against far superior numbers, and the active cannonade which he kept up upon this extreme edge of the French front, would have been one of the major conditions determining the success of the allies if their enormously larger forces in other parts of the field had all of them kept their time-table and done what was expected of them.
II
THE SECOND AND THIRD COLUMNS UNDER OTTO AND THE DUKE OF YORK
On turning to the second group (the second column under Otto and the third under York), we discover a record of continuous success throughout the whole of that day, Saturday the 17th of May, which deserved a better fate than befell them upon the morrow.
(A) The Second Column under Otto
The second column under Otto, consisting of twelve battalions and ten squadrons, certain of the latter being English horse, and the whole command numbering some 10,000 men, advanced with the early morning of that same Saturday the 17th simultaneously with Bussche from Bailleul to Leers. It drove the French outposts in, carried Leers, and advanced further to Wattrelos. It carried Wattrelos.
It continued its successful march another three miles, still pressing in and thrusting off to its right the French soldiers of Compere’s command, until it came to what was then the little market-town of Tourcoing. It carried Tourcoing and held it. This uninterrupted series of successes had brought Otto’s troops forward by some eight miles from their starting-point, and had filled the whole morning, and Otto stood during the afternoon in possession of this advanced point, right on the line between Courtrai and Lille, and having fully accomplished the object which his superiors had set him.
From the somewhat higher roll of land which his cavalry could reach, and from which they could observe the valley of the Lys four miles beyond, they must have strained their eyes to catch some hint of Clerfayt’s troops, upon whose presence across the river on their side they had so confidently calculated, and which, had Clerfayt kept to his time-table and crossed the Lys at dawn, would now have been in the close neighbourhood of Tourcoing and in junction with this successful second column.
But there was no sign of any such welcome sight. The dull rolling plain, with its occasional low crests falling towards the river, betrayed the presence of troops in more than one position to the north and west. But those troops were not moving: they were holding positions, or, if moving, were obviously doing so with the object of contesting the passage of the river. They were French troops, not Austrian, that thus showed distinctly in rare and insufficient numbers along the southern bank of the Lys, and indeed, as we know, Clerfayt, during the whole of that afternoon of the 17th, was painfully bringing up his delayed pontoons, and was, until it was far advanced, upon the wrong side of the river.
Otto maintained his position, hoped against hope that Clerfayt might yet force his way through before nightfall, and was still master of Tourcoing and the surrounding fields when darkness came.
(B) The Third Column under York
Meanwhile York, with his 10,000 half British and half Austro-Hessian, had marched with similar success but against greater obstacles parallel with Otto, and to his left, and had successively taken every point in his advance until he also had reached the goal which had been set before him.
Details of that fine piece of work deserve full mention.
Delayed somewhat by a mist in the dark hours before dawn, York’s command had marched north-westward up the road from Templeuve, where now runs the little tramway reaching the Belgian frontier.
The French troops in front of him, as much as those who had met Otto a mile or two off to the right, and Bussche still further off at Mouscron, were taken aback by the suddenness and the strength of the unexpected blow. They stood at Lannoy. York cannonaded that position, sent certain of the British Light Dragoons round to the left to turn it, and attacked it in front with the Brigade of Guards. The enemy did not stand, and the British forces poured through Lannoy and held it just as Otto in those same hours was pouring into and holding Leers and Wattrelos. Beyond Lannoy, a matter of two miles or so, and still on that same road, was the small town, now swollen to a great industrial city, called Roubaix. The Duke of York left a couple of battalions of his allied troops (Hessians) to hold Lannoy, and with the rest of the column pursued his march.
Roubaix offered far more serious resistance than Lannoy had done. The element of surprise was, of course, no longer present. The French forces were concentrating. The peril they were in of being cut off was by this time thoroughly seized at their headquarters, and the roll of land immediately before Roubaix was entrenched and held by a sufficient force well gunned. A strong resistance was offered to the British advance, but once more the Brigade of Guards broke down that resistance and the place was taken with the bayonet.
York’s next objective, and the goal to which his advance had been ordered, was Mouveaux. Mouveaux is a village standing upon a somewhat higher roll of land rather more than two miles from the centre of Roubaix, in continuation of the direction which York’s advance had hitherto pursued. From Mouveaux the eye could overlook the plain reaching to the Lys and to Wervicq, some seven odd miles away, a plain broken by one or two slight hummocks of which the least inconspicuous holds the village of Linselles. Mouveaux was the point to which Clerfayt was expected to advance from his side. It was on a level with Tourcoing, and lay, as Tourcoing did, precisely upon the line between Courtrai and Lille. To reach Mouveaux, therefore, and not to be content with the capture of Roubaix, was consistent with and necessary to the general plan of the allies. Moreover, as Otto with the second column had taken Tourcoing, it was necessary that the third column should proceed to Mouveaux, unless Otto’s left or southern flank was to remain exposed and in peril. One may say, in general, that until Mouveaux was occupied the chance of joining hands with Clerfayt (supposing that General to have kept to his time-table and to be across the Lys and marching up to meet the columns from the Scheldt) was in peril. Therefore, until one has learnt what was happening to the fourth and the fifth columns, it is difficult to understand why the Duke of York, after the difficult capture of Roubaix, desired to make that point the utmost limit of his advance and for the moment to proceed no further. Without anticipating the story of the fourth and fifth columns, it is enough to say that the Duke of York’s desire not to advance beyond Roubaix was sufficiently excused by the aspect of the country to the west and south upon his left.
Roubaix overlooks from a slight elevation the valley of the Marque. Lest the word “valley” be misleading, let me hasten to add that that stream here flows at the bottom of a very slight and very broad depression. But, at any rate, from Roubaix one overlooks that depression for some miles; one sees five miles distant the fortifications of Lille, and the intervening country is open enough to betray the presence of troops. Indeed, once Roubaix was captured, the English commander could see across those fields, a couple of hours’ march away, the tents of the great French camp at Sainghin under the walls of the fortress.
Now, along that river valley and across those fields there should have been apparent in those mid hours of the day, when the Guards had stormed Roubaix, the great host of the fourth and fifth columns coming up in support of the second and third.
If the time-table had been observed, the Arch-Duke and Kinsky, over 25,000 men, should have been across the Marque before dawn, should have pushed back the French forces outside Lille, and should, long before noon, have been covering those fields between Roubaix and Lille with their advancing squadrons and battalions. There was no sign of them. If, or when, the French body near Lille were free to advance and attack the Duke of York’s left flank, there was no one between to prevent their doing so. That great body of the third and fourth columns, more than half of all the men who were advancing from the Scheldt to meet Clerfayt, had failed to come up to time. That was why the Duke of York desired to push no further than Roubaix, and even to leave only an advance guard to hold that place while he withdrew the bulk of his command to Lannoy.
But his decision was overruled. The Emperor and his staff, who, following up the march of this third column, were now at Templeuve, thought it imperative that Mouveaux should be held. Only thus, in their judgment, could the junction with Clerfayt (who, though late, must surely be now near at hand) be accomplished. And certainly, unless Mouveaux were held, Otto could not hold his advanced position at Tourcoing. The order was therefore sent to York to take Mouveaux. In the disastrous issue that order has naturally come in for sharp blame; but it must be remembered that much of the plan was already successfully accomplished, that Clerfayt was thought to be across the Lys, and that if the French around Courtrai, and hitherward from Courtrai to Tourcoing, were to be cut off, it was imperative to effect the junction with Clerfayt without delay. Had Clerfayt been, as he should have been at that hour in the afternoon of Saturday the 17th, between the Lys and the line Mouveaux-Tourcoing, the order given by the Austrian staff to the Duke of York would not only have been approved by the military opinion of posterity, but any other order would have been thought a proof of indecision and bad judgment.
Upon receiving this order to take Mouveaux, York obeyed. The afternoon was now far advanced, very heavy work had been done, a forward march of nearly six miles had been undertaken, accompanied by continual fighting — latterly, outside Roubaix, of a heavy sort. But if Mouveaux was to be held before nightfall, an immediate attack must be made, and York ordered his men forward.
Mouveaux stands upon one of those very slight crests which barely diversify the flat country in which Roubaix and Tourcoing stand. The summit of that crest is but little more than fifty feet higher than the bottom of the low, broad depression between it and the centre of Roubaix, of which swollen town it is to-day a western suburb. Slight as is the elevation, it does, as I have said, command a view towards the Lys and Wervicq; and the evenness and length of the very gentle slope upon the Roubaix side make it an excellent defensive position.
I have pointed out how the columns of attack as they advanced could not fail to find an increasing resistance. Roubaix had held out more strongly than Lannoy, Mouveaux was to hold out more strongly than Roubaix. The position was palisaded and entrenched. Redoubts had even been hastily thrown up by the French at either end of it, but the weight of the attacking column told. It was again the Guards who were given the task of carrying the trenches at the bayonet, and after a sharp struggle they were successful. The French, as they retired, set fire to the village (which stands upon the very summit of that roll of land), and were charged in their retirement by Abercromby with the English Dragoons. They left three hundred upon the field, and three field-pieces as well. Despite the great superiority of numbers which York’s columns still commanded over the enemy immediately before him, it was a brilliant feat, especially when one considers that it came at the very end of a day that was hot for the season, that had begun before one o’clock in the morning, and that had involved the carrying of three positions, each more stoutly defended than the last, within an advance of over seven miles.
Mouveaux thus carried, the head of York’s column was on a line with the head of Otto’s, which held Tourcoing just two miles away. The heads of either column now occupied the main road between Lille and Courtrai (which passes through Mouveaux and Tourcoing), and the heads of either column also held the slight crests from which the belated advance of Clerfayt from the Lys could be watched and awaited.
But though there was evidence of heavy fighting down in the river valley five miles to the north and west, and though it seemed probable from the sound of the firing that Clerfayt with the sixth body had crossed the Lys at Wervicq and was now on the right side of it, upon the southern bank, there was no sign of his advancing columns in those empty fields towards Linselles and the river over which the setting sun glared.
Neither, as his troops prepared to bivouac for the night upon the slopes of Mouveaux, could York, looking southward, find any indication of the fourth and fifth columns under Kinsky and the Arch-Duke which should have come up to this same position at Mouveaux by noon seven hours before. The flat and marshy fields upon either bank of the Marque were anxiously scanned in vain as the twilight deepened. Down there, far off, the cannon had been heard all that afternoon round the French camp at Sainghin, but nothing had come through.
It was therefore under a sense of isolation and of confusion, with the knowledge that their left flank was open, that Clerfayt in front of them was not yet in reach, that the second and third columns, which had so thoroughly accomplished their task, established their posts under the early summer night to await the chances of the morning.
III
THE FOURTH AND FIFTH COLUMNS UNDER KINSKY AND THE ARCH-DUKE CHARLES
Now what had happened to the fourth and fifth columns under Kinsky and the Arch-Duke? I must describe their fortunes, show why they had failed to come up, and thus complete the picture of the general advance from the Scheldt, before I turn to conclude the explanation of the disaster by detailing the further adventures of Clerfayt after he had crossed the Lys.
(A) The Fourth Column under Kinsky
Kinsky with his 11,000 men had been delayed, as we have seen, at Froidmont by the message which the Arch-Duke had sent him from St Amand, to the effect that the fifth column could not hope to be at Pont-à-Marcq before dawn upon the 17th.
At the moment, therefore, when in the small hours of Saturday the 17th Otto and the Duke of York started out simultaneously from Bailleul and Templeuve, Kinsky was still pinned to Froidmont. But he knew that the Arch-Duke had started with his great column some time after dark in the Friday night from St Amand, and when he estimated that they had proceeded far enough along the road to Pont-à-Marcq to be up level with him upon his left, Kinsky set his men in march and made for the Bridge of Bouvines, which was the crossing of the Marque immediately in front of him.
The Bridge of Bouvines lay right in front of the great French camp. It was strongly held, and the hither side of the river, as Kinsky approached it, was found to be entrenched. His men drove the French from those entrenchments, they retired over the bridge, and as they retired they broke it down. Upon the far side of the river in front of their camp the French further established a battery of heavy guns upon that slight slope which is now crowned by the Fort of Sainghin, and Kinsky could not force the passage until the fifth column, or at any rate the head of it, should begin to appear upon his left.
It will be seen upon the frontispiece map that when the Arch-Duke’s men reached Pont-à-Marcq and crossed the river there, they would take the French camp and the main French forces there in reserve, weaken the power of the French resistance at the Bridge of Bouvines, afford Kinsky the opportunity of crossing at that point, and that, immediately after that crossing, Kinsky and the Arch-Duke, having joined hands, would be in sufficient strength to push back the French from Sainghin and to march up north together towards Mouveaux. The appearance of their combined force at Mouveaux by noon would fulfil the time-table, and at mid-day of Saturday, if the time-table were thus fulfilled, the whole combined force of the second, third, fourth, and fifth columns would have been astraddle of the Lille-Courtrai Road, would have cut off Souham’s corps from Lille, and could await Clerfayt if he had not yet arrived. When, therefore, the Arch-Duke and the fifth column should have crossed the Marque at Pont-à-Marcq, the fortunes of the fourth column would have blended with it, and the story of the two would have been one. We may therefore leave Kinsky still waiting anxiously in front of the broken bridge at Bouvines for news of the Arch-Duke, and conclude the picture of the whole advance from the Scheldt by describing what had happened and was happening to that Commander and his great force of 17,000 to 18,000 men.
(B) The Fifth Column under the Arch-Duke Charles
When the Arch-Duke Charles had let Kinsky know upon the day before, the Friday, that he could not be at the appointed post of Pont-à-Marcq by the next daybreak, he had implied that somewhere in the early morning of that Saturday, at least, he would be there. Exactly how early neither he nor Kinsky could tell. His troops had sixteen full miles to march; they had but one road by which to advance, and they were fatigued with the enormous exertion of that hurried march northward to St Amand, which has already been set down.
Such were the delays at St Amand in preparing that advance, that the night was far gone before the fifth column took the road to Pont-à-Marcq, and the effort that was to be demanded of it was more than should have been justly demanded of any troops. Indeed, the idea that a body of this great size, tied to one road, could suffer the severe effort of the rush from the south to St Amand, followed by a night-march, that march to be followed by heavy fighting during the ensuing morning and a further advance of eight or nine miles during the forenoon, was one of the weakest points in the plan of the allies. No such weakness would have been apparent if the main body of the Austrians under the Arch-Duke had been called up on the 12th instead of the 14th, and had been given two more days in which to cover the great distance. But, as it was, the delay of the Emperor and his staff in calling up that main body had gravely weakened its effective power.
The league-long column thrust up the road through the darkness hour upon hour, with its confusion of vehicles and that difficulty in marshalling all units which is the necessary handicap of an advance in the darkness. Long before their task was so much as half accomplished, it was apparent not only that Pont-à-Marcq would not be reached at dawn, but that the mass of the infantry would not be at that river-crossing until the morning was far spent.
When day broke, though cavalry had been set forward at greater speed, the heads of the infantry column were but under the Hill of Beuvry. It was long after six before the force had passed through Orchies, and though Kinsky learnt, in the neighbourhood of eight o’clock, that the cavalry of the fifth column were up on a level with him and had reached the river, the main force of the fifth column was not available for crossing Pont-à-Marcq until noon, and past noon.
Kinsky, thus tied to the broken Bridge of Bouvines until Pont-à-Marcq should be forced, saw mid-day come and pass, and still his force and that of the Arch-Duke upon his left were upon the wrong side of the stream.
Yet another hour went by. His fourth column and the fifth should already have been nine miles up north, by Mouveaux, and they were not yet even across the Marque!
It was not until two o’clock that the passage of the river at Pont-à-Marcq was forced by the Arch-Duke Charles, and that, as the consequence of that passage of the stream, the French were taken in reverse in their camp at Sainghin and were compelled to fall back northward, leaving the passage at Bouvines free. Kinsky repaired the bridge, and was free to bring his 11,000 over, and the two extreme columns, the fourth and the fifth, would then have joined forces in the mid-afternoon of the Saturday, having accomplished their object of forcing the Marque and uniting for the common advance northward in support of Otto and the Duke of York.
Now, had the Arch-Duke Charles’ men been machines, this section of the general plan would yet have failed by half a day to keep its time-table: and by more than half a day: by all the useful part of a working day. By the scheme of time upon which the plan was based, the fifth column should have been across the Marque at dawn; by six, or at latest by seven o’clock the French should have been compelled to fall back from Sainghin, and the combined fourth and fifth columns should have been upon their northward march for Mouveaux. It was not seven o’clock, it was between three and four o’clock by the time the Arch-Duke was well across the Marque and the French retired; but still, if the men of this fifth column had been machines, Kinsky was now free to effect his junction across the Bridge of Bouvines, and the combined force would have reached the neighbourhood of Mouveaux and Tourcoing by nightfall, or shortly after dark.
But the men of the fifth column were not machines, and at that hour of the mid-afternoon of Saturday they had come to the limits of physical endurance. It was impossible to ask further efforts of them, or, if those efforts were demanded, to hope for success. In the Arch-Duke’s column by far the greater part of the 17,000 or 18,000 men had been awake and working for thirty-six hours. All had been on foot for at least twenty-four; they had been actually marching for seventeen, and had been fighting hard at the end of the effort and after sixteen miles of road. There could be no question of further movement that day: they bivouacked just north of the river, near where the French had been before their retirement, and Kinsky, seeing no combined movement could be made that day, kept his men also bivouacked near the Bridge of Bouvines.
Thus it was that when night fell upon that Saturday the left wing of the advance from the Scheldt had failed. And that is why those watching from the head of the successful third column at Mouveaux and Roubaix, under the sunset of that evening, saw no reinforcement coming up the valley of the Marque, caught no sign of their thirty thousand comrades advancing from the south, and despaired of the morrow.
SUMMARY OF SITUATION ON THE SOUTH BY THE EVENING OF SATURDAY, MAY 17th.
IF WE TAKE stock of the whole situation, so far as the advance of the five columns from the Scheldt was concerned, when darkness fell upon that Saturday we can appreciate the peril in which the second and third column under Otto and York lay.
The position which the plan had assigned to the four columns, second, third, fourth, and fifth, by noon of that Saturday (let alone by nightfall), is that marked upon the map by the middle four of the six oblongs in dotted lines marked B. Of these, the two positions on the right were filled, for the second and third columns had amply accomplished their mission. But the two on the left, so far from being filled, were missed by miles of space and hours of time. At mid-day, or a little after, when Kinsky and the Arch-Duke should have been occupying the second and third dotted oblong respectively, neither of them was as yet even across the Marque. Both were far away back at E, E: and these hopeless positions, E, E, right away behind the line of positions across the Courtrai-Lille road which the plan expected them to occupy by Saturday noon, Kinsky and the Arch-Duke pacifically maintained up to and including the night between Saturday and Sunday!
The Elements of Tourcoing
It is evident, therefore, that instead of all four columns of nearly sixty thousand men barring the road between Souham and Lille and effecting the isolation of the French “wedge” round Courtrai, a bare, unsupported twenty thousand found themselves that night alone: holding Roubaix, Tourcoing, Lannoy, Mouveaux, and thrust forward isolated in the midst of overwhelmingly superior and rapidly gathering numbers.
In such an isolation nothing could save Otto and York but the abandonment during the night of their advanced positions and a retreat upon the points near the Scheldt from which they had started twenty hours before.
The French forces round Lille were upon one side of them to the south and west, in number perhaps 20,000. On the other side of them, towards Courtrai, was the mass of Souham’s force which they had hoped to cut off, nearly 40,000 strong. Between these two great bodies of men, the 20,000 of Otto and York were in peril of destruction if the French awoke to the position before the retirement of the second and third columns was decided on.
It is here worthy of remark that the only real cause of peril was the absence of Kinsky and the Arch-Duke.
Certain historians have committed the strange error of blaming Bussche for what followed. Bussche, it will be remembered, had been driven out of Mouscron early in the day, and was holding on stubbornly enough, keeping up an engagement principally by cannonade with the French upon the line of Dottignies. It is obvious that from such a position he could be of no use to the isolated Otto and York five miles away. But on the other hand, he was not expected to be of any use. What could his 4000 have done to shield the 20,000 of Otto and York from those 40,000 French under Souham’s command? His business was to keep as many of the French as possible occupied away on the far north-east of the field, and that object he was fulfilling.
Finally, it may be asked why, in a posture so patently perilous, Otto and York clung to their advanced positions throughout the night? The answer is simple enough. If, even during the night, the fourth and fifth columns should appear, the battle was half won. If Clerfayt, of whom they had no news, but whom they rightly judged to be by this time across the Lys, were to arrive before the French began to close in, the battle would be not half won, but all won. Between 55,000 and 60,000 men would then be lying united across the line which joined the 40,000 of the enemy to the north with the 20,000 to the south. If such a junction were effected even at the eleventh hour, so long as it took place before the 20,000 French outside Lille and the 40,000 to the north moved upon them, the allies would have won a decisive action, and the surrender of all Souham’s command would have been the matter of a few hours. For a force cut in two is a force destroyed.
But the night passed without Clerfayt’s appearing, and before closing the story of that Saturday I must briefly tell why, though he had crossed the Lys in the afternoon, he failed to advance southward through the intervening five or six miles to Mouveaux.
CLERFAYT’S COLUMN.
CLERFAYT HAD, IN that extraordinary slow march of his, advanced by the Friday night, as I have said, no further than the great high road between Menin and Ypres. I further pointed out that though only three miles separated that point from Wervicq, yet those three miles meant, under the military circumstances of the moment, a loss of time equivalent to at least half a day.
We therefore left Clerfayt at Saturday’s dawn, as we left the Arch-Duke at the same time, far short of the starting-point which had been assigned to him.
Whereas the Arch-Duke, miles away over there to the south, had at least pushed on to the best of his ability through the night towards Pont-à-Marcq, Clerfayt did not push on by night to Wervicq as he should have done. He bivouacked with the heads of his columns no further than the Ypres road.
Nor did he even break up and proceed over the remaining three miles during the very earliest hours. For one reason or another (the point has never been cleared up) the morning was fairly well advanced when he set forth — possibly because his units had got out of touch and straggling in the sandy country, or blocked by vehicles stuck fast. Whatever the cause may have been, he did not exchange shots with the French outposts at Wervicq until well after noon upon that Saturday the 17th of May.
When at last he had forced his way into the town (the great bulk of which lies north of the river), he found the bridge so well defended that he could not cross it, or, at any rate, that the carrying of it — the chances of its being broken after the French should have retired and the business of bringing his great force across, with the narrow streets of the town to negotiate and the one narrow bridge, even if intact to use — would put him upon the further bank at a hopelessly late hour. Therefore did he call for his pontoons in order to solve the difficulty by bridging the river somewhat lower down. The Lys is here but a narrow stream, and it would be easy, with the pontoons at his disposal, to pass his troops over rapidly upon a broader front, making, if necessary, two wide bridges. I say “with the pontoons at his disposal.” But by the time Clerfayt had taken this decision and had sent for the pontoons, he found that they were not there!
His section of pontoons had not kept abreast with the rest of the army, and their delay had not been notified to him. It was not until quite late in the day that they arrived; it was not until evening that the laying of the pontoons began, nor till midnight that he was passing the first of his troops over.
He did not get nor attempt to get the mass of his sixteen or seventeen thousand across in the darkness. He bivouacked the remainder upon the wrong side of the river and waited for the morrow.
So that Saturday ended, with Otto and York isolated at the central meeting-place round Tourcoing-Mouveaux, which they alone had reached; with the Arch-Duke Charles and Kinsky bivouacked miles away to the south on either side of the Bridge of Bouvines; and with Clerfayt still, as to the bulk of his force, on the wrong side of the Lys.
It was no wonder that the next day, Sunday, was to see the beginning of disaster.
SUNDAY, MAY the 18th, 1794.
I HAVE SAID that, considering the isolated position in which York and Otto found themselves, with no more than perhaps 18,000 in the six positions of Leers, Wattrelos, and Tourcoing, Lannoy, Roubaix, and Mouveaux, the French had only to wake up to the situation, and Otto and York would be overwhelmed.
The French did wake up. How thoroughly taken by surprise they had been by the prompt and exact advance of Otto and York the day before, the reader has already been told. Throughout Saturday they remained in some confusion as to the intention of the enemy; and indeed it was not easy to grasp a movement which was at once of such great size, and whose very miscarriage rendered it the more baffling of comprehension. But by the evening of the day, Souham, calling a council of his generals at Menin, came to a decision as rapid as it was wise. Reynier, Moreau, and Macdonald, the generals of divisions that were under his orders, all took part in the brief discussion and the united resolve to which it led. “It was,” in the words of a contemporary, “one of those rare occasions in which the decision of several men in council has proved as effective as the decision of a single will.”
Of the troops which were, it will be remembered, dispersed to the north of the Lys, only one brigade was left upon the wrong side of the river to keep an eye on Clerfayt; all the rest were recalled across the stream and sent forward to take up positions north of Otto’s and Kinsky’s columns. Meanwhile the bulk of the French troops lying between Courtrai and Tourcoing were disposed in such fashion as to attack from the north and east, south and westward. Some 40,000 men all told were ready to close in with the first light from both sides upon the two isolated bodies of the allies. To complete their discomfiture, word was sent to Bonnaud and Osten, the generals of divisions who commanded the 20,000 about Lille, ordering them to march north and east, and to attack simultaneously with their comrades upon that third exposed side where York would receive the shock. In other words, the 18,000 or so distributed on the six points under Otto and York occupied an oblong the two long sides of which and the top were about to be attacked by close upon 60,000 men. The hour from which this general combined advance inwards upon the doomed commands of the allies was to begin was given identically to all the French generals. They were to break up at three in the morning. With such an early start, the sun would not have been long risen before the pressure upon Otto and York would begin.
When the sun rose, the head of Otto’s column upon the little height of Tourcoing saw to the north, to the north-east, and to the east, distant moving bodies, which were the columns of the French attack advancing from those quarters. As they came nearer, their numbers could be distinguished. A brigade was approaching them from the north and the Lys valley, descending the slopes of the hillock called Mont Halhuin. It was Macdonald’s. Another was on the march from Mouscron and the east. It was Compere’s. The General who was commanding for Otto in Tourcoing itself was Montfrault. He perceived the extremity of the danger and sent over to York for reinforcement. York spared him two Austrian battalions, but with reluctance, for he knew that the attack must soon develop upon his side also. In spite of the peril, in the vain hope that Clerfayt might yet appear, Mouveaux and Tourcoing were still held, and upon the latter position, between five and six o’clock in the morning, fell the first shots of the French advance. The resistance at Tourcoing could not last long against such odds, and Montfrault, after a gallant attempt to hold the town, yielded to a violent artillery attack and prepared to retreat. Slowly gathering his command into a great square, he began to move south-eastward along the road to Wattrelos. It was half-past eight when that beginning of defeat was acknowledged.
Meanwhile York, on his side, had begun to feel the pressure. Mouveaux was attacked from the north somewhat before seven o’clock in the morning, and, simultaneously with that attack, a portion of Bonnaud’s troops which had come up from the neighbourhood of Lille, was driving in York’s outposts to the west of Roubaix.
How, it may be asked, did the French, in order thus to advance from Lille, negotiate the passage of that little River Marque, which obstacle had proved so formidable a feature in the miscarriage of the great allied plan the day before? The answer is, unfortunately, easily forthcoming. York had left the bridges over the Marque unguarded. Why, we do not know. Whether from sheer inadvertence, or because he hoped that Kinsky had detached men for the purpose, for one reason or another he had left those passages free, and, by the bridge of Hempempont against Lannoy, by that of Breuck against Roubaix, Bonnaud’s and Osten’s men poured over.
As at Tourcoing, so at Mouveaux, a desperate attempt was made to hold the position. Indeed it was clung to far too late, but the straits to which Mouveaux was reduced at least afforded an opportunity for something of which the British service should not be unmindful. Immediately between Roubaix and the River Marque, Fox, with the English battalions of the line, was desperately trying to hold the flank and to withstand the pressure of the French, who were coming across the river more than twice his superiors in number. He was supported by a couple of Austrian battalions, and the two services dispute as to which half of this defending force was first broken. But the dispute is idle. No troops could have stood the pressure, and at any rate the defence broke down — with this result: that the British troops holding Mouveaux, Abercrombie’s Dragoons, and the Brigade of Guards, were cut off from their comrades in Roubaix. Meanwhile, Tourcoing having been carried and the Austrians driven out from thence, the eastern and western forces of the French had come into touch in the depression between Mouveaux and Roubaix, and it seemed as though the surrender or destruction of that force was imminent. Abercrombie saved it. A narrow gap appeared between certain forces of the French, eastward of the position at Mouveaux, and leaving a way open round to Roubaix. He took advantage of it and won through: the Guards keeping a perfect order, the rear defended by the mobility and daring of the Dragoons. The village of Roubaix, in those days, consisted in the main of one long straight street, though what is now the great town had already then so far increased in size as to have suburbs upon the north and south. The skirmishers of the French were in these suburbs. (Fox’s flank command had long ago retired, keeping its order, however, and making across country as best it could for Lannoy.) It was about half-past nine when Abercrombie’s force, which had been saved by so astonishing a mixture of chance, skill, coolness, and daring, filed into the long street of Roubaix. The Guards and the guns went through the passage in perfect formation in spite of the shots dropping from the suburbs, which were already beginning to harass the cavalry behind them. Immediately to their rear was the Austrian horse, while, last of all, defending the retreat, the English Dragoons were just entering the village. In the centre of this long street a market-place opened out. The Austrian cavalry, arrived at it, took advantage of the room afforded them; they doubled and quadrupled their files until they formed a fairly compact body, almost filling the square. It was precisely at this moment that the French advance upon the eastern side of the village brought a gun to bear down the long straight street and road, which led from the market square to Wattrelos. The moment it opened fire, the Austrians, after a vain attempt to find cover, pressed into the side streets down the market-place, fell into confusion. There is no question here of praise or blame: a great body of horsemen, huddled in a narrow space, suddenly pounded by artillery, necessarily became in a moment a mass of hopeless confusion. The body galloped in panic out of the village, swerved round the sharp corner into the narrower road (where the French had closed in so nearly that there was some bayonet work), and then came full tilt against the British guns, which lay blocking the way because the drivers had dismounted or cut the traces and fled. In the midst of this intolerable confusion a second gun was brought to bear by the French, and the whole mob of ridden and riderless horses, some dragging limbers, some pack-horses charged, many more the dispersed and maddened fragments of the cavalry, broke into the Guards, who had still kept their formation and were leading what had been but a few moments before an orderly retreat.
It is at this point, I think, that the merit of this famous brigade and its right to regard the disaster not with humiliation but with pride, is best established. For that upon which soldiers chiefly look is the power of a regiment to reform. The Guards, thus broken up under conditions which made formation for the moment impossible, and would have excused the destruction of any other force, cleared themselves of the welter, recovered their formation, held the road, permitted the British cavalry to collect itself and once more form a rearguard, and the retreat upon Lannoy was resumed by this fragment of York’s command in good order: in good order, although it was subjected to heavy and increasing fire upon either side.
It was a great feat of arms.
As for the Duke of York, he was not present with his men. He had ridden off with a small escort of cavalry to see whether it might not be possible to obtain some reinforcement from Otto, but the French were everywhere in those fields. He found himself with a squadron, with a handful, and at last alone, until, a conspicuous figure with the Star of the Garter still pinned to his coat, he was chivied hither and thither across country, followed and flanked by the sniping shots of the French skirmishers in thicket and hedge; after that brief but exceedingly troubled ride, Providence discovered him a brook and a bridge still held by some of Otto’s Hessians. He crossed it, and was in safety.
His retreating men — those of them that remained, and notably the remnant of the Dragoons and the Guards — were still in order as they approached Lannoy. They believed, or hoped, that that village was still in possession of the Hessians whom York had left there. But the French attack had been ubiquitous that morning. It had struck simultaneously upon all the flanks. At Roubaix as at Mouveaux, at Lannoy as at Roubaix, and the Guards and the Dragoons within musket shot of Lannoy discovered it, in the most convincing fashion, to be in the hands of the enemy. After that check order and formation were lost, and the remaining fragment of the Austrian and British who had marched out from Templeuve the day before 10,000 strong, hurried, dispersed over the open field, crossed what is now the Belgian border, and made their way back to camp.
Thus was destroyed the third column, which, of all portions of the allied army, had fought hardest, had most faithfully executed its orders, had longest preserved discipline during a terrible retreat and against overwhelming numbers: it was to that discipline that the Guards in particular owed the saving from the wreck of so considerable a portion of their body. Of their whole brigade just under 200 were lost, killed, wounded or taken prisoners. The total loss of the British was not quite five times this — just under 1000, — but of their guns, twenty-eight in number, nineteen were left in the hands of the enemy.
There is no need to recount in detail the fate of Otto’s column. As it had advanced parallel in direction and success to the Duke of York’s, it suffered a similar and parallel misfortune. As the English had found Lannoy occupied upon their line of retreat, so Otto’s column had found Wattrelos. As the English column had broken at Lannoy, so the Austrian at Leers. And the second column came drifting back dispersed to camp, precisely as the third had done. When the fragments were mustered and the defeat acknowledged, it was about three o’clock in the afternoon.
For the rest of the allied army there is no tale to tell, save with regard to Clerfayt’s command; the fourth and the fifth columns, miles away behind the scene of the disaster, did not come into action. Long before they could have broken up after the breakdown through exhaustion of the day before, the French were over the Marque and between them and York. When a move was made at noon, it was not to relieve the second and third columns, for that was impossible, though, perhaps, if they had marched earlier, the pressure they would have brought to bear upon Bonnaud’s men might have done something to lessen the disaster. It is doubtful, for the Marque stood in between and the French did not leave it unguarded.
Bussche, true to his conduct of the day before, held his positions all day and maintained his cannonade with the enemy. It is true that there was no severe pressure upon him, but still he held his own even when the rout upon his left might have tempted him to withdraw his little force.
As for Clerfayt, he had not all his men across the Lys until that very hour of seven in the morning when York at Mouveaux was beginning to suffer the intolerable pressure of the French, and Otto’s men at Tourcoing were in a similar plight.
By the time he had got all his men over, he found Vandamme holding positions, hastily prepared but sufficiently well chosen, and blocking his way to the south. With a defensive thus organised, though only half as strong as the attack, Vandamme was capable of a prolonged resistance; and while it was in progress, reinforcements, summoned from the northern parts of the French line beyond Lille, had had time to appear towards the west. He must have heard from eight o’clock till noon the fire of his retreating comrades falling back in their disastrous retreat, and, rightly judging that he would have after mid-day the whole French army to face, he withdrew to the river, and had the luck to cross it the next day without loss: a thing that the French now free from the enemy to the south should never have permitted.
So ended the Battle of Tourcoing, an action which, for the interest of its scheme, for the weight of its results, and, above all, for the fine display of courage and endurance which British troops showed under conditions that should normally have meant annihilation, deserves a much wider fame in this country than it has obtained.
WATERLOO
I. THE POLITICAL OBJECT AND EFFECT OF THE WATERLOO CAMPAIGN
IT MUST CONTINUALLY be insisted upon in military history, that general actions, however decisive, are but the functions of campaigns; and that campaigns, in their turn, are but the functions of the political energies of the governments whose armies are engaged.
The object of a campaign is invariably a political object, and all its military effort is, or should be, subsidiary to that political object.
One human community desires to impose upon the future a political condition which another human community rejects; or each is attempting to impose upon the future, conditions irreconcilable one with the other. Until we know what those conditions are, or what is the political objective of each opponent, we cannot decide upon the success of a campaign, nor give it its true position in history.
Thus, to take the simplest and crudest case, a nation or its government determines to annex the territory of a neighbour; that is, to subject a neighbouring community to the laws of the conqueror. That neighbouring community and its government, if they are so old-fashioned as to prefer freedom, will resist by force of arms, and there will follow what is called a “campaign” (a term derived from the French, and signifying a countryside: for countrysides are the theatres of wars). In this campaign the political object of the attempted conquest on the one hand, and of resistance to it on the other, are the issue. The military aspect of the campaign is subsidiary to its political objects, and we judge of its success or failure not in military but in political terms.
The prime military object of a general is to “annihilate” the armed force of his opponents. He may do this by breaking up their organisation and dispersing them, or by compelling the surrender of their arms. He may achieve success in this purely military object in any degree. But if, as an end and consequence of his military success, the political object be not achieved — if, for instance, in the particular case we are considering, the neighbouring community does not in the future obey laws dictated to it by the conqueror, but remains autonomous — then the campaign has failed.
Such considerations are, I repeat, the very foundation of military history; and throughout this Series they will be insisted upon as the light in which alone military history can be understood.
It is further true that not only may a campaign be successful in the military sense, and yet in the largest historical sense be a failure, but, quite evidently, the actions in a campaign may each be successful and yet the campaign a failure; or each action may, on the whole, fail, and yet that campaign be a success. As the old formulæ go, “You can win every battle and lose your campaign.” And, again, “A great general does not aim at winning battles, but at winning his campaign.” An action results from the contact of the opposing forces, and from the necessity in which they find themselves, after such contact, of attempting the one to disorganise or to capture the other. And in the greater part actions are only “accepted,” as the phrase goes, by either party, because each party regards the action as presenting opportunities for his own success.
A campaign can perfectly well be conceived in which an opponent, consciously inferior in the field, will avoid action throughout, and by such a plan can actually win the campaign in the end. Historical instances of this, though rare, exist. And there have even been campaigns where, after a great action disastrous to one side, that side has yet been able to keep up a broken resistance sufficiently lengthy and exhausting to baulk the conqueror of his political object in the end.
In a word, it is the business of the serious student in military history to reverse the popular and dramatic conception of war, to neglect the brilliance and local interest of a battle for the larger view of the whole operations; and, again, to remember that these operations are not an end in themselves, but are only designed to serve the political plan of the government which has commanded them.
Judged in this true light, we may establish the following conclusions with regard to the battle of Waterloo.
First, the battle of Waterloo was a decisive action, the result of which was a complete military success for the Allies in the campaign they had undertaken, and a complete military defeat for Napoleon, who had opposed them.
This complete military success of the Allies’ campaign was, again, equivalent to a success in their immediate political object, which was the overthrow of Napoleon’s personal power, the re-establishment of the Bourbons upon the French throne, and the restoration of those traditions and ideals of government which had been common to Europe before the outbreak of the French Revolution twenty-four years before.
Had the effect of this battle and that campaign been permanent, one could speak of their success as complete; but when we discuss that largest issue of all, to wit, whether the short campaign which Waterloo so decisively concluded really effected its object, considering that that object was the permanent destruction of the revolutionary effort and the permanent re-establishment of the old state of affairs in Europe, we are compelled to arrive at a very different conclusion: a conclusion which will vary with the varying judgment of men, and one which cannot be final, because the drama is not yet played out; but a conclusion which, in the eyes of all, singularly modifies the effect of the campaign of Waterloo.
It is obvious, at the first glance we take of European history during, say, the lifetime of a man who should have been a boy in Waterloo year, that the general political object of the revolutionary and Napoleonic armies was not reversed at Waterloo. It was ultimately established. The war had been successfully maintained during too long a period for the uprooting of the political conditions which the French had attempted to impose upon Europe. Again, those conditions were sufficiently sympathetic to the European mind at the time to develop generously, and to grow in spite of all attempted restriction. And we discover, as a fact, democratic institutions, democratic machinery at least, spreading rapidly again after their defeat at Waterloo, and partially victorious, first in France and later elsewhere, within a very few years of that action.
The same is true of certain secondary results of the prolonged revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. Nationality predominated over the old idea of a monarch governing his various “peoples,” and the whole history of the nineteenth century was a gradual vindication of the principle of nationality. A similar fate awaited institutions bound up with the French revolutionary effort: a wide and continually expressed suffrage, the arming of whole nations in defence of their independence, the ordering of political life upon the new plan, down even to the details of the revolutionary weights and measures (the metre, the gramme, etc.) — these succeeded and in effect triumphed over the arrangements which that older society had fought to restore.
On the other hand, the advance of all this was much slower, much more disturbed, much less complete, than it would have been had Napoleon not failed in Russia, suffered his decisive defeat at Leipzig, and fallen for ever upon that famous field of Waterloo; and one particular characteristic, namely, the imposition of all these things upon Europe by the will of a government at Paris, wholly disappeared.
We may sum up, then, and say that the political effect of the battle of Waterloo and its campaign was an immediate success for the Allies: that their ultimate success the history of the nineteenth century has reversed; but that the victory of Waterloo modified, retarded, and perhaps distorted in a permanent fashion the establishment of those conceptions of society and government which the Revolution, and Napoleon as its soldier, had set out to establish.
There is a side question attached to all this, with which I shall conclude, because it forms the best introduction to what is to follow: that question is,— “Would Napoleon have ultimately succeeded even if he had triumphed instead of fallen upon the 18th of June 1815?” In other words, was Waterloo one of these battles the winning or losing of which by either side, meant a corresponding decisive result to that side? Had Wellington’s command broken at Waterloo before the arrival of Blucher, would Napoleon’s consequent victory have meant as much to him as his defeat actually meant to the allies?
The answer of history to this question is, No. Even had Napoleon won on that day he would have lost in the long run.
The date to which we must affix the reverse of Napoleon’s effort is not the 18th of June 1815, but the 19th of October 1812, when the Grand Army began its retreat from Moscow; and the political decision, his failure in which was the origin of his fall, was not the decision taken in June 1815 to advance against the Allies in Belgium, but the decision taken in May 1812 to advance into the vast spaces of Russia. The decisive action which the largest view of history will record in centuries to come as the defeat which ruined Napoleon took place, not south of Brussels, but near the town of Leipzig, two years before. From the last moment of that three days’ battle (again the 19th of October, precisely a twelvemonth after the retreat from Moscow had begun), Napoleon and the French armies are continually falling back. Upon the 4th of April in the following year Napoleon abdicated; and exactly a month later, on the 4th of May, he was imprisoned, under the show of local sovereignty, in the island of Elba.
It was upon the 1st of March 1815 that, having escaped from that island, he landed upon the southern coast of France. There followed the doomed attempt to save somewhat of the Revolution and the Napoleonic scheme, which is known to history as the “hundred days.” Even that attempt would have been impossible had not the greater part of the commanders of units in the French army, that is, of the colonels of regiments, abandoned the Bourbon government, which had been restored at Paris, and decided to support Napoleon.
But even so, the experiment was hazardous in the extreme. Had the surrounding governments which had witnessed and triumphed over his fall permitted him, as he desired, to govern France in peace, and France alone, this small part of the revolutionary plan might have been saved from the general wreck of its fortunes and of his. But such an hypothesis is fantastic. There could be and there was no chance that these great governments, now fully armed, and with all their organised hosts prepared and filled with the memory of recent victory, would permit the restoration of democratic government in that France which had been the centre and outset of the vast movement they had determined to destroy. Further, though Napoleon had behind him the majority, he had not the united mass of the French people. An ordered peace following upon victory would have given him such a support; after his recent crushing defeat it was lacking. It was especially true that the great chiefs of the army were doubtful. His own generals rejoined him, some with enthusiasm, more with doubt, while a few betrayed him early in the process of his attempted restoration.
It is impossible to believe that under such circumstances Napoleon could have successfully met Europe in arms. The military resources of the French people, though not exhausted, were reaching their term. New levies of men yielded a material far inferior to the conscripts of earlier years; and when the Emperor estimated 800,000 men as the force which he required for his effort, it was but the calculation of despair. Eight hundred thousand men: even had they been the harvest of a long peace, the whole armed nation, vigorous in health and fresh for a prolonged contest, would not have been sufficient. The combined Powers had actually under arms a number as great as that, and inexhaustible reserves upon which to draw. A quarter of a million stood ready in the Netherlands, another quarter of a million could march from Austria to cross the Rhine. North Italy had actually present against him 70,000 men; and Russia, which had a similarly active and ready force of 170,000, could increase that host almost indefinitely from her enormous body of population.
But, so far from 800,000 men, Napoleon found to his command not one quarter of that number armed and ready for war. Though Napoleon fell back upon that desperate resource of a starved army, the inclusion of militia; though he swept into his net the whole youth of that year, and accepted conscripts almost without regard to physical capacity; though he went so far as to put the sailors upon shore to help him in his effort, and counted in his effectives the police, the customs officials, and, as one may say, every uniformed man, he was compelled, even after two and a half months of effort, to consider his ready force as less than 300,000, indeed only just over 290,000.
There was behind this, it is true, a reserve of irregulars such as I have described, but the spirit furnishing those irregulars was uncertain, and the yield of them patchy and heterogeneous. Perhaps a quarter of the country responded readily to the appeal which was to call up a national militia. But even upon the eve of the Waterloo campaign there were departments, such as the Orne, which had not compelled five per cent. of those called to join the colours, such as the Pas de Calais and the Gers, which had not furnished eight per cent., and at the very last moment, of every twenty-five men called, not fifteen had come.
Add to this that Napoleon must strike at once or not at all, and it will readily be seen how desperate his situation was. His great chiefs of the higher command were not united in his service, the issue was doubtful, and to join Napoleon was to be a rebel should he fail, — was to be a rebel, that is, in case of a very probable event. The marvel is that so many of the leading men who had anything to lose undertook the chances at all. Finally, even of the total force available to him at that early moment when he was compelled to strike, Napoleon could strike with but a fraction. Less than half of the men available could he gather to deliver this decisive blow; and that blow, be it remembered, he could deliver at but one of the various hosts which were preparing to advance against him.
He was thus handicapped by two things: first, the necessity under which he believed himself to be of leaving considerable numbers to watch the frontiers. Secondly, and most important, the limitations imposed upon him by his lack of provision. With every effort, he could not fully arm and equip and munition a larger force than that which he gathered in early June for his last desperate throw; and the body upon the immediate and decisive success of which everything depended numbered but 124,000 men.
With this force Napoleon proceeded to attack the Allies in the Netherlands. There was a belt of French-speaking population. There was that body of the Allies which lay nearest to his hand, and over which, if he were but victorious, his victory would have its fullest effect. There were the troops under Wellington, a defeat of which would mean the cutting off of England, the financier of the Allies, from the Continent. There was present a population many elements of which sympathised with him and with the French revolutionary effort. Finally, the allied force in Belgium was the least homogeneous of the forces with which he would have to deal in the long succession of struggle from which even a success at this moment would not spare him.
From all these causes combined, and for the further reason that Paris was most immediately threatened from this neighbouring Belgian frontier, it was upon that frontier that Napoleon determined to cast his spear. It was upon the 5th of June that the first order was sent out for the concentration of this army for the invasion of Belgium.
In ten days the 124,000 men, with their 370 guns, were massed upon the line between Maubeuge and Philippeville, immediately upon the frontier, and ready to cross it. The way in which the frontier was passed and the river Sambre crossed before the first actions took place form between them the preliminaries of the campaign, and must be the subject of my next section.
II. THE PRELIMINARIES: NAPOLEON’S ADVANCE ACROSS THE SAMBRE
TO UNDERSTAND THE battle of Waterloo it is necessary, more perhaps than in the case of any other great decisive action, to read it strategically: that is, to regard the final struggle of Sunday the 18th of June as only the climax of certain general movements, the first phase of which was the concentration of the French Army of the North, and the second the passage of the Sambre river and the attack. This second phase covered four days in time, and in space an advance of nearly forty miles.
There is a sense, of course, in which it is true of every battle that its result is closely connected with the strategy which led up to its tactical features: how the opposing forces arrived upon the field, in what condition, and in what disposition and at what time, with what advantage or disadvantage, is always necessarily connected with the history of the campaign rather than of the individual action; but, as we saw in the case of Blenheim, and as might be exemplified from a hundred other cases, the greater part of battles can be understood by following the tactical dispositions upon the field. They are won or lost, in the main, according to those dispositions.
With Waterloo it was not so. Waterloo was lost by Napoleon, won by the Allies, not mainly on account of tactical movements upon the field itself, but mainly on account of what had happened in the course of the advance of the French army to that field. In other words, the military character of that great decisive action is always missed by those who have read it isolated from the movements immediately preceding it.
Napoleon, determining to strike at Belgium under the political circumstances we have already seen, was attacking forces about double his own.
He was like one man coming up rapidly and almost unexpectedly to attack two: but hoping if possible to deal successively and singly with either opponent.
His doubtful chance of success in such a hazard obviously lay in his being able to attack each enemy separately: that is, to engage first one before the second came to his aid; then the second; and thus to defeat each in turn. The chance of victory under such circumstances is slight. It presupposes the surprise of the two allied adversaries by their single opponent, and the defeat of one so quickly that the other cannot come to his aid till all is over. But no other avenue of victory is open to a man fighting enemies of double his numerical strength; at least under conditions where armament, material, and racial type are much the same upon either side.
The possibility of dealing thus with his enemy Napoleon thought possible, and thought it possible from two factors in the situation before him.
The first factor was that the allied army, seeing its great numbers, the comparatively small accumulation of supplies which it could yet command, the great length of frontier which it had to watch, was spread out in a great number of cantonments, the whole stretch of which was no less than one hundred miles in length, from Liège upon the east or left to Tournay upon the west or right.
The second factor which gave Napoleon his chance was that this long line depended for its supply, its orders, its line of retreat upon two separate and opposite bases.
The left or eastern half, formed mainly of Prussian subjects, and acting under Blucher, had arrived from the east, looked for safety in case of defeat to a retreat towards the Rhine, obtained its supplies from that direction, and in general was fed from the east along those communications, continual activity along which are as necessary to the life of an army as the uninterrupted working of the air-tube is necessary to the life of a diver.
The western or right-hand part of the line, Dutch, German, Belgian, and British, acting under Wellington, depended, upon the contrary, upon the North Sea, and upon communication across that sea with England. That is, it drew its supplies and the necessaries of its existence from the west, the opposite and contrary direction from that to which the Prussian half of the Allies were looking for theirs. The effect of this upon the campaign is at once simple to perceive and of capital importance in Napoleon’s plan.
Wellington and Blucher did not, under the circumstances, oppose to Napoleon a single body drawing its life from one stream of communications. They did not in combination command a force defending one goal; they commanded two forces defending two goals. The thorough defeat of one would throw it back away from the other if the attack were delivered at the point where the two just joined hands; and the English or western half under Wellington was bound to movements actually contrary to the Prussian or eastern half under Blucher in case either were defeated before the other could come to its aid.
Napoleon, then, in his rapid advance upon Belgium, was a man conducting a column against a line. He was conducting that column against one special point, the point of junction between two disparate halves of an opposing line. He advanced therefore upon a narrow front perpendicular to, and aimed at the centre of, the long scattered cordon of his double enemy, which cordon it was his business if possible to divide just where the western end of one half touched the eastern end of the other. He designed to fight in detail the first portion he could engage, then to turn upon the other, and thus to defeat both singly and in turn.
I will put this strategical position before the reader in the shape of an English parallel in order to make it the plainer, and I will then, by the aid of sketch maps, show how the Allies actually lay upon the Belgian frontier at the moment when Napoleon delivered his attack upon it.
Imagine near a quarter million of men spread out in a line of separate cantonments from Windsor at one extremity to Bristol at the other; and suppose that the eastern half of this line from Windsor to as far west as Wallingford is depending for its supplies and its communications upon the river Thames and its road system, and is prepared in case of defeat to fall back, down the valley of that stream towards London.
On the other hand, imagine that the western half from Swindon to Bristol is receiving its supplies from the Severn and the Bristol Channel, and must in case of defeat fall back westward upon that line.
Now, suppose an invading column rather more than 120,000 strong to be advancing from the south against this line, but prepared to strike up from almost any point on the Channel. It strikes, as a fact, from Southampton, and marches rapidly north by Winchester and Newbury. By the time it has reached Newbury, the eastern half of the opposing line, that between Wallingford and Windsor, has concentrated to meet it, but is defeated in the neighbourhood of that town.
Such a battle at Newbury would correspond to the battle at Ligny (let it be fought upon a Friday). Meanwhile, the western half, hurrying up in aid, has failed to effect a junction before the eastern half was defeated, comes up too late above Newbury, and finding it is too late, retires upon Abingdon. The victorious invader pursues them, and at noon on the second day engages them in a long line which they hold in front of Abingdon.
If he has only to deal in front of Abingdon with this second or western half, which hurried up too late to help the defeated eastern half, he has very fair chances of success. He is slightly superior numerically; he has, upon the whole, better troops and he has more guns. But the eastern half of the defending army, which has been beaten at Newbury, though beaten, was neither destroyed nor dispersed, nor thrust very far back from the line of operations. It has retreated to Wallingford, that is towards the north, parallel to the retreat of the western half; and a few hours after this western half is engaged in battle with the invader in front of Abingdon, the eastern half appears upon that invader’s right flank, joins forces with the line of the defenders at Abingdon, and thus brings not only a crushing superiority of numbers upon the field against the invader, but also brings it up in such a manner that he is compelled to fight upon two fronts at once. He is, of course, destroyed by such a combination, and his army routed and dispersed. An action of this sort fought at Abingdon would correspond to the action which was fought upon the field of Waterloo, supposing, of course, for the purpose of this rough parallel, an open countryside without the obstacle of the river.
The actual positions of the two combined commands, the command of Blucher and the command of Wellington, which between them held the long line between Tournay and Liège, will be grasped from the sketch map upon the next page.
The reader who would grasp the campaign in the short compass of such an essay as this had best consider the numbers and the positions in a form not too detailed, and busy himself with a picture which, though accurate, shall be general.
Let him, then, consider the whole line between Liège and Tournay to consist of the two halves already presented: a western half, which we will call the Duke of Wellington’s, and an eastern half, which we will call Blucher’s: of these two the Duke of Wellington was Commander-in-chief.
Next, note the numbers of each and their disposition. The mixed force under the Duke of Wellington was somewhat over 100,000 men, with just over 200 guns. They consisted in two corps and a reserve. The first corps was under the Prince of Orange, and was mainly composed of men from the Netherlands. Its headquarters were at Braine le Comte. The second corps was under Lord Hill, and contained the mass of the British troops present. Its headquarters were at Ath. These two between them amounted to about half of Wellington’s command, and we find them scattered in cantonments at Oudenarde, at Ath, at Enghien, at Soignies, at Nivelles, at Roeulx, at Braine le Comte, at Hal. A reserve corps under the Duke’s own command was stationed at Brussels, and amounted to more than one-fifth, but less than one-quarter, of the whole force. The remaining quarter and a little more is accounted for by scattered cavalry (mainly in posts upon the river Dender), by the learned arms, gunners and sappers, distributed throughout the army, and by troops which were occupying garrisons — in numbers amounting to rather more than ten per cent. of the force.
The eastern Prussian or left half of the line was, as is apparent in the preceding map, somewhat larger. It had a quarter more men and half as many guns again as that under the Duke of Wellington, and it was organised into four army corps, whose headquarters were respectively Charleroi, Namur, Ciney, and Liège.
The whole line, therefore, which was waiting the advance of Napoleon, was not quite two and a third hundred thousand men, with rather more than 500 guns. Of this grand total of the two halves, Wellington’s and Blucher’s combined, about eighteen per cent. came from the British Islands, and of that eighteen per cent., again, a very large proportion — exactly how large it is impossible to determine — were Irish.
Now let us turn to the army which Napoleon was leading against this line of Wellington and Blucher. It was just under one hundred and a quarter thousand men strong, that is, just over half the total number of its opponents. It had, however, a heavier proportion of guns, which were two-thirds as numerous as those it had to meet.
This “Army of the North” was organised in seven great bodies, unequal in size, but each a unit averaging seventeen odd thousand men. These seven great bodies were the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th Army Corps, the 6th Army Corps, the Imperial Guard, and the reserve cavalry under Grouchy.
The concentration of this army began, as I said in a previous section, upon the 5th of June, and was effected with a rapidity and order which are rightly regarded as a model by all writers upon military science.
The French troops, when the order for concentration was given, stretched westward as far as Lille, eastward as far as Metz, southward as far as Paris, in the neighbourhood of which town was the Imperial Guard. The actual marching of the various units occupied a week. Napoleon was at the front on the night of the 13th of June; the whole army was upon the 14th drawn up upon a line stretched from Maubeuge to Philippeville, and the attack was ready to begin.
The concentration had been effected with singular secrecy, as well as with the promptitude and accuracy we have noted; and though the common opinion of Wellington and Blucher, that Napoleon had no intention of attacking, reposed upon sound general judgment — for the hazard Napoleon was playing in this game of one against two was extreme, — nevertheless it is remarkable that both of these great commanders should have been so singularly ignorant of the impending blow. Napoleon himself was actually over the frontier at the moment when Wellington was writing at his ease that he intended to take the offensive at the end of the month, and Blucher, a few days earlier, had expressed the opinion that he might be kept inactive for a whole year, since Bonaparte had no intention of attacking.
By the evening of Wednesday, June the 14th, all was ready for the advance, which was ordered for the next morning.
It would but confuse the general reader to attempt to carry with him through this short account the name and character of each commander, but it is essential to remember one at least — the name of Erlon; and he should also remember that the corps which Erlon commanded was the First Corps; for, as we shall see, upon Erlon’s wanderings with this First Corps depended the unsatisfactory termination of Ligny, and the subsequent intervention of the Prussians at Waterloo, which decided that action.
It is also of little moment for the purpose of this to retain the names of the places which were the headquarters of each of these corps before the advance began. It is alone important to the reader that he should have a clear picture of the order in which this advance took place, for thus only will he understand both where it struck, and why, with all its rapidity, it suffered from certain shocks or jerks.
Napoleon’s advance was upon three parallel lines and in three main bodies.
The left or westernmost consisted of the First and Second Corps d’Armée; the centre, of the Imperial Guard, together with the Third and Sixth Corps. The third or right consisted of the Fourth Corps alone, with a division of cavalry. These three bodies, when the night of Wednesday the 14th of June fell, lay, the first at Sorle and Leer; the second at Beaumont, and upon the road that runs through it to Charleroi; the third at Philippeville.
It is at this stage advisable to consider why Napoleon had chosen the crossing of the Sambre at Charleroi and the sites immediately to the north on the left bank of that river as the point where he would strike at the long line of the Allies.
Many considerations converged to impose this line of advance upon Napoleon. In the first place, it was his task to cut the line of the Allies in two at the point where the extremity of one army, the Prussian, touched upon the extremity of the other, that of the Duke of Wellington. This point lay due north of the river-crossing he had chosen.
Again, the main road to Brussels was barred by the fortress of Mons, which, though not formidable, had been put in some sort of state of defence.
Again, as a glance at the accompanying map will show, the Prussian half of the allied line was drawn somewhat in front of the other half; and if Napoleon were to attack the enemy in detail, he must strike at the Prussians first. Finally, the line Maubeuge-Philippeville, upon which he concentrated his front, was, upon the whole, the most central position in the long line of his frontier troops, which stretched from Metz to the neighbourhood of the Straits of Dover. Being the most central point, not only with regard to these two extremities, but also with regard to distant Paris, it was the point upon which his concentration could most rapidly be effected.
This, then, was the position upon the night of the 14th. The three great bodies of French troops (much the largest of which was that in the centre) to march at dawn, the light cavalry moving as early as half past two, ahead of the centre, the whole body of which was to march on Charleroi.
The left, that is the First and Second Corps, to cross the Sambre at Thuin, the Abbaye d’Aulne, and Marchiennes. (There were bridges at all three places.) The right or Fourth Corps was also to march on Charleroi.
Napoleon intended to be over the river with all his men by the afternoon of the 15th, but, as we shall see, this “bunching” of fully half the advance upon one crossing place caused, not a fatal, but a prejudicial delay. Among other elements in this false calculation was an apparent error on the part of Soult, who blundered in some way which kept the Third Corps with the centre instead of relieving the pressure by sending it over with the Fourth to cross, under the revised instructions, by Châtelet.
Disposition of the Four Prussian Corps on June 15th, 1815.
At dawn, then, the whole front of the French army was moving. It was the dawn of Thursday the 15th of June. By sunset of Sunday all was to be decided.
At this point it is essential to grasp the general scheme of the operations which are about to follow.
Put in its simplest elements and graphically, the whole business began in some such form as is presented in the accompanying sketch map.
Napoleon’s advancing army X Y Z, marching on Thursday, June 15th, strikes at O (which is Charleroi), the centre of the hundred-mile-long line of cantonments A B C —— D E F, which form the two armies of the Allies, twice as numerous as his own, but thus dispersed. Just behind Charleroi (O) are a hamlet and a village, called respectively Quatre Bras (Q) and Ligny (P).
Napoleon succeeds in bringing the eastern or Prussian half of this long line D E F to battle and defeating it at Ligny (P) upon the next day, Friday, June 16th, before the western half, or Wellington’s A B C, can come up in aid; and on the same day a portion of his forces, X, under his lieutenant, Marshal Ney, holds up that western half, just as it is attempting to effect its junction with the eastern half at Quatre Bras (Q), a few miles off from Ligny (P). The situation on the night of Friday, June 16th, at the end of this second step, is that represented in this second sketch map.
Believing the Prussians (D E F) to be retreating from Ligny towards their base eastward, and not northwards, Napoleon more or less neglects them and concentrates his main body in order to follow up Wellington’s western half (A B C), and in the hope of defeating that in its turn, as he has already defeated the eastern or Prussian half (D E F) at Ligny (P). With this object Napoleon advances northward during all the third day, Saturday, June 17th. Wellington (A B C) retreats north before him during that same day, and then, on the morrow, the 18th, Sunday, turns to give battle at Waterloo (W). Napoleon engages him with fair chances of success, and the situation as the battle begins at midday on the 18th is that sketched in this third map.
But unexpectedly, and against what Napoleon had imagined possible, the Prussians (D E F), when defeated at Ligny (P), did not retreat upon their base, and have not so suffered from their defeat as to be incapable of further action. They have marched northward parallel to the retreat of Wellington; and while Napoleon (X Y Z) is at the hottest of his struggle with Wellington (A B C) at Waterloo (W), this eastern or Prussian half (D E F) comes down upon his flank at (R) in the middle of the afternoon, and by the combined numbers and disposition of this double attack Napoleon’s army is crushed before darkness sets in.
Such, in its briefest graphic elements, is the story of the four days.
It will be observed from what we have said that the whole thing turns upon the incompleteness of Napoleon’s success at Ligny, and the power of retreating northward left to the Prussians after that defeat.
When we come to study the details of the story, we shall see that this, the Prussian defeat at Ligny, was thus incomplete because one of Napoleon’s subordinates, Erlon, with the First French Army Corps, received contradictory orders and did not come up as he should have done to turn the battle of Ligny into a decisive victory for Napoleon. A part of Napoleon’s forces being thus neutralised and held useless during the fight at Ligny, the Prussian army escaped, still formed as a fighting force, and still capable of reappearing, as it did reappear, at the critical moment, two days later, upon the field of Waterloo.
The Advance
THE RAPIDITY OF Napoleon’s stroke was marred at its very outset by certain misfortunes as well as certain miscalculations. His left, which was composed of the First and Second Corps d’Armée, did indeed reach the river Sambre in the morning, and had carried the bridge of Marchiennes by noon, but the First Corps, under Erlon, were not across — that is, the whole left had not negotiated the river — until nearly five o’clock in the afternoon.
Next, the general in command of the leading division of the right-hand body — the Fourth Corps — gave the first example of that of which the whole Napoleonic organisation was then in such terror, I mean the mistrust in the fortunes of the Emperor, and the tendency to revert to the old social conditions, which for a moment the Bourbons had brought back, and which so soon they might bring back again — he deserted. The order was thereupon given for the Fourth Corps or right wing to cross at Châtelet, but it came late (as late as half-past three in the afternoon), and did but cause delay. At this eastern end of Napoleon’s front the last men were not over the river until the next day.
As to the centre (the main body of the army), its cavalry reached Charleroi before ten o’clock in the morning, but an unfortunate and exasperating accident befallen a messenger left the infantry immediately behind without instructions. The cavalry were impotent to force the bridge crossing the river Sambre, which runs through the town, until the main body should appear, and it was not until past noon that the main body began crossing the Sambre by the Charleroi bridge. The Emperor had probably intended to fight immediately after having crossed the river. Gosselies, to the north, was strongly held; and had all his men been over the Sambre in the early afternoon as he had intended, an action fought suddenly, by surprise as it were, against the advance bodies of the First Prussian Corps, would have given the first example of that destruction of the enemy in detail which Napoleon intended. But the delays in the advance, rapid as it had been, now forbade any such good fortune. The end of the daylight was spent in pushing back the head of the First Prussian Corps (with a loss of somewhat over 1000 men), and when night fell upon that Thursday evening, the 15th of June, the French held Charleroi and all the crossings of the Sambre, but were not yet in a position to attack in force. Of the left, the First Corps were but just over the Sambre; on the right, that is, of the Fourth Corps, some units were still upon the other side of the river; while, of the centre, the whole of the Sixth Corps, and a certain proportion of cavalry as well, had still to cross!
Napoleon had failed to bring the enemy to action; that enemy had fallen back upon Fleurus, pretty nearly intact. All the real work had evidently to be put off, not only until the morrow, but until a fairly late hour upon the morrow, for it would take some time to get all the French forces on to the Belgian side of the river.
When this should have been accomplished, however, the task of the next day, the Friday, was clear.
It was Napoleon’s business to fall upon whatever Prussian force might be concentrated before him and upon his right and to destroy it, meanwhile holding back, by a force sent up the Brussels road to Quatre Bras, any attempt Wellington and his western army might make to join the Prussians and save them.
That night the Duke of Wellington’s army lay in its cantonments without concentration and without alarm, guessing nothing. The head of Wellington’s First Corps, the young Prince of Orange, who commanded the Netherlanders, had left his headquarters to go and dine with the Duke in Brussels.
Wellington, we may believe if we choose (the point is by no means certain), knew as early as three o’clock in the afternoon that the French had moved. It may have been as late as five, it may even have been six. But whatever the hour in which he received his information, it is quite certain that he had no conception of the gravity of the moment. As late as ten o’clock at night the Duke issued certain after-orders. He had previously given general orders (which presupposed no immediate attack), commanding movements which would in the long-run have produced a concentration, but though these orders were ordered to be executed “with as little delay as possible,” there was no hint of immediate duty required, nor do the posts indicated betray in any way the urgent need there was to push men south and east at the top of their speed, and relieve the Prussians from the shock they were to receive on the morrow.
These general orders given — orders that betray no grasp of the nearness of the issue — Wellington went off to the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in what the impartial historian cannot doubt to be ignorance of the great stroke which Napoleon had so nearly brought off upon that very day, and would certainly attempt to bring off upon the next.
In the midst of the ball, or rather during the supper, definite news came in that the French army had crossed the river Sambre, and had even pushed its cavalry as far up the Brussels road as Quatre Bras.
The Duke does not seem to have appreciated even then what that should mean in the way of danger to the Prussians, and indeed of the breaking of the whole line. He left the dance at about two in the morning and went to bed.
He was not long left in repose. In the bright morning sunlight, four hours afterwards, he was roused by a visitor from the frontier, and we have it upon his evidence that the Duke at last understood what was before him, and said that the concentration of his forces must be at Quatre Bras.
In other words, Wellington knew or appreciated extremely tardily on that Friday morning about six that the blow was about to fall upon his Prussian allies to the south and east, and that it was the business of his army upon the west to come up rapidly in succour.
As will be seen in a moment, he failed; but it would be a very puerile judgment of this great man and superb defensive General to belittle his place in the history of war upon the basis of even such errors as these.
True, the error and the delay were prodigious and, in a fashion, comic; and had Napoleon delivered upon the Thursday afternoon, as he had intended, an attack which should have defeated the Prussians before him, Wellington’s error and delay would have paid a very heavy price.
As it was, Napoleon’s own delay in crossing the Sambre made Wellington’s mistake and tardiness bear no disastrous fruit. The Duke failed to succour the Prussians. His troops, scattered all over Western Belgium, did not come up in time to prevent the defeat of his allies at Ligny. But he held his own at Quatre Bras; and in the final battle, forty-eight hours later, the genius with which he handled his raw troops upon the ridge of Mont St Jean wiped out and negatived all his strategical misconceptions of the previous days.
From this confusion, this partial delay and error upon Napoleon’s part, this ignorance upon Wellington’s of what was toward, both of which marked Thursday the 15th, we must turn to a detailed description of that morrow, Friday the 16th, which, though it is less remembered in history than the crowning day of Waterloo, was, in every military sense, the decisive day of the campaign.
We shall see that it was Napoleon’s failure upon that Friday completely to defeat, or rather to destroy, the Prussian force at Ligny — a failure largely due to Wellington’s neighbouring resistance at Quatre Bras — which determined the Emperor’s final defeat upon the Sunday at Waterloo.
III. THE DECISIVE DAY
Friday the 16th of June
Quatre Bras and Ligny
We have seen what the 15th of June was in those four short days of which Waterloo was to be the climax. That Thursday was filled with an advance, rapid and unexpected, against the centre of the allied line, and therefore against that weak point where the two halves of the allied line joined, to wit, Charleroi and the country immediately to the north of that town and bridge.
We have further seen that while the unexpectedness of the blow was almost as thorough as Napoleon could have wished, the rapidity of its delivery, though considerable, had been less than he had anticipated. He had got by the evening of the day not much more than three-quarters of his forces across the river Sambre, and this passage, which was mapped out for completion before nightfall, straggled on through the whole morning of the morrow, — a tardiness the effects of which we shall clearly see in the next few pages.
Napoleon’s intention, once the Sambre was crossed, was to divide his army into two bodies: one, on the left, was to be entrusted to Ney; one, on the right, to Grouchy. A reserve, which the Emperor would command in person, was to consist in the main of the Imperial Guard.
The left-hand body, under Ney, was to go straight north up the great Brussels road.
Napoleon rightly estimated that he had surprised the foe, though he exaggerated the extent of that surprise. He thought it possible that this body to the left, under Ney, might push on to Brussels itself, and in any case could easily deal with the small and unprepared forces which it might meet upon the way. Its function in any case, whether resistance proved slight or formidable, was to hold the forces of Wellington back from effecting a junction with Blucher and the Prussians.
Meanwhile, the right-hand body, under Grouchy, was to fall upon the extremity of the Prussian line and overwhelm it.
Such an action against the head of the long Prussian cordon could lead, as the Emperor thought, to but one of two results: either the great majority of the Prussian force, coming up to retrieve this first disaster, would be defeated in detail as it came; or, more probably, finding itself cut off from all aid on the part of Wellington’s forces to the west and its head crushed, the long Prussian line would roll up backwards upon its communications towards the east, whence it had come.
In either case the prime object of Napoleon’s sudden move would have been achieved; and, with the body upon the left, under Ney, pushing up the Brussels road, the body upon the right, under Grouchy, pushing back the head of the Prussian line eastward, the two halves of the Allies would be separated altogether, and could later be dealt with, each in turn. The capital disadvantage under which Napoleon suffered — the fact that he had little more than half as many men as his combined enemies — would be neutralised, because he would, after the separation of those enemies into two bodies, be free to deal with either at his choice. Their communications came from diametrically opposite directions, and, as the plan of each depended upon the co-operation of the other, their separation would leave them confused and without a scheme.
Napoleon in all this exaggerated the facility of the task before him; but before we go into that, it is essential that the reader should grasp a certain character in all military affairs, to misunderstand which is to misread the history of armies.
This characteristic is the necessary uncertainty under which every commander lies as to the disposition, the number, the order, and the information of his opponents.
It is a necessary characteristic in all warfare, because it is a prime duty in the conduct of war to conceal from your enemy your numbers, your dispositions, and the extent of your information. It is a duty which every commander will always fulfil to his best ability.
It is therefore a characteristic, be it noted, which no development of human science can conceivably destroy, for with every advance in our means of communicating information we advance also in our knowledge of the means whereby the new means of communication may be interrupted. An advantage over the enemy in the means one has of acquiring knowledge with regard to him must, of course, always be of supreme importance, and when those means are novel, one side or the other is often beforehand for some years with the new science of their use. When such is the case, science appears to uninstructed opinion to have changed this ancient and fixed characteristic which is in the very nature of war. But in fact there has been no such change. Under the most primitive conditions an advantage of this type was of supreme importance; under conditions the most scientific and refined it is an advantage that may still be neutralised if the enemy has learnt means of screening himself as excellent as our means of discovering him. Even the aeroplane, whose development in the modern French service has so vastly changed the character of information, and therefore of war, can never eliminate the factor of which I speak. A service possessed of a great superiority in this new arm will, of course, be the master of its foe; but when the use of the new arm is spread and equalised among all European forces so that two opposing forces are equally matched even in this new discovery, then the old element of move and countermove, feint, secrecy, and calculated confusion of an adversary, will reappear.
In general, then, to point out the ignorance and the misconceptions of one commander is no criticism of a campaign until we have appreciated the corresponding ignorance and misconceptions of the other. We have already seen Wellington taken almost wholly by surprise on the French advance; we shall see him, even when he appreciated its existence, imagining it to be directed principally against himself. We shall similarly see Napoleon underestimating the Prussian force in front of him, and underestimating even that tardy information which had reached Wellington in time for him to send troops up the Brussels road, and to check the French advance along it. But we must judge either of the two great opponents not by a single picture of his own misconceptions alone, but by the combined picture of the misconceptions of both, and especially by a consideration of the way in which each retrieved or attempted to retrieve the results of those misconceptions when a true idea of the enemy’s dispositions was conveyed to him.
Here, then, we have Napoleon on the morning of Friday the 16th of June prepared to deal with the Prussians. It is his right-hand body, under Grouchy, which is deputed to do this, while he sends up the left-hand body, under Ney, northwards to brush aside, or, at the worst, at least to hold off whatever of the Duke of Wellington’s command may be found upon the Brussels road attempting to join the Prussians.
The general plan of what happened upon that decisive 16th is simple enough.
The left-hand body, under Ney, goes forward up the Brussels road, finds more resistance than it expected, but on the whole performs its task and prevents any effective help being given by the western half of the Allies — Wellington’s half — to the eastern half — the Prussian half. But it only prevents that task with difficulty and at the expense of a tactical defeat. This action is called Quatre Bras.
Meanwhile, the right-hand body equally accomplishes the elements of its task, engages the head of the Prussian line and defeats it, with extreme difficulty, just before dark. This action is called Ligny.
But the minor business conducted by the left, under Ney, is only just successful, and successful only in the sense that it does, at vast expense, prevent a junction of Wellington with Blucher. The major business conducted on the right, by Napoleon himself, in support of Grouchy, is disappointing. The head of the Prussian line is not destroyed; the Prussian army, though beaten, is free to retreat in fair order, and almost in what direction it chooses.
The ultimate result is that Wellington and Blucher do manage to effect their junction on the day after the morrow of Ligny and Quatre Bras, and thus defeat Napoleon at Waterloo.
Now, why were both these operations, Quatre Bras and Ligny, incompletely successful? Partly because there was more resistance along the Brussels road than Napoleon had expected, and a far larger body of Prussians in front of him than he had expected either; but much more because a whole French army corps, which, had it been in action, could have added a third to the force of either the right or the left wing, was out of action all day; and wandered aimlessly over the empty zone which separated Ney from Grouchy, Quatre Bras from Ligny, the left half of Napoleon’s divided army from its right half.
This it was which prevented what might have been possible — the thrusting back of Wellington along the Brussels road, and even perhaps the disorganisation of his forces. This it was which missed what was otherwise certainly possible — the total ruin of the Prussian army.
This army corps thus thrown away unused in hours of aimless marching and countermarching was the First Army Corps. Its commander was Erlon; and the enormous blunder or fatality which permitted Erlon and his 20,000 to be as useless upon the 16th of June as though they had been wiped out in some defeat is what makes of the 16th of June the decisive day of the campaign.
It was Erlon’s failure to be present either with Ney or with Grouchy, either upon the left or upon the right, either at Quatre Bras or at Ligny, while each of those two actions were in doubt, which made it possible for Wellington’s troops to stand undefeated in the west, for the Prussians to retire — not intact, but still an army — from the east, and for both to unite upon the day after the morrow, the Sunday, and destroy the French army at Waterloo.
It is upon Erlon’s blunder or misfortune that the whole issue turns, and upon the Friday, the 16th of June, in the empty fields between Quatre-Bras and Ligny, much more than upon the famous Sunday at Waterloo, that the fate of Napoleon’s army was decided.
In order to make this clear, let us first follow what happened in the operations of Napoleon’s right wing against the Prussians opposed to it, — operations which bear in history the name of “the Battle of Ligny.”
LIGNY
“If they fight here they will be damnably mauled.”
(Wellington’s words on seeing the defensive positions chosen by the Prussians at Ligny.)
Napoleon imagined that when he had crossed the Sambre with the bulk of his force, the suddenness of his attack (for, though retarded as we have seen, and though leaving troops upon the wrong bank of the river, it was sudden) would find the Prussian forces in the original positions wherein he knew them to have lain before he marched. He did not think that they would yet have had the time, still less the intention, to concentrate. Those original positions the map upon makes plain.
The 124,000 men and more, which lay under the supreme command of Blucher, had been spread before the attack began along the whole extended line from Liège to Charleroi, and had been disposed regularly from left to right in four corps d’armée.
The first of these had its headquarters in Charleroi itself, its furthest outpost was but five miles east of the town, its three brigades had Charleroi for their centre; its reserve cavalry was at Sombreffe, its reserve artillery at Gembloux. The Second Corps had its headquarters twenty miles away east, at Namur, and occupied posts in the country as far off as Hannut (thirty miles away from Charleroi).
The Third Corps had its headquarters at Ciney in the Ardennes, and was scattered in various posts throughout that forest, its furthest cantonment being no nearer than Dinant, which, by the only good road available, was nearer forty than thirty miles from Napoleon’s point of attack.
Finally, the Fourth Corps was as far away as Liège (nearer fifty than forty miles by road from the last cantonment of the First Corps), and having its various units scattered round the neighbourhood of that town.
Napoleon, therefore, attacking Charleroi suddenly, imagined that he would have to deal only with the First Corps at Charleroi and its neighbourhood. He did not think that the other three corps had information in time to enable them to come up westward towards the end of the line and meet him. The outposts of the First Corps had, of course, fallen back before the advance of the Emperor’s great army; the mass of that First Corps was, he knew, upon this morning of the 16th, some mile or two north and east of Fleurus, astraddle of the great road which leads from Charleroi to Gembloux. At the very most, and supposing this First Corps (which was of 33,000 men, under Ziethen) had received reinforcements from the nearest posts of the Second and the Third Corps, Napoleon did not think that he could have in front of him more than some 40,000 men at the most.
He was in error. It had been arranged among the Prussian leaders that resistance to Napoleon, when occasion might come for it, should be offered in the neighbourhood of the cross-roads where the route from Charleroi to Gembloux crosses that from Nivelles to Namur. In other words, they were prepared to stand and fight between Sombreffe and the village of Ligny. The plan had been prepared long beforehand. The whole of the First Corps was in position with the morning, awaiting the Emperor’s attack. The Second Corps had been in motion for hours, and was marching up during all that morning. So was the Third Corps behind it. Blucher himself had arrived upon the field of battle the day before (the 15th), and had written thence to his sovereign to say that he was fully prepared for action the next day.
Indeed, Blucher on the 15th confidently expected victory, and the end of the campaign then and there. He had a right to do so, for Napoleon’s advance had been met by so rapid a concentration that, a little after noon on that Friday the 16th, and before the first shots were fired, well over 80,000 men were drawn up to receive the shock of Napoleon’s right wing. But that right wing all told, even when the belated French troops beyond the Sambre had finally crossed that river, and even when the Emperor had brought up the Guard and the reserve, numbered but 63,000. Supposing the French had been able to use every man, which they were not, they counted but seven to nine of their opponents. And the nine were upon the defensive; the seven had to undertake the task of an assault.
It was late in the day before battle was joined. Napoleon had reached Fleurus at about ten o’clock in the morning, but it was four hours more before he had brought all his troops across the river, and by the time he had done so two things had happened. First, the Duke of Wellington (who, as we shall see later, had come to Quatre Bras that morning, and had written to Blucher telling him of his arrival) rode off in person to the Prussian positions and discussed affairs near the windmill of Bussy with the Prussian Commander-in-chief. In this conversation, Wellington undoubtedly promised to effect, if he could, a junction with the Prussians in the course of the afternoon. Even without that aid Blucher felt fairly sure of victory; with it, he could be perfectly confident.
The Prussian concentration before Ligny, showing the junction of the
First, Second, and Third Corps on the morning of June 16th,
and the inability of the Fourth Corps to come up in time.
As matters turned out, Wellington found himself unable to effect his junction with Blucher. Ney, as we shall see later, found in front of him on the Brussels road much heavier opposition than he had imagined, but Wellington was also surprised to find to what strength the French force under Ney was at Quatre Bras. Wellington, as we shall see, held his own on that 16th of June, but was quite unable to come up in succour of Blucher when the expected victory of that general turned to a defeat.
The second thing that happened in those hours was Napoleon’s discovery that the Prussian troops massing to oppose him before Ligny were going to be much more than a single corps. It looked to him more like the whole Prussian army. It was, indeed, three-quarters of that army, for it consisted of the First, the Second, and the Third Corps. Only the Fourth, with its headquarters at distant Liège, had not been able to arrive in time. This Fourth Corps would also have been present, and would probably have turned the scale in favour of the Prussians, had the staff orders been sent out promptly and conveyed with sufficient rapidity. As it was, its most advanced units got no further west, during the course of the action, than about halfway between Liège and the battlefield.
Napoleon was enabled to discover with some ease the great numbers which had concentrated to oppose him from the fact that these numbers had concentrated upon a defective position. Wellington, the greatest defensive general of his time, at once discovered this weakness in Blucher’s chosen battlefield, and was provoked by the discovery to the exclamation which stands at the head of this section. The rolling land occupied by the Prussian army lay exposed in a regular sweep downwards towards the heights upon which lay the French, and the Prussian army as it deployed came wholly under the view of its enemy. Nothing was hidden; and a further effect was that, as Napoleon himself remarked, all the artillery work of the French side went home. If a round missed the foremost positions of the Prussian army, it would necessarily fall within the ranks behind them.
This discovery, that there lay before him not one corps but a whole army, seemed to Napoleon, upon one condition, an advantage. The new development would, upon that one condition, give him, if his troops were of the quality he estimated them to be, a complete victory over the united Prussian force, and might well terminate the campaign on that afternoon and in that place. That one condition was the possibility of getting Ney upon the left, or some part at least of Ney’s force, to leave the task of holding off Wellington, to come down upon the flank of the Prussians from the north and west, to envelop them, and thus, in company with the troops of Napoleon himself, to destroy the three Prussian Army Corps altogether.
Had that condition been fulfilled, the campaign would indeed have come to an end decisively in Napoleon’s favour, and, as he put it in a famous phrase, “not a gun” of the army opposing him “should escape.”
Unfortunately for the Emperor, that one condition was not fulfilled. The 63,000 Frenchmen of the right wing, under Napoleon, did indeed defeat and drive off the 80,000 men opposed to them. But that opposing army was not destroyed; it was not contained; it remained organised for further fighting, and it survived to decide Waterloo.
In order to appreciate Napoleon’s idea and how it might have succeeded, let the reader consider the dispositions of the battle of Ligny.
The battlefield named in history after the village of Ligny consists of a number of communes, of which that village is the central one. The Prussian army held the villages marked on the map by the names of Tongrinelle and Tongrinne, to the east of Ligny; it held Brye, St Amand, and Wagnelée to the east. It held also the heights behind upon the great road leading from Nivelles to Namur. When Napoleon had at last got his latest troops over from beyond the Sambre on to the field of battle, which was not until just on two o’clock in the afternoon, the plan he formed was to hold the Prussian left and centre by a vigorous attack, that is, to pin the Prussians down to Tongrinne, Tongrinelle, and Ligny, while, on the other front, the east and south front of the Prussians, another vigorous attack should be driving them back out of Wagnelée and St Amand.
The plan can be further elucidated by considering the elements of the battle as they are sketched in the map over leaf. Napoleon’s troops at C C C were to hold the Prussian left at H, to attack the Prussian right at D, with the Guard at E left in reserve for the final effort.
By thus holding the Prussians at H and pushing them in at D, he would here begin to pen them back, and it needed but the arrival on the field of a fresh French force attacking the Prussians along A B to destroy the force so contained and hemmed in. For that fresh force Napoleon depended upon new and changed instructions which he despatched to Ney when he saw the size of the Prussian force before him. During Napoleon’s main attack, some portion of Ney’s force, and if possible the whole of it, should appear unexpectedly from the north and west, marching down across the fields between Wagnelée and the Nivelles-Namur road, and coming on the north of the enemy at A B, so as to attack him not only in the flank but in the rear. He would then be unable to retreat in the direction of Wavre (W) — a broken remnant might escape towards Namur (N). But it was more likely that the whole force would be held and destroyed.
Elements of Ligny.
Supposing that Napoleon’s 63,000 showed themselves capable of holding, let alone partially driving in, the 80,000 in front of them, the sudden and unexpected appearance of a new force in the height of the action, adding another twenty or thirty thousand to the French troops already engaged, coming upon the flank and spreading to the rear of the Prussian host, would inevitably have destroyed that host, and, to repeat Napoleon’s famous exclamation, “not a gun would have escaped.”
The reader may ask: “If this plan of victory be so obvious, why did Napoleon send Ney off with a separate left wing of forty to fifty thousand men towards Quatre Bras?”
The answer is: that when, upon the day before, the Thursday, Napoleon had made this disposition, and given it as the general orders for that Friday, he had imagined only one corps of Prussians to be before him.
The right wing, with which the Emperor himself stayed, numbering, as we have seen, about 63,000 men, would have been quite enough to deal with that one Prussian corps; and he had sent so large a force, under Ney, up the Brussels road, not because he believed it would meet with serious opposition, but because this was to be the line of his principal advance, and it was his intention to occupy the town of Brussels at the very first opportunity. Having dealt with the single Prussian corps, as he had first believed it would be, in front of Fleurus, he meant that same evening to come back in person to the Brussels road and, in company with Ney, to conduct decisive operations against Wellington’s half of the Allies, which would then, of course, be hopelessly outnumbered.
But when Napoleon saw, a little after midday of the Friday, that he had to deal with nearly the whole of the Prussian army, he perceived that the great force under Ney would be wasted out there on the west — supposing it to be meeting with little opposition — and had far better be used in deciding a crushing victory over the Prussians. To secure such a victory would, without bothering about the Duke of Wellington’s forces to the westward, be quite enough to determine the campaign in favour of the French.
As early as two o’clock a note was sent to Ney urging him, when he had brushed aside such slight resistance as the Emperor expected him to find upon the Brussels road, to return and help to envelop the Prussian forces, which the Emperor was about to attack. At that hour it was not yet quite clear to Napoleon how large the Prussian force really was. This first note to Ney, therefore, was unfortunately not as vigorous as it might have been; though, even if it had been as vigorous as possible, Ney, who had found unexpected resistance upon the Brussels road, could certainly not have come up to help Napoleon with his whole force. He might, however, have spared a portion of it, and that portion, as we shall see later, would have been most obviously Erlon’s corps — the First. Rather more than an hour later, at about a quarter-past three, when Napoleon had just joined battle with the Prussians, he got a note from Ney informing him that the left wing was meeting with considerable resistance, and could hardly abandon the place where it was engaged before Quatre Bras to come up against the Prussian flank at Ligny. Napoleon sent a note back to say that, none the less, an effort must be made at all costs to send Ney’s forces to come over to him to attack the Prussian flank, for such an attack would mean the winning of a great decisive battle.
The distance over which these notes had to be carried to and fro, from Napoleon to Ney, was not quite five miles. The Emperor might therefore fairly expect after his last message that in the late middle of the afternoon — say half-past five or six — troops would appear upon his north-west horizon and march down to his aid. In good time such troops did appear; how inconclusively it will be my business to record.
Meanwhile, Napoleon had begun the fight at Ligny with his usual signal of three cannonshots, and between three and four o’clock the front of the whole army was engaged. It was for many hours mere hammer-and-tongs fighting, the French making little impression upon their right against Ligny or the villages to the east of it, but fighting desperately for St Amand and for Wagnelée. Such a course was part of Napoleon’s plan, for he had decided, as I have said, only to hold the Prussian left, to strike hardest at their right, and, when his reinforcement should come from Ney, to turn that right, envelop it, and so destroy the whole Prussian army.
These villages upon the Prussian right were taken and retaken in a series of furious attacks and counter-attacks, which it would be as tedious to detail as it must have been intolerable to endure.
All this indecisive but furious struggle for the line of villages (not one of which was as yet carried and held permanently by the French) lasted over two hours. It was well after five o’clock when there appeared, far off, under the westering sun, a new and large body of troops advancing eastward as though to reach that point between Wagnelée and St Amand where the left of the French force was struggling for mastery with the right of the Prussians. For a moment there was no certitude as to what this distant advancing force might be. But soon, and just when fortune appeared for a moment to be favouring Blucher’s superior numbers and the French line was losing ground, the Emperor learned that it was his First Army Corps, under the command of Erlon which was thus approaching.
At that moment — in the neighbourhood of six o’clock in the evening — Napoleon must have believed that his new and rapidly formed plan of that afternoon, with its urgent notes to Quatre Bras and its appeal for reinforcement, had borne fruit; a portion at least of Ney’s command had been detached, as it seemed, to deliver that final and unexpected attack upon the Prussian flank which was the keystone of the whole scheme.
Coincidently with the news that those distant advancing thousands were his own men and would turn this doubtful struggle into a decisive victory for the Emperor came the news — unexplained, inexplicable — that Erlon’s troops would advance no further! That huge distant body of men, isolated in the empty fields to the westward; that reinforcement upon which the fate of Napoleon and of the French army hung, drew no nearer. Watched from such a distance, they might seem for a short time to be only halted. Soon it was apparent that they were actually retiring. They passed back again, retracing their steps beyond the western horizon, and were lost to the great struggle against the Prussians. Why this amazing countermarch, with all its catastrophic consequences was made will be discussed later. It is sufficient to note that it rendered impossible that decisive victory which Napoleon had held for a moment within his grasp. His resource under such a disappointment singularly illustrates the nature of his mind.
Already the Emperor had determined, before any sign of advancing aid had appeared, that if he were left alone to complete the decision, if he was not to be allowed by fate to surround and destroy the Prussian force, he might at least drive it from the field with heavy loss, and, as far as possible, demoralised. In the long struggle of the afternoon he had meant but to press the Prussian line, while awaiting forces that should complete its envelopment; these forces being now denied him, he determined to change his plan, to use his reserves, the Guard, and to drive the best fighting material he had, like a spearhead, at the centre of the Prussian positions. Since he could not capture, he would try and break.
As the hope of aid from Erlon’s First Corps gradually disappeared, he decided upon this course. It was insufficient. He could not hope by it to destroy his enemy wholly. But he could drive him from the field and perhaps demoralise him, or so weaken him with loss as to leave him crippled.
Just at the time when Napoleon had determined thus to strike at the centre of the Prussian fine, Blucher, full of his recent successes upon his right and the partial recapture of the village of St Amand, had withdrawn troops from that centre to pursue his advantage. It was the wrong moment. While Blucher was thus off with the bulk of his men towards St Amand, the Old Guard, with the heavy cavalry of the Guard, and Milhaud’s cavalry as well — all Napoleon’s reserve — drew up opposite Ligny village for a final assault.
Nearly all the guns of the Guard and all those of the Fourth Corps crashed against the village to prepare the assault, and at this crisis of the battle, as though to emphasise its character, a heavy thunderstorm broke over the combatants, and at that late hour (it was near seven) darkened the evening sky.
It was to the noise and downpour of that storm that the assault was delivered, the Prussian centre forced, and Ligny taken.
When the clouds cleared, a little before sunset, this strongest veteran corps of Napoleon’s army had done the business. Ligny was carried and held. The Prussian formation, from a convex line, was now a line bent inwards at its centre and all but broken.
Blucher had rapidly returned from the right to meet the peril. He charged at the head of his Uhlans. The head of the French column of Guards reserved their fire until the horse was almost upon them; then, in volley after volley at a stone’s-throw range, they broke that cavalry, which, in their turn, the French cuirassiers charged as it fled and destroyed it. Blucher’s own horse was shot under him, the colonel of the Uhlans captured, the whole of the Prussian centre fell into disorder and was crushed confusedly back towards the Nivelles-Namur road.
Darkness fell, and nothing more could be accomplished. The field was won, indeed, but the Prussian army was still an organisation and a power. It had lost heavily in surrenders, flight, and fallen, but its main part was still organised. It was driven to retreat in the darkness, but remained ready, when time should serve, to reappear. It kept its order against the end of the French pressure throughout the last glimmer of twilight; and when darkness fell, the troops of Blucher, though in retreat, were in a retreat compact and orderly, and the bulk of his command was saved from the enemy and available for further action.
Thus ended the battle of Ligny, glorious for the Emperor, who had achieved so much success against great odds and after the hottest combat; but a failure of his full plan, for the host before him was still in existence: it was free to retreat in what direction, east or north, it might choose. The choice was made with immediate and conquering decision: the order passed in the darkness, “By Tilly on Wavre.” The Prussian staff had not lost its head under the blow of its defeat. It preserved a clear view of the campaign, with its remaining chances, and the then beaten army corps were concentrated upon a movement northwards. Word was sent to the fresh and unused Fourth Corps to join the other three at Wavre, and the march was begun which permitted Blucher, forty hours later, to come up on the flank of the French at Waterloo and destroy them.
Quatre Bras
Such had been the result of the long afternoon’s work upon the right-hand or eastern battlefield, that of Ligny, where Napoleon had been in personal command.
In spite of his appeals, no one had reached him from the western field, and the First Corps had only appeared in Napoleon’s neighbourhood to disappear again.
What had been happening on that western battlefield, three to four miles away, which had thus prevented some part at least of Ney’s army coming up upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, towards the end of the day, and inflicting upon Blucher a complete disaster?
What had happened was the slow, confused action known to history as the battle of Quatre Bras.
It will be remembered that Ney had been entrusted by Napoleon with the absolute and independent command of something less than half of his whole army.
He had put at his disposal the First and the Second Army Corps, under Erlon and Reille respectively — nearly 46,000 men; and to these he had added, by an afterthought, eight regiments of heavy cavalry, commanded by Kellerman.
The rôle of this force, in Napoleon’s intention, was simply to advance up the Brussels road, brushing before it towards the left or west, away from the Prussians, as it went, the outposts of that western half of the allied army, which Wellington commanded.
We have seen that Napoleon, who had certainly arrived quickly and half-unexpectedly at the point of junction between Wellington’s scattered forces and those of the Prussians, when he crossed the Sambre at Charleroi, overestimated his success. He thought his enemy had even less notice of his advance than that enemy really had; he thought that enemy had had less time to concentrate than he had really had. Napoleon therefore necessarily concluded that his enemy had concentrated to a less extent than he actually had.
That mistake had the effect, in the case of the army of the right, which he himself commanded, of bringing him up against not one Prussian army corps but three. This accident had not disconcerted him, for he hoped to turn it into a general disaster for the Prussians, and to take advantage of their unexpected concentration to accomplish their total ruin. But such a plan was dependent upon the left-hand or western army, that upon the Brussels road under Ney, not finding anything serious in front of it. Ney could spare men less easily if the Emperor’s calculation of the resistance likely to be found on the Brussels road should be wrong. It was wrong. That resistance was not slight but considerable, and Ney was not free to come to Napoleon’s aid. Tardy as had been the information conveyed to the Duke of Wellington, and grievously as the Duke of Wellington had misunderstood its importance, there was more in front of Ney upon the Brussels road than the Emperor had expected. What there was, however, might have been pushed back — after fairly heavy fighting it is true, but without any risk of failure — but for another factor in the situation, which was Ney’s own misjudgment and inertia.
Napoleon himself said later that his marshal was no longer the same man since the disasters of two years before; but even if Ney had been as alert as ever, misjudgment quite as much as lack of will must have entered into what he did. He had thought, as the Emperor had, that there would be hardly anything in front of him upon the Brussels road. But there was this difference between the two errors: Ney was on the spot, and could have found out with his cavalry scouts quite early on the morning of Friday the 16th what he really had to face. He preferred to take matters for granted, and he paid a heavy price. He thought that there was plenty of time for him to advance at his leisure; and, thinking this, he must have further concluded that to linger upon that part of the Brussels road which was nearest the Emperor’s forthcoming action to the east by Ligny would be good policy in case the Emperor should have need of him there.
On the night of the 15th Ney himself was at Frasnes, while the furthest of his detachments was no nearer than the bridge of Thuin over the Sambre, sixteen miles away. The rough sketch printed opposite will show how very long that line was, considering the nearness of the strategical point Quatre Bras, which it was his next business to occupy. The Second Army Corps under Reille was indeed fairly well moved up, and all in the neighbourhood of Gosselies by the night between Thursday 15th and Friday 16th of June. But the other half of the force, the First Army Corps under Erlon, was strung out over miles of road behind.
To concentrate all those 50,000 men, half of them spread out over so much space, meant a day’s ordinary marching; and one would have thought that Ney should have begun to concentrate before night fell upon the 15th. He remembered, however, that the men were fatigued, he thought he had plenty of time before him, and he did not effect their concentration. The mass of the Second Army Corps (Reille’s) was, as I have said, near Gosselies on the Friday dawn; but Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in disposition to bring the bulk of it up by the same time. He could not expect to be near Quatre Bras till noon or one o’clock. But even to this element of delay, due to his lack of precision, Ney added further delay, due to slackness in orders.
It was eleven o’clock on the morning of that Friday the 16th before Ney sent a definite order to Reille to march; it was twelve before the head of that Second Army Corps set out up the great road to cover the four or five miles that separated them from Ney’s headquarters at Frasnes. Erlon, lying next behind Reille, could not advance until Reille’s last division had taken the road. So Erlon, with the First Army Corps, was not in column and beginning his advance with his head troops until after one o’clock.
At about half-past one, then, we have the first troops of Reille’s army corps reaching Ney at Frasnes, its tail-end some little way out of Gosselies; while at the same hour we have Erlon’s First Army Corps marching in column through Gosselies.
It would have been perfectly possible, at the expense of a little fatigue to the men, to have had the Second Army Corps right up at Frasnes and in front of it and deployed for action by nine o’clock, while Erlon’s army corps, the First, coming behind it as a reserve, an equal body in numbers, excellence, and order, would have taken the morning to come up. In other words, Ney could have had more than 20,000 men ready for the attack on Quatre Bras by mid-morning, with as many men an hour or two behind them, and ready on their arrival to act as a reserve. As a matter of fact, he waited with his single battalion and a few horsemen at his headquarters at Frasnes, only giving the orders we have seen, which did not bring Reille’s head columns up to him till as late as half-past one. It was well after two o’clock before Reille’s troops had deployed in front of Frasnes and this Second Army Corps were ready to attack the position at Quatre Bras, which Ney still believed to be very feebly held. The other half of Ney’s command, the First Army Corps, under Erlon, was still far away down the road.
This said, it behoves us to consider the strategical value of the Quatre Bras position, and later to see how far Ney was right in thinking that it was still quite insufficiently furnished with defenders, even at that late hour in the day.
Armies must march by roads. At any rate, the army marching by road has a vast advantage over one attempting an advance across country; and the better kept-up the road the greater advantage, other things being equal, has the army using it over another army debarred from its use.
Quatre Bras is the cross-way of two great roads. The first road is that main road from north to south, leading from the frontier and Charleroi to Brussels; along this road, it was Napoleon’s ultimate intention to sweep, and up this road he was on that morning of the 16th sending Ney to clear the way for him. The second road is the great road east and west from Nivelles to Namur, which was in June 1815 the main line of communication along which the two halves of the Allies could effect their junction.
The invader, then, when he held Quatre Bras, could hold up troops coming against him from the north, troops coming against him from the east, or troops coming against him from the west. He could prevent, or rather delay, their junction. He would have stepped in between.
But Quatre Bras has advantages greater than this plain and elementary strategical advantage. In the first place, it dominates the whole countryside. A patch or knoll, 520 feet above the sea, the culminating point of the plateau, is within a few yards of the cross-roads. Standing there, a few steps to the west of the highway, you look in every direction over a rolling plain, of which you occupy the highest point for some miles around.
Now, this position of the “Quatre Bras” or “Cross Roads” can be easily defended against a foe coming from the south, as were the two corps under Ney. In 1815 its defence was easier still.
A large patch of undergrowth, cut in rotation, called the Wood of Bossu, ran along the high road from Frasnes and Charleroi, flanking that road to the west, and forming cover for troops that might wish to forbid access along it. The ground falls somewhat rapidly in front of the cross-roads to a little stream, and just where the stream crosses the road is the walled farm of Gemioncourt, which can be held as an advanced position, while in front of the fields where the Wood of Bossu once stood is the group of farm buildings called Pierrepont. Finally, that arm of the cross-roads which overlooks the slope down to Gemioncourt ran partly on an embankment which could be used for defence as a ready-made earthwork.
Now, let us see what troops were actually present that Friday morning upon the allied side to defend this position against Ney’s advance, and what others were near enough in the neighbourhood to come up in defence of the position during the struggle.
There was but one division of the Allies actually on the spot. This was the Netherlands division, commanded by Perponcher; and the whole of it, including gunners and sappers (it had hardly any cavalry with it), was less than 8000 strong. It was a very small number to hold the extended position which the division at once proceeded to occupy. They had to cover a front of over 3000 yards, not far short of two miles.
They did not know, indeed, what Ney was bringing up against them; Wellington himself, later on, greatly underestimated the French forces on that day. Now even if Ney had had far less men than he had, it was none the less a very risky thing to disperse the division as Perponcher did, especially with no more than fourteen guns to support him, but under the circumstances it turned out to be a wise risk to have taken. Ney had hesitated already, and was in a mood to be surprised at any serious resistance. The more extended the veil that was drawn before him, the better for the Allies and their card of delay. For everything depended upon time. Ney, as will be seen, had thrown away his chance of victory by his extreme dilatoriness, and during the day the Allies were to bring up unit after unit, until by nightfall nearly 40,000 men not only held Quatre Bras successfully, but pushed the French back from their attack upon it.
Perponcher, then, put a battalion and five guns in front of Gemioncourt, another battalion inside the walls of the farm, four battalions and a mounted battery before the Wood of Bossu and the farm of Pierrepont. Most of his battalions were thus stretched in front of the position of Quatre Bras, the actual Cross Roads where he left only two as a reserve.
Against the Dutchmen, thus extended, the French order to advance was given, and somewhere between half-past two and a quarter to three the French attack began. It was delivered upon Gemioncourt and the fields to the right or east of the Brussels road.
The action that followed is one simple enough to understand by description, but difficult to express upon a map. It is difficult to express upon a map because it consisted in the repeated attack of one fixed number of men against an increasing number of men.
Ney was hammering all that afternoon with a French force which soon reached its maximum. The position against which he was hammering, though held at first by a force greatly inferior to his own, began immediately afterwards to receive reinforcement after reinforcement, until at the close of the action the defenders were vastly superior in numbers to the attackers.
I have attempted in the rough pen sketch opposite this page to express this state of affairs on the allied side during the battle by marking in successive degrees of shading the bodies of the defence in the order in which they came up, but the reader must remember the factor of time, and how all day long Wellington’s command at Quatre Bras kept on swelling and swelling by driblets, as the units marched in at a hurried summons from various points behind the battlefield. This gradual reinforcement of the defence gives all its character to the action.
The French, then, began the assault by an advance to the right or east of the Brussels road. They cleared out the defenders from Gemioncourt; they occupied that walled position; they poured across the stream, and were beginning to take the rise up to Quatre Bras when, at about three o’clock, Wellington, who had been over at Ligny discussing the position with Blucher, rode up and saw how critical the moment was.
In a few minutes the first French division might be up to the cross-roads at Q.
Bossu Wood, with the four battalions holding it, had not yet been attacked by the French, because their second division of Reille’s Second Corps (under Napoleon’s brother Jerome), had not yet come up; Erlon’s First Corps was still far off, down the road. The men in the Bossu Wood came out to try and stop the French advance. They were thrown back by French cavalry, and even as this was proceeding Jerome’s division arrived, attacked the south of Bossu Wood, and brought up the whole of Ney’s forces to some 19,000 or 20,000 men.
The French advance, so continued, would now undoubtedly have succeeded against the 8000 Dutch at this moment of three o’clock (and Wellington’s judgment that the situation was critical at that same moment was only too sound) had there not arrived precisely at that moment the first of his reinforcements.
A brigade of Dutch cavalry came up from the west along the Nivelles road, and three brigades of infantry appeared marching hurriedly in from the north, along the Brussels road; two of these brigades were British, under the command of Kemp and of Pack, and they formed Picton’s division. The third were a brigade of Hanoverians, under Best. The British and the Hanoverians formed along the Namur road at M N, protected by its embankment, kneeling in the high wheat, and ready to fire when the enemy’s attacking line should come within close range of their muskets.
The newly arrived Dutch cavalry, on the other side of the road, charged the advancing French, but were charged themselves in turn by French cavalry, overthrown, and in their stampede carried Wellington and his staff in a surge past the cross-roads; but the French cavalry, in its turn, was compelled to retire by the infantry fire it met when it had ridden too far. Immediately afterwards the French infantry as they reached the Namur road came unexpectedly upon the just-arrived British and Hanoverians, and were driven back in disorder by heavy volleying at close range from the embankment and the deep cover beyond.
The cavalry charge and countercharge (Jerome beginning to clear the south of the Bossu Wood), the check received by the French on the right from Picton’s brigade and the Hanoverians occupied nearly an hour. It was not far short of four o’clock when Ney received that first urgent dispatch from Napoleon which told him to despatch the enemy’s resistance at Quatre Bras, and then to come over eastward to Ligny and help against the Prussians.
Ney could not obey. He had wasted the whole of a precious morning, and by now, close on four o’clock in the afternoon, yet another unit came up to increase the power of the defence, and to make his chance of carrying the Quatre Bras cross-roads, of pushing back Wellington’s command, of finding himself free to send men to Napoleon increasingly doubtful.
The new unit which had come up was the corps under the Duke of Brunswick, and when this arrived Wellington had for the first time a superiority of numbers over Ney’s single corps (there was still no sign of Erlon) though he was still slightly inferior in guns.
However, the French advance was vigorously conducted. Nearly the whole of the Wood of Bossu was cleared. The Brunswickers, who had been sent forward along the road between Quatre Bras and Gemioncourt, were pushed back as to their infantry; their cavalry broke itself against a French battalion.
It was in this doubly unsuccessful effort that the Duke of Brunswick, son of the famous General of the earlier Revolutionary wars, fell, shot in the stomach. He died that night in the village.
The check to this general advance of the French all along the line was again given by the English troops along the Namur road. Picton seized the moment, ordered a bayonet charge, and drove the French right down the valley. His men were in turn driven back by the time they had cleared the slope, but the check was given and the French never recovered it. Two fierce cavalry charges by the French failed to break the English line, though the Highlanders upon Pack’s extreme right, close against Quatre Bras itself, were caught before they could form square, and the second phase of the battle ended in a draw.
Ney had missed the opportunity when the enemy in front of him were in numbers less than half his own; he had failed to pierce their line when reinforcements had brought up their numbers to a superiority over his own. He must now set about a far more serious business, for there was every prospect, as the afternoon advanced, that Wellington would be still further reinforced, while Ney had nothing but his original 20,000 — half his command; of Erlon’s coming there was not a sign! Yet another hour had been consumed in the general French advance and its repulse, which I have just described. It was five o’clock.
I beg the reader to concentrate his attention upon this point of the action — the few minutes before and after the hour of five. A number of critical things occurred in that short space of time, all of which must be kept in mind.
The first was this: A couple of brigades came in at that moment to reinforce Wellington. They gave him a 25 per cent. superiority in men, and an appreciable superiority in guns as well.
In the second place, Ney was keeping the action at a standstill, waiting until his own forces should be doubled by the arrival of Erlon’s force. Ney had been fighting all this while, as I have said, with only half his command — the Second Army Corps of Reille. Erlon’s First Army Corps formed the second half, and when it came up — as Ney confidently expected it to do immediately — it would double his numbers, and raise them from 20,000 to 40,000 men. With this superiority he could be sure of success, even if, as was probable, further reinforcements should reach the enemy’s line. It is to be noted that it was due to Ney’s own tardiness in giving orders that Erlon was coming up so late, but by now, five o’clock, the head of his columns might at any moment be seen debouching from Frasnes.
In the third place, while Ney was thus anxiously waiting for Erlon, and seeing the forces in front of him swelling to be more and more superior to his own, there came yet another message from Napoleon telling Ney how matters stood in the great action that was proceeding five miles away, urging him again with the utmost energy to have done at Quatre Bras, to come back over eastward upon the flank of the Prussians at Ligny, and so to destroy their army utterly and “to save France.”
To have done with the action of Quatre Bras! But there were already superior forces before Ney! And they were increasing! If he dreamt of turning, it would be annihilation for his troops, or at the least the catching of his army’s and Napoleon’s between two fires. He might just manage when Erlon came up — and surely Erlon must appear from one moment to another — he might just manage to overthrow the enemy in front of him so rapidly as to have time to turn and appear at Ligny before darkness should fall, from three to four hours later.
It all hung on Erlon: — He might! and at that precise moment, with his impatience strained to breaking-point, and all his expectation turned on Frasnes, whence the head of Erlon’s column should appear, there rode up to Ney a general officer, Delcambre by name. He came with a message. It was from Erlon… Erlon had abandoned the road to Quatre Bras; had understood that he was not to join Ney after all, but to go east and help Napoleon! He had turned off eastward to the right two and a half miles back, and was by this time far off in the direction which would lead him to take part in the battle of Ligny!
Under the staggering blow of this news Ney broke into a fury. It meant possibly the annihilation of his body, certainly its defeat. He did two things, both unwise from the point of view of his own battle, and one fatal from the point of view of the whole campaign.
First, he launched his reserve cavalry, grossly insufficient in numbers for such a mad attempt, right at the English line, in a despairing effort to pierce such superior numbers by one desperate charge. Secondly, he sent Delcambre back — not calculating distance or time — with peremptory orders to Erlon, as his subordinate, to come back at once to the battlefield of Quatre Bras.
There was, as commander to lead that cavalry charge, Kellerman. He had but one brigade of cuirassiers: two regiments of horse against 25,000 men! It was an amazing ride, but it could accomplish nothing of purport. It thundered down the slope, breaking through the advancing English troops (confused by a mistaken order, and not yet formed in square), cut to pieces the gunners of a battery, broke a regiment of Brunswickers near the top of the hill, and reached at last the cross-roads of Quatre Bras. Five hundred men still sat their horses as the summit of the slope was reached. The brigade had cut a lane right through the mass of the defence; it had not pierced it altogether.
Some have imagined that if at that moment the cavalry of the Guard, which was still in reserve, had followed this first charge by a second, Ney might have effected his object and broken Wellington’s line. It is extremely doubtful, the numbers were so wholly out of proportion to such a task. At any rate, the order for the second charge, when it came, came somewhat late. The five hundred as they reined up on the summit of the hill were met and broken by a furious cross-fire from the Namur road upon the right, from the head of Bossu Wood upon the left, while yet another unit, come up in this long succession to reinforce the defence — a battery of the King’s German Legion — opened upon them with grape. The poor remnant of Kellerman’s Horse turned and galloped back in confusion.
The second cavalry charge attempted by the French reserve, coming just too late, necessarily failed, and at the same moment yet another reinforcement — the first British division of the Guards, and a body of Nassauers, with a number of guns — came up to increase the now overwhelming superiority of Wellington’s line.
There was even an attempt at advance upon the part of Wellington.
As the evening turned to sunset, and the sunset to night, that advance was made very slowly and with increasing difficulty — and all the while Ney’s embarrassed force, now confronted by something like double its own numbers, and contesting the ground yard by yard as it yielded, received no word of Erlon.
The clearing of the Wood of Bossu by the right wing of Wellington’s army, reinforced by the newly arrived Guards, took more than an hour. It took as long to push the French centre back to Gemioncourt, and all through the last of the sunlight the walls of the farm were desperately held. On the left, Pierrepont was similarly held for close upon an hour. The sun had already set when the Guards debouched from the Wood of Bossu, only to be met and checked by a violent artillery fire from Pierrepont, while at the same time the remnant of the cuirassiers charged again, and broke a Belgian battalion at the edge of the wood.
By nine o’clock it was dark and the action ceased. Just as it ceased, and while, in the last glimmerings of the light, the major objects of the landscape, groups of wood and distant villages, could still be faintly distinguished against the background of the gloom, one such object seemed slowly to approach and move. It was first guessed and then perceived to be a body of men: the head of a column began to debouch from Frasnes. It was Erlon and his 20,000 returned an hour too late.
All that critical day had passed with the First Corps out of action. It had neither come up to Napoleon to wipe out the Prussians at Ligny, nor come back in its countermarch in time to save Ney and drive back Wellington at Quatre Bras. It might as well not have existed so far as the fortunes of the French were concerned, and its absence from either field upon that day made defeat certain in the future, as the rest of these pages will show.
Two things impress themselves upon us as we consider the total result of that critical day, the 16th of June, which saw Ney fail to hold the Brussels road at Quatre Bras, and there to push away from the advance on Brussels Wellington’s opposing force, and which also saw the successful escape of the Prussians from Ligny, an escape which was to permit them to join Wellington forty-eight hours later and to decide Waterloo.
The first is the capital importance, disastrous to the French fortunes, of Erlon’s having been kept out of both fights by his useless march and countermarch.
The Elements of Quatre Bras.
The second is the extraordinary way in which Wellington’s command came up haphazard, dribbling in by units all day long, and how that command owed to Ney’s caution and tardiness, much more than to its own General’s arrangements, the superiority in numbers which it began to enjoy from an early phase in the battle.
I will deal with these two points in their order.
As to the first: —
The whole of the four days of 1815, and the issue of Waterloo itself, turned upon Erlon’s disastrous counter-marching between Quatre Bras and Ligny upon this Friday, the 16th of June, which was the decisive day of the war.
What actually happened has been sufficiently described. The useless advance of Erlon’s corps d’armée towards Napoleon and the right — useless because it was not completed; the useless turning back of that corps d’armée towards Ney and the left — useless because it could not reach Ney in time, — these were the determining factors of that critical moment in the campaign.
In other words, Erlon’s zigzag kept the 20,000 of the First Corps out of action all day. Had they been with Ney, the Allies under Wellington at Quatre Bras would have suffered a disaster. Had they been with Napoleon, the Prussians at Ligny would have been destroyed. As it was, the First Army Corps managed to appear on neither field. Wellington more than held his own; the Prussians at Ligny escaped, to fight two days later at Waterloo.
Such are the facts, and they explain all that followed (see Map, next page).
But it has rightly proved of considerable interest to historians to attempt to discover the human motives and the personal accidents of temperament and misunderstanding which led to so extraordinary a blunder as the utter waste of a whole army corps during a whole day, within an area not five miles by four.
It is for the purpose of considering these human motives and personal accidents that I offer these pages; for if we can comprehend Erlon’s error, we shall fill the only remaining historical gap in the story of Waterloo, and determine the true causes of that action’s result.
There are two ways of appreciating historical evidence. The first is the lawyer’s way: to establish the pieces of evidence as a series of disconnected units, to docket them, and then to see that they are mechanically pieced together; admitting, the while, only such evidence as would pass the strict and fossil rules of our particular procedure in the courts. This way, as might be inferred from its forensic origin, is particularly adapted to arriving at a foregone conclusion. It is useless or worse in an attempt to establish a doubtful truth.
The second way is that by which we continually judge all real evidence upon matters that are of importance to us in our ordinary lives: the way in which we invest money, defend our reputation, and judge of personal risk or personal advantage in every grave case.
This fashion consists in admitting every kind of evidence, first hand, second hand, third hand, documentary, verbal, traditional, and judging the general effect of the whole, not according to set legal categories, but according to our general experience of life, and in particular of human psychology. We chiefly depend upon the way in which we know that men conduct themselves under the influence of such and such emotions, of the kind of truth and untruth which we know they will tell; and to this we add a consideration of physical circumstance, of the laws of nature, and hence of the degrees of probability attaching to the events which all this mass of evidence relates.
It is only by this second method, which is the method of common-sense, that anything can be made of a doubtful historical point. The legal method would make of history what it makes of justice. Which God forbid!
Historical points are doubtful precisely because there is conflict of evidence; and conflict of evidence is only properly resolved by a consideration of the psychology of witnesses, coupled with a consideration of the physical circumstances which limited the matter of their testimony.
Judged by these standards, the fatal march and countermarch of Erlon become plain enough.
His failure to help either Ney or Napoleon was not treason, simply because the man was not a traitor. It proceeded solely from obedience to orders; but these orders were fatal because Ney made an error of judgment both as to the real state of the double struggle — Quatre Bras, Ligny — and as to the time required for the countermarch. This I shall now show.
Briefly, then: —
Erlon, as he was leading his army corps up to help Ney, his immediate superior, turned it off the road before he reached Ney and led it away towards Napoleon.
Why did he do this?
It was because he had received, not indeed from his immediate superior, Ney himself, but through a command of Napoleon’s, which he knew to be addressed to Ney, the order to do so.
When Erlon had almost reached Napoleon he turned his army corps right about face and led it off back again towards Ney.
Why did he do that?
It was because he had received at that moment a further peremptory order from Ney, his direct superior, to act in this fashion.
Such is the simple and common-sense explanation of the motives under which this fatal move and countermove, with its futile going and coming, with its apparent indecision, with its real strictness of military discipline, was conducted. As far as Erlon is concerned, it was no more than the continual obedience of orders, or supposed orders, to which a soldier is bound. With Ney’s responsibility I shall deal in a moment.
Let me first make the matter plainer, if I can, by an illustration.
Fire breaks out in a rick near a farmer’s house and at the same time in a barn half a mile away. The farmer sends ten men with water-buckets and an engine to put out the fire at the barn, while he himself, with another ten men, but without an engine, attends to the rick. He gives to his foreman, who is looking after the barn fire, the task of giving orders to the engine, and the man at the engine is told to look to the foreman and no one else for his orders. The foreman is known to be of the greatest authority with his master. Hardly has the farmer given all these instructions when he finds that the fire in the rick has spread to his house. He lets the barn go hang, and sends a messenger to the foreman with an urgent note to send back the engine at once to the house and rick. The messenger finds the man with the engine on his way to the barn, intercepts him, and tells him that the farmer has sent orders to the foreman that the engine is to go back at once to the house. The fellow turns round with his engine and is making his way towards the house when another messenger comes posthaste from the foreman direct, telling him at all costs to bring the engine back to the barn. The man with the engine turns once more, abandons the house, but cannot reach the barn in time to save it. The result of the shilly-shally is that the barn is burnt down, and the fire at the farmer’s house only put out after it has done grave damage.
The farmer is Napoleon. His rick and house are Ligny. The foreman is Ney, and the barn is Quatre Bras. The man with the engine is Erlon, and the engine is Erlon’s command — the First Corps d’Armée.
There was no question of contradictory orders in Erlon’s mind, as many historians seem to imagine; there was simply, from Erlon’s standpoint, a countermanded order.
He had received, indeed, an order coming from the Emperor, but he had received it only as the subordinate of Ney, and only, as he presumed, with Ney’s knowledge and consent, either given or about to be given. In the midst of executing this order, he got another order countermanding it, and proceeding directly from his direct superior. He obeyed this second order as exactly as he had obeyed the first.
Such is, undoubtedly, the explanation of the thing, and Ney’s is the mind, the person, historically responsible for the whole business.
Let us consider the difficulties in the way of accepting this conclusion. The first difficulty is that Ney would not have taken it upon himself to countermand an order of Napoleon’s. Those who argue thus neither know the character of Ney nor the nature of the struggle at Quatre Bras; and they certainly underestimate both the confusion and the elasticity of warfare. Ney, a man of violent temperament (as, indeed, one might expect with such courage), was in the heat of the desperate struggle at Quatre Bras when he received Napoleon’s order to abandon his own business (a course which was, so late in the action, physically impossible). Almost at the same moment Ney heard most tardily from a messenger whom Erlon had sent (a Colonel Delcambre) that Erlon, with his 20,000 men — Erlon, who had distinctly been placed under his orders — was gone off at a tangent, and was leaving him with a grossly insufficient force to meet the rapidly swelling numbers of Wellington. We have ample evidence of the rage into which he flew, and of the fact that he sent back Delcambre with the absolutely positive order to Erlon that he should turn round and come back to Quatre Bras.
Of course, if war were clockwork, if there were no human character in a commander, if no latitude of judgment were understood in the very nature of a great independent command such as Ney’s was upon that day, if there were always present before every independent commander’s mental vision an exact map of the operations, and, at the same time, a plan of the exact position of all the troops upon it at any given moment — if all these armchair conceptions of war were true, then Ney’s order would have been as undisciplined in character and as foolish in intention as it was disastrous in effect.
But such conceptions are not true. Great generals entrusted with separate forces, and told off to engage in a great action at a distance from the supreme command, have, by the very nature of their mission, the widest latitude of judgment left to them. They are perfectly free to decide, in some desperate circumstance, that if their superior knew of that circumstance, he would understand why an afterorder of his was not obeyed, or was even directly countermanded. That Ney should have sent this furious counterorder, therefore, to Erlon, telling him to come back instantly, in spite of Napoleon’s first note, though it was a grievous error, is one perfectly explicable, and parallel to many other similar incidents that diversify the history of war. In effect, Ney said to himself: “The Emperor has no idea of the grave crisis at my end of the struggle or he wouldn’t have sent that order. He is winning, anyhow; I am actually in danger of defeat; and if I am defeated, Wellington’s troops will pour through and come up on the Emperor’s army from the rear and destroy it. I have a right, therefore, to summon Erlon back.” Such was the rationale of Ney’s decision. His passionate mood did the rest.
A second and graver difficulty is this: By the time Erlon got the message to come back, it was so late that he could not possibly bring his 20,000 up in time to be of any use to Ney at Quatre Bras. They could only arrive on the field, as they did in fact arrive, when darkness had already set in. It is argued that a general in Ney’s position would have rapidly calculated the distance involved, and would have seen that it was useless to send for his subordinate at such an hour.
The answer to this suggestion is twofold. In the first place, a man under hot fire is capable of making mistakes; and Ney was, at the moment when he gave that order, under the hottest fire of the whole action. In the second place, he could not have any very exact idea of where in all those four miles of open fields behind him the head of Erlon’s column might be, still less where exactly Delcambre would find it by the time he had ridden back. A mile either way would have made all the difference; if Erlon was anywhere fairly close; if Delcambre knew exactly where to find him, and galloped by the shortest route — if this and if that, it might still be that Erlon would turn up just before darkness and decide the field in Ney’s favour.
Considerable discussion has turned on whether, as the best authorities believe, Erlon did or did not receive a pencilled note written personally to him by the Emperor, telling him to turn at once and come to his, Napoleon’s, aid, and by his unexpected advent upon its flank destroy the Prussian army.
As an explanation of the false move of Erlon back and forth, the existence of this note is immaterial. The weight of evidence is in its favour, and men will believe or disbelieve it according to the way in which they judge human character and motive. For the purposes of a dramatic story the incident of a little pencilled note to Erlon is very valuable, but as an elucidation of the historical problem it has no importance, for, even if he got such a note, Erlon only got it in connection with general orders, which, he knew, were on their way to Ney, his superior.
The point for military history is that —
(a) Erlon, with the First Corps, on his way up to Quatre Bras that afternoon, was intercepted by a messenger, who told him that the Emperor wanted him to turn off eastward and go to Ligny, and not to Quatre Bras; while —
(b) He also knew that that message was intended also to be delivered, and either had been or was about to be delivered, to his superior officer, Ney. Therefore he went eastward as he had been told, believing that Ney knew all about it; and therefore, also, on receiving a further direct order from Ney to turn back again westward, he did turn back.
If we proceed to apportion the blame for that disastrous episode, which, by permitting Blucher to escape, was the plain cause of Napoleon’s subsequent defeat at Waterloo, it is obvious that the blame must fall upon Ney, who could not believe, in the heat of the violent action in which he was involved, that Napoleon’s contemporary action against Ligny could be more decisive or more important than his own. It was a question of exercising judgment, and of deciding whether Napoleon had justly judged the proportion between his chances of a great victory and Ney’s chances; and further, whether a great victory at Ligny would have been of more effect than a great victory or the prevention of a bad defeat at Quatre Bras. Napoleon was right and Ney was wrong.
I have heard or read the further suggestion that Napoleon, on seeing Erlon, or having him reported, not two miles away, should have sent him further peremptory orders to continue his march and to come on to Ligny.
This is bad history. Erlon, as it was, was heading a trifle too much to the south, so that Napoleon, who thought the whole of Ney’s command to be somewhat further up the Brussels road northward than it was, did not guess at first what the new troops coming up might be, and even feared they might be a detachment of Wellington’s, who might have defeated Ney, and now be coming in from the west to attack him.
He sent an orderly to find out what the newcomers were. The orderly returned to report that the troops were Erlon’s, but that they had turned back. Had Napoleon sent again, after this, to find Erlon, and to make him for a third time change his direction, it would have been altogether too late to have used Erlon’s corps d’armée at Ligny by the time it should have come up. Napoleon had, therefore, no course before him but to do as he did, namely, give up all hope of help from the west, and defeat the Prussians at Ligny before him, if not decisively, at least to the best of his ability, with the troops immediately to his hand.
So much for Erlon.
Now for the second point: the way in which the units of Wellington’s forces dribbled in all day haphazard upon the position of Quatre Bras.
Wellington, as we saw on an earlier page, was both misinformed and confused as to the nature and rapidity of the French advance into Belgium. He did not appreciate, until too late, the importance of the position of Quatre Bras, nor the intention of the French to march along the great northern road. Even upon the field of Waterloo itself he was haunted by the odd misconception that Napoleon’s army would try and get across his communications with the sea, and he left, while Waterloo was actually being fought, a considerable force useless, far off upon his right, on that same account.
The extent of Wellington’s misjudgment we can easily perceive and understand. Every general must, in the nature of war, misjudge to some extent the nature of his opponent’s movements, but the shocking errors into which bad staff work led him in this his last campaign are quite exceptional.
Wellington wrote to Blucher, on his arrival at the field of Quatre Bras, at about half-past ten in the morning, a note which distinctly left Blucher to understand that he might expect English aid during his forthcoming battle with Napoleon at Ligny. He did not say so in so many words, but he said: “My forces are at such and such places,” equivalent, that is, to saying, “My forces can come up quite easily, for they are close by you,” adding: “I do not see any large force of the enemy in front of us; and I await news from your Highness, and the arrival of troops, in order to determine my operations for the day.”
In this letter, moreover, he said in so many words that his reserve, the large body upon which he mainly depended, would be within three miles of him by noon, the British cavalry within seven miles of him at the same hour.
Then he rode over to see Blucher on the field of Ligny before Napoleon’s attack on that general had begun. He got there at about one o’clock.
An acrimonious discussion has arisen as to whether he promised to come up and help Blucher shortly afterwards or not, but it is a discussion beside the mark, for, in the first place, Wellington quite certainly intended to come up and help the Prussians; and in the second place, he was quite as certainly unable to do so, for the French opposition under Ney which he had under-estimated, turned out to be a serious thing.
But his letter, and his undoubted intention to come up and help Blucher, depended upon his belief that the units of his army were all fairly close, and that by, say, half-past one he would have the whole lot occupying the heights of Quatre Bras.
Now, as a fact, the units of Wellington’s command were scattered all over the place, and it is astonishing to note the discrepancy between his idea of their position and their real position on the morning of the day when Quatre Bras was fought. When one appreciates what that discrepancy was, one has a measure of the bad staff work that was being done under Wellington at the moment.
The plan () distinguishes between the real positions of Wellington’s command on the morning of the 16th when he was writing his letter to Blucher and the positions which Wellington, in that letter, erroneously ascribes to them. It will show the reader the wide difference there was between Wellington’s idea of where his troops were and their actual position on that morning. It needs no comment. It is sufficient in itself to explain why the action at Quatre Bras consisted not in a set army meeting and repelling the French (it could have destroyed them as things turned out, seeing Erlon’s absence), but in the perpetual arrival of separate and hurried units, which went on from midday almost until nightfall.
IV. THE ALLIED RETREAT AND FRENCH ADVANCE UPON WATERLOO AND WAVRE
WHEN THE PRUSSIANS had concentrated to meet Napoleon at Ligny they had managed to collect, in time for the battle, three out of their four army corps.
These three army corps were the First, the Second, and the Third, and, as we have just seen, they were defeated.
But, as we have also seen, they were not thoroughly defeated. They were not disorganised, still less were the bulk of them captured and disarmed. Most important of all, they were free to retreat by any road that did not bring them against their victorious enemy. In other words, they were free to retreat to the north as well as to the east.
The full importance of this choice will, after the constant reiteration of it in the preceding pages, be clear to the reader. A retreat towards the east, and upon the line of communications which fed the Prussian army, would have had these two effects: First, it would have involved in the retirement that fresh Fourth Army Corps under Bulow which had not yet come into action, and which numbered no less than 32,000 men. For it lay to the east of the battlefield. In other words, that army corps would have been wasted, and the whole of the Prussian forces would have been forced out of the remainder of the campaign. Secondly, it would have finally separated Blucher and his Prussians from Wellington’s command. The Duke, with his western half of the allied forces, would have had to stand up alone to the mass of Napoleon’s army, which would, after the defeat of the Prussians at Ligny, naturally turn to the task of defeating the English General.
Now the fact of capital importance upon which the reader must concentrate if he is to grasp the issue of the campaign is the fact that the French staff fell into an error as to the true direction of the Prussian retreat.
Napoleon, Soult, and all the heads of the French army were convinced that the Prussian retreat was being made by that eastern road.
As a fact, the Prussians, under the cover of darkness, had retired not east but north.
The defeated army corps, the First, Second, and Third, did not fall back upon the fresh and unused Fourth Corps; they left it unhampered to march northward also; and all during the darkness the Prussian forces, as a whole, were marching in roughly parallel columns upon Wavre and its neighbourhood.
It was this escape to the north instead of the east that made it possible for the Prussians to effect their junction with Wellington upon the day of Waterloo; but it must not be imagined that this supremely fortunate decision to abandon the field of their defeat at Ligny in a northerly rather than an easterly direction was at first deliberately conceived by the Prussians with the particular object of effecting a junction with Wellington later on.
In the first place, the Prussians had no idea what line Wellington’s retreat would take. They knew that he was particularly anxious about his communications with the sea, and quite as likely to move westward as northward when Napoleon should come against him.
The full historical truth, accurately stated, cannot be put into the formula, “The Prussians retreated northward in order to be able to join Wellington two days later at Waterloo.” To state it so would be to read history backwards, and to presuppose in the Prussian staff a knowledge of the future. The true formula is rather as follows:— “The Prussians retired northward, and not eastward, because the incompleteness of their defeat permitted them to do so, and thus at once to avoid the waste of their Fourth Army Corps and to gain positions where they would be able, if necessity arose, to get news of what had happened to Wellington.”
In other words, to retreat northwards, though the decision to do so depended only upon considerations of the most general kind, was wise strategy, and the opportunity for that piece of strategy was seized; but the retreat northwards was not undertaken with the specific object of at once rejoining Wellington.
It must further be pointed out that this retreat northwards, though it abandoned the fixed line of communications leading through Namur and Liège to Aix la Chapelle, would pick up in a very few miles another line of communications through Louvain, Maestricht, and Cologne. The Prussian commanders, in determining upon this northward march, were in no way risking their supply nor hazarding the existence of their army upon a great chance. They were taking advantage of one of two courses left open to them, and that one the wiser of the two.
This retreat upon Wavre was conducted with a precision and an endurance most remarkable when we consider the fact that it took place just after a severe, though not a decisive, defeat.
Of the eighty odd thousand Prussians engaged at Ligny, probably 12,000 had fallen, killed or wounded. When the Prussian centre broke, many units became totally disorganised; and, counting the prisoners and runaways who failed to rejoin the colours, we must accept as certainly not exaggerated the Prussian official report of a loss of 15,000.
In spite, I say, of this severe defeat, the order of the retreat was well maintained, and was rewarded by an exceptional rapidity.
The First Corps marched along the westerly route that lay directly before them by Tilly and Mont St Guibert. They marched past Wavre itself, and bivouacked about midday of Saturday the 17th, round about the village of Bierges, on the other side of the river Dyle.
The Second Corps followed the First, and ended its march on the southern side of Wavre, round about the village of St Anne.
The Third Corps did not complete the retreat until the end of daylight upon the 17th, and then marched through Wavre, across the river to the north, and bivouacked around La Bavette.
Finally, still later on the same evening, the Fourth Corps, that of Bulow, which had come to Ligny too late for the action, marching by the eastward lanes, through Sart and Corry, lay round Dion Le Mont.
By nightfall, therefore, on Saturday the 17th of June, we have the mass of the Prussian army safe round Wavre, and duly disposed all round that town in perfect order.
With the exception of a rearguard, which did not come up until the morning of the Sunday, all had been safely withdrawn in the twenty-four hours that followed the defeat at Ligny.
It may be asked why this great movement had been permitted to take place without molestation from the victors.
Napoleon would naturally, of course, after his defeat of the Prussians, withdraw to the west the greater part of the forces he had used against Blucher at Ligny and direct them towards the Brussels road in order to use them next against Wellington. But Napoleon had left behind him Grouchy in supreme command over a great body of troops, some 33,000 in all, whose business it was to follow up the Prussians, to find out what road they had taken; at the least to watch their movements, and at the best to cut off any isolated bodies or to give battle to any disjointed parts which the retreat might have separated from support. In general, Grouchy was to see to it that the Prussians did not return.
In this task Grouchy failed. True, he was not given his final instructions by the Emperor until nearly midday of the 17th, but a man up to his work would have discovered the line of the Prussian retreat and have hung on to it. Grouchy failed, partly because he was insufficiently provided with cavalry, partly because he was a man excellent only in a sudden tactical dilemma, incompetent in large strategical problems, partly because he mistrusted his subordinates, and they him; but most of all because of an original prepossession (under which, it is but fair to him to add, all the French leaders lay) that the Prussian retreat had taken the form of a flight towards Namur, along the eastern line of communications, while, as a fact, it had taken the form of a disciplined retreat upon Wavre and the north.
At ten o’clock in the evening of Saturday the 17th, twenty-four hours after the battle of Ligny, and at the moment when the whole body of the Prussian forces was already reunited in an orderly circle round Wavre, Grouchy, twelve miles to the south of them, was beginning — but only beginning — to discover the truth. He wrote at that hour to the Emperor that “the Prussians had retired in several directions,” one body towards Namur, another with Blucher the Commander-in-chief towards Liège, and a third body apparently towards Wavre. He even added that he was going to find out whether it might not be the larger of the three bodies which had gone towards Wavre, and he appreciated that whoever had gone towards Wavre intended keeping in touch with the rest of the Allies under Wellington. But all that Grouchy did after writing this letter proves how little he, as yet, really believed that any great body of the enemy had marched on Wavre. He anxiously sent out, not northward, but eastward and north-eastward, to feel for what he believed to be the main body of the retreating foe.
During the night he did become finally convinced by the mass of evidence brought in by his scouts that round Wavre was the whole Prussian force, and the conclusion that he came to was singular! He took it for granted that through Wavre the Prussians certainly intended a full retreat on Brussels. He wrote at daybreak of the 18th of June that he was about to pursue them.
That Blucher could dream of taking a short cut westward, thus effecting an immediate junction with Wellington, never entered Grouchy’s head. He did not put his army in motion until after having written this letter. He advanced his troops in a decent and leisurely manner up the Wavre road through the mid hours of the day, and himself, just before noon, wrote a dispatch to the Emperor; he wrote it from Sart, a point ten miles south of Wavre. In that letter he announced “his intention to be massed at Wavre that night,” and begging for “orders as to how he should begin his attack of the next day.”
The next day! Monday!
Already, hours before — by midnight of Saturday — Blucher had sent his message to Wellington assuring him that the Prussians would come to his assistance upon Sunday, the morrow.
Even as Grouchy was writing, the Prussian Corps were streaming westward across country to appear upon Napoleon’s flank four hours later and decide the campaign.
Having written his letter, Grouchy sat down to lunch. As he sat there at meat, far off, the first shots of the battle of Waterloo were fired.
So far, we have followed the retreat of the Prussians northwards from their defeat at Ligny. With the exception of the rearguard, they were all disposed by the evening of Saturday the 17th in an orderly fashion round the little town of Wavre. We have also followed the methodical but tardy and ill-conceived pursuit in which Grouchy felt out with his cavalry to discover the line of the Prussian retreat, and continued to be in doubt of its nature at least until midnight, and probably until even later than midnight, in that night between Saturday the 17th, evening, and Sunday the 18th of June.
We have further seen that during the morning of Sunday the 18th of June he was taking no dispositions for a rapid pursuit, but, being now convinced that the Prussians merely intended a general retreat upon Brussels, proposed to follow them in order to watch that retreat, and, if possible, to shepherd them eastwards. He wrote, as we have just said, to the Emperor in the course of that morning of the Sunday, announcing that he meant to mass his troops at Wavre by nightfall, and asking for orders for the next day.
What the Prussians were doing during that Sunday morning when Grouchy was so quietly and soberly taking for granted that they could not or would not rejoin Wellington, and was so quietly shielding his own responsibility behind the Emperor’s orders, we shall see when we come to talk of the action itself — the battle of Waterloo.
Meanwhile we must return to the second half of the great strategic move, and watch the retreat of the Duke of Wellington during that same Saturday, and the stand which he made on the ridge called “the Mont St Jean” by the nightfall of that day, in order to accept battle on the Sunday morning.
An observer watching the whole business of that Saturday from some height in the air above the valley of the Sambre, and looking northwards, would have seen on the landscape below, to his right, the Prussians streaming in great parallel columns upon Wavre from the battlefield of Ligny. He would have seen, scattered upon the roads, small groups of mounted men, here in touch with the last files of a Prussian column, there lost and wandering forward into empty spaces where no soldiers were. These were the cavalry scouts of Grouchy. South of these, and far behind the Prussian rear, separated from them by a gap of ten miles, a dense body of infantry, drawn up in heavy columns of route, was the corps commanded by Grouchy.
What would such an observer have seen upon the landscape below and before him to his left? He would have seen an interminable line of men streaming northward also, all afternoon, up the Brussels road from Quatre Bras; and behind them, treading upon their heels, another column, miles in length, pressing the pursuit. The retreating column, as it hurried off, he would see screened on its rear by a mass of cavalry, that from time to time charged and checked the pursuers, and sometimes put guns in line to hold them back. The pursuers, after each such check, would still press on. The first, the thousands in retreat, were Wellington’s command retiring from Quatre Bras; the second, the pursuers, were a body some 74,000 strong formed by the junction of Ney and Napoleon, and pressing forward to bring Wellington to battle.
At Quatre Bras, Wellington had not been able, as he had hoped, to join the Prussians and save them from defeat. The French, under Ney, had held him up. He would even have suffered a reverse had Ney attacked promptly and strongly earlier in the day of Friday the 16th, but Ney had not acted promptly and strongly.
All day long reinforcements had come in one after the other, much later than the Duke intended, but in a sufficient measure to meet the tardy and too cautious development of Ney’s attack. Finally, the real peril under which the Duke lay (though he did not know it) — the junction of Erlon and his forces with Ney — had not taken place until darkness fell, and Erlon’s 20,000 had been wasted in the futile fashion which has been described and analysed.
The upshot, therefore, of the whole business at Quatre Bras was, that during the night between Friday and Saturday the 16th and the 17th the English and the French lay upon their positions, neither seriously incommoding the other.
During that night further reinforcements reached Wellington where his troops had bivouacked upon the positions they had held so well. Lord Uxbridge, in command of the British cavalry, and Ompteda’s brigade both came up with the morning, as did also Clinton’s division and Colville’s division, and so did the reserve artillery.
In spite of all these reinforcements, in spite even of the great mass of horse which Uxbridge had brought up, and of the new guns, Wellington’s position upon that morning of Saturday the 17th of June was, though he did not yet know it, very perilous.
He still believed that the Prussians were holding on to Ligny, and that they had kept their positions during the night, which night he had himself spent at Genappe, to the rear of the battlefield of Quatre Bras.
When Wellington awoke on the morning of Saturday in Genappe, there were rumours in the place that the Prussians had been defeated the day before at Ligny. The Duke went at once to Quatre Bras; sent Colonel Gordon off eastward with a detachment of the Tenth Hussars to find out what had happened, and that officer, finding the road from Ligny in the hands of the French, had the sense to scout up northwards, came upon the tail of the Prussian retreat, and returned to Wellington at Quatre Bras by half-past seven with the whole story: the Prussians had indeed been beaten; they were in full retreat; but a chance of retreat had lain open towards the north, and that was the road they had taken.
Wellington knew, therefore, before eight o’clock on that Saturday morning, that his whole left or eastern flank was exposed, and it was common-sense to expect that Napoleon, with the main body of the French, having defeated the Prussians at Ligny, would now march against himself, come up upon that exposed flank (while Ney held the front), and so outnumber the Anglo-Dutch under the Duke’s command. At the worst that command would be destroyed; at the best it could only hope, if it gave time for Napoleon to come up, to have to retreat westward, and to lose touch, for good, with the Prussians.
In such a plight it was Wellington’s business to retreat towards the north, so as to remain in touch with his Prussian allies, while yet that line of retreat was open to him, and before Napoleon should have forced a battle.
Sketch showing the situation in which Wellington was
at Quatre Bras on the morning of the 17th.
The Duke was in no hurry to undertake this movement, for as yet there was no sign of Napoleon’s arrival. The men breakfasted, and it was not until ten o’clock that the retreat began. He sent word back up the road to stop the reinforcements that were still upon their way to join him at Quatre Bras, and to turn them round again up the Brussels road, the way they had come, until they should reach the ridge of the Mont St Jean, just in front of the village of Waterloo, where he had determined to stand. This done, he made his dispositions for retirement, and a little after ten o’clock the retreat upon Waterloo began. His English infantry led the retreat, the Netherland troops following, then the Brunswickers, and the last files of that whole great body of men were marching up the Brussels road northward before noon. Meanwhile, Lord Uxbridge, with his very considerable force of cavalry and the guns necessary to support it, deployed to cover the retreat, and watched the enemy.
That enemy was motionless. Ney did not propose to attack until Napoleon should come up. Napoleon and his troops, arriving from the battlefield of Ligny, were not visible until within the neighbourhood of two o’clock. As he came near the Emperor was perceived, his memorable form distinguished in the midst of a small escorting body, urging the march; and the English guns, during one of those rare moments in which war discovers something of drama, fired upon the man who was the incarnation of all that furious generation of arms. In a military study, this moment, valuable to civilian history, may be neglected.
The flood of French troops arriving made it hard for Uxbridge, in spite of his very numerous cavalry and supporting guns, to cover Wellington’s retreat.
The task was, however, not only successfully but nobly accomplished. Just as the French came up the sky had darkened and a furious storm had broken from the north-west upon the opposing forces. It was in the midst of a rain so violent that friend could be hardly distinguished from foe at thirty yards distance that the pursuit began, and to the noise of limbers galloped furiously to avoid capture, and of all those squadrons pursuing and pursued, was joined an incessant thunder.
Things are accomplished in war which do not fit into the framework of its largest stories, and tend, therefore, to be lost. Overshadowed by the great story of Waterloo, the work which Lord Uxbridge and his Horse did on that afternoon of Saturday the 17th of June is too often forgotten.
The ability and the energy displayed were equal.
The first deployment to meet the French advance, the watching of the retirement of Wellington’s main body, the continual appreciation of ground during a rapid and dangerous movement and in the worst of weather, the choice of occasional artillery positions — all these showed mastery, and secured the complete order of Wellington’s retreat.
The pursuit was checked at its most important point (where the French had to cross the river Dyle at Genappe) by a rapid deployment of the cavalry upon the slope beyond the stream, a rapid unlimbering of the batteries in retreat, and a double charge, first of the Seventh Hussars, next of the First Life Guards.
These charges were successful, they checked the French, and during the remainder of the afternoon the pursuit to the north of the Dyle slackened off until, before darkness, it ceased altogether.
Indeed, there was by that time no further use in it. The mass of Wellington’s army had reached, and had deployed upon, that ridge of the Mont St Jean where he intended to turn and give battle. They were in a position to receive any immediate attack, and the purposes of mere pursuit were at an end.
Facing that ridge of the Mont St Jean, where, at the end of the afternoon and through the evening, Wellington’s troops were already taking up their positions, was another ridge, best remembered by the name of a farm upon its crest, the “Belle Alliance.” This ridge formed the natural halting-place of the pursuers. From the height above Genappe to the ridge of the Belle Alliance was but 5000 yards; and if a further reason be quoted for the cessation of the pursuit and the ranging into battle array of either force, the weather will provide that reason.
The soil of all these fields is of a peculiar black and consistent sort, almost impassable after a drenching rain. The great paved high road which traverses it was occupied and encumbered by the wheeled vehicles and by the artillery. A rapid advance of infantry bodies thrown out to the right and left of the road, and so securing speed by parallel advance, was made impossible by mud, and the line grew longer and longer down the main road, forbidding rapid movement. From mud, that “fifth element in war” (as Napoleon himself called it), Wellington’s troops — the mass of them at least — had been fairly free. They had reached their positions before the downpour. Only the cavalry of the rearguard and its batteries had felt the full force of the storm. Dry straw of the tall standing crops had been cut on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, and the men of Wellington’s command bivouacked as well as might be under such weather.
With the French it was otherwise. Their belated units kept straggling in until long after nightfall. The army was drawn up only at great expense of time and floundering effort, mainly in the dark, drenched, sodden with mud, along the ridge of the Belle Alliance. It was with difficulty that the wood of the bivouac fires could be got to burn at all. They were perpetually going out; and all that darkness was passed in a misery which the private soldier must silently expect as part of his trade, and which is relieved only by those vague corporate intuitions of a common peril, and perhaps a common glory, which, down below all the physical business, form the soul of an army.
Napoleon, when he had inspected all this and assured himself that Wellington was standing ranged upon the opposite ridge, returned to sleep an hour or two at the farm called Le Caillou, a mile behind the line of bivouacs. Wellington took up his quarters in the village of Waterloo, about a mile and a half behind the bivouacs of his troops upon the Mont St Jean.
In such a disposition the two commanders and their forces waited for the day.
There must, lastly, be considered, before the description of action is entered on, the nature of the field upon which it was about to be contested. That field had been studied by Wellington the year before. He, incomparably the greatest tactical defensive commander of his time, and one of the greatest of all time, had chosen it for its capacities of defence. They were formidable. Relying upon them, and confident of the Prussians coming to his aid when the battle was joined, he rightly counted upon success.
Let us begin by noting that of no battle is it more important to seize the exact nature of the terrain, that is, of the ground over which it was fought, than of Waterloo.
To the eye the structure of the battlefield is simple, consisting essentially of two slight and rounded ridges, separated by a very shallow undulation of land.
But this general formation is complicated by certain features which can only be grasped with the aid of contours, and these contours, again, are not very easy to follow at first sight for those who have not seen the battlefield.
In the map which forms the frontispiece of this volume, and to which I will beg the reader to turn, I have indicated the undulations of land in pale green lines underlying the other features of the battle, which are in black, red, and blue. The contours are drawn at five metres (that is 16 feet 4 inches) distance; no contours are given below that of 100 metres above the sea. The valley floors below that level are shaded. Up to the 120-metre line the contours are indicated by continuous lines of increasing thickness. Above the 120-metre line they are indicated by faint dotted or dashed lines. I hope in this manner, though the task is a difficult one, to give a general impression of the field.
The whole field, both slight ridges and the intervening depression, lies upon a large swell of land many square miles in extent, while it slopes away gradually to the east on one side and the west on the other. The highest and hardly distinguishable knolls of it stand about 450 feet above the sea. The site of the battle lies actually on the highest part, the water-parting; and the floors of the valleys, down which the streams run to the east and to the west, are from 150 to 200 feet lower than this confused lift of land between. To one, however, standing upon any part of the battlefield, this feature of height is not very apparent. True, one sees lower levels falling away left and right, and the view seems oddly wide, but the eye gathers the impression of little more than a rolling plain. This is because, in comparison with the scale of the landscape as a whole, the elevations and depressions are slight.
Upon this rolling mass of high land there stand out, as I have said, those two slight ridges, and these ridges lie, roughly speaking, east and west — perpendicular to the great Brussels road, which cuts them from south to north. It was upon this great Brussels road that both Wellington and Napoleon took up, at distances less than a mile apart, their respective centres of position for the struggle. Though this line of the road did not precisely bisect the two lines of the opposing armies, the point where it crossed each line marked the tactical centre of that line: both Wellington and Napoleon remained in person upon that road.
Now it must not be imagined that the shallow depression between the ridges stretches of even depth between the two positions taken up by Wellington and Napoleon, with the road cutting its middle; on the contrary, it is bridged, a little to the west of the road, by a “saddle,” a belt of fields very nearly flat, and very nearly as high as each ridge. The eastern half of the depression therefore rises continually, and gets shallower and shallower as it approaches the road from east westward, and the road only cuts off the last dip of it. Then, just west of the road there is the saddle; and as you proceed still further westward along the line midway between the French and English positions you find a second shallow valley falling away. This second valley does not precisely continue the direction of the first, but turns rather more to the north. In the first slight decline of this second valley, and a few hundred yards west of the road, lies the country-house called Hougomont, and just behind it lay the western end of Wellington’s line. The whole position, therefore, if it were cut out as a model in section from a block of wood, might appear as does the accompanying plan.
In such a model the northern ridge P — Q some two miles in length is that held by Wellington. The southern one M — N is that held by Napoleon. Napoleon commanded from the point A, Wellington from the point B, and the dark band running from one to the other represents the great Brussels High Road. The subsidiary ridge O — O is that on which Napoleon, as we shall see, planted his great battery preparatory to the assault. The enclosure H is Hougomont, the enclosure S is La Haye Sainte.
Of the two ridges, that held by Napoleon needs less careful study for the comprehension of the battle than that held by Wellington.
The latter is known as the Ridge of the Mont St Jean, from a farm lying a little below its highest point and a little behind its central axis. This ridge Wellington had carefully studied the year before, and that great master of defence had noted and admired the excellence of its defensive character. Not only does the land rise towards the ridge through the whole length of the couple of miles his troops occupied, not only is it almost free of “dead” ground, but there lie before it two walled enclosures, the small one of La Haye Sainte, the large one of Hougomont, which, properly prepared and loopholed as they were, were equivalent to a couple of forts standing out to break the attack. There is, again, behind the whole line of the ridge, lower ground upon which the Duke could and did conceal troops, and along which he could and did move them safely during the course of the action.
Anyone acquainted with Wellington’s various actions and their terrains will recognise a common quality in them: they were all chosen by an eye unequalled for seizing, even in where an immediate decision was necessary, all the capabilities of a defensive position. That taken up on the 18th of June 1815, in the Duke’s last battle, had been chosen, not under the exigencies of immediate combat, but with full leisure and after a complete study. It is little wonder, then, that it is the best example of all. Of all the defensive positions which the genius of Wellington has made famous in Europe, none excels that of Waterloo.
V. THE ACTION
IN APPROACHING THIS famous action, it is essential to recapitulate the strategical conditions which determined its result.
I have mentioned them at the outset and again in the middle of this study; I must repeat them here.
The only chance Napoleon had when he set forward in early June to attack the allies in Belgium, the vanguard of his enemies (who were all Europe), was a chance of surprising that vanguard, of striking in suddenly between its two halves, of thoroughly defeating one or the other, and then turning to defeat as thoroughly its colleague.
Other chances than this desperate chance he had none; for he was fighting against odds of very nearly two to one even in his attack upon this mere vanguard of the armed kings; their total forces were, of course, overwhelmingly superior.
He did succeed, as we have seen, in striking suddenly in between the two halves of the allied army in Belgium. He was not as quick as he had intended to be. There were faults and delays, but he managed, mainly through the malinformation and misjudgment of Wellington, to deal with the Prussians unsupported by Wellington’s western wing.
He attacked those Prussians with the bulk of his forces; and although he was outnumbered even upon that field, he defeated the Prussians at Ligny. But the defeat was not complete. The Prussians were free to retire northward, and so ultimately to rejoin Wellington. They took that opportunity, and from the moment they had taken it Napoleon was doomed.
We have further seen that Grouchy, who had been sent after the Prussian retreat, might, if he had seen all the possibilities of that retreat, and had seen them in time, have stepped in between the Prussians and Wellington, and have prevented the appearance of the former upon the field of Waterloo.
Had Grouchy done so, Waterloo would not have been the crushing defeat it was for Napoleon. It would very probably have been a tactical success for Napoleon.
But, on the other hand, we have no ground for thinking that it would have been a final and determining success for the Emperor. For if Wellington had not known quite early in the action that he could count upon the arrival of the Prussians, he would not have accepted battle. If, as a fact, he had found the Prussians intercepted, he could have broken contact and retreated before it was too late.
Had he done so, it would simply have meant that he would later have effected a junction with his allies, and that in the long-run Napoleon would still have had to fight an allied army immensely superior to his own.
All this is as much as to say once more what has been insisted upon throughout these pages; Waterloo was lost, not upon Sunday, June 18th, but two days before, when the 63,000 of Napoleon broke and drove back the 80,000 of Blucher but failed to contain them, failed to drive them eastward, away from Wellington, or to cause a general surrender, and failed because the First French Army Corps, under Erlon, a matter of 20,000 men, failed to come up in flank at the critical moment.
We have seen what the effect of that failure was; we have discussed its causes, and we must repeat the main fact for military history of all those four days: the breakdown of Napoleon’s last desperate venture turned upon Erlon’s useless marching and countermarching between Quatre Bras and Ligny, two days before the final action of Waterloo was fought.
This being so, the battle of Waterloo must resolve itself into two main phases: the first, the beginning of the struggle with Wellington before the Prussians come up; the second, the main and decisive part of the action, in which both Prussians and English are combined against the French army.
This second phase develops continually as the numbers of the arriving Prussians increase, until it is clinched by the appearance of Ziethen’s corps at the very end of the day, and the break-up of the French army; this second part is therefore itself capable of considerable subdivision. But in any large and general view of the whole action, we must regard it as divided into these two great chapters, during the first of which is engaged the doubtful struggle between Napoleon and Wellington; during the second of which the struggle, no longer doubtful, is determined by the arrival of the Prussians in flank upon the field.
Elements of Waterloo.
The First Part of the Action
BEFORE THE ARRIVAL of the Prussians
The action was to take the form of an assault by Napoleon’s forces against this defensive position held by Wellington. It was the business of Wellington, although his total force was slightly inferior to the enemy in numbers, and considerably inferior in guns, to hold that defensive position until the Prussians should come up in flank. This he had had word would take place at latest by one or two o’clock. It was the business of Napoleon to capture the strong outworks, Hougomont and La Haye Sainte; and, that done, to hammer the enemy’s line until he broke it. That delay in beginning this hammering would be fatal; that the Prussians were present upon his flank, could arrive in the midst of the battle, and were both confidently and necessarily expected by his enemy; that his simple single battle would turn into two increasingly complex ones, Napoleon could have no idea. Napoleon could see no need for haste. A long daylight was before him. It was necessary to let the ground dry somewhat after the terrible rain of the day before if artillery was to be used effectively; nor did he press his columns, which were moving into position all through the morning, and which had not completely deployed even by eleven o’clock.
It was a little after that hour that he dictated to Soult the order of battle. Its first and effective phrases run as follows: —
“Once the whole army is deployed, that is, at about half-past one, at the moment when the Emperor shall send the order to Marshal Ney, the attack is to be delivered. It will have for its object the capture of the village of Mont St Jean and the cross-roads…”
The remainder of the order sets out forces to be engaged in this first attack.
The French forces consisted in the IInd Army Corps deployed to the left or west of the road, the Ist to the right or east of it, and behind Napoleon, in the centre and in reserve, the VIth Corps and the Guard.
The plan in the Emperor’s mind was perfectly simple. There was to be no turning of the right nor of the left flank of the enemy, which would only have the effect of throwing back that enemy east or west. His line was to be pierced, the village of Mont St Jean which lay on the ridge of Wellington’s position and which overlooks the plateau on every side was to be carried, and this done Napoleon would be free to decide upon his next action, according to the nature and extent of the disorder into which he had thrown the enemy’s broken line.
As a fact, Napoleon made a movement before that hour of half-past one which he had set down in his order for the beginning of the assault. That movement was a movement against the advanced and fortified position of Hougomont.
He sent orders to his left, to the body on the east of the high road, the Second Army Corps, under Reille, to send troops to occupy the outer gardens, wood, and orchards of the country-house, and at twenty-five minutes to twelve the first gun fired in support of that movement was also the first cannonshot of Waterloo.
After a brief artillery duel and exchange of cannonshots between the height on the French left, which overlooks Hougomont, and the corresponding height upon the English right, the French infantry began to march down the slope to occupy the little wood which stands to the south of the chateau. These four regiments were commanded by the Emperor’s brother Jerome, who was — as we have seen at Quatre Bras — under the orders of Reille. The clearing of the wood was no very desperate affair, but it was a difficult one, and it took an hour. The Germans of Nassau and Hanover, who were charged with the defence of Hougomont and its approaches, stubbornly contested the standing trees and the cut-clearing which lay between them and the garden wall of the chateau.
It must be clearly seized, at this early and even premature point in the action, that Napoleon’s object in making this attack upon Hougomont was only to weaken Wellington’s centre.
Hougomont lay upon Wellington’s right. Wellington had always been nervous of his right, and feared the turning of his line there, because, should he have to retreat, his communications would ultimately lie in that direction. It was for this reason that he had set right off at Braine l’Alleud, nearly a mile to the west of his line, the Dutch-Belgian Division of Chassé and sixteen guns, which force he connected with a reserve body at Hal, much further to the west.
Napoleon judged that an attack on Hougomont before the action proper was begun, coming thus upon Wellington’s right, would make him attempt to reinforce the place and degarnish his centre, where the Emperor intended the brunt of the attack to fall.
Napoleon had no other intention that history can discover in pressing the attack against Hougomont so early. It was almost in the nature of a “feint.” But when, towards half-past twelve, his brother’s division had cleared the wood and come up against the high garden wall of the farm, for some reason which cannot be determined, whether the eagerness of the troops, the impulsiveness of Jerome himself, or whatever cause, instead of being contented with holding the wood according to orders, the French furiously attacked the loopholed and defended wall. They attempted to break in the great door, which was recessed, and therefore protected by a murderous cross-fire. They were beaten back into the wood, leaving a heap of dead. At this point Reille, according to his own account (which may well enough be accurate), sent orders for the division to remain in the wood, and not to waste itself against so strong an outpost. But Jerome and his men were not to be denied. They marched round the chateau, under a heavy artillery fire from the English batteries above, and attempted to carry the north wall. As they were so doing, four companies of the Coldstreams, the sole reinforcement which Wellington could be tempted to part with from his main line, came in reinforcement to the defence, and, after a sharp struggle, the French were thrust back once more.
It was by that time past one o’clock, and this first furious attempt upon Hougomont, unintended by the Emperor, and a sheer waste, had doubly failed. It had failed in itself — the house and garden still remained untaken, the post was still held. It had failed in its object, which had been to draw Wellington, and to get him to send numerous troops from his centre to his right in defence of the threatened place.
Meanwhile the Emperor, for whom this diversion of a few regiments against Hougomont was but a small matter, had prepared and was about to deliver his main attack.
The reader will see upon the contours of the coloured map a definite spur of land marked with a broad green band in front of the French order of battle, and further marked by the green letter “B” in the very centre of the map. It was along this spur and at about one o’clock that the Emperor drew up a great battery of eighty pieces in order to prepare the assault upon the opposing ridge, which was to be delivered the moment their fire had ceased. Napoleon at that moment was watching his army and its approaching engagement from that summit upon the great road marked “A” in green upon my coloured map, whence the whole landscape to the north and west lies open.
There he received the report of Ney that the guns were ready, and only waiting for the order.
A little while before the guns were ready and Ney had reported to that effect, Napoleon had received Grouchy’s letter, in which it was announced that the mass of the Prussian army had retreated on Wavre. He had replied to it with instructions to Grouchy so to act that no Prussian corps at Wavre could come and join Wellington. Hardly had the Emperor dictated this reply when, looking northward and then eastward over the great view, he saw, somewhat over four miles away, a shadow, or a movement, or a stain upon the bare uplands towards Wavre; he thought that appearance to be companies of men. A few moments later a sergeant of Silesian Hussars, taken prisoner by certain cavalry detachments far out to the east, was brought in. He had upon him a letter sent from Bulow to Wellington announcing that the Prussians were at hand, and the prisoner further told the Emperor that the troops just perceived were the vanguard of the Prussian reinforcement. Thus informed, the Emperor caused a postscript to be added to his dictated letter, and bade Grouchy march at once towards this Prussian column, fall upon it while it was still upon the march and defenceless and destroy it.
Such an order presupposed Grouchy’s ability to act upon it; Napoleon took that ability for granted. But Grouchy, as a fact, could not act upon it in time. Hard riding could not get Napoleon’s note to Grouchy’s quarters within much less than an hour and a half. When it got there Grouchy himself must be found, and that done his 33,000 must be got together in order to take the new direction. Further, the Emperor could not know in what state Grouchy’s forces might be, nor what direction they might already have taken. It should be mentioned, however, to explain Napoleon’s evident hope at the moment of things going well, that the prisoner had told the Emperor it was commonly believed in the Prussian lines that Grouchy was actually marching to join him, Napoleon, at that moment. Napoleon sent some cavalry off eastward to watch the advent of the Prussians; he ordered his remnant of one army corps, the Sixth, which he had kept in reserve behind his line, to march down the hill to the village of Plancenoit and stand ready to meet the Prussian attack; and having done all this, he made ready for the assault upon the ridge which Wellington’s troops held.
That assault was to be preceded, as I have said, by artillery preparation from the great battery of eighty guns which lay along the spur to the north and in front of the French line. For half an hour those guns filled the shallow valley with their smoke; at half-past one they ceased, and Erlon’s First Corps d’Armée, fresh to the combat, because it had so unfortunately missed both Ligny and Quatre Bras, began to descend from its position, to cross the bottom, and to climb the opposite slope, while over the heads of the assaulting columns the French and English cannon answered each other from height to height.
The advance across the valley, as will be apparent from the map, had upon its right the village of Papelotte, upon its left the farm of La Haye Sainte, and for its objective that highway which runs along the top of the ridge, and of which the most part was in those days a sunken road, as effective for defence as a regular trench.
Following a practice which he never abandoned, which he had found universally successful, and upon which he ever relied, the Duke of Wellington had kept his British troops, the nucleus of his defensive plan, for the last and worst of the action. He had stationed to take the first brunt those troops upon which he least relied, and these were the first Dutch-Belgian brigade under Bijlandt. This body was stationed in front of the sunken road (at the point marked A in red upon the map). Behind it he had put Pack’s brigade and Kemp’s, both British; to the left of it, but also behind the road, Best’s Hanoverian brigade. Papelotte village he held with Perponcher’s Belgians.
It will be seen that the crushing fire of the French eighty guns maintained for half an hour had fallen full upon the Dutch-Belgians, standing exposed upon the forward slope at a range of not more than 800 yards. At the French charge, though that was delivered through high standing crops and over drenched and slippery soil up the slope, Bijlandt’s brigade broke. It is doubtful indeed whether any other troops would not have broken under such circumstances. Unfortunately the incident has been made the subject of repeated and most ungenerous accusation. A body purposely set forward before the whole line to stand such fearful pounding and to shelter the rest; one, moreover, which in two days of fighting certainly lost one-fourth of its number in killed and wounded, and probably lost more than one-third, is deserving of a much more chivalrous judgment than that shown by most historians in its regard. Anyhow, Kemp’s brigade quickly filled the gap left by the failure of the Netherlanders, and began to press back the French charge.
Meanwhile the French right, which had captured Papelotte, was compelled to retreat upon seeing the centre thus driven back, while the French left had failed to carry the farm of La Haye Sainte. Indeed upon this side, that is, in the neighbourhood of the great road, the check and reverse to the French assault had been more complete than elsewhere. An attempt to drive its first success home with a cavalry charge had been met by a countercharge, deservedly famous, in which, among other regiments, the First and Second Lifeguards, the Blues, the King’s Dragoons, had broken the French horse and followed up the French retirement down the slope. The centre of that retirement was similarly charged by the Scots Greys; and in the end of the whole affair the English horsemen rode up to the spur where the great battery stood, sabred the gunners, and then, being thus advanced so uselessly and so dangerously from their line, were in their turn driven back to the English positions with bad loss.
When this opening chapter of the battle closed, the net result was that the initial charge of the First Corps under Erlon had failed. It had left behind it many prisoners; certain guns which had advanced with it had been put out of action; it had lost two colours.
Save for the furious inconsequent and almost purposeless fighting that was still raging far off to the left round Hougomont, the battle ceased. The valley between the opposing forces was strewn with the dead and dying, but no formed groups stood or moved among the fallen men. The swept slopes had all the appearance during that strange halt of a field already lost or won. The hour was between three and half-past in the afternoon, and so ended the first phase of the battle of Waterloo. It had lasted rather over two hours.
The Second Part of the Action
THE SECOND AND decisive phase of the battle of Waterloo differed from the first in this: In the first phase Napoleon was attacking Wellington’s command alone. It was line against line. By hammering at the line opposed to him on the ridge of the Mont St Jean, Napoleon confidently expected to break it before the day should close. His first hammer blow, which was the charge of the First Army Corps under Erlon, had failed, and failed badly. The cavalry in support of that infantry charge had failed as well as their comrades, and the British in their turn had charged the retiring French, got right into their line, sabred their gunners, only to be broken in their turn by the counter-effort of further French horse.
This first phase had ended in a sort of halt or faint in the battle, as I have described.
The second phase was a very different matter. It developed into what were essentially two battles. It found Napoleon fighting not only against Wellington in front of him, but against Blucher to his right and almost behind him. It was no longer a simple business of hammering with the whole force of the French army at the British and their allies upon the ridge in front, but of desperately attempting to break the Anglo-Dutch line against time, with diminishing and perpetually reduced forces; with forces perpetually reduced by the necessity of sending more and more men off to the right to resist, if it were possible, the increasing pressure of the accumulating Prussian forces upon the right flank of the French.
This second phase of the action at Waterloo began in the neighbourhood of four o’clock.
It is true that the arriving Prussians had not yet debouched from the screen of wood that hid them two and a half miles away to the east, but at that hour (four o’clock) the heads of their columns were all ready to debouch, and the delay between their actual appearance upon the field and the beginning of the second half of the battle was not material to the result.
That second half of the action began with a series of great cavalry charges which the Emperor had not designed, and which, even as he watched them, he believed would be fatal to him. As spectacles, these famous rides presented the most awful and memorable pageant in the history of modern war; as tactics they were erroneous, and grievously erroneous.
Before this second phase of the battle was entered it was easily open to Napoleon, recognising the Prussians advancing and catching no sight of Grouchy, to change his plan, to abandon the offensive, to stand upon the defensive along the height which he commanded, there to await Grouchy, and, if Grouchy still delayed, to maintain the chances of an issue which might at least be negative, if he could prevent its being decisively disastrous.
But even if such a conception had passed through the Emperor’s mind, military science was against it. If ever those opposed to him had full time to concentrate their forces he would, even with the reinforcement of Grouchy, be fighting very nearly two to one. His obvious, one might say his necessary, plan was to break Wellington’s line, if still it could be broken, before the full pressure of the arriving Prussians should be felt. Short of that, there could be nothing but immediate or ultimate disaster.
We shall see how, much later in the action, yet another opportunity for breaking away, and for standing upon the defensive, or for retreating, was, in the opinion of some critics, offered to the Emperor by fate.
But we shall see how, upon that second and later occasion in the day, his advantage in so doing was even less than it was now between this hour of half-past three and four o’clock, when he determined to renew the combat.
He first sent orders to Ney to make certain of La Haye Sainte, to clear the enemy from that stronghold, which checked a direct assault upon the centre, and then to renew the general attack.
La Haye Sainte was not taken at this first attempt. The French were repelled; the skirmishers, who were helping the direct attack by mounting the slope upon its right, were thrown back as well, and after this unsuccessful beginning of the movement the guns were called upon to prepare a further and more vigorous assault upon a larger scale. Not only the first great battery of eighty guns, but many of the batteries to the west of the Brussels road (which had hitherto been turned upon Hougomont and the English guns behind that position) were now directed upon the centre of the English line, and there broke out a cannonade even more furious than the one which had opened the action at one o’clock. Men trained in a generation’s experience of war called it the most furious artillery effort of their time; and never, perhaps, even in the career of the Gunner who was now in the last extremity of his fate, had guns better served him.
Under the battering of that discharge the front of Wellington’s command was partially withdrawn behind the cover of the ridge. A stream of wounded, mixed with not a few men broken and flying, began to swell northward up the Brussels road; and Ney, imagining from such a sight that the enemy’s line wavered, committed his capital error, and called upon the cavalry to charge.
Wellington’s line was not wavering. For the mass of the French cavalry to charge at such a moment was to waste irreparably a form of energy whose high potential upon the battlefield corresponds to a very rapid exhaustion, and which, invaluable against a front shaken and doubtful, is useless against a front still solid.
It was not and could not have been the Emperor who ordered that false step. It is even uncertain whether the whole body of horsemen that moved had been summoned by Ney, or whether the rearmost did not simply follow the advance of their fellows. At any rate, the great group of mounted men which lay in reserve behind the First Army Corps, and to the west of the road, passed in its entirety through the infantry, and began to advance at the trot down the valley for the assault upon the opposite slope.
I repeat, it is not certain whether Ney called upon all this mass of cavalry and deliberately risked the waste of it in one blow. It is more probable that there was some misunderstanding; that Desnoettes’ command, which was drawn up behind Milhaud’s, followed Milhaud’s, under the impression that a general order had been given to both; that Ney, seeing this extra body of horse following, imagined Napoleon to have given it orders. At any rate, Napoleon never gave such orders, and, from the height upon which he stood, could not have seen the first execution of them, for the first advance of that cavalry was hidden from him by a slight lift of land.
There were 5000 mounted men drawn up in the hollow to the west of the Brussels road for the charge. It was not until they began to climb the slope that Napoleon saw what numbers were being risked, and perceived the full gravity of Ney’s error.
To charge unshaken infantry in this fashion, and to charge it without immediate infantry support, was a thing which that master of war would never have commanded, and which, when he saw it developing under the command of his lieutenant, filled him with a sense of peril. But it was too late to hesitate or to change the disposition of this sudden move. The 5000 climbed at a slow and difficult trot through the standing crops and the thick mud of the rising ground, suffered — with a moment’s wavering — the last discharge of the British guns, and then, on reaching the edge of the plateau, spurred to the gallop and charged.
It was futile. They passed the line of guns (the gunners had orders to abandon their pieces and to retire within the infantry squares); they developed, in too short a start, too slight an impetus; they seethed, as the famous metaphor of that field goes, “like angry waves round rocks”; they lashed against every side of the squares into which the allied infantry had formed. The squares stood.
Wellington had had but a poor opinion of his command. It contained, indeed, elements more diverse and raw material in larger proportion than ever he, or perhaps any other general of the great wars, had had to deal with, but it was infantry hitherto unshaken; and the whole conception of that false movement, the whole error of that cavalry action, lay in the idea that the allied line had suffered in a fashion which it had been very far from suffering. Nothing was done against the squares; and the firmest of them, the nucleus of the whole resistance, were the squares of British infantry, three deep, against which the furious close-sabring, spurring, and fencing of sword with bayonet proved utterly vain. Upon this mass of horsemen moving tumultuous and ineffectual round the islands of foot resisting their every effort, Uxbridge, gathering all his cavalry, charged, and 5000 fresh horse fell upon the French lancers and cuirassiers, already shredded and lessened by grape at fifty yards and musket fire at ten. This countercharge of Uxbridge’s cleared the plateau. The French horsemen turned bridle, fled to the hollow of the valley again, and the English gunners returned to their pieces. The whole fury of the thing had failed.
But it had failed only for a moment. What remained of the French horse reformed and once again attempted to charge. Once again, for all their gravely diminished numbers, they climbed the slope; once again the squares were formed, and the torment of horsemen round about them struck once more.
Seen from the point where Napoleon stood to the rear of his line, the high place that overlooked the battlefield, it seemed to eyes of less genius than his own that this second attempt had succeeded. Indeed, its fierce audacity seemed to other than the French observers at that distance to promise success. The drivers of the reserve batteries in the rear of Wellington’s line were warned for retreat, and Napoleon, reluctant, but pressed by necessity, seeing one chance at last of victory by mere shock, himself sent forward a reserve of horse to support the distant cuirassiers and lancers. He called upon Kellerman, commanding the cavalry of the Guard, to follow up the charge.
He knew how doubtful was the success of this last reinforcement, for he knew how ill-judged had been Ney’s first launching of that great mass of horse at an unbroken enemy; but, now that the thing was done, lest, unsupported, it should turn to a panic which might gain the whole army, he risked almost the last mounted troops he had and sent them forward, acting thus like a man throwing good money after bad for fear that all may be lost.
A better reason still decided Napoleon so to risk a very desperate chance, and to hurl Kellerman upon the heels of Milhaud. That reason was the advent, now accomplished, of the Prussians upon his right, and the necessity, imperative and agonised, of breaking Wellington’s line before the whole strength of the newcomers should be felt upon the French flank and rear.
Let us turn, then, and see how far and with what rapidity the Prussians at this moment — nearly half-past five o’clock — had accomplished their purpose.
Of the four Prussian corps d’armée bivouacked in a circle round Wavre, and unmolested, as we have seen, by Grouchy, it was the fourth, that of Bulow, which was given the task of marching first upon the Sunday morning to effect the junction with Wellington. It lay, indeed, the furthest to the east of all the Prussian army, but it was fresh to the fight, for it had come up too late to be engaged at Ligny. It was complete; it was well commanded.
The road it had to traverse was not only long, but difficult. The passage of the river Lasne had to be effected across so steep a ravine and by so impassable a set of ways that the modern observer, following that march as the present writer has followed it, after rain and over those same fields and roads, is led to marvel that it was done in the time which Blucher’s energy and the traditional discipline of the Prussian soldiers found possible. At any rate, the heads of the columns were on the Waterloo edge of the Wood of Fischermont (or Paris) before four o’clock, and ready to debouch. Wellington had expected them upon the field by two o’clock at latest. They disappointed him by two hours, and nearly three, but the miracle is that they arrived when they did; and it is well here to consider in detail this feat which the Fourth Prussian Army Corps had accomplished, for it is a matter upon which our historians of Waterloo are often silent, and which has been most unfortunately neglected in this country.
The Fourth Prussian Army Corps, under Bulow, lay as far east as Liège when, on the 14th of June, Napoleon was preparing to cross the Sambre. Its various units were all in the close neighbourhood of the town, so none of them were spared much of the considerable march which all were about to undertake to the west; even its most westward detachment was no more than three miles from Liège city.
Bulow should have received the order to march westward at half-past ten on the morning of the 15th. The order, as we have seen in speaking of Ligny, was not delivered till the evening of that day. The Fourth Army Corps was told to concentrate in the neighbourhood of Hannut and a little east of that distant point. The corps, as a whole, did not arrive until the early afternoon of Friday the 16th.
It is from this point — Hannut — that the great effort begins.
Bulow, it must be remembered, commanded no less than 32,000 men. The fatigues and difficulties attendant upon the progress of such a body, most of it tied to one road, will easily be appreciated.
During the afternoon of the 16th, while Ligny was being fought, he advanced the whole of this body to points immediately north and east of Gembloux. Not a man, therefore, of his great command had marched less than twenty miles, many must have marched over twenty-five, upon that Friday afternoon.
Then followed the night during which the other three defeated corps fell back upon Wavre.
That night was full of their confused but unmolested retreat. With the early morning of the Saturday Bulow’s 32,000 fell back along a line parallel to the general retirement, and all that day they were making their way by the cross-country route through Welhain and Corroy to Dion Le Mont.
This task was accomplished through pouring rain, by unpaved lanes and through intolerable mud, over a distance of close on seventeen miles for the hardest pushed of the troops, and not less than thirteen for those whom the accident of position had most spared.
The greater part of the Fourth Corps had spent the first night in the open; all of it had spent the second night upon the drenched ground. Upon the third day, the Sunday of Waterloo, this force, though it lies furthest from the field of Waterloo of all the Prussian forces, is picked out to march first to the aid of Wellington, because it as yet has had no fighting and is supposed to be “fresh.” On the daybreak, therefore, after bivouacking in that dreadful weather, Bulow’s force is again upon the move. It does not get through Wavre until something like eight o’clock, and the abominable conditions of the march may be guessed from the fact that its centre did not reach St Lambert until one o’clock, nor did the last brigade pass through that spot until three o’clock. Down the steep ravine of the Lasne and up on the westward side of it was so hard a business that, as we have seen, the brigades did not begin to debouch from the woods at the summit until after four o’clock. It was not until after five o’clock that the last brigade, the 14th, had come up in line with the rest upon the field of Waterloo, having moved, under such abominable conditions of slow, drenched marching, another fifteen miles.
In about forty-eight hours, therefore, this magnificent piece of work had been accomplished. It was a total movement of over fifty miles for the average of the corps — certainly more than sixty for those who had marched furthest — broken only by two short nights, and those nights spent in the open, one under drenching rain. The whole thing was accomplished without appreciable loss of men, guns, or baggage, and at the end of it these men put up a fight which was the chief factor in deciding Waterloo.
Such was the supreme effort of the Fourth Prussian Army Corps which decided Waterloo.
There are not many examples of endurance so tenacious and organisation so excellent in the moving so large a body under such conditions in the whole history of war.
When the Fourth Prussian Corps debouched from the Wood of Fischermont and began its two-mile approach towards his flank, Napoleon, who had already had it watched by a body of cavalry, ordered Lobau with the Sixth French Army Corps, or rather with what he had kept with him of the Sixth Army Corps, to go forward and check it.
It could only be a question of delay. Lobau had but 10,000 against the 30,000 which Bulow could ultimately bring against him when all his brigades had come up; but delay was the essential of the moment to Napoleon. To ward off the advancing Prussian pressure just so long as would permit him to carry the Mont St Jean was his most desperate need. Lobau met the enemy, three to two, in the hollow of Plancenoit, was turned by such superior numbers, and driven from the village.
All this while, during the Prussian success which brought that enemy’s reinforcement nearer and nearer to the rear of the French army and to the Emperor’s own standpoint, the wasted though magnificent action of the French cavalry was continuing against Wellington’s right centre, west of the Brussels road. Kellerman had charged for the third time; the plateau was occupied, the British guns abandoned, the squares formed. For the third time that furious seething of horse against foot was seen from the distant height of the Belle Alliance. For the third time the sight carried with it a deceptive appearance of victory. For the third time the cavalry charge broke back again, spent, into the valley below. Ney, wild as he had been wild at Quatre Bras, failing in judgment as he had failed then, shouted for the last reserve of horse, and forgot to call for that 6000 untouched infantry, the bulk of Reille’s Second Corps, which watched from the height of the French ridge the futile efforts of their mounted comrades.
Folly as it was to have charged unbroken infantry with horse alone, the charges had been so repeated and so tenacious that, immediately supported by infantry, they might have succeeded. If those 6000 men of Reille’s, the mass of the Second Army Corps, which stood to arms unused upon the ridge to the west of the Brussels road, had been ordered to follow hard upon the last cavalry charge, Napoleon might yet have snatched victory from such a desperate double strain as no general yet in military history has escaped. He might conceivably have broken Wellington’s line before that gathering flood of Prussians to the right and behind him should have completed his destruction.
But the moment was missed. Reille’s infantry was not ordered forward until the defending line had had ample time to prepare its defence; until the English gunners were back again at their pieces, and the English squares once more deployed and holding the whole line of their height.
It is easy to note such errors as we measure hours and distances upon a map. It is a wonderment to some that such capital errors appear at all in the history of armies. Those who have experience of active service will tell us what the intoxication of the cavalry charges meant, of what blood Ney’s brain was full, and why that order for the infantry came too late. Of the 6000 infantry which attempted so belated a charge, a quarter was broken before the British line was reached, and that assault, in its turn, failed.
At this point in the battle, somewhat after six o’clock, two successes on the part of the French gave them an opportunity for their last disastrous effort, and introduced the close of the tragedy.
The first was the capture of La Haye Sainte, the second was the recapture of Plancenoit.
La Haye Sainte, standing still untaken before the very front of Wellington’s line, must be captured if yet a further effort was to be attempted by Napoleon. Major Baring had held it with his small body of Germans all day long. Twice had he thrust back a general assault, and throughout more than five hours he had resisted partial and equally unsuccessful attacks. Now Ney, ordered to carry it at whatever cost, brought up against it a division, and more than a division. The French climbed upon their heaped dead, broke the doors, shot from the walls, and, at the end of the butchery, Baring with forty-two men — all that was left him out of nine companies — cut his way back through to the main line, and the farm was taken. Hougomont, on the left, round which so meaningless a struggle had raged all day long, was never wholly cleared of its defenders, but the main body of it was in flames, and with the capture of La Haye Sainte the whole front was free for a final attack at the moment which Napoleon should decide.
Meanwhile, at Plancenoit, further French reinforcements had recaptured the village and again lost it. The Sixth Corps had given way before the Prussian advance, as we have seen. The next French reinforcements, though they had at first thrust the Prussians back, in turn gave way as the last units of the enemy arrived, and the Prussian batteries were dropping shot right on to the fields which bordered the Brussels road.
Napoleon took eleven battalions of the Guard (the Imperial Guard was his reserve, and had not yet come into action) and drew them up upon his flank to defend the Brussels road; with two more battalions he reinforced the wavering troops in Plancenoit. They cleared the enemy out of the village with the bayonet, and for the moment checked that pressure upon the flank and rear which could not but ultimately return.
It was somewhat past seven by the time all this was accomplished. Napoleon surveyed a field over which it was still just possible (in his judgment at least) to strike a blow that might save him. He saw, far upon the left, Hougomont in flames; in the centre, La Haye Sainte captured; on the right, the skirmishers advancing upon the slope before the English line; his eastern flank for the moment free of the Prussians, who had retired before the sudden charge of the Guard. He heard far off a cannonade which might be that of Grouchy.
But even as he looked upon his opportunity he saw one further thing that goaded him to an immediate hazard. Upon the north-eastern corner of his strained and bent-back line of battle, against the far, perilous, exposed angle of it, he saw new, quite unexpected hordes of men advancing. It was Ziethen debouching with the head of his First Prussian Army Corps at this latest hour — and Napoleon saw those most distant of his troops ready to yield to the new torrent.
The sun, now within an hour of setting, had shone out again. Its light came level down the shallow valley, but all that hollow was so filled with the smoke of recent discharges that the last stroke which Napoleon was now preparing was in part hidden from the Allies upon the hill. That final stake, the only venture left, was to be use of his last reserve and the charge of the Guard.
No combat in history, perhaps, had seen a situation so desperate maintained without the order for retreat. Wellington’s front, which the French were attacking, was still held unbroken; upon the French flank and rear, though the Fourth Prussian Army Corps were for the moment held, they must inevitably return; more remained to come: they were in the act of pressing upon the only line open to the French for retreat, and now here came Ziethen with his new masses upon the top of all.
If, at this hour, just after seven, upon that fatal day, retreat had been possible or advisable to Napoleon, every rule of military art demanded it. He was now quite outnumbered; his exhausted troops were strained up to and beyond the breaking point. To carry such strains too far means in all things, not only in war, an irretrievable catastrophe.
But retreat was hardly possible as a military action; it was impossible as a political one.
Napoleon could hardly retreat at that hour, although he was already defeated, because the fury and the exhaustion of the combat, its increasing confusion, and the increasing dispersion of its units, made any rapid concentration and organisation for the purposes of a sudden retirement hazardous in the extreme. The doomed body, held closer and closer upon its right flank, menaced more and more on its right rear, now suddenly threatened on its exposed salient angle, would fight on.
Though Napoleon had withdrawn from the combat an hour before, when Bülow’s 30,000 had struck at his right flank and made his destruction certain; though he had then, while yet he could, organised a retirement, abandoned the furious struggle for La Haye Sainte before it was successful, and covered with his best troops an immediate retreat, that retreat would not have availed his cause.
The appearance of the Prussians on his right proved glaringly the nature of his doom. Grouchy — a quarter of his forces — was cut off from him altogether. The enemy, whom he believed to be beyond Grouchy, and pursued by Grouchy, had appeared, upon the contrary, between Grouchy and himself. Now Ziethen too was here.
Did Napoleon retire, he would retire before forces half as large again as his own, and destined to grow to double his own within a few hours. His retirement would leave Grouchy to certain disaster.
Politically, retreat was still more hopeless. He himself would re-enter France defeated, with, at the most, half the strength that had crossed the frontier three days before. He would so re-enter France — the wealthier classes of which watched his power, nearly all of them with jealousy, most with active hate — surrounded by general officers not ten of whom, perhaps, he could sincerely trust, and by a whole society which supported him only upon the doubtful condition of victory.
Such a retirement was ruin. It was more impossible morally even than it was impossible physically, under the conditions of the field. Therefore it was that, under conditions so desperate, with his battle lost if ever battle was, the Emperor yet attempted one ultimate throw, and in this half-hour before the sunset sent forward the Guard.
In those solemn moments, wherein the Imperial Guard formed for their descent into that hollow whose further slope was to see their last feat of arms, Ziethen, with the First Prussian Corps, pressed on into the far corner the field of battle. At the far end of the long ridge of the Mont St Jean, more than a mile away, this last great body and newest reinforcement of the Emperor’s foes had emerged from the walls and thickets of Smohain and, new to the fighting, was already pushing in the weary French line that had stood the carnage of six hours. It was not enough that the Fourth Prussian Corps should have determined the day already with its 30,000 come up from the east against him; now the foremost battalions of the First coming up from the north were appearing to clinch the matter altogether.
It was under such conditions of irretrievable disaster that Napoleon played for miracle, and himself riding slowly down the valley at the head of his comrades and veterans, gave them over to Ney for the final attack against Wellington’s line which still held the opposing slope.
It was then, at the moment when Ziethen and the men of the First Prussian Army Corps began to press upon the north-eastern angle of the fight, and were ready to determine it altogether, that the Guard began its ponderous thrust up between Hougomont and La Haye Sainte, to the west of the Brussels road. Up that fatal hill, which had seen the four great cavalry charges, and more recently the breaking of the Second Corps, the tall men, taller for the bearskins and the shouldered musket, the inheritors of twenty-two victorious and now immortal years, leant forward, advancing. To the hanging smoke of the cannon in the vale was added the rising mist of evening; and when the furious cannonade which was to support their attack had ceased with their approach to the enemy’s line, a sort of silence fell upon the spectators of that great event.
The event was brief.
It was preceded by a strange sight: a single horseman galloped unharmed from the French to the English line (a captain); he announced to the enemy the approaching movement of the Guard. He was a hater of the flag and of the Revolution, and of its soldier: he was for the old Kings.
There was no need for this dramatic aid. The lull in the action, Napoleon’s necessity for a last stroke, possibly through the mist and smoke the actual movement of the Guard, were apparent. The infantry whom Wellington had retired behind the ridge during the worst of the artillery preparation was now set forward again. It was the strongest and the most trusted of his troops whom Wellington posted to receive the shock — Adams’ brigade and the brigade of Guards. Three batteries of the reserve were brought forward, with orders not to reply to the French cannon, but to fire at the advancing columns of the charge.
As the Guard went upward, the whole French front to the right moved forward and supported the attack. But upon the left, the Second Army Corps, Reille’s recently broken 6000, could not yet move. They came far behind and to the west of the Brussels road; the Guard went up the slope alone.
At two hundred yards from the English line the grape began to mow through them. They closed up after each discharge. Their advance continued unchecked.
Of the four columns, that nearest to the Brussels road reached, touched, and broke the line of the defenders. Its strength was one battalion, yet it took the two English batteries, and, in charging Halkett’s brigade, threw the 30th and the 73rd into confusion. It might have been imagined for one moment that the line had here been pierced, but this first and greatest chance of success was defeated, and with it all chances, for it is the head of a charge that tells.
The reader will have seen upon the map, far off to the west or left, at Braine l’Alleud, a body of reserve, Belgian, which Wellington had put so far off in the mistaken notion that the French would try to turn him in that direction. This force of 3000 men with sixteen guns Wellington had recalled in the last phases of the battle. It was their action, and especially that of their artillery, that broke this first success of the Guard. The Netherlanders charged with the bayonet to drive home the effect of their cannon, and the westernmost column of the French attack was ruined.
As the four columns were not all abreast, but the head of the first a little more forward than that of the second, the head of the second than that of the third, and so forth, the shock of the French guard upon the British came in four separate blows, each delivered a few moments later than the last.
We have seen how the Dutch broke the first column.
The second column, which attacked the right of Halkett’s brigade, failed also. The 33rd and 69th wavered indeed, but recovered, and their recovery was largely due to the personal courage of their chief.
The next column, again, the third, came upon the British Guards; and the Guards, reserving their fire until the enemy were at a stone’s-throw, fired point-blank and threw the French into confusion. During that confusion the brigade of Guards charged, pursued the enemy part of the way down the slope, were closed upon by the enemy and driven back again to the ridge.
The fourth column of the French was now all but striking the extremity of the British line. Here Adams’ brigade, a battalion of the 95th, the 71st, and the 52nd regiments, awaited the blow.
The 52nd was the inmost of the three.
It stood just where the confusion of the Guards as they were thrown back up the hill joined the still unbroken ranks of Adams’ extremity of the British line.
The 52nd determined the crisis of that day. And it was then precisely that the battle of Waterloo was decided, or, to be more accurate, this was the moment when the inevitable breaking-point appeared.
Colborne was its commander. Instead of waiting in the line, he determined to run the very grave risk of leaving it upon his own initiative, and of playing a tremendous hazard; he took it upon himself to bring the 52nd out, forward in advance of and perpendicular to the defending line, and so to bring a flank fire upon the last French charge.
The peril was very great indeed. It left a gap in the English line; the possibility, even the chance, of a French advance to the left against that gap and behind the 52nd meant ruin. It was the sort of thing which, when men do it and fail, is quite the end of them. Colborne did it and succeeded. No French effort was made to the left of the 52nd. It had therefore but its front to consider; it wheeled round, left that dangerous gap in the English line, and poured its fire in flank upon the last charge of the fourth French column. That fire was successful. The assault halted, wavered, and began to break.
The French line to the right, advancing in support of the efforts of the Guard, saw that backward movement, and even as they saw it there came the news of Ziethen’s unchecked and overwhelming pressure upon the north-east of the field, a pressure which there also had at last broken the French formation.
The two things were so nearly simultaneous that no historical search or argument will now determine the right of either to priority. As the French west of the Brussels road gave way, the whole English line moved together and began to advance. As the remnants of the First French Army Corps to the east of the Brussels road were struck by Ziethen they also broke. At which point the first flexion occurred will never be determined.
The host of Napoleon, stretched to the last limit, and beyond, snapped with the more violence, and in those last moments of daylight a complete confusion seized upon all but two of its numerous and scattered units.
Those two were, first, certain remnants of the Guard itself, and secondly, Lobau’s troops, still stubbornly holding the eastern flank.
Squares of the Old Guard, standing firm but isolated in the flood of the panic, checked the pursuit only as islands check a torrent. The pursuit still held. All the world knows the story of the challenge shouted to these veterans, and of Cambronne’s disputed reply just before the musket ball broke his face and he fell for dead. Lobau also, as I have said, held his troops together. But the flood of the Prussian advance, perpetually increasing, carried Plancenoit; the rear ranks of the Sixth Army Corps, thrust into the great river of fugitives that was now pouring southward in panic down the Brussels road, were swept away by it and were lost; and at last, as darkness fell, the first ranks also were mixed into the mass of panic, and the Imperial army had ceased to exist.
There was a moon that night; and hour after hour the Prussian cavalry, to whom the task had been entrusted, followed, sabring, pressing, urging the rout. Mile after mile, past the field of Quatre Bras itself, where the corpses, stripped by the peasantry, still lay stark after those two days, the rush of the breakdown ran. Exhaustion had weakened the pursuers before fear had given way to fatigue with the pursued; and when the remnants of Napoleon’s army were past the Sambre again, not 30,000 disjointed, unorganised, dispersed, and broken men had survived the disaster.
FINIS
MALPLAQUET
Malplaquet.
I. THE POLITICAL MEANING OF MALPLAQUET
THAT POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE which we must seek in all military history, and without which that history cannot be accurate even upon its technical side, may be stated for the battle of Malplaquet in the following terms.
Louis XIV. succeeding to a cautious and constructive period in the national life of France, this in its turn succeeding to the long impotence of the religious wars, found at his orders when his long minority was ended a society not only eager and united, but beginning also to give forth the fruit due to three active generations of discussion and combat.
Every department of the national life manifested an extreme vitality, and, while the orderly and therefore convincing scheme of French culture imposed itself upon Western Europe, there followed in its wake the triumph of French arms; the king in that triumph nearly perfected a realm which would have had for its limits those of ancient Gaul.
It would be too long a matter to describe, even in general terms, the major issues depending upon Louis XIV.’s national ambitions and their success or failure.
In one aspect he stands for the maintenance of Catholic civilisation against the Separatist and dissolving forces of the Protestant North; in another he is the permanent antagonist of the Holy Roman Empire, or rather of the House of Austria, which had attained to a permanent hegemony therein. An extravagant judgment conceives his great successes as a menace to the corporate independence of Europe, or — upon the other view — as the opportunity for the founding of a real European unity.
But all these general considerations may, for the purposes of military history, be regarded in the single light of the final and decisive action which Louis XIV. took when he determined in the year 1701 to support the claims of his young grandson to the throne of Spain. This it was which excited against him a universal coalition, and acts following upon that main decision drew into the coalition the deciding factor of Great Britain.
The supremacy of French arms had endured in Europe for forty years when the Spanish policy was decided on. Louis was growing old. That financial exhaustion which almost invariably follows a generation of high national activity, and which is almost invariably masked by pompous outward state, was a reality already present though as yet undiscovered in the condition of France.
It was at the close of that year 1701 that the French king had determined upon a union of the two crowns of France and Spain in his own family. His forces occupied the Spanish Netherlands, which we now call the Kingdom of Belgium; others of his armies were spread along the Rhine, or were acting in Northern Italy — for the coalition at once began to make itself felt. Two men of genius combined in an exact agreement, the qualities of each complementing the defects of the other, to lead the main armies that were operating against the French. These men were Prince Eugene of Savoy (French by birth and training, a voluntary exile, and inspired throughout his life by a determination to avenge himself upon Louis XIV.), and the Englishman John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
The combination of such a pair was irresistible. Its fruit appeared almost at the inception of the new situation in the great victory of Blenheim.
This action, fought in August 1704, was the first great defeat French arms had registered in that generation. Henceforward the forces commanded from Versailles were compelled to stand upon the defensive.
To Blenheim succeeded one blow after another. In 1706 the great battle of Ramillies, in 1708 the crushing action of Oudenarde, confirmed the supremacy of the allies and the abasement of France. By the opening of 1709 the final defeat of Louis and his readiness to sue for peace were taken for granted.
The financial exhaustion which I have said was already present, though hardly suspected, in 1701, was grown by 1709 acute. The ordinary methods of recruitment for the French army — which nominally, of course, was upon a voluntary basis — had long reached and passed their limit. The failure of the harvest in 1708, followed by a winter of terrible severity, had completed the catastrophe, and with the ensuing spring of 1709 Louis had no alternative but to approach the allies with terms of surrender.
It seemed as though at last the way to Paris lay open. The forces of the allies in the Netherlands were not only numerically greatly superior to any which the exhausted French could now set against them, but in their equipment, in their supplies, the nourishment of the men, and every material detail, they were upon a footing wholly superior to the corresponding units of the enemy, man for man. They had further the incalculable advantage of prestige. Victory seemed normal to them, defeat to their opponents; and so overwhelming were the chances of the coalition against Louis that its leaders determined with judgment to demand from that monarch the very fullest and most humiliating terms.
Though various sections of the allies differed severally as to their objects and requirements, their general purpose of completely destroying the power of France for offence, of recapturing all her conquests, and in particular of driving the Bourbons from the throne of Spain, was held in common, and vigorously pursued.
Marlborough was as active as any in pushing the demands to the furthest possible point; Eugene, the ruling politicians of the English, the Dutch, and the German princes were agreed.
Louis naturally made every effort to lessen the blow, though he regarded his acceptance of grave and permanent humiliation as inevitable. The negotiations were undertaken at the Hague, and were protracted. They occupied the late spring of 1709 and stretched into the beginning of summer. The French king was prepared (as his instructions to his negotiators show) to give up every point, though he strove to bargain for what remained after each concession. He would lose the frontier fortresses, which were the barrier of his kingdom in the north-east. He would even consent to the abandonment of Spain to Austria.
Had that peace been declared for which the captains of Europe were confidently preparing, the future history of our civilisation would have proved materially different from what it has become. It is to be presumed that a complete breakdown of the strength of France would have followed; that the monarchy at Versailles would have sunk immediately into such disrepute that the eighteenth century would have seen France divided and possibly a prey to civil war, and one may even conclude that the great events of a century later, the Revolution and the campaigns of Napoleon, could not have sprung from so enfeebled a society.
It so happened, however, that one of those slight miscalculations which are productive in history of its chief consequences, prevented the complete humiliation of Louis XIV. The demands of the allies were pushed in one last respect just beyond the line which it was worth the while of the defeated party to accept, for it was required of the old king not only that he should yield in every point, not only that he should abandon the claims of his own grandson to the throne of Spain (which throne Louis himself had now, after eight years of wise administration, singularly strengthened), but himself take arms against that grandson and co-operate in his proper shame by helping to oust him from it. It was stipulated that Louis should so act (if his grandson should show resistance and still clung to his throne) in company with those who had been for so many years his bitter and successful foes.
This last small item in the programme of the victors changed all. It destroyed in the mind of Louis and of his subjects the advantages of the disgraceful peace which they had thought themselves compelled to accept; and, as Louis himself well put it, if he were still compelled to carry on the war, it was better to fail in pursuing it against his enemies than against his own household.
The king issued to the authorities of his kingdom and to his people a circular letter, which remains a model of statesmanlike appeal. Grave, brief, and resolute, it exactly expressed the common mood of the moment. It met with an enthusiastic response. The depleted countrysides just managed to furnish the armies with a bare pittance of oats and rye (for wheat was unobtainable). Recruits appeared in unexpected numbers; and though none could believe that the issue could be other than disastrous, the campaign of 1709 was undertaken by a united nation.
Of French offensive action against the overwhelming forces of their enemies there could be no question. Villars, who commanded the armies of Louis XIV. upon the north-eastern frontier, opposing Marlborough and Eugene, drew up a line of defence consisting of entrenchments, flooded land, and the use of existing watercourses, a line running from the neighbourhood of Douai away eastward to the Belgian frontier. Behind this line, with his headquarters at La Bassée, he waited the fatal assault.
It was at the close of June that the enemy’s great forces moved. Their first action was not an attempt to penetrate the line but to take the fortresses upon its right, which taken, the defence might be turned. They therefore laid siege to Tournai, the first of the two fortresses guarding the right of the French line. (Mons was the second.)
Here the first material point in the campaign showed the power of resistance that tradition and discipline yet maintained in the French army. The long resistance of Tournai and its small garrison largely determined what was to follow. Its siege had been undertaken in the hope of its rapid termination, which the exiguity of its garrison and the impossibility of its succour rendered probable. But though Marlborough had established his headquarters before the place by the evening of the 27th of June, and Eugene upon the next day, the 28th, though trenches were opened in the first week of July and the first of the heavy fighting began upon the 8th of that month, though the town itself was occupied after a fortnight’s struggle, yet it was not until the 3rd of September that the citadel surrendered.
This protracted resistance largely determined what was to follow. While it lasted no action could be undertaken against Villars. Meanwhile the French forces were growing stronger, and, most important of all, the first results of the harvest began to be felt.
Tournai once taken, it was the business of the allies to pierce the French line of defence as soon as possible, and with that object to bring Villars to battle and to defeat him.
The plan chosen for this object was as follows: —
The allied army to march to the extreme right of the positions which the French could hope to defend. There the allies would contain the little garrison of Mons. Thither the mass of the French forces must march in order to bar the enemy’s advance upon Paris, and upon some point near Mons the whole weight of the allies could fall upon them, destroy them, and leave the way to the capital open.
Sketch Map showing how the Lines of La Bassée blocked the advance of the Allies on Paris,
and Marlborough’s plan for turning them by the successive capture of Tournai and Mons.
The plan was strategically wise. The lines of La Bassée proper could not be pierced, but this right extremity of the French positions was backed by easy country; the swamps, canals, and entrenchments of the main line to the north and west were absent. With the defeat of the inferior French forces at this point all obstacle to an advance into the heart of France would be removed.
The plan was as rapidly executed as it was skilfully devised. Actually before the capitulation of the citadel of Tournai, but when it was perceived that that capitulation could only be a matter of hours, Lord Orkney had begun to advance upon the neighbourhood of Mons. Upon the day of the capitulation of Tournai, the Prince of Hesse-Cassel had started for Mons, Cadogan following him with the cavalry. Less than twenty-four hours after Tournai had yielded, the whole allied army was on the march throughout the night. Never was a military operation performed with organisation more exact, or with obedience more prompt. Three days later Mons was contained, and by Monday the 9th of September Villars awaited, some few miles to the west of that fortress, the assault of the allies.
There followed two days of delay, which will be discussed in detail later. For the purposes of this introductory survey of the political meaning of the battle, it is enough to fix the date, Wednesday, 11th September 1709. A little before eight o’clock on the morning of that day the first cannon-shot of the battle of Malplaquet was fired. To the numerical superiority of the allies the French could oppose entrenchment and that character in the locality of the fight, or “terrain,” which will be fully described on a later page. To the superior moral, equipment, and subsistence of the allies, however, it was doubtful whether any factor could be discovered on the French side.
An unexpected enthusiasm lent something to the French resistance; the delay of two days lent something more to their defensive power. As will be seen in the sequel, certain errors (notably upon the left of Marlborough’s line) also contributed to the result, and the whole day was passed in a series of attacks and counter-attacks which left the French forces intact, and permitted them in the early afternoon to rely upon the exhaustion of the enemy and to leave, in order and without loss, the field to the enemy.
Marlborough’s victory at Malplaquet was both honourable and great. The French were compelled to withdraw; the allies occupied upon the evening of the battle the ground upon which the struggle had taken place. It is with justice that Malplaquet is counted as the fourth of those great successful actions which distinguish the name of Marlborough, and it is reckoned with justice the conclusion of the series whose three other terms are Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde. So much might suffice did war consist in scoring points as one does in a game. But when we consider war as alone it should be considered for the serious purposes of history — that is, in its political aspect; and when we ask what Malplaquet was in the political sequence of European events, the withdrawal of the French from the field in the early afternoon of September 11, 1709, has no significance comparable to the fact that the allies could not pursue.
Strategically the victory meant that an army which it was intended to destroy had maintained itself intact; morally, the battle left the defeated more elated than the victors; and for this reason, that the result was so much more in their favour than the expectation had been. In what is most important of all, the general fortunes of the campaign, the victory of the allies at Malplaquet was as sure a signal that the advance on Paris could not be made, and as sure a prevention of that advance as though Marlborough and Eugene had registered, not a success, but a defeat.
Situations of this sort, which render victories barren or actually negative, paradoxical to the general reader, simple enough in their military aspect, abound in the history of war. It is perhaps more important to explain them if one is to make military history intelligible than to describe the preliminaries and movements of the great decisive action.
The “block” of Malplaquet (to use the metaphor which is common in French history), the unexpected power of resistance which this last of the French armies displayed, and the moral effect of that resistance upon the allies, have an historical meaning almost as high as that of Blenheim upon the other side. It has been well said that one may win every battle and yet lose a campaign; there is a sense in which it may be said that one may win a campaign and suffer political loss as the result.
Malplaquet was the turning-point after which it was evident that the decline of the French position in Europe would go no further. As Blenheim had marked the turn of the tide against Louis, so Malplaquet marked the slack water when the tide was ready to turn in his favour. After Blenheim it was certain that the ambition of Louis XIV. was checked, and probable that it would wholly fail. After Malplaquet it was equally certain that the total destruction of Louis’ power was impossible, that the project of a march on Paris might be abandoned, and that the last phases of the great war would diminish the chances of the allies.
The Dutch (whose troops in particular had been annihilated upon the left of the field) did indeed maintain their uncompromising attitude, but no longer with the old certitude of success; Austria also and her allies did continue the war, but a war doomed to puerility, to a sort of stale-mate bound to end in compromise. But it was in England that the effect of the battle was most remarkable.
In England, where opinion had but tardily accepted the necessity for war nine years before, and where the fruits of that war were now regarded as quite sufficient for the satisfaction of English demands, this negative action, followed by no greater fruit than the capitulation of the little garrison at Mons, began the agitation for peace. Look closely at that agitation through its details, and personal motives will confuse you; the motives of the queen, of Harley, of Marlborough’s enemies. Look at it in the general light of the national history and you will perceive that the winter following Malplaquet, a winter of disillusionment and discontent, bred in England an opinion that made peace certain at last. The accusation against Marlborough that he fought the battle with an eye to his failing political position is probably unjust. The accusation that he fought it from a lust of bloodshed is certainly a stupid calumny. But the unpopularity of so great a man succeeding upon so considerable a technical success sufficiently proves at what a price the barrenness of that success was estimated in England. It was the English Government that first opened secret negotiations with Louis for peace in the following year; and when the great instrument which closed the war was signed at Utrecht in 1713, it was after the English troops had been withdrawn from their allies, after Eugene, acting single-handed, had suffered serious check, and in general the Peace of Utrecht was concluded under conditions far more favourable to Louis than would have been any peace signed at the Hague in 1709. The Spanish Netherlands were ceded to Austria, but France kept intact what is still her Belgian frontier. She preserved what she has since lost on the frontier of the Rhine, and (most remarkable of all!) the grandson of Louis was permitted to remain upon the Spanish throne.
Such is the general political setting of this fierce action, one of the most determined known in the history of European arms, and therefore one of the most legitimately glorious; one in which men were most ready at the call of duty and under the influences of discipline to sacrifice their lives in the defence of a common cause; and one which, as all such sacrifices must, illumines the history of the several national traditions concerned, of the English as of the Dutch, of the German principalities as of the French.
No action better proves the historical worth of valour.
II. THE SIEGE OF TOURNAI
WHEN THE NEGOTIATIONS for peace had failed, that is, with the opening of June 1709, the King of France and his forces had particularly to dread an invasion of the country and the march on Paris.
The accompanying sketch map will show under what preoccupations the French commander upon the north-eastern frontier lay.
Lille was in the hands of the enemy. There was still a small French garrison in Ypres, another in Tournai, and a third in Mons. These of themselves (considering that Lille, the great town, was now occupied by the allies, and considering also the width of the gap between Ypres and Tournai) could not prevent the invasion and the advance on the capital.
It was necessary to oppose some more formidable barrier to the line of advance which topography marked out for the allies into the heart of France.
Sketch Map showing how the Allies holding Lille thrust the French back
on to the defensive line St Venant-Valenciennes, and thus cut off the
French garrisons of Ypres, Tournai, and Mons.
Some fear was indeed expressed lest a descent should be made on the coasts and an advance attempted along the valley of the Somme. The fear was groundless. To organise the transportation of troops thus by sea, to disembark them, to bring and continue the enormous supply of provisions and ammunition they would require, was far less practical than to use the great forces already drawn up under Marlborough and Eugene in the Low Countries. Of what size these forces were we shall see in a moment.
The barrier, then, which Villars at the head of the French forces proceeded to erect, and which is known in history as “The Lines of La Bassée,” are the first point upon which we must fix our attention in order to understand the campaign of Malplaquet, and why that battle took place where it did.
It was upon the 3rd of June that Louis XIV. had written to Villars telling him that a renewal of the war would now be undertaken. On the 14th, Villars began to throw up earth for the formation of an entrenched camp between the marshy ground of Hulluch and that of Cuinchy. Here he proposed to concentrate the mass of his forces, with La Bassée just before him, the town of Lens behind. He used the waterways and the swamped ground in front and to the right for the formation of his defensive lines. These followed the upper valley of the Deule, the line of its canal, and finally reposed their right upon the river Scarpe. Though the regularly fortified line went no further than the camp near La Bassée, he also threw up a couple of entrenchments in front of Bethune and St Venant in order to cover any march he might have to make towards his left should the enemy attempt to turn him in that direction.
It must further be noted that from the Scarpe eastward went the old “lines of La Trouille” thrown up in a former campaign, and now largely useless, but still covering, after a fashion, the neighbourhood of Mons.
Toward the end of the month of June Villars awaited the advance of the allies. His forces were inferior by 40,000 to those of his enemy. He had but eight men to their twelve. The season of the year, immediately preceding the harvest, made the victualling of his troops exceedingly difficult, nor was it until the day before the final assault was expected that the moneys necessary to their pay, and to the other purposes of the army, reached him; but he had done what he could, and, acting upon a national tradition which is as old as Rome, he had very wisely depended upon fortification.
The same conditions of the season which produced something like famine in the French camp, though they did not press equally severely upon that of the allies, rendered difficult the provisioning of their vast army also.
It was the first intention of Marlborough and Eugene to attack the lines at once, to force them, and to destroy the command of Villars. But these lines had been carefully reconnoitred, notably by Cadogan, who, with a party of English officers, and under a disguise, had made himself acquainted with their strength. It was determined, therefore, at the last moment, partly also from the fears of the Dutch, to whom the possession of every fortress upon the frontier was of paramount importance, to make but a “feint” upon Villars’ lines and to direct the army upon Tournai as its true object. The feint took the form of Eugene’s marching towards the left or western extremity of the line, Marlborough towards the eastern or right extremity near Douai, and this general movement was effected on the night of the 26th and 27th of June. In the midst of its execution, the feint (which for the moment deceived Villars) was arrested.
The 27th was passed without a movement, Villars refusing to leave his entrenchments, and the commanders of the allies giving no hint of their next intention. But during that same day Tilly with the Dutch had appeared before Tournai. On the evening of the day Marlborough himself was before the town. On the 28th Prince Eugene joined both the Dutch and Marlborough before the town, taking up his headquarters at Froyennes, Marlborough being at Willemeau, and the Dutch, under Tilly, already established on the east of Tournai from Antoing to Constantin, just opposite Eugene, where they threw a bridge across the Scheldt. By the evening of the 28th, therefore, Tournai was invested on every side, and the great allied armies of between 110,000 and 120,000 men had abandoned all hope of carrying Villars’ lines, and had sat down to the capture of the frontier fortress.
A comprehension of this siege of Tournai, which so largely determined the fortunes of the campaign of Malplaquet, will be aided by the accompanying sketch map. Here it is apparent that Marlborough with his headquarters at Willemeau, Eugene with his at Froyennes, the Dutch under Tilly in a semicircle from Antoing to Constantin, completed the investment of the fortress, and that the existing bridge at Antoing which the Dutch commanded, the bridge at Constantin which they had constructed, giving access over the river to the north and to the south, made the circle complete.
Sketch Map showing complete investment of Tournai.
The fortifications of Tournai were excellent. Vauban had superintended that piece of engineering in person, and the scheme of the fortifications was remarkable from the strength of the citadel which lay apart from the town (though within its ring of earthworks) to the south. The traveller can still recognise in its abandonment this enormous achievement of Louis XIV.’s sappers, and the opposition it was about to offer to the great hosts of Marlborough and Eugene does almost as much honour to the genius of the French engineer as to the tenacity of the little garrison then defending it.
Two factors in the situation must first be appreciated by the reader.
The first is that the inferiority of Villars’ force made it impossible for him to do more than demonstrate against the army of observation. He was compelled to leave Tournai to its fate, and, indeed, the king in his first instructions, Villars in his reply, had taken it for granted that either that town or Ypres would be besieged and must fall. But the value of a fortress depends not upon its inviolability (for that can never be reckoned with), but upon the length of time during which it can hold out, and in this respect Tournai was to give full measure.
Secondly, it must be set down for the allies that their unexpectedly long task was hampered by exceptional weather. Rain fell continually, and though their command of the Scheldt lessened in some degree the problem of transport, rain in those days upon such roads as the allies drew their supplies by was a heavy handicap. The garrison of Tournai numbered thirteen and a half battalions, five detached companies, the complement of gunners necessary for the artillery, and a couple of Irish brigades — in all, counting the depleted condition of the French units at the moment, some six to seven thousand men. Perhaps, counting every combatant and non-combatant attached to the garrison, a full seven thousand men.
The command of this force was under Surville, in rank a lieutenant-general. Ravignon and Dolet were his subordinates. There was no lack of wheat for so small a force. Rationed, it was sufficient for four months. Meat made default, and, what was important with a large civil population encumbering the little garrison, money. Surville, the bishop, and others melted down their plate; even that of the altars in the town was sacrificed.
The first trench was opened on the night of the 7th of July, and three first attacks were delivered: one by the gate called Marvis, which looks eastward, another by the gate of Valenciennes, the third at the gate known as that of the Seven Springs. A sortie of the second of these was fairly successful, and upon this model the operations continued for five days.
By the end of that time a hundred heavy pieces had come up the Scheldt from Ghent, and sixty mortars as well. Four great batteries were formed. That to the south opened fire upon the 13th of July, and on the 14th the three others joined it.
The discipline maintained in the great camps of the besiegers was severe, and the besieged experienced the unusual recruitment of five hundred to six hundred deserters who penetrated within their lines. A considerable body of deserters also betook themselves to Villars’ lines, and the operations in these first days were sufficiently violent to account for some four thousand killed and wounded upon the side of the allies. Villars, meanwhile, could do no more than demonstrate without effect. Apart from the inferiority of his force, it was still impossible for him, until the harvest was gathered, to establish a sufficient accumulation of wheat to permit a forward movement. He never had four days’ provision of bread at any one time, nor, considering the length of his line, could he concentrate it upon any one place. He was fed by driblets from day to day, and lived from hand to mouth while the siege of Tournai proceeded to the east of him.
That siege was entering, with the close of the month, upon the end of its first phase.
It had been a desperate combat of mine and counter-mine even where the general circumvallation of the town was concerned, though the worst, of course, was to come when the citadel should be attacked. The batteries against the place had been increased until they counted one hundred and twelve heavy pieces and seventy mortars. On the night of the 24th of July the covered way on the right of the Scheldt was taken at heavy loss; forty-eight hours later the covered way on the left between the river and the citadel. The horn work in front of the Gate of the Seven Springs was carried on the 27th, and the isolated work between this point and the Gate of Lille upon the following day. Surville in his report, in the true French spirit of self-criticism, ascribed to the culpable failure of their defenders the loss of these outworks. But the loss, whatever its cause, determined the loss of the town. A few hours later practicable breaches had been made in the walls, ways were filled in over the ditches, and on the imminence of a general assault Surville upon the 28th demanded terms. The capitulation was signed on the 29th, and with it the commander sent a letter to Versailles detailing his motives for demanding terms for the civilian population. Finally, upon the 30th, Surville with 4000 men, all that was left of his original force of 7000, retired into the citadel and there disposed himself for as a long a resistance as might be. As his good fortune decided, he was to be able to hold with this small force for five full weeks.
To Marlborough is due the honour of the capitulation. The besieging troops were under his command, while Eugene directed the army of observation to the west. Marlborough put some eight thousand men into the town under Albemarle. A verbal understanding was given on both sides that the citadel would not fire upon the civilian part, nor the allies make an attack from it upon the citadel, and the siege of that stronghold began upon the following day, the 21st, towards evening. The operations against the citadel proved far more severe and a far greater trial to Marlborough’s troops than those against the general circumvallation of the town. The subterranean struggle of mine and counter-mine particularly affected the moral of the allies, and after a week a proposal appeared that the active fighting should cease, the siege be converted into a blockade, and only the small number of men sufficient for such a blockade be left before the citadel until the 5th of September, up to which date, a month ahead, at the utmost, it was believed the garrison could hold out. Louis was willing to accept the terms upon the condition that this month should be one of general truce. The allies refused this condition, and hostilities were resumed.
The force employed for containing the citadel and for prosecuting its siege had no necessity to be very large.
It was warfare of a terrible kind. Men met underground in the mines, were burned alive when these were sprung, were exhausted, sometimes to death, in the subterranean and perilous labour. The mass of the army was free to menace Villars and his main body.
But the admirable engineering which had instructed and completed the lines of La Bassée still checked the allies, in spite of superior numbers and provisionment still superior.
The effect of the harvest was indeed just beginning to be felt, and the French general was beginning to have a little more elbow-room, so to speak, for the disposition of his men through the gradual replenishment of his stores. But even so, Marlborough and Eugene had very greatly the advantage of him in this respect.
When the siege of the citadel of Tournai had been proceeding a little more than a week, upon the 8th of August the main body of the allies fell suddenly upon Marchiennes. Here the river Scarpe defended the main French positions. The town itself lay upon the further bank like a bastion. The attack was made under Tilly, and, consonantly to the strength of all Villars’ defensive positions, that attack failed. On the night of the 9th Tilly retired from before Marchiennes, after having suffered the loss of but a few of his men.
This action, though but a detail in the campaign, is well worth noting, because it exhibits in a sort of section, as it were, the causes of Malplaquet.
Malplaquet, as we shall see in a moment, was fought simply because it had been impossible to pierce Villars’ line, and Malplaquet, though a victory, was a sterile victory, more useful to the defeated than to the victors, because the defence had been kept up for such a length of time and was able to choose its own terrain.
Now all this character in the campaign preceding the battle is exemplified in the attempt upon Marchiennes upon August 8th and 9th and its failure. Had it succeeded, had the line been pierced, there would have been no “block” at Malplaquet but an immediate invasion of France, just as there would have been had the line been pierced in the first attempt of five weeks before.
In the next week and the next, Villars continually extended that line. He brought it up solidly as far as St Venant on his left, as far as Valenciennes on his right. He continually strengthened it, so that at no one place should it need any considerable body of men to hold it, and that the mass of the army should be free to move at will behind this strong entrenchment and dyke, fortified as it was with careful inundation and the use of two large rivers.
Though the body of the allies again appeared in the neighbourhood of the lines, no general attack was delivered, but on the 30th of August Villars heard from deserters and spies that the citadel of Tournai was at the end of its provisions. Though but a certain minority of the allied army was necessary to contain that citadel, yet once it had fallen the whole of the allied forces would be much freer to act.
It was upon the 31st of August that Surville, finding himself at the end of his provisionment of food, proposed capitulation. At first no capitulation could be arrived at. Marlborough insisted upon the garrison’s complete surrender; Surville replied by threatening a destruction of the place. It was not until the morning of the 3rd September that a capitulation was signed in the form that the officers and soldiers of the garrison should not be free to serve the king until after they had been exchanged. The troops should march out with arms and colours, and should have safe escort through the French lines to Douai. They reached that town and camp upon the 4th, and an exchange of prisoners against their numbers was soon effected.
Thus after two months ended the siege of Tournai, a piece of resistance which, as the reader will soon see, determined all that was to follow. Six thousand four hundred men had held the place when it was first invested. Of these, 1709 (nearly a third) had been killed; a number approximately equal had been wounded. The figures are sufficient to show the desperate character of the fighting, and how worthy this episode of war was on both sides of the legends that arose from it.
III. THE MANŒUVRING FOR POSITION
WITH THE END of the siege of Tournai both armies were free, the one for unfettered assault, the other to defend itself behind the lines as best it might.
To make a frontal attack upon Villars’ lines at any point was justly thought impossible after the past experience which Eugene and Marlborough had of their strength. A different plan was determined on. Mons, with its little garrison, should be invested, and the mass of the army should, on that extreme right of the French position, attempt to break through the old lines of the Trouille and invade France.
Coincidently with the first negotiations for the capitulation of the citadel of Tournai, this new plan was entered upon. Lord Orkney, with the grenadiers of the army and between 2000 and 3000 mounted men, was sent off on the march to the south-east just as the first negotiations of Marlborough with Surville were opened. With this mobile force Orkney attempted to pass the Haine at St Ghislain. He all but surprised that point at one o’clock of the dark September night, but the French posts were just in time. He was beaten off, and had to cross the river higher up upon the eastern side of Mons, at Havre.
The little check was not without its importance. It meant that the rapid forward march of his vanguard had failed to force that extreme extension of the French line, which was called “The Line of the Trouille” from the name of the small river that falls into the Haine near Mons. In point of time — which is everything in defensive warfare — the success of the defence at St Ghislain meant that all action by the allies was retarded for pretty well a week. Meanwhile, the weather had turned to persistent and harassing rain, the allied army, “toiling through a sea of mud,” had not invested Mons even upon the eastern side until the evening of the 7th of September. On the same day Villars took advantage of a natural feature, stronger for purposes of defence than the line of the Trouille. This feature was the belt of forest-land which lies south and a little west of Mons, between that town and Bavai. He strengthened such forces as he had on the line of the Trouille (the little posts which had checked the first advance upon Mons, as I have said), concentrated the whole army just behind and west of the forest barrier, and watching the two gaps of that barrier, whose importance will be explained in a moment, he lay, upon the morning of Sunday, September the 8th, in a line which stretched from the river Haine at Montreuil to the bridge of Athis behind the woods; keeping watch upon his right in case he should have to move the line down south suddenly to meet an attack. As Villars so lay, he was in the position of a man who may be attacked through one of two doors in a wall. Such a man would stand between the two doors, watching both, and ready to spring upon that one which might be attacked, and attempt to defend it. The wall was the wall of wood, the two doors were the opening by Boussu and the other narrow opening which is distinguished by the name of Aulnois, the principal village at its mouth. It was this last which was to prove in the event the battlefield.
All this I must make plainer and elaborate in what follows, and close this section by a mere statement of the manœuvring for position.
Sketch Map showing the Lines of Woods behind Mons,
with the two gaps of Boussu and Aulnois.
Villars lying, as I have said, with his right at Athis, his left on the river Haine at Montreuil, Marlborough countered him by bringing the main of his forces over the Trouille so that they lay from Quevy to Quaregnon.
Eugene brought up his half, and drew it up as an extension of the Duke of Marlborough’s line, and by the evening of the Sunday and on the morning of the Monday, all the troops who were at Tournai having been meanwhile called up, the allied army lay opposite the second or southern of the two openings in the forest wall. Villars during the Sunday shifted somewhat to the left or the south in the course of the day to face the new position of his enemy. It was evident upon that Monday morning the 9th of September that the action, when it was forced, would be in the second and southernmost of the two gaps. On that same Monday morning Villars brought the whole of his army still further south and was now right in front of the allies and barring the gap of Aulnois. By ten o’clock the centre of the French forces was drawn up in front of the hamlet of Malplaquet, by noon it had marched forward not quite a mile, stretched from wood to wood, and awaited the onslaught. A few ineffective cannon-shots were exchanged, but the expected attack was not delivered. Vastly to the advantage of the French and to the inexplicable prejudice of the allies Marlborough and Eugene wasted all that Monday and all the Tuesday following: the result we shall see when we come to the battle, for Villars used every moment of his respite to entrench and fortify without ceasing.
With the drawing up of the French army across the gap, however, ends the manœuvring for position, and under the title of “The Preliminaries of the Battle” I will next describe the arrival of Boufflers — a moral advantage not to be despised — the terrain, the French defences, and the full effect of the unexpected delay upon the part of the allies.
IV. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
THE ARRIVAL OF Louis Francis, Duke of Boufflers, peer and marshal of France, upon the frontier and before the army of defence, was one of those intangible advantages which the civilian historian will tend to exaggerate and the military to belittle, but which, though not susceptible of calculation or measurement, may always prove of vast consequence to a force, and have sometimes decided between victory and defeat. This advantage did not lie in Boufflers’ singular capacity for command, nor, as will presently be seen, was he entrusted with the supreme direction of the action that was to follow. He was a great general. His service under arms had occupied the whole of his life and energies; he was to have a high and worthy reputation in the particular province of his career. But much more than this, the magic of his name and the just prestige which attached to the integrity and valour of the man went before him with a spiritual influence which every soldier felt, and which reanimated the whole body of the defence. His record was peculiarly suited for the confirmation of men who were fighting against odds, under disappointment, at the end of a long series of defeats, and on a last line to which the national arms had been thrust back after five years of almost uninterrupted failure.
Boufflers at this moment was in his 66th year, and seemed older. His masterful, prominent face, large, direct, humorous in expression, full of command, was an index of a life well lived in the business of organisation, of obedience, and at last of supreme direction. Years ago at Namur his tenacity, under the pressure of a superior offensive, had earned him the particular character which he now bore. Only the year before, his conduct of the siege of Lille, when he had determinedly held out against the certitude of ultimate surrender, had refused to yield the place even after receiving orders from his sovereign, and had finally obtained, by his unshakable determination, a capitulation of the most honourable kind, was fresh in the minds of all. There is a story that on his arrival in the French camp the cheers with which he was greeted reached the opposing line, and that the allies were moved by the enormous rumour to expect an instant assault. He was one of those leaders who, partly through their legend, more through their real virtue, are a sort of flag and symbol to the soldiery who have the good fortune to receive their command.
Nine years the senior in age of Villars, of a military experience far superior, in rank again possessed of the right to supreme command (for he had received the grade of marshal long before), he none the less determined to put himself wholly at Villars’ orders, for he knew of what importance was continuity of direction in the face of the enemy. At the end of the last campaign, when he had expected peace, he had honourably retired. His life was nearing its close; in two years he was to die. He sacrificed both the pretension and the fact of superiority so dear to the commander, and told Villars that he came simply as a volunteer to aid as best he might, and to support the supreme command in the coming fight.
He had arrived at Arras on the same day that Tournai had surrendered. Upon the morrow he had reached Villars’ headquarters near Douai, Sin le Noble, in the centre of the defensive line. He had followed the easterly movement of the mass of the French army along that line to their present establishment between the two woods and to the terrain whereupon the action would be decided. In that action he was set at the head of the troops on the right, while Villars, attending in particular to the left, retained the general command and ordered all the disposition of the French force.
The landscape which lay before the French commanders when upon the Monday morning their line was drawn up and immediate battle expected, has changed hardly at all in the two hundred years between their day and ours. I will describe it.
From the valley of the Sambre (which great river lies a day’s march to the south of the French position) the land rises gradually upward in long rolls of bare fields. At the head of this slope is a typical watershed country, a country that is typical of watersheds in land neither hilly nor mountainous; small, sluggish streams, lessening to mere trickles of water as you rise, cut the clay; and the landscape, though at the watershed itself one is standing at a height of 500 feet above the sea, has the appearance of a plain. It is indeed difficult, without the aid of a map, to decide when one has passed from the one to the other side of the water parting, and the actual summit is, at this season of the year, a confused, flat stretch of open stubble fallow, and here and there coarse, heathy, untilled land. For two or three miles every way this level stretches, hummocked by slight rolls between stream and stream, and upon the actual watershed marked by one or two stagnant ponds. Seven miles behind you as you stand upon the battlefield lies the little French market town of Bavai, which was for centuries one of the great centres of Roman rule. It was the capital of the Nervii. Seven great Roman roads still strike out from it, to Rheims, to Cologne, to Utrecht, to Amiens, to the sea. Two in particular, that to Treves and that to Cologne, spreading gradually apart like the two neighbouring fingers of a hand, are the natural ways by which an army advancing to such a field or retreating from it would communicate with Bavai as a base.
The outstanding feature of this terrain is not that it is the summit of a watershed; indeed, as I have said, but for a map one would not guess that it bore this character, and to the eye it presents the appearance of a plain; it is rather the symmetrical arrangement of it as a broad belt of open land, flanked upon either side north and south by two great woods. That upon the right is known as the wood of Lanière, that upon the left bears several names in its various parts, and is easiest to remember under the general title of “The Forest of Sars.” The gap between these two woods narrows to a line which is precisely 2000 yards in extent and runs from north-west to south-east, the two nearest points where either wood approaches the other being distant one from another by that distance and bearing one to the other upon those points of the compass. The French army, therefore, drawn up on the open land and stretching from wood to wood, faced somewhat north of east. The allies, drawn up a mile and a half away on the broad beginning of that gap, looked somewhat south of west. Behind the latter at a day’s march was Mons; behind the former some seven miles was Bavai; and the modern frontier as well as the natural topographical frontier of the watershed runs just in front of what was then the emplacement of the French line.
Upon the French side the bare fields are marked by no more than a few hamlets, the chief of which is the little village of Malplaquet, a few houses built along what is now the main road to Brussels. Certain of the French reserve were posted in this village, accompanied by a few sections of artillery, but the fields before it lay completely open to the action.
Upon the Belgian side a string of considerable villages stretched; three of them from right to left marked the principal position of the allies. Their names from north to south, that is, from the left of the allies to the right, are Aulnois, Blaregnies, and Sars. The first of these lies right under the wood of Lanière; the second faces the gap between the woods; the third lies behind the left-hand wood, and takes its name from it, and is, as we have seen, called the forest of Sars.
The dispositions which the French army would take in such a defensive position were evident enough. It must defend the gap by entrenchment; it must put considerable forces into the woods upon the right and to the left of the gap to prevent the entrenchments being turned. The character of Villars and the French tradition of depending upon earth wherever that be possible, was bound, if time were accorded, to make the entrenchment of the open gap formidable. The large numbers engaged upon either side left a considerable number at the disposal of either commander, to be used by the one in holding the woods, by the other in attempting to force them; not much more than half of the French force need stand to the defence of the open gap. This gap was so suitable, with its bare fields after harvest, the absence of hedges, the insignificance of the rivulets, for the action of cavalry, that gates or gaps would be left in the French entrenchment for the use of that arm in order to allow the mounted men to pass through and charge as the necessity for such action might arise. In general, therefore, we must conceive of the French position as strong entrenchments thrown across the gap and lined with infantry, the cavalry drawn up behind to pass through the infantry when occasion might demand, through the line of entrenchment, and so to charge; the two woods upon either side thickly filled with men, and the position taken up by these defended by felled tree trunks and such earthwork as could be thrown up with difficulty in the dense undergrowth.
It would be the business of the allies to try and force this line, either by carrying the central entrenchments across the gap or by turning the French left flank in the forest of Sars or the French right flank in the wood of Lanière, or by both of these attempts combined; for it must be remembered that the numerical superiority of the allies gave them a choice of action. Should either the stand on the left or that on the right be forced, the French line would be turned and the destruction of the army completed. Should the centre be pierced effectively and in time, the Northern half of the army so severed would certainly be destroyed, for there was no effective line of retreat; the Southern half might or might not escape towards the valley of the Sambre. In either case a decisive victory would destroy the last of the French bodies of defence and would open the way for an almost uninterrupted march upon Paris.
It will be self-evident to the reader that what with Villars’ known methods, his dependence upon his engineers, the tradition of the French service in this respect, the inferior numbers of the French forces, and the glaring necessities of the position, earthworks would be a deciding factor in the result.
Now the value of entrenchment is a matter of time, and before proceeding to a description of the action we must, if we are to understand its result, appreciate how great an advantage was conferred upon the French by the delay in the attack of the allies.
As I have said, it was upon the morning of Monday, September 9th, that the two armies were drawn up facing each other, and there is no apparent reason why the assault should not have been delivered upon that day. Had it been delivered we can hardly doubt that a decisive defeat of the French would have resulted, that the way to Paris would have been thrown open, and that the ruin of the French monarchy would have immediately followed. As it was, no attack was delivered upon that Monday. The whole of Tuesday was allowed to pass without a movement. It was not until the Wednesday morning that the allies moved.
The problem of this delay is one which the historian must anxiously consider, for the answer to it explains the barrenness and political failure associated with the name of Malplaquet. But it is one which the historian will not succeed in answering unless indeed further documents should come to light. All that we now know is that in a council of war held upon the Monday on the side of the allies, it was thought well to wait until all the troops from Tournai should have come up (though these were few in number), and necessary to send 9000 men to hold the bridge across the Haine at St Ghislain in order to secure retreat in case of disaster.
The English historians blame the Dutch, the Dutch the English, and the Austrians and Prussians blame both.
Perhaps there would have been an attack upon the Tuesday at least had not Villars spent all the Monday and all the Monday night in exacting from his men the most unexpected labours in constructing entrenchments of the most formidable character. Marlborough and Eugene, riding out before their lines to judge their chances on the Tuesday, were astonished at the work that had been done in those twenty-four hours. Nine redans, that is, openworks of peculiar strength, stretched across the gap to within about 600 yards of the wood of Lanière, and the remainder of the space was one continuous line of entrenchment. What had been done in the woods could not be judged from such a survey, but it might be guessed, and the forcing of these became a very different problem from what it would have been had an attack been delivered on the Monday. Behind this main line Villars drew up another and yet another series of earthworks; even Malplaquet itself, with the reserve in the rear, was defended, and the work was continued without interruption even throughout the Tuesday night with relays of men.
When at last, upon the Wednesday morning, the allies had arrived at their tardy agreement and determined to force an action, their superiority in numbers, such as it was (and this disputed point must be later discussed), was quite negatived by having to meet fortifications so formidable as to be called, in the exaggerated phrase of a witness, “a citadel.”
One last point must be mentioned before the action itself is described: the open gap across which the centre of the allies must advance to break the French centre and encapture the entrenchments was cut in two by a large copse or small wood, called “The Wood of Tiry.” It was not defended, lying too far in front of the French line, and was of no great consequence save in this: that when the advance of the allies against the French defence should begin, it was bound to canalise and cut off from support for a moment the extreme left of that advance through the channel marked A upon the map over page. As will be seen, the Dutch advanced too early and in too great strength through this narrow gap, and the check they suffered, which was of such effect upon the battle, would not have been nearly so severe had not the little wood cut them off from the support of the centre.
V. THE ACTION
ON THE MORNING of Wednesday, the 11th of September, the allied army was afoot long before dawn, and was ranged in order of battle earlier than four o’clock. But a dense mist covered the ground, and nothing was done until at about half-past seven this lifted and enabled the artillery of the opposing forces to estimate the range and to open fire. In order to understand what was to follow, the reader may, so to speak, utilise this empty period of the early morning before the action joined, to grasp the respective positions of the two hosts.
The Elements of the Action of Malplaquet, September 11th, 1709.
The nature of the terrain has already been described. The plan upon the part of the allies would naturally consist in an attempt to force both woods which covered the French flank, and, while the pressure upon these was at its strongest, the entrenched and fortified centre. Of course, if either of the woods was forced before the French centre should break, there would be no need to continue the central attack, for one or other of the French flanks would then be turned. But the woods were so well garnished by this time, and so strongly lined with fallen tree-trunks and such entrenchments as the undergrowth permitted, that it seemed to both Eugene and Marlborough more probable that the centre should be forced than that either of the two flanks should first be turned, and the general plan of the battle depended rather upon the holding and heavy engagement of the forces in the two woods to the north and south than in any hope to clear them out, and the final success was expected rather to take the form of piercing the central line while the flanks were thus held and engaged. The barren issue of the engagement led the commanders of the allies to excuse themselves, of course, and the peculiar ill-success of their left against the French right, which we shall detail in a moment, gave rise to the thesis that only a “feint” was intended in that quarter. The thesis may readily be dismissed. The left was intended to do serious work quite as much as the right. The theory that it was intended to “feint” was only produced after the action, and in order to explain its incomplete results.
Upon the French side the plan was purely defensive, as their inferior numbers and their reliance upon earthworks both necessitated and proved. It was Villars’ plan to hold every part of his line with a force proportionate to its strength; to furnish the woods a little more heavily than the entrenchments of the open gap, but everywhere to rely upon the steadiness of his infantry and their artificial protections in the repelling of the assault. His cavalry he drew up behind this long line of infantry defence, prepared, as has already been said, to charge through gaps whenever such action on their part might seem effective.
It will be perceived that the plan upon either side was of a very simple sort, and one easily grasped. On the side of the allies it was little more than a “hammer-and-tongs” assault upon a difficult and well-guarded position; on the side of the French, little more than a defence of the same.
Next must be described the nature of the troops engaged in the various parts of the field.
Upon the side of the allies we have: —
On their left — that is, to the south of their lines and over against the wood of Lanière — one-third of the army under the Prince of Orange. The bulk of this body consisted in Dutch troops, of whom thirty-one battalions of infantry were present, and behind the infantry thus drawn up under the Dutch commander were his cavalry, instructed to keep out of range during the attack of the infantry upon the wood, and to charge and complete it when it should be successful. Embodied among these troops the British reader should note a corps of Highlanders, known as the Scottish Brigade. These did not form part of the British army, but were specially enrolled in the Dutch service. The cavalry of this left wing was under the command of the Prince of Hesse-Cassel, who was mentioned a few pages back in the advance upon Mons. It numbered somewhat over 10,000 sabres.
The other end of the allied position consisted in two great forces of infantry acting separately, and in the following fashion: —
First, a force under Schulemberg, which attacked the salient angle of the forest of Sars on its northern face, and another body attacking the other side of the same angle, to wit, its eastern face. In the first of these great masses, that under Schulemberg, there were no English troops. In strength it amounted alone to nearly 20,000 men. The second part, which was to attack the eastern face, was commanded by Lottum, and was only about half as strong, contained a certain small proportion of English.
It may be asked when once these two great bodies of the left and the right (each of which was to concern itself with one of the two woods in front of the gap) are disposed of, what remained to furnish the centre of the allies? To this the curious answer must be afforded that in the arrangements of the allies at Malplaquet no true centre existed. The battle must be regarded from their side as a battle fought by two isolated wings, left and right, and ending in a central attack composed of men drawn from either wing. If upon the following sketch map the section from A to B be regarded as the special province of the Dutch or left wing, and the section from C to D be regarded as the special province of the Austro-Prussian or right wing, then the mid-section between B and C has no large body of troops corresponding to it. When the time came for acting in that mid-section, the troops necessary for the work were drawn from either end of the line. There were, however, two elements in connection with this mid-section which must be considered.
First, a great battery of forty guns ready to support an attack upon the entrenchments of the gap, whenever that time should come; and secondly, far in the rear, about 6000 British troops under Lord Orkney were spread out and linked the massed right of the army to its massed left. One further corps must be mentioned. Quite separate from the rest of the army, and right away on the left on the French side of the forest of Sars, was the small isolated corps under Withers, which was to hold and embarrass the French rear near the group of farmsteads called La Folie, and when the forest of Sars was forced was to join hands with the successful assault of the Prussians and Austrians who should have forced it.
The general command of the left, including Lord Orkney’s battalions, also including (though tactically they formed part of the right wing) the force under Lottum, lay with the Duke of Marlborough. The command of the right — that is, Schulemberg and the cavalry behind him — lay with Prince Eugene.
The French line of defence is, from its simplicity, quite easy to describe. In the wood of Lanière, and in the open space just outside it, as far as the fields in front of Malplaquet village, were the troops under command of the French general D’Artagnan. Among the regiments holding this part was that of the Bourbonnais, the famous brigade of Navarre (the best in the service), and certain of the Swiss mercenaries. The last of this body on the left was formed by the French Guards. The entrenchments in the centre were held by the Irish Brigades of Lee and O’Brien, and by the German mercenaries and allies of Bavaria and Cologne. These guarded the redans which defended the left or northern part of the open gap. The remainder of this gap, right up to the forest of Sars, was held by Alsatians and by the Brigade of Laon, and the chief command in this part lay with Steckenberg. The forest of Sars was full of French troops, Picardy, the Marines, the Regiment of Champagne, and many others, with a strong reserve of similar troops just behind the wood. The cavalry of the army formed a long line behind this body of entrenched infantry; the Household Cavalry being on the right near the wood of Lanière, the Gens d’armes being in the centre, and the Carabiniers upon the left. These last stretched so far northward and westward as to come at last opposite to Withers.
Such was the disposition of the two armies when at half-past seven the sun pierced the mist and the first cannon-shots were exchanged. Marlborough and Eugene had decided that they would begin by pressing, as hard as might be, the assault upon the forest of Sars. When this assault should have proceeded for half an hour, the opposite end of the line, the left, under the Prince of Orange, should engage the French troops holding the wood of Lanière. It was expected that the forest of Sars would be forced early in the action; that the troops in the wood of Lanière would at least be held fast by the attack of the Prince of Orange, and that the weakened French centre could then be taken by assault with the use of the reserves, of Orkney’s men, and of detachments drawn from the two great masses upon the wings.
The reader may here pause to consider the excellence of this plan — very probably Marlborough’s own, and one the comparative ill-success of which was due to the unexpected power of resistance displayed by the French infantry upon that day.
It was wise to put the greater part of the force into a double attack upon the forest of Sars, for this forest, with its thick woods and heavy entrenchments, was at once the strongest part of the French position in its garnishing and artificial enforcement, yet weak in that the salient angle it presented was one that could not, from the thickness of the trees, be watched from any central point, as can the salient angle of a fortification. Lottum on the one side, Schulemberg on the other, were attacking forces numerically weaker than their own, and separate fronts which could not support each other under the pressure of the attack.
It was wise to engage the forces upon the French side opposite the allied left in the wood of Lanière half an hour after the assault had begun upon the forest of Sars, for it was legitimate to expect that at the end of that half hour the pressure upon the forest of Sars would begin to be felt by the French, and that they would call for troops from the right unless the right were very busily occupied at that moment.
Finally, it was wise not to burden the centre with any great body of troops until one of the two flanks should be pressed or broken, for the centre might, in this case, be compared to a funnel in which too great a body of troops would be caught at a disadvantage against the strong entrenchments which closed the mouth of the funnel. An historical discussion has arisen upon the true rôle of the left in this plan. The commander of the allies gave it out after the action (as we have seen above) that the left had only been intended to “feint.” The better conclusion is that they were intended to do their worst against the wood of Lanière, although of course this “worst” could not be expected to compare with the fundamental attack upon the forest of Sars, where all the chief forces of the battle were concentrated.
If by a “feint” is meant a subsidiary part of the general plan, the expression might be allowed to pass, but it is not a legitimate use of that expression, and if, as occurred at Malplaquet with the Dutch troops, a subsidiary body in the general plan is badly commanded, the temptation to call the original movement a “feint,” which developed from breach of orders into a true attack, though strong for the disappointed commanders, must not be admitted by the accurate historian. In general, we may be certain that the Dutch troops and their neighbours on the allied left were intended to do all they could against the wood of Lanière, did all they could, but suffered in the process a great deal more than Marlborough had allowed for.
These dispositions once grasped, we may proceed to the nature and development of the general attack which followed that opening cannonade of half-past seven, which has already been described.
The first movement of the allies was an advance of the left under the Prince of Orange and of the right under Lottum. The first was halted out of range; the second, after getting up as far as the eastern flank of the forest of Sars, wheeled round so as to face the hedge lining that forest, and formed into three lines. It was nine o’clock before the signal for the attack was given by a general discharge of the great battery in the centre opposite the French entrenchments in the gap. Coincidently with that signal Schulemberg attacked the forest of Sars from his side, the northern face, and he and Lottum pressed each upon that side of the salient angle which faced him. Schulemberg’s large force got into the fringe of the wood, but no further. The resistance was furious; the thickness of the trees aided it. Eugene was present upon this side; meanwhile Marlborough himself was leading the troops of Lottum. He advanced with them against a hot fire, passed the swampy rivulet which here flanks the wood, and reached the entrenchments which had been drawn up just within the outer boundary of it.
This attack failed. Villars was present in person with the French troops and directed the repulse. Almost at the same time the advance of Schulemberg upon the other side of the wood, which Eugene was superintending, suffered a check. Its reserves were called up. The intervals of the first line were filled up from the second. One French brigade lining the wood was beaten back, but the Picardy Regiment and the Marines stood out against a mixed force of Danes, Saxons, and Hessians opposing them. Schulemberg, therefore, in this second attack had failed again, but Marlborough, leading Lottum’s men upon the other side of the wood to a second charge in his turn, had somewhat greater success. He had by this time been joined by a British brigade under the Duke of Argyle from the second line, and he did so far succeed with this extension of his men as to get round the edge of the French entrenchments in the wood.
The French began to be pressed from this eastern side of their salient angle, right in among the trees. Schulemberg’s command felt the advantage of the pressure being exercised on the other side. The French weakened before it, and in the neighbourhood of eleven o’clock a great part of the forest of Sars was already filled with the allies, who were beating back the French in individual combats from tree to tree. Close on noon the battle upon this side stood much as the sketch map upon the opposite page shows, and was as good as won, for it seemed to need only a continuation of this victorious effort to clear the whole wood at last and to turn the French line.
This is undoubtedly the form which the battle would have taken — a complete victory for the allied forces by their right turning the French left — and the destruction of the French army would have followed, had not the allied left been getting into grave difficulty at the other end of the field of battle.
Sketch Map showing the peril the French centre ran towards
noon of being turned on its left.
The plan of the allied generals, it will be remembered, was that the left of their army under the Prince of Orange should attack the wood of Lanière about half an hour after the right had begun to effect an entrance into the opposing forest of Sars. When that half hour had elapsed, that is, about half-past nine, the Prince of Orange, without receiving special orders, it is true, but acting rightly enough upon his general orders, advanced against the French right. Tullibardine with his Scottish brigade took the worst of the fighting on the extreme left against the extreme of the French right, and was the first to get engaged among the trees. The great mass of the force advanced up the opening between the coppice called the wood of Tiry and the main wood, with the object of carrying the entrenchments which ran from the corner of the wood in front of Malplaquet and covered this edge of the open gap. The nine foremost battalions were led by the Prince of Orange in person; his courage and their tenacity, though fatal to the issue of the fight, form perhaps the finest part of our story. As they came near the French earthworks, a French battery right upon their flank at the edge of the wood opened upon them, enfilading whole ranks and doing, in the shortest time, terrible execution. The young leader managed to reach the earthworks. The breastwork was forced, but Boufflers brought up men from his left, that is, from the centre of the gap, drove the Dutch back, and checked, at the height of its success, this determined assault. Had not the wood of Tiry been there to separate the main part of the Prince of Orange’s command from its right, reinforcements might have reached him and have saved the disaster. As it was, the wood of Tiry had cut the advance into two streams, and neither could help the other. The Dutch troops and the Highlanders rallied; the Prince of Orange charged again with a personal bravery that made him conspicuous before the whole field, and should make him famous in history, but the task was more than men could accomplish. The best brigade at the disposal of the French, that of Navarre, was brought up to meet this second onslaught, broke it, and the French leapt from the earthworks to pursue the flight of their assailants. Many of Orange’s colours were taken in that rout, and the guns of his advanced battery fell into French hands. Beyond the wood of Tiry the extreme right of the Dutch charge had suffered no better fate. It had carried the central entrenchment of the French, only to be beaten back as the main body between the wood of Tiry and the wood of Lanière opened.
At this moment, then, after eleven o’clock, which was coincident with the success of Lottum and Schulemberg in the forest of Sars, upon the right, the allied left had been hopelessly beaten back from the entrenchments in the gap, and from the edge of the wood of Lanière.
Marlborough was hurriedly summoned away from his personal command of Lottum’s victorious troops, and begged to do what he could for the broken regiments of Orange. He galloped back over the battlefield, a mile or so of open fields, and was appalled to see the havoc. Of the great force that had advanced an hour and a half before against Boufflers and the French right, fully a third was struck, and 2000 or more lay dead upon the stubble and the coarse heath of that upland. The scattered corpses strewn over half a mile of flight from the French entrenchments, almost back to their original position, largely showed the severity of the blow. It was impossible to attempt another attack upon the French right with any hope of success.
Marlborough, trusting that the forest of Sars would soon be finally cleared, determined upon a change of plan. He ordered the advance upon the centre of the position of Lord Orkney’s fifteen battalions, reinforced that advance by drafts of men from the shattered Dutch left, and prepared with some deliberation to charge the line of earthworks which ran across the open and the nine redans which we have seen were held by the French allies and mercenaries from Bavaria and Cologne, and await his moment. That moment came at about one o’clock; at this point in the action the opposing forces stood somewhat as they are sketched on the map over page.
The pressure upon the French in the wood of Sars, perpetually increasing, had already caused Villars, who commanded there in person, to beg Boufflers for aid; but the demand came when Boufflers was fighting his hardest against the last Dutch attack, and no aid could be sent.
Somewhat reluctantly, Villars had weakened his centre by withdrawing from it the two Irish regiments, and continued to dispute foot by foot the forest of Sars. But foot by foot and tree by tree, in a series of individual engagements, his men were pressed back, and a larger area of the woodland was held by the troops of Schulemberg and Lottum. Eugene was wounded, but refused to leave the field. The loss had been appalling upon either side, but especially severe (as might have been expected) among the assailants, when, just before one o’clock, the last of the French soldiers were driven from the wood.
Sketch Map showing Marlborough bringing up troops to the centre for the
final and successful attack upon the entrenchments about one o’clock.
All that main defence which the forest of Sars formed upon the French left flank was lost, but the fight had been so exhausting to the assailants in the confusion of the underwood, and the difficulty of forming them in the trees was so great, that the French forces once outside the wood could rally at leisure and draw up in line to receive any further movement on the part of their opponents. It was while the French left were thus drawn up in line behind the wood of Sars, with their redans at the centre weakened by the withdrawal of the Irish brigade, that Marlborough ordered the final central attack against those redans. The honour of carrying them fell to Lord Orkney and his British battalions. His men flooded over the earthworks at the first rush, breaking the depleted infantry behind them (for these, after the withdrawal of the Irish, were no more than the men of Bavaria and Cologne), and held the parapet.
The French earthworks thus carried by the infantry in the centre, the modern reader might well premise that a complete rout of the French forces should have followed. But he would make this premise without counting for the preponderant rôle that cavalry played in the wars of Marlborough.
Facing the victorious English battalions of Orkney, now in possession of the redans, stood the mile-long unbroken squadrons of the French horse.
The allied cavalry, passing between gaps in its infantry line, began to deploy for the charge, but even as they deployed they were charged by the French mounted men, thrust back, and thrown into confusion. The short remainder of the battle is no more than a mêlée of sabres, but the nature of that mêlée must be clearly grasped, and the character of the French cavalry resistance understood, for this it was which determined the issue of the combat and saved the army of Louis XIV.
A detailed account of the charges and counter-charges of the opposing horse would be confusing to the reader, and is, as a fact, impossible of narration, for no contemporary record of it remains in any form which can be lucidly set forth.
A rough outline of what happened is this: —
The first counter-charge of the French was successful, and the allied cavalry, caught in the act of deployment, was thrust back in confusion, as I have said, upon the British infantry who lined the captured earthworks.
The great central battery of forty guns which Marlborough had kept all day in the centre of the gap, split to the right and left, and, once clear of its own troops, fired from either side upon the French horse. Shaken, confused, and almost broken by this fire, the French horse were charged by a new body of the allied horse led by Marlborough in person, composed of British and Prussian units. But, just as Marlborough’s charge was succeeding, old Boufflers, bringing up the French Household Cavalry from in front of Malplaquet village, charged right home into the flank of Marlborough’s mounted troops, bore back their first and second lines, and destroyed the order of their third.
Thereupon Eugene, with yet another body of fresh horse (of the Imperial Service), charged in his turn, and the battle of Malplaquet ends in a furious mix-up of mounted men, which gradually separated into two undefeated lines, each retiring from the contest.
It will be wondered why a conclusion so curiously impotent was permitted to close the fighting of so famous a field.
The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action. Any attempt of the French to advance in force after two o’clock would have led to their certain disaster, for the allies were now in possession of their long line of earthworks.
On the other hand, the allies could not advance, because the men upon whom they could still count for action were reduced to insufficient numbers. Something like one-third of their vast host had fallen in this most murderous of battles; from an eighth to a sixth were dead. Of the remainder, the great proportion suffered at this hour from an exhaustion that forbade all effective effort.
The horse upon either side might indeed have continued charge and counter-charge to no purpose and with no final effect, but the action of the cavalry in the repeated and abortive shocks, of which a list has just been detailed, could lead neither commander to hope for any final result. Boufflers ordered a retreat, screened by his yet unbroken lines of horse. The infantry were withdrawn from the wood of Lanière, which they still held, and from their positions behind the forest of Sars. They were directed in two columns towards Bavai in their rear, and as that orderly and unhurried retreat was accomplished, the cavalry filed in to follow the line, and the French host, leaving the field in the possession of the victors, marched back westward by the two Roman roads in as regular a formation as though they had been advancing to action rather than retreating from an abandoned position.
It was not quite three o’clock in the afternoon.
There was no pursuit, and there could be none. The allied army slept upon the ground it had gained; rested, evacuated its wounded, and restored its broken ranks through the whole of the morrow, Thursday. It was not until the Friday that it was able to march back again from the field in which it had triumphed at so terrible an expense of numbers, guns, and colours, and with so null a strategic result, and to take up once more the siege of Mons. Upon the 9th of October Mons capitulated, furnishing the sole fruit of this most arduous of all the great series of Marlborough’s campaigns.
No battle has been contested with more valour or tenacity than the battle of Malplaquet. The nature of the woodland fighting contributed to the enormous losses sustained upon either side. The delay during which the French had been permitted to entrench themselves so thoroughly naturally threw the great balance of the loss upon the assailants. In no battle, free, as Malplaquet was free, from all pursuit or a rout, or even the breaking of any considerable body of troops (save the Dutch troops and Highlanders on the left in the earlier part of the battle, and the Bavarians and Cologne men in the redans at the close of it), has the proportion of the killed and wounded been anything like so high. In none, perhaps, were casualties so heavy accompanied by so small a proportion of prisoners.
The action will remain throughout history a standing example of the pitch of excellence to which those highly trained professional armies of the eighteenth century, with their savage discipline, their aristocratic command, their close formations, and their extraordinary reliance upon human daring, could arrive.
FINIS
POITIERS
INTRODUCTION
THE BATTLE OF Poitiers was fought ten years and four weeks after that of Crécy.
The singular similarity between the two actions will be pointed out upon a later page. For the moment it must suffice to point out that Poitiers and Crécy form unique historical parallels, distinguishing like double summits the English successes of Edward III.’s army upon the Continent and of the first part of the Hundred Years’ War.
For the political situation which had produced that conflict, and for the objects which Edward III. had in provoking it, I must refer my reader to the first section of my little book upon Crécy in this series; as also for the armament and organisation of the forces that served the English crown. There remain to be added, however, for the understanding of Poitiers and its campaign, two features which differentiate the fighting of 1356 from that of ten years before. These two features are: first, the character of the commander; and secondly, the nature of the regions from which he started and through which he proceeded, coupled with the political character of the English rule in the South of France. I will take these points in inverse order.
When Calais had fallen and had become an English possession in the summer of 1347 no peace followed. A truce was patched up for some months, followed by further truces. Through the mediation of the Pope a final and definite treaty was sketched, which should terminate the war upon the cession of Aquitaine to Edward III. in full sovereignty. The French Valois king would perhaps have agreed to a settlement which would have preserved his feudal headship, though it would have put the Plantagenets in virtual possession of half France (as France was then defined). But Edward III. would not accept the terms. He had claimed the crown of France. He had won his great victory at Crécy still claiming that crown. He would not be content with adding to his feudal tenures under the French crown. He would add to his sovereignty at least, to his absolute sovereignty, or continue the war. In 1354 (the Black Death intervening) the war was renewed. Edward would have been content, not with the whole of Aquitaine, but with complete sovereignty over the triangle between the Garonne and the Pyrenees in the south, coupled with complete sovereignty over the north-eastern seaboard of France from the Somme to Calais, and inland as far as Arras, and its territory, the Artois. But the French monarchy, though ready to admit feudal encroachments, would not dismember the nominal unity of the kingdom: just as a stickler in our north will grant a 999-year lease, but will not sell.
The result of this breach in the negotiations was that Edward, and his son the Black Prince, entered upon the renewal of the war with a vague claim to Aquitaine as a whole, with an active claim upon Guienne — that is, the territory just north of the Garonne — and a real hold upon Gascony; and still preserving at the back of the whole scheme of operations that half-earnest, half-theatrical plan for an Anglo-French monarchy under the house of Plantagenet which had been formulated twenty-five years before.
It must be clearly grasped by the general reader how natural was both the real and the fantastic side of that pursuit. It involved no question of nationality as we should now understand it. It was based upon still living traditions of feudal connections which were personal and not racial; the chivalry of France and England was a French-speaking society based upon common ideals and fed with common memories. Gascony was in favour of the Plantagenets. Further, Guienne — the district north of Gascony beyond the Garonne — was Edward’s feudal own. He was not king of it, but he was feudal lord of it, and had done homage for it in 1331 to the Valois. It was not a new or distant tie. For the rest of the quarrel my first section in the essay on Crécy already alluded to must suffice, but for the link with Gascony a more particular emphasis is needed. The trade of Bordeaux, its great town, was principally with British ports. Its export of wine was a trade with Britain. It lay far from the centre of the French monarchy. It had counted in its Basque population an element indifferent for hundreds of years to the national unity of Gaul. The moneyed interests of its great commercial centres, of the western ones, at least (which were by far the richest), were closely bound up with England, with English trade. Add to this his actual feudal tenure of Guienne, and we can see how the feeling that all the south-west corner of France was his grew to be a very real feeling in Edward’s mind, and was shared by his son.
When, therefore, upon the 20th September 1355, Edward, the Black Prince, landed at Bordeaux, it was to find a province the nobles of which were honestly attached to his cause and the greater townsmen as well; while in the mass of the people there was no disaffection to the idea of this one out of the vague, many, French-speaking feudal lords whom they knew to be their masters, being the actual governor of the land. There was no conquest, nor any need for it, so far as Gascony was concerned; and in any expedition the Prince might make he was as certain of a regular following from the towns and estates that lay between the mountains and the Garonne as the King of France was certain of his own feudal levies in the north. But expeditions and fighting there would be because the Black Prince came with a commission not only to govern Gascony, but to establish himself in the more doubtful Guienne, and even to be — if he could conquer it — the lieutenant of his father, Edward, in all Aquitaine. He was to recover the districts immediately north of the Garonne, and even (in theory, at least) right up to the neighbourhood of the Loire; and (in theory, again) he was to regard those who might resist his administration of all these “lost” countries of the Central and Southern West of France as “rebels.”
It was thought certain at first, of course, that the whole claim could never be pushed home; but the Black Prince might well hope so to harry the districts which were claimed — and the neighbouring county of Toulouse to the east, which was admittedly feudatory to the King of Paris — as to compel that sovereign to recognise at last his father’s absolute sovereignty over Gascony certainly, and perhaps over Guienne, or even somewhat more than Guienne.
The remainder of that year, 1355, therefore — the autumn and the winter — were spent in striking at the sole portion of Gascony that was disaffected (that of Armagnac), and pushing eastward to ravage Toulouse and Carcassonne; for though these towns were admittedly outside Edward’s land, the wasting of their territory was a depletion of the King of France’s revenue.
The Black Prince did more. In the early part of the next year, 1356, he set up his flag upon Perigueux, some days’ march to the north of his father’s real boundary; and, as the year proceeded, he planned an advance far to the northward of that, which advance was to be taken in co-operation with a descent of the Plantagenet forces upon the other extremity of the French kingdom.
As to the character of the Black Prince, which so largely determined what is to follow, and especially his character in command, nothing is more conspicuous in the history of the Middle Ages. He was, partly from the influence of models, partly from personal force, the mirror of what the fighting, French-speaking nobility of that century took for its ideal conception of a captain. Far the first thing for him was the trade and the profession of arms, and the appetite for combat which this career satisfied certainly in its baser, but still more certainly in its nobler, effects in the mind of a virile youth. He had gone through the great experience of Crécy as a boy of sixteen. He was now, upon the eve of the Campaign of Poitiers, a man in his twenty-sixth year, thoroughly avid not only of honour but of capture, thoroughly contemptuous of gain, generous with a mad magnificence, always in debt, and always utterly careless of it. His courage was of the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger, and particularly in danger accompanied by strong action; he was an intense and a variable lover of women, an unwearied rider, of some (but no conspicuous) ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field, not cruel as yet (but already violent to an excess which later years, alas! refined into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and strung every way for command. He could and did inspire a force, especially a small force, in the fashion which it was his chief desire to achieve. He was a great soldier; but his sins doomed him to an unhappy failure and to the wasting of his life at last.
PART I. THE CAMPAIGN
AS THE FIRST of the great raids, that of Crécy, had been designed to draw off the pressure from Edward III.’s troops in the South of France, and to bring the French levies northward away from them, so the second great raid ten years later, which may be called by courtesy the “Campaign” of Poitiers, was designed to call pressure off the English troops in the north and to bring the French levies down southward away from them. As Edward’s march through Normandy had been a daring ride for booty, so was the Black Prince’s ride northward from Aquitaine; and as Edward from the neighbourhood of Paris turned and retreated at top speed from before the French host, so did the Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood of the Loire and retreat at speed from before the pursuit of the bodies which the King of France had gathered. And as the one great raid ended in the signal victory of Crécy, so did the other end in the signal victory of Poitiers.
But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest: each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Crécy wholly, Poitiers partly, by the excellence of a missile weapon — the long-bow. Each shows also a striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.
Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with the details of Crécy must expect a repetition of much the same sort of incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the mass of contemporary mediæval warfare.
In this opening section I will describe the great ride of Edward the Black Prince from the Dordogne to the Loire, and show by what a march the raid proceeded to its unexpected crisis in the final battle.
I have said that the Black Prince’s object (apart from booty, which was a main business in all these rapid darts of the time) was to draw the pressure from the English troops in the north.
As a fact, the effort was wasted for any such purpose. Lancaster, who commanded in the north, was already in retreat before the Black Prince had started, but that commander in the south could not, under the conditions of the time, learn the fact until he had set off. Further, the Black Prince hoped, by this diversion of a raid up from the south through the centre of France, to make it easier for King Edward, his father, to cross over and prosecute the war in Normandy. As a fact, the King of England never started upon that expedition, but his son thought he was about to do so, and said as much in a letter to the Mayor of London.
The point of departure which the Black Prince chose for this dash to the north was Bergerac upon the Dordogne, and the date upon which he broke camp was Thursday, the 4th August 1356.
His force was an extremely small and a very mobile one; 3500 men-at-arms — that is, fully armoured gentlemen — were the nucleus of it; 2500 archers accompanied them, and it is remarkable that these archers he mounted. Besides these 6000 riding men, he took with him 1000 lightly armed foot-soldiers, and thus, with a little band of no more than 7000 combatants all told, he began the adventure. He had no intention of risking action. It was his desire to take booty, to harry, to compel the French king to come south in his pursuit, and when that enemy should be close upon him, at whatever stage this might be in his own northern progress, to turn and ride back south as rapidly as he had ridden north. Thus he would draw the French feudal levies after him, and render what he had been told was the forthcoming English expedition to Normandy an easy matter, free from opposition. As things turned out, he was able to ride north as far as the Loire before his enemy was upon him, and it gives one an idea of the scale on which this great raid was planned, that from the point on the Dordogne whence he started, to the point on the Loire where he turned southward, was in a straight line no less than a hundred and fifty miles. As a fact, his raid northward came to much more, for he went round to the east in a great bend before he came to the neighbourhood of the French forces, and his total advance covered more than two hundred miles of road.
Of the 7000 who marched with him, perhaps the greater part, and certainly half, were Gascon gentlemen from the south who were in sympathy with the English occupation of Aquitaine, or, having no sentiment one way or the other, joined in the expedition for the sake of wealth and of adventure. Of these were much the most of the men-at-arms. But the archers were for the most part English.
Raid though it was, the Black Prince’s advance was not hurried. He proposed no more than to summon southward the French king by his efforts, and it was a matter of some indifference to him how far northward he might have proceeded before he would be compelled by the neighbourhood of the enemy’s forces to return. His high proportion of mounted men and the lightness of his few foot-soldiers were for local mobility rather than for perpetual speed; nor did the Black Prince intend to make a race of it until the pursuit should begin. Whenever that might be, he felt secure (though in the event his judgment proved to be wrong) in his power to outmarch any body the King of France might bring against him. He must further have thought that his chance of a rapid and successful retreat, and his power to outmarch any possible pursuers, would increase in proportion to the size of the force that might be sent after him.
The raid into the north began and was continued in a fashion not exactly leisurely, but methodically slow. It made at first through Périgueux to Brantôme. Thence up through the country of the watershed to Bellac. It turned off north-westward as far as Lussac, and thence broke back, but a little north of east, to Argenton.
It will be evident from the trace of such a route that it had no definite strategic purpose. It was a mere raid: a harrying of the land with the object of relieving the pressure upon the north. It vaguely held, perhaps, a further object of impressing the towns of Aquitaine with the presence of a Plantagenet force. But this last feature we must not exaggerate. The Black Prince did not treat the towns he visited as territory ultimately to be governed by himself or his father. He treated them as objects for plunder.
The pace and method with which all this early part of the business was conducted in the first three weeks of August may be judged by the fact that, measured along the roads the Black Prince followed, he covered between Bergerac and Argenton just on a hundred and eighty miles, and he did it in just under eighteen marching days. In other words, he kept to a fairly regular ten miles a day, and slowly rolled up an increasing loot without fatiguing his horses or his men.
From Argenton, which he thus reached quite unweakened on the 21st of August, he made Châteauroux (rather more than eighteen miles off, but not nineteen by the great road) in two days, reaching it on the 23rd. Thence he turned still more to the eastward, and passed by Issoudun towards Bourges. This last excursion or “elbow” in the road was less strategically motiveless than most of the march; for the Prince had had news that some French force under the son of the French king was lying at Bourges, and to draw off such a force southward was part of the very vague plan which he was following. Unlike that string of open towns which the mounted band had sacked upon their way, Bourges was impregnable to them, for it was walled and properly defended. They turned back from it, therefore, down the River Yevre towards the Cher Valley again, and upon the 28th of August reached Vierzon, having marched in the five days from Châteauroux the regulation ten miles a day; for they covered fifty miles or a little more.
This point, Vierzon, is an important one to note in the march. The town lies just to the south of a curious district very little known to English travellers, or, for that matter, to the French themselves. It is a district called the “Sologne,” that is, the “Solitarium” or “Desert.” For a space of something like forty miles by sixty a great isolated area of wild, almost uncultivatable, land intervenes between the valley of the Cher and that of the Loire. Only one road of importance traverses it, that coming from Paris and Orleans, and making across the waste for Vierzon to the south. No town of any size is discoverable in this desolate region of stagnant pools, scrub, low forest, and hunters.
It was such a situation on the outer edge of the Sologne which made Vierzon the outpost of Aquitaine, and having reached Vierzon, the Prince, in so far as he was concerned with emphasising the Plantagenet claim over Aquitaine, had reached his northern term. But his raid had, as we know, another object: that of drawing the French forces southward. And, with the characteristic indecision of feudal strategic aims, it occurred to the Black Prince at this stage to immix with that object an alternative, and to see whether he could not get across the Loire to join Lancaster’s force, which was campaigning in the West of France on the other side of that river.
At Vierzon Edward’s men came across the first resistance. A handful of John’s forces, irregulars hired by the French king under a leader most charmingly named “Grey Mutton,” skirmished to their disadvantage against the Anglo-Gascon force.
The Black Prince made back westward after “Grey Mutton,” thinking, perhaps, to cross the Loire at Blois, and two days out from Vierzon (rather over twenty miles) he made the only assault upon fortifications which he permitted his men in the whole campaign. This was an attack upon the Castle of Romorantin, in which “Grey Mutton” had taken refuge.
It was not the moment for delay. Edward knew that the French army must now be somewhere in the neighbourhood; he had already touched lance with one small French force; but he had his teeth into the business and would not let go his hold. The outworks were taken early in the affair. The keep held out for four days more, surrendering at last to fire upon the 3rd of September.
The season was now full late if the Black Prince intended a return to the south. But, as we have seen, he no longer entirely intended such a retreat. He had already begun to consider the alternative of crossing the Loire and joining his brother’s force beyond it. He had information, however, that the bridges directly in front of him were cut. It is not easy to reconcile this with the passage immediately afterwards of the French army. But the most vivid, and perhaps the most accurate, account we have of this march not only tells us that the bridges were cut, but particularly alludes to the high water in the Loire at that moment. It is a significant piece of information, because no river in Europe north of the Pyrenees differs so much in its volume from day to day as does the Loire, which is sometimes a trickle of water in the midst of sandbanks, and at other times a great flood a quarter of a mile across, and twenty feet deep, like the Thames at London.
At any rate, from Romorantin, Prince Edward made for Tours, a distance of fifty miles as the crow flies, and a march of precisely five days. It will be observed that his plotted rate of marching at ten miles a day was most accurately maintained.
Now from his camp in front of Tours, Edward behaved in a fashion singular even for the unbusinesslike warfare of that somewhat theatrical generation. He sat down, apparently undecided which way to turn, and remained in that posture during the remainder of September the 8th, all the next day, September 9th, and all the next day again, the 10th. There could be no question of attacking Tours. It was a strong, large, and well-defended town, and quite beyond the power of the Black Prince’s force, which was by this time encumbered with a very heavy train of waggons carrying his booty. But while he was waiting there (and he could see, says one account, the fires of his brother’s army by night beyond the Loire), his enemy, with such forces as he had been able to collect, was marching down upon him.
The King of France had begun to get men together at Chartres upon the same day that his rival had reached Vierzon, the 28th of August. Five days later, just when Romorantin Castle was surrendering, he had broken up and was marching to the Loire. And upon the same 8th of September which saw the Black Prince pitch his tents under the walls of Tours, the first bodies of the French command were beginning to cross the Loire at the two upper points of Meung and Blois, while some of them were preparing to cross at Tours itself.
Yet so defective was Edward’s information that it was not until Sunday, September 11th, that news reached him of King John’s movements. He heard upon that day that the French king himself had crossed at Blois, thirty miles up river behind him. Edward at once broke camp and started on his retreat to the south. After him as he went followed the French host, which had combined its forces after its separate passages of the river.
It is important, if we are to understand what follows, to appreciate both the quality and the numbers of those whom the King of France had been able to gather. He had with him, by the still necessary and fatal military weakness of French society, only those loose feudal levies whose lack of cohesion had accounted ten years before for the disaster of Crécy. But John commanded no such host as Philip had nominally led in the Picardy Campaign against Edward III. At the most, and counting all his command, it was little if at all superior in numbers to that of the Black Prince. He hoped, indeed, to increase it somewhat with further levies as his progress southward advanced, and we shall see that his ultimate entry into the town of Poitiers did considerably reinforce him. But at no time before the battle which decided this campaign was John in any important numerical superiority over his enemy, and even in that battle the superiority had nothing of the dramatic disproportion which has rendered the field of Crécy famous.
John marched down the Loire straight on Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles off, in two days, coming under that town and castle upon Monday the 12th of September, twenty-four hours after the Black Prince had broken up his camp in front of Tours. As it was now useless to go on to Tours, John turned and marched due south, reaching Loches, another twenty miles away, not in two days but in one. It was a fine forced march; and if the Black Prince had appreciated the mobility of the foe, he would not have committed the blunder which will be described in the next section. He himself was marching well, but, encumbered as he was by his heavy baggage train, he covered on the 12th and 13th just less than thirty miles, and reached the town of La Haye des Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into Loches, twenty miles away.
On the next day, Wednesday the 14th, John made yet another of those astonishing marches which merited a better fate than the disaster that was to conclude them, covered the twenty miles between Loches and La Haye, and entered the latter town just as the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, only fifteen miles in front of him. Both the commanders, pursuing and pursued, had been getting remarkable work out of their men; for even the Black Prince, though the slower of the two, had covered forty-five miles in three days. But John in that determined advance after him had covered forty miles in two days.
With John’s entry into La Haye des Cartes and Edward’s leaving that town twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching and conflicting purposes which may properly be called “The Preliminaries” of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal with them in the next section.
Sketch Map of operations preceding the Battle
PART II. THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION
IT WAS, AS we have seen, on the evening of Tuesday, September the 13th, that the Black Prince with his 7000 men and his heavy train of booty had marched into La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the right bank of the Creuse, somewhat above the place where that river falls into the Vienne.
His confidence that his well-mounted and light-armed troops could outmarch his pursuers was not yet shaken; he was even prepared to imagine that he had already shaken them off; but anyone who could have taken a general survey of all that countryside would have discovered how ill-founded was his belief. The great forces of the French king, coming down slantways from the north and east, had had nearly four miles to march to his three. Yet they were gaining on him. Edward had given the French king a day’s advance by his hesitation before Tours, and the tardiness with which he had received news of John’s crossing the Loire was another point in favour of the French.
It was the Black Prince’s business to get down on to the great road which has been the trunk road of Western France for two thousand years, and which leads from Paris through Châtellerault and Poitiers to Angoulême, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped) he could advance so quickly as to get rid of the pursuit, so much the better. If he were still pressed he must continue his rapid marching, but, at any rate, that was the road he must take.
To the simple plan, however, of reaching Châtellerault and then merely following the great road on through Poitiers, he must make a local exception, for Poitiers itself contained a large population, with plenty of trained men, munitions, and arms; and it was further, from its position as well as from its walls, altogether too strong a place for him to think of taking it.
The town had been from immemorial time a fortress: first tribal (and the rallying point of the Gaulish Picts under the name of Limon); later, Roman and Frankish. The traveller notes to-day its singular strength, standing on the flat top and sides of its precipitous peninsula, isolated from its plateau on every side save where a narrow neck joins it to the higher land; it is impregnable to mere assault, half surrounded by the Clain to the east, and on the west protected by a deep and formidable ravine.
It was absolutely necessary for the Prince not only to avoid Poitiers, but not to pass so close to it as to give the alarm. What he proposed to do, therefore, was to strike the great Bordeaux road at a point well south of the city, called Les Roches, and to do this he must engage himself within the broadening triangle which lies between the Clain and the Vienne: these rivers join their waters just above Châtellerault itself.
The main road from Châtellerault to Poitiers runs on the further side of the Clain from this triangle, and the Black Prince, by engaging himself in the wedge between the rivers, would thus have a stream between his column and the natural marching route of any force which might approach him from the fortified city which he feared.
Further, he was well provided for part of this march through the triangle between the rivers by the existence of a straight way formed by the old Roman road which runs through it, and may still be followed. He could not pursue this road all the way to Poitiers (which town it ultimately reaches by a bridge over the Clain), but somewhere half-way between Châtellerault and Poitiers he would diverge from it towards the east, and so avoid the latter stronghold and make a straight line for Les Roches. This it would be the easier for him to do because the soil in that countryside is light and firm and traversed by very numerous cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous farms. Only one considerable obstacle interrupts a passage southward through the triangle between the rivers. It is the forest of Moulière. But the Black Prince’s march along the Roman road would skirt this wood to the west, and by the time his approach to Poitiers compelled him to diverge from the Roman road eastward, the boundary of the forest also sloped eastward away from it.
His first day’s march upon this last lap, as it were, of his escape was a long one. By the road he took it was no less than fifteen miles, and at the end of it he gathered his column into Châtellerault, a couple of miles from the place where the Clain and the Vienne meet, and where the triangle between the two streams through which he proposed to retreat begins. At the same hour that the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, John was leading the head of his column into La Haye. He was just one day’s march behind the Plantagenet.
There followed an unsoldierly and uncharacteristic blunder on the part of the Black Prince which determined all the strange cross-purposes of that week.
The Black Prince having made Châtellerault, believed that he had shaken off the pursuit.
In explanation of this error, it must be remembered that the population so far north as this was universally hostile to the southern cause and to the claim of the Plantagenets. Whether news of the ravaging and burning to the eastward had affected these peasants or no, we are certain that they would give the Anglo-Gascon force nothing but misleading information. The scouting, a perpetual weakness in mediæval warfare, was imperfect; and even had it been better organised, to scout rearwards is not the same thing as scouting on an advance or on the flanks. At any rate, he took it for granted that there was no further need for haste, that he had outmarched the French king, and that the remainder of the retreat might be taken at his own pleasure. It must further be noted that there was a frailty in the Black Prince’s leading which was more than once discovered in his various campaigns, and which he only retrieved by his admirable tactical sense whenever he was compelled to a decision. This frailty consisted, as might be guessed of so headstrong a rider, in trying to get too much out of his troops in a forced march, and paying for it upon the morrow of such efforts by expensive delays which more than counterbalanced its value. He relied too much upon the very large proportion of mounted men which formed the bulk of his small force. He forgot the limitations of his few foot-soldiers and the strain that a too-rapid advance put upon his heavy and cumbersome train of waggons, laden with a heavier and heavier booty as his raid proceeded.
He stayed in Châtellerault recruiting the strength of his mounts and men for two whole days. He passed the Thursday and the Friday there without moving, and it was not until the Saturday morning that he set out from the town, crossed the Clain, and engaged himself within the triangle between the two rivers.
The land through which he marched upon that Saturday morning had been the scene of a much more famous and more decisive feat of arms; for it was there, just north of the forest of Moulière, that Charles Martel six hundred years before had overthrown the Mahommedans and saved Europe for ever.
So he went forward under the morning, making south in a retreat which he believed to be unthreatened.
Meanwhile, John, at the head of the French army, was pursuing a better-thought-out strategical plan, whose complexity has only puzzled historians because they have not weighed all the factors of the military situation.
We do not know what numbers the King of France disposed of during this, the first part of the pursuit, but we must presume that he could not yet risk an engagement. The town of Poitiers was everything to him. There he would find provisions and munition, some considerable body of trained men, and the possibility of levying many thousands more. It was a secure rallying point upon which to block the Black Prince’s march to the south, or from which to sally out and intercept his march. But when John found himself in La Haye upon Wednesday the 14th, a day’s march behind Edward’s command, he could not take the direct line for Poitiers because that very command intercepted him. He knew that it had taken the road for Châtellerault. He determined, therefore, by an exceptionally rapid progress, to march round his enemy by the east, to get down to Chauvigny, and from that point to turn westward and reach Poitiers. It was a risk, but it was the only course open to him. Had the Black Prince pursued his march instead of waiting at Châtellerault, John’s plan would have failed, prompt as its execution was; but the Black Prince’s delay gave him his opportunity.
From La Haye to Chauvigny by the crossroads that lead directly southward is a matter of thirty miles. John covered this in two days. Leaving La Haye upon the morning of Thursday the 15th, he brought his force into Chauvigny upon the 16th, Friday. He left, no doubt, a certain proportion delayed upon the road, but he himself, with the bulk of the army, completed the distance.
While, therefore, the Black Prince was delaying all that Thursday and Friday in Châtellerault, John was passing right in front and beyond him some eight miles to the eastward; and on the Saturday, the 17th, while the Black Prince was leading his column through the triangle between the rivers, John was marching due west from Chauvigny to Poitiers by the great road through St Julien, yet another fifteen miles and more, in the third day of his great effort. The head of the column, with the king himself, we must presume to have ridden through the gate of Poitiers before or about noon, but the last contingents were spread out along the road behind him when, in that same morning or early afternoon of Saturday, the outriders of the Anglo-Gascon force appeared upon the fields to the north.
It was an encounter as sudden as it was dramatic. The countryside at this point consists in wide, open fields, the plough-lands of a plateau which rises about one hundred feet above the level of the rivers. To the east of this open country a line of wood marks the outlying fragments of the forest of Moulière; to the west, five miles away, and out of sight of these farms, stands upon its slope above the Clain the town of Poitiers. The lane by which the Black Prince was advancing was that which passes through the hamlet of Le Breuil. It is possible that he intended to camp there; he had covered sixteen miles. But if that was his intention, the accident which followed changed it altogether. A mile beyond the village there is a roll of rising land, itself a mile short of the great road which joins Poitiers and Chauvigny. It was from this slight eminence that scouts riding out in front of Edward’s army saw, massed upon that road and advancing westward across their view, a considerable body of vehicles escorted by armed men. It was the rearguard and the train of King John.
A man following to-day that great road between Poitiers and Chauvigny eastward, notes a spinney and a farm lying respectively to the right and to the left of his way, some four kilometres from the gate of Poitiers, and not quite three from the famous megalith of the “Lifted Stone,” which is a matter of immemorial reverence for the townsfolk. That farm is known as La Chaboterie, and it marks the spot upon the high road where John’s rearguard first caught sight of Edward’s scouts upon the sky-line to the north.
The mounted men of this force turned northward off the high road, and pursued the scouts to the main body near Le Breuil; then a sharp skirmish ensued, and the French were driven off. This mêlée was the first news the Black Prince had that the French army, so far from having abandoned the pursuit, had marched right round him, and that his column was actually in the gravest peril. It warned him that though he had already covered those sixteen miles, he must press on further before he could dare to camp for the night. His column was already weary, but there was no alternative.
The army reached the high road, and crossed it long after the French rearguard had disappeared to the west. Exhausted as it was, it pushed on another mile or two southward by the lanes that lead across the fields to the neighbourhood of Mignaloux, and there it camped. The men had covered that day close on twenty miles! But before settling for the evening, the Black Prince sent out the Captal de Buch north-westward over the rolling plateau in reconnaissance. When this commander and his body reached the heights which overlook the Clain, and faced the houses of Poitiers upon the hill beyond, they saw in the valley beneath them, and on the slopes of the river bank, the encampment of the French army; and reported, upon their return, “that all the plain was covered with men-at-arms.”
Upon the next morning, that of Sunday the 18th of September, broken as the force was with fatigue, it was marshalled again for the march — but no more than a mile or two was asked of it.
Edward had scouted forward upon the morning, and discovered, just in front of the little town of Nouaillé and to the northward of the wood that covers that little town, a position which, if it were necessary to stand, would give him the opportunity for a defensive action.
That he intended any such action we may doubt in the light of what followed. It was certainly not to his advantage to do so. The French by occupying Poitiers had left his way to the south free, but the extreme weariness of his force and the possibility that the French might strike suddenly were both present in his mind. He wisely prepared for either alternative of action or retreat, and carefully prepared the position he had chosen. For its exact nature, I must refer my reader to the next section, but the general conditions of the place are proper to the interest of our present matter.
The main business, it must be remembered, upon which the Prince’s mind was concentrated was still his escape to the south. He must expect the French advance upon him to come down by the shortest road to any position he had prepared, even if he did not intend, or only half intended, to stand there: and that position was therefore fixed astraddle of the road which leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé.
Now, just behind — that is, to the south of — this position runs in a tortuous course through a fairly sharp little valley a stream called the Miosson. It formed a sufficient obstacle to check pursuit for some appreciable time. There was only one bridge across it, at Nouaillé itself, which he could destroy when his army had passed; and the line of it was strengthened by woods upon either side of the stream.
The Black Prince, therefore, must be judged (if we collate all the evidence) to have looked forward to a general plan offering him two alternatives.
Either the French would advance at once and press him. In which case he would be compelled to take his chance of an action against what were by this time far superior numbers; and in that case he had a good prepared position, which will shortly be described, upon which to meet them.
Or they would give him time to file away southward, in which case the neighbouring Miosson, with its ravine and its woods, would immediately, at the very beginning of the march, put an obstacle between him and his pursuer; especially as he had two crossings, a ford, and a bridge some way above it, and he could cut the bridge the moment he had crossed it.
Finally, if (as was possible) a combination of these two alternatives should present itself, he had but to depend upon his prepared position for its rearguard to hold during just the time that would permit the main force to make the passage of the Miosson, not two miles away.
With this plan clearly developed he advanced upon the Sunday morning no more than a mile or two to the position in question, fortified it after the fashion which I shall later describe, and camped immediately behind it to see what that Sunday might bring. He could not make off at once, because his horses and his marching men were worn out with the fatigue of the previous day’s great march.
PART III. THE TERRAIN
THE DEFENSIVE POSITION taken up by Edward, the Black Prince, upon Sunday the 18th of September 1356, and used by him in the decisive action of the following day, is composed of very simple elements; which are essentially a shallow dip (about thirty feet only in depth), bounded by two slight parallel slopes, the one of which the Anglo-Gascon force held against the advance of the King of France’s cosmopolitan troops from the other.
We can include all the business of that Monday’s battle in a parallelogram lying true to the points of the compass, and measuring three miles and six furlongs from north to south, by exactly two and a half miles from east to west; while the actual fighting is confined to an inner parallelogram no more than two thousand yards from east to west, by three thousand from north to south. The first of these areas is that given upon the coloured map which forms the frontispiece of this little book. The second is marked by a black frame within that coloured map, the main features of which are reproduced in line upon a larger scale on the page opposite this.
I have said that the essentials of the Black Prince’s defensive plan were:
(1) A prepared defensive position, which it might or might not be necessary to hold, coupled with
(2) an obstacle, the Miosson River, which (when he should retreat) he could count upon to check pursuit; especially as its little valley was (a) fairly deeply cut, (b) encumbered by wood, and (c) passable for troops only at the bridge of Nouaillé, which he was free to cut when it had served him, and at a somewhat hidden ford which I will later describe.
I must here interpose the comment that the bridge of Nouaillé, being of stone, would not have been destroyable during a very active and pressed retreat under the conditions of those times; that is, without the use of high explosives. But it must be remembered that such a narrow passage would in any case check the pursuit, that half an hour’s work would suffice to make a breach in the roadway, and perhaps to get rid of the keystones, that a few planks thrown over the gap so formed would be enough to permit archers defending the rear to cross over, that these planks could then be immediately withdrawn, and that the crush of a hurried pursuit, which would certainly be of heavily armed and mounted knights, would be badly stopped by a gap of the kind. I therefore take it for granted that the bridge of Nouaillé was a capital point in Edward’s plan.
The line along which the Black Prince threw up entrenchments was the head of the slight slope upon the Nouaillé or eastern side of the depression I have mentioned. It ran from the farm Maupertuis (now called La Cardinerie) to the site of those out-buildings which surround the modern steadings of Les Bordes, and to-day bear the name of La Dolerie. The length of that line was, almost to a foot, one thousand English yards, and it will easily be perceived that even with his small force only a portion of his men were necessary to hold it. Its strength and weakness I shall discuss in a moment. This line faces not quite due west, indeed nearly twenty degrees north of west. Its distance as the crow flies from the Watergate of Poitiers is just under seven kilometres, or, as nearly as possible, four miles and six hundred and fifty English yards. While its bearings from the town of Poitiers, or the central part thereof, is a trifle south of due south-east.
The line thus taken up, and the depression in front of it, are both singularly straight, and the slope before the entrenchments, like its counterpart opposite, is regular, increasing in depth as the depression proceeds down towards the Miosson, which, at this point, makes a bend upward to meet, as it were, the little valley. A trifle to the south of the centre of the line there is a break in the uniformity of the ridge, which comes in the shape of a little dip now occupied by some tile-works; and on the further, or French, side a corresponding and rather larger cleft faces it; so that the whole depression has the shape of a long cross with short arms rather nearer its base than its summit. Just at the end of the depression, before the ground sinks abruptly down to the river, the soil is marshy.
Leading towards this position from Poitiers there was and is but one road, a winding country lane, now in good repair, but until modern times of a poor surface, and never forming one of the great high roads. The importance of this unique road will be seen in a moment.
There had once existed, five hundred yards from the right of the Black Prince’s entrenched line, a Roman road, the traces of which can still be discovered at various parts of its course, but which, even by the time of Poitiers, had disappeared as a passable way. The only approach remaining, as I have said, was that irregular lane which formed the connection between Poitiers and Nouaillé.
Now in most terrains where feudal cavalry was concerned, the existence or non-existence of a road, and its character, would be of little moment in the immediate neighbourhood of the action: for though a feudal army depended (as all armies always must) upon roads for its strategics, it was almost independent of them in its tactics upon those open fields which were characteristic of mediæval agriculture. The mounted and armoured men deployed and charged across the stubble. Those who have read the essay upon the Terrain of Crécy, which preceded this in the present series, will appreciate that the absence of a road uniting the English and French positions in that battle was of no significance to the result.
But in the particular case of Poitiers this road, and a certain cart-track leading off it, must be carefully noted, because between them they determine all that happened; and the reason of this is that the front of the English position was covered with vines.
The French method of cultivating the vine, and the condition of that cultivation in the middle of September (in all but a quite exceptionally early year so far north as Poitou), makes of a vineyard the most complete natural obstacle conceivable against the use of cavalry, and at the same time a most formidable entanglement to the advance of infantry, and a tolerable cover for missile weapons at short range.
The vine is cultivated in France upon short stakes of varying height with varying districts, but usually in this neighbourhood somewhat over four feet above the ground; that is, covering most of a man’s figure, even as he would stand to arms with a long-bow, yet affording space above for the discharge of the weapon. These stakes are set at such distances apart as allow ordered and careful movement between them, but close enough together to break and interfere with a pressed advance: their distances being determined by the fulness of the plant before the grapes are gathered, a harvest which falls in that region somewhat later than the date of the action.
Wherever a belt of vineyard is found, cultivated after this fashion, the public ways through it are the only opportunities for advance; for land is so valuable under the grape that various allotments or properties are cultivated to their outermost limit. The vineyards (which have now disappeared, but which then stood upon the battlefield) could only be pierced by the roads I have mentioned.
This line, then, already well protected by the vineyards, was further strengthened by the presence of a hedge which bounded them and ran along their eastern edge upon the flat land above the depression.
I have mentioned a cart-track, which branched off on the main lane, and which is marked upon my map with the letters “A-A.” It formed, alongside with the lane, a second approach through the English line, and it must be noticed that, like the main lane, a portion of it, where it breasted the slope, was sunk in those times below the level of the land on either side.
The first thought that will strike the modern student of such a position is that a larger force, such as the one commanded by the King of France, should have been able easily to turn the defensive upon its right.
Now, first, a feudal army rarely manœuvred. For that matter, the situation was such that if John had avoided a fight altogether, and had merely marched down the great south-western road to block Prince Edward’s retreat, the move would have had a more complete effect than winning a pitched battle. The reader has also heard how the Black Prince’s sense of his peril was such that he had been prepared to treat upon any but the most shameful terms. It is evident, therefore, that if the French fought at all it was because they wanted to fight, and that they approached the conflict in the spirit (which was that of all their time) disdainful of manœuvring and bound in honour to a frontal attack. A modern force as superior in numbers as was John’s to the Black Prince’s would have “held” the front of the defensive with one portion of its effectives, while another portion marched round that defensive’s right flank. But it is impossible to establish a comparison between developed tactics and the absolutely simple plan of feudal warfare. It is equally impossible to compare a modern force with a feudal force of that date. It had not the unity of command and the elasticity of organisation which are necessary to divided and synchronous action. It had no method of attack but to push forward successive bodies of men in the hope that the weight of the column would tell.
Secondly, Edward defended that right flank from attack by establishing there his park of waggons.
None the less, the Black Prince could not fail to see the obvious danger of the open right upon the plateau beyond the Roman road; even in the absence of any manœuvring, the mere superior length of the French line might suffice to envelop him there. It was presumably upon this account that he stationed a small body of horse upon that slightly higher piece of land, five hundred yards behind Maupertuis and a little to the right of it, which is now the site of the railway station; and this mounted force which he kept in reserve was to prove an excellent point of observation during the battle. It was the view over towards the French position obtained from it which led, as will be seen in the next section, to the flank charge of the Captal de Buch.
There remains to be considered such environments of the position as would affect the results of the battle. I have already spoken of the obstacle of the Miosson, of Nouaillé, of the passages of the river, and of the woods which would further check a pursuit if the pressure following upon a partial defeat, or upon a determination to retire without accepting action, should prove serious. I must now speak of these in a little more detail.
The depression, which was the main feature of the battlefield, is carved like its fellows out of a general and very level plateau of a height some four hundred to four hundred and fifty feet above the sea. This formation is so even that all the higher rolls of the land are within ten or twenty feet of the same height. They are, further, about one hundred feet, or a little more, higher than the water level of the local streams. This tableland, and particularly the ravine of the Miosson, nourishes a number of woods. One such wood, not more than a mile long by perhaps a quarter broad, covers Nouaillé, and intervenes between that town and the battlefield. On the other side of the Miosson there is a continuous belt of wood five miles long, with only one gap through it, which gap is used by the road leading from Nouaillé to Roches and to the great south-western road to Bordeaux.
In other words, the Black Prince had prepared his position just in front of a screen of further defensible woodland.
I have mentioned one last element in the tactical situation of which I have spoken, and which needs careful consideration.
Over and above the passage of the Miosson by a regular bridge and a proper road at Nouaillé, the water is fordable in ordinary weather at a spot corresponding to the gap between the woods, and called “Man’s Ford” or “Le Gué d’Homme.” Now, of the several accounts of the action, one, the Latin chronicler Baker, mentions the ford, while another, the rhymed French story of the Chandos Herald, speaks of Edward’s having begun to retire, and of part of his forces having already crossed the river before contact took place. I will deal later with this version; but in connection with the ford and whether Edward either did or intended to cross by it, it is worthy of remark that the only suggestion of his actually having crossed it, and of his intention to do so in any case, is to be found in the rhymed chronicle of the Chandos Herald; and the question arises — what reliance should be placed on that document?
It is evident on the face of it that the detail of the retreat was not invented. Everyone is agreed that the rhymed chronicle of the Chandos Herald does not carry the same authority as prose contemporary work. It is not meant to. It is a literary effort rather than a record. But there would be no reason for inventing such a point as the beginning of a retreat before an action — not a very glorious or dramatic proceeding — and the mere mention of such a local feature as the ford in Baker is clear proof that what we can put together from the two accounts is based upon an historical event and the memory of witnesses.
On the other hand, the road proper ran through Nouaillé, and when you are cumbered with a number of heavy-wheeled vehicles, to avoid a road and a regular bridge and to take a bye-track across fields down a steep bank and through water would seem a very singular proceeding. Further, this track would lose all the advantages which the wood of Nouaillé gave against pursuit, and, finally, would mean the use of a passage that could not be cut, rather than one that could.
Again, we know that the Black Prince when he was preparing the position on Sunday morning, covered its left flank, exactly as his father had done at Crécy ten years before, with what the Tudors called a “leaguer,” or park of waggons.
Further, we have a discrepancy between the story of this retreat by the ford and the known order of battle arranged the day before. In that order of battle he put in the first line, just behind his archers, who lined the hedge bounding the vineyards, a group of men-at-arms under Warwick and Oxford. He himself commanded the body just behind these, and the third or rearmost line was under the command of Salisbury and Suffolk.
How are these contemporary and yet contradictory accounts to be reconciled? What was the real meaning of movement on the ford?
I beg the reader to pay a very particular attention to the mechanical detail which I am here examining, because it is by criticism such as this that the truth is established in military history between vague and apparently inconsistent accounts.
If you are in command of a force such as that indicated upon the following plan, in which A and B together form your front line, C your second, and D your third, all three facing in the direction of the arrow, and expecting an attack from that direction; and if, after having drawn up your men so, you decide there is to be no attack, and determine to retreat in the direction of X, your most natural plan will be to file off down the line towards X, first with your column D, to be followed by your column C, with A and B bringing up the rear. And this would be all the more consonant with your position, from the fact that the very men A and B, whom you had picked out as best suited to take the first shock of an action, had an action occurred, would also in the retreat form your rearguard, and be ready to fight pursuers should a pursuit develop and press you. That is quite clear.
Now, if, for reasons of internal organisation or what not, you desired to keep your vanguard still your vanguard in retreat, as it was on the field, your middle body still your middle body on the march, and what was your rearguard on the field still your rearguard in the long column whereby you would leave that field, the manœuvre by which you would maintain this order would be filing off by the left; that is, ordering A to form fours and turn from a line into a column, facing towards the point E, and, having done so, to march off in the direction of X. You would order B to act in the same fashion next. When A and B had got clear of you and had reached, say, F, you would make C form fours and follow after; and when C had marched away so far as to leave things clear for D, the last remaining line, you would make D in its turn form fours and close up the column.
Now, suppose the Black Prince had been certain on that Monday morning that there would be no attack, nor even any pursuit. Suppose that he were so absolutely certain as to let him dispense with a rearguard — then he might have drawn off in the second of the two fashions I have mentioned. Warwick and Oxford (A and B) would have gone first, C (the Black Prince, in the centre) would have gone next, and Salisbury, D, would have closed the line of the retreat. This would have been the slowest method he could have chosen for getting off the field, it would have had no local tactical advantage whatsoever, and to adopt such a method in a hurried departure at dawn from the neighbourhood of a larger force with whom one had been treating for capitulation the day before, would be a singular waste of time in any case. But, at any rate, it would be physically possible.
What is quite impossible is that such a conversion and retirement should have been attempted; for we know that a strong rearguard was left, and held the entrenchments continuously.
To leave the field in the second fashion I have described is mathematically equivalent to breaking up your rearguard and ceasing to maintain it for the covering of your retreat. It is possible only if you do not intend to have a rearguard at all to cover your retirement, because you think you do not need it. As a fact, we know that all during the movement, whatever it was, a great body of troops remained on the field not moving, and watching the direction from which the French might attack. So even if there was a beginning of retirement, a strong rearguard was maintained to cover that movement. We further know that the Black Prince and the man who may be called chief of his staff, Chandos, planned to keep that very strong force in position in any case, until the retirement (if retirement it were) was completed; and we further know that the fight began with a very stout and completely successful resistance by what must have been a large body posted along the ridge, and what even the one account which speaks of the retirement describes as the bulk of the army.
To believe, then, that Warwick filed off by the left, followed by the vehicles, and then by the main command under the Prince, and that all this larger part of the army, including its wheeled vehicles, had got across the ford before contact took place and an action developed, is impossible. It is not only opposed to any sound judgment, it is mathematically impossible. It also conflicts with the use of a park of vehicles to defend the left of the entrenched line, and with the natural use of the line of retreat by Nouaillé. I can only conclude that what really happened was something of this sort:
Edward intended to retreat if he were left unmolested. He intended to retreat through Nouaillé and by its bridge, but for safety and to disencumber the road he sent the more valuable of the loot-waggons by the short cut over the ford.
The Prince had got the bulk of his force standing on the entrenched position upon that Monday morning, and bidden it wait and see whether the enemy would attempt to force them or no. As there was no sign of the enemy’s approach from the northwest, and as he was not even watched by any scout of the enemy’s, he next put Salisbury in command of the main force along the hedge, put Warwick and Oxford at the head of a strong escort for leading off the more valuable of the booty — which would presumably be in few waggons — and began to get these waggons away down the hill towards the ford. They would thus be taking a short cut to join the road between Nouaillé and Roches later on, and they would relieve the congestion upon the main road of retreat through Nouaillé. It is possible that the Black Prince oversaw this operation himself upon the dawn of that day, involving, as it did, the negotiation of a steep bank with cumbersome vehicles, and those vehicles carrying the more precious and portable loot of his raid. This would give rise to the memory of his having crossed the stream. But, meanwhile, the mass of army was still standing where it was posted, prepared for retreat on the bridge of Nouaillé if it were not molested, or for action if it were. Just as this minor detachment of the more valuable vehicles, with its escort, had got across the water, messengers told Edward that there were signs of a French advance. He at once came back, countermanded all provisional orders for the retirement, and recalled the escort, save perhaps some small party to watch the waggons which had got beyond the river. Thus, returning immediately, Edward was ready to instruct and fight the action in the fashion described in all the other accounts.
This, I think, is the rational reconciliation of several stories which are only in apparent contradiction, and which are rather confusing than antagonistic.
PART IV. THE ACTION
THOUGH THE ACCOUNTS of the Battle of Poitiers, both contemporary with and subsequent to it, show, like most mediæval chronicling, considerable discrepancies, it is possible by comparing the various accounts and carefully studying the ground to present a collected picture of that victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the position, character, and numbers of Edward’s force as it lay upon the early morning of Monday the 19th of September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged in dense formation, faced west by a little north upon the level which intervenes between the modern farm of Cardinerie and the wood of Nouaillé. These three bodies of men stood armed, one rank behind the other, and all three parallel. The first was commanded by Salisbury. It was drawn up along the hedge that bounded the vineyards, and it stretched upon either side of the lane which led and leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé. With Salisbury was Suffolk; and this first line, thus facing the hedge, the depression, and the fields beyond, from whence a French attack might develop, was certainly the largest of the three lines. The reader must conceive of the road astraddle of which this command of Salisbury’s and Suffolk’s stood as lying flush with the fields around, until the edge of the depression was reached, and there forming for some yards a sunken road between the vines that stood on either side of it. The reader should also remember that further to the left, and covered by the last extension of this line of men, was the second diverging lane, crossing through vineyards precisely as did the other, and sunk as the other was sunk for some yards at the crest of the little depression. It is this lane which now passes by the tile-works and leads later to the ford over the river in the valley beyond. The line thus holding the hedge, and commanded by Suffolk and Salisbury, contained the greater number of the archers, and also a large proportion of men-at-arms, dismounted, and ready to repel any French attack, should such an attack develop in the course of the morning to interfere with the retirement which Edward had planned; but as yet, in the neighbourhood of six o’clock, there was no sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon the west beyond the depression. The King of France’s camp was more than two miles away, and it looked as though Edward would be able to get his whole force beyond the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first line, for the position of which, as for that of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer to the coloured map forming the frontispiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn up came a second line, under the command of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much smaller body, because it had a very different task to perform. Its business was to act as an escort for certain of the waggon-loads which Edward, both on account of their value and of the difficulty of getting them up and down the banks of the steep ravine of the river behind them, had determined to send forward at the head of his retirement. This escort, then, we may call the second line. Before the retiring movement began it stood parallel to and immediately in the rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat larger command, principally of Gascon men-at-arms under the direct leadership of the Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing one behind the other and facing away from the sunrise of that Monday morning, we must add a great body of waggons, parked together, upon the right of the first line and defending it from any turning movement that might be attempted upon that flank, should a French advance develop after all. We must suppose some few of the more valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best booty of the raid, to have been put last in this park, so that their drivers should have the opportunity of filing off first when the middle or second line, which was to be their escort, began the retirement. Further, we must remark teams harnessed and drivers mounted in front of those special waggons, while the mass of the wheeled vehicles still lay closely packed together for the purposes of defence against a possible attack, their teams standing to the rear, ready to harness up only when the retirement was in full swing, and to come last in the retreating column, saving perhaps for a small rearguard that might be left to watch the extremity of the line after everyone else had got safely off the field. We must see the Black Prince’s command, such of it as was mounted, all on horseback already, and the men-at-arms of the second line or escort under Warwick similarly in the saddle; but the first line, which formed the bulk of the whole force, we must picture to ourselves all on foot, the mounted men as well as the small proportion of foot-sergeants: for if there should be occasion to repel some attack developing during the retirement, it was in the essence of the Plantagenet tactics to dismount the men-at-arms during the defensive, and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy appeared upon the empty fields to the west beyond the depression while these dispositions were being made; and, when all was ready, perhaps between seven and eight o’clock, the order for the first movement of the retirement was given. Warwick and the escort he commanded turned from line to column and began to file off by the left, down towards the ford. The special waggons, whose safety was thus being first anxiously provided for, followed, and the whole of the second line thus got clear of the space between the first and the third. It marched south towards the river, with its little body of wheeled vehicles following up its mounted men.
When the second line had thus got clear of the original formation, Edward, preceded by his banner and accompanied by a certain number of men from the third line (how many we cannot tell, but presumably no great force), rode off over the fields to the left of Warwick’s string of cavalry and waggons, to superintend the difficult passage of the Miosson. He left behind him, standing to arms at the hedge, the whole of the strong first line under Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of his own third line marshalled in parallel behind this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere between seven and eight o’clock, the situation is thus: the Prince and the band with him are riding off towards the edge where the land falls somewhat steeply towards the Miosson. He and his men have their backs turned to the bulk of the army, which, in two bodies, the larger one lining the hedge and a smaller one behind it, are holding the chosen defensive position in case there should be any sign of a French pursuit. We must presume that if no such pursuit appeared to be developing it was Edward’s intention, when he had got the special waggons and their escort safely across the ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force thus left behind by the road through Nouaillé and across its bridge. The smaller body would go first; then, section by section, the first line would fall into column and retire by the Nouaillé road, leaving at last no more than a small rearguard at the hedge, which, when all the waggons of the park had been harnessed up and were filing down the Nouaillé road, would itself fall into column and bring up the extreme end of the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads with their escort, which had crossed at the ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say, an hour or an hour and a half by the bulk of the army, which would have rejoined by the Nouaillé road, and the junction would be effected at the spot where, at the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line passing the ford reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command, with its heavy and cumbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on the heights there called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in safety, with the obstacle of the Miosson behind them, the great south-western road to Bordeaux, along which the rest of the retreat would take place.
This plan would have every advantage, always supposing that there was no French pursuit, or that that pursuit should develop too late to interfere with the Black Prince’s scheme. The more valuable of the booty would have been got clean away by a side track which was also a short cut, and which would put it, when the whole retirement was effected, ahead of the column, that is upon the safe side of the force, furthest from an enemy’s attack. It would have got away early without suggesting to the enemy the line of its escape or the opportunity of using the ford. The retirement of the mass of the army by the Nouaillé road would lead the pursuit, if any, along that road and towards the bridge, the cutting of which after the Anglo-Gascon force had passed would leave that force with the obstacle of the river between it and its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did develop, and, luckily for the Black Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off to superintend Warwick’s passage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when the mass of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaillé, he might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away from the defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay on all that open land which now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the south-west of that steading, between the great Lussac road and that country road to Nouaillé along which the march of the French army had proceeded, and across which, further along, the Black Prince’s command lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy’s dispositions. In spite of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more than the fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road, and between him and Nouaillé, the Black Prince’s force was gathered. He appears to have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon that Monday morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it was with the intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until he found the enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four bodies; three main “battles” or lines, comparable to the English three lines — it was the universal formation of a mediæval army — were brought up in column for the advance, to deploy when the field should be reached. The first was commanded by the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of Normandy; the second by the Duke of Orleans, the king’s brother; the third was commanded by the king himself, and was the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against his enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with difficulties, but must nevertheless be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful) romantic pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not without some value, because, like so many of Froissart’s statements, it mirrors the tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If we had no other figures than Froissart’s we should not accept them, but we should accept, and rightly, an impression of great superiority in numbers on the part of the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the field itself, and who wrote from the English side — Burghersh. If anything, he would exaggerate, of course; but he was a soldier (and Froissart was at the other psychological pole!). He actually wrote from the spot, and he thought that everything mounted in front of him came to about 8000, to which he added 3000 men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may have been, and probably was, concerned to mention no more than what he regarded as fighting units worth mentioning: infantry more or less trained and properly accoutred men-at-arms. For these latter, and their number of 8000, we have plenty of independent testimony, and especially Baker’s. Baker gives the same number. As regards the trained infantry, we know that John had 2000 men armed with the arbalest (a mechanical cross-bow worked with a ratchet), and we know that he also had, besides these cross-bowmen, a number of trained mercenaries armed with javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits to the numbers somewhat as follows: the French host included 8000 fully-armed mounted men; that is, not quite double the Gascon and English units of the same rank and equipment. It had somewhat less than the English contingent of missile-armed soldiers, and these armed with a weapon inferior to their opponents. Count these two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-Gascon 7000 or 8000. There you have an inferior limit which was certainly exceeded, for John’s command included a number of other rougher mounted levies and other less trained or untrained infantry. Above that minimum we may add anything we like up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we get a superior limit for the total of 20,000 men all told. Averaging the probabilities from the various accounts, we are fairly safe in setting this addition at 5000, and perhaps a little over. So that the whole force which John could have brought into the field, and which, had it been properly led and organised, he might have used to full effect in that field, was about double the numbers which the Black Prince could oppose to him. The Anglo-Gascons, standing on the defensive, had from 7000 to 8000 men, and the force marching against them on the offensive was presumably in the neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000; while an analysis of the armament gives you, in the capital factors of it, an inferior number of French missile weapons to the missile weapons of the English prince, but double the number of fully-armed knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two sides offered a more striking contrast than the contrast in their numbers. The Plantagenet force worked together and was one well-handled command. The Valois force was in separate commands, so little cohesive that one of them, as we shall see, abandoned the struggle without orders. For the other causes of the defeat I must ask the reader to wait until we come to the actual engagement.
To the three “battles” thus marshalled and advancing along the road, John added a special vanguard, the constitution of which must be carefully noted. It was sent forward under the two marshals, Audrehen and Clermont. They commanded: first, 300 fully-armoured and mounted men-at-arms, who rode at the head; next, and following immediately behind these, certain German auxiliaries, also mounted, in what precise numbers we do not know, but few; thirdly, 2000 spearmen on foot, and with them the whole 2000 cross-bowmen using the only missile weapons at John’s disposal.
It will be seen that something like a third of John’s whole force, and nearly half the trained part, was thus detached to form the vanguard in front of the three marching columns. Its function and mishap we shall gather when we come to the contact between them and Edward’s force. Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French army as breaking camp some time between six and seven o’clock of the Monday, forming in three columns upon the Nouaillé road, with the king commanding the largest rear column, his brother, the Duke of Orleans, the column immediately in front, and the King’s son and heir, the Duke of Normandy, in front of Orleans; while ahead of all these three columns marched the 4000 or 5000 men of the vanguard under the marshals, with their 300 picked knights leading the whole.
It must have been at about eight o’clock that the men thus riding with the marshals in front of the French advance came up the slight slope near La Moudurerie, topped the hill, and saw, six or seven hundred yards in front of them, beyond the little depression, the vineyards and the hedge behind the vineyards, and behind that hedge again the massed first line of the Black Prince’s force. Off in the rear to the right they could see the Black Prince’s banner, making away down towards the river, and soon dropping out of sight behind the shoulder of the hill. The special waggons of booty, with Warwick and their escort, must already have disappeared when the French thus had their first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince’s banner disappearing down into the valley on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that their enemy had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it. The force in front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they rightly conceived to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat. They determined to attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which had carefully been planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was fighting on King John’s side, and who had experience of the new Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crécy ten years before had left with the Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and overwhelming superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by the old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack the front of a line sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this fashion meant disaster, many horses would be shot long before their riders could come within lance thrust, the dense packed line of feudal knights, thousands in number, would be thrown into confusion by the maddened and fallen animals, the weight of the remainder as they pressed forward would only add to that confusion, and the first “battle,” delivering the regular traditional first-charge with which every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle of welter and carnage stretched in front of the defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I have spoken was formed. Its orders were these: — The picked three hundred knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English archers, and almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as their numbers were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to follow. It was their business in this immolation of their bodies to make it possible for the mass of infantry, especially those armed with missile weapons, to come close in behind and tackle the English line. That infantry, aided by the mounted German mercenaries and meeting missile with missile by getting hand to hand with the English bowmen at last, would prevent those English bowmen from effective action against the next phase of the offensive. This next phase was to be the advance of the first “battle,” that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His men-at-arms were to go forward dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were: —
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick’s men having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of the English line, and the consequent “bunching” of the attack on to the lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers themselves did not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped — nor did anyone in Europe for some time to come — the remarkable superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to suit a damp string, for instance, and if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed, the complicated thing held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was, from the hands of the strong and trained man, the simplest and most calculable of shots, variable to every condition of the moment. Its elasticity of aim was far superior, and, most important of all, its rate of fire was something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided, upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on foot. But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour upon foot tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the defensive, and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its armoured knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another thing for such armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of half a mile or more on foot, and to engage with the sword or the shortened lance at the end of it. Armour was at that moment in transition. To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite ponderous enough to burden a man on foot, there had been added in that generation plate in various forms. Everyone had plate armour at least upon the elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all the front of the legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted it as a complete covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields for the matter of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact came. But of this men could not judge so early in the development of the new tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited the armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however well he might serve in a defensive “wall.”
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to follow.
It was a little before nine when the vanguard of the Valois advanced across the depression and began to approach the slight slope up towards the vineyards and the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon either side of the hollow road, stood, in the same “harrow” formation as at Crécy, the English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals spurred and charged. Small as their number was, it was crowded for the road into which the stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded them as they galloped forward, and, struggling to press on in that sunken way, either side of their little column was exposed to the first violent discharge of arrows from the vines. They were nearly all shot down, but that little force, whose task it had been, after all, to sacrifice their lives in making a way for their fellows, had permitted the rest of the vanguard to come to close quarters. The entanglement of the vineyard, the unexpected and overwhelming superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow, the superior numbers of the English archers over their enemies’ arbalests, made the attack a slow one, but it was pressed home. The trained infantry of the vanguard, the German mounted mercenaries, swarmed up the little slope. The front of them was already at the hedge, and was engaged in a furious hand to hand with the line defending it, the mass of the remainder were advancing up the rise, when a new turn was given to the affair by the unexpected arrival of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander had been escorting had been got safely across the Miosson; the Black Prince had overlooked their safe crossing, when there came news from the plateau above that the French had appeared, and that the main force which the Black Prince had left behind him was engaged. Edward rode back at once, and joined his own particular line, which we saw just before the battle to be drawn up immediately behind the first line which guarded the hedge and the vineyard. Warwick, with excellent promptitude, did not make for Salisbury and Suffolk to reinforce their struggling thousands with his men, but took the shorter and more useful course of moving by his own left to the southern extremity of his comrade’s fiercely pressed line (see frontispiece near the word “Hedge”; the curved red arrow lines indicate the return of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill, just before the mass of the French vanguard had got home, and when only the front of it had reached the hedge and was beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He put such archers as he had had with his escort somewhat in front of the line of the hedge, and with their fire unexpectedly and immediately enfiladed all that mass of the French infantry, which expected no danger from such a quarter, and was pressing forward through the vineyards to the summit of the little rise. This sharp and unlooked for flank fire turned the scale. The whole French vanguard was thrown into confusion, and broke down the side of the depression and up its opposing slope. As it so broke it interfered with and in part confused the first of the great French “battles,” that under the Dauphin, whose ordered task it was to follow up the vanguard and reinforce its pressure upon the English line. Though the vanguard had been broken, the Dauphin’s big, unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men managed to go forward through the shaken and flying infantry, and in their turn to attack the hedge and the vineyard before it. Against them, the flank fire from Warwick could do less than it had done against the unarmoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of the vanguard which it had just routed. The Dauphin’s cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the main English position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for the effort then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a weight of iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come back, the full weight of his command — every man of it except a reserve of four hundred — was massed to meet the Dauphin’s attack. Warwick’s men hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the mêlée was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which should, by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten o’clock, which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the fight, the Dauphin’s unequal struggle was one of the finest feats of arms in all the Hundred Years’ War. Nothing but a miracle could have made it succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in which the English defending line had itself suffered heavily and the Dauphin’s attack had been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a third phase in the battle which quite cancelled not only the advantage (for that was slight) but also the glory gained by the Dauphin’s great effort.
Next behind the Dauphin’s line, the second “battle,” that of the Duke of Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and to have launched yet another wave of men against the hedge which had been with such difficulty held. Had it done so, the battle would have been decided against Edward. The Dauphin’s force, though it was now broken and the remnants of it were scattering back across the depression, had hit the Anglo-Gascon corps very hard indeed. Edward had lost heavily, his missile weapon was hampered and for the moment useless, many of his men were occupied in an attempt to save the wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from the train to replace those which had been broken or lost in the struggle. What seems to have struck most those who were present at the action upon the English side was the exhaustion from which their men were suffering just after the Dauphin’s unsuccessful attempt to pierce the line. If Orleans had come up then, he could have determined the day. But Orleans failed to come into action at all, and the whole of his “battle,” the second, was thrown away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly difficult to infer from the short and confused accounts that have reached us. It is certain that the whole of Orleans’ command left the field without actually coming into contact with the enemy. The incident left a profound impression upon the legend and traditions of the French masses, and was a basis of that angry contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the populace against the declining claims of the feudal nobility. It may almost be said that the French monarchy would not have conquered that nobility with the aid of the French peasantry and townsmen had not the knights of the second “battle” fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this. The remnant of the Dauphin’s force, falling back in confusion down the slight slope, mixed into and disarrayed the advancing “battle” of Orleans. These, again, were apparently not all of them, nor most of them, dismounted as they should have been, and, in any case, their horses were near at hand. The ebb tide of the Dauphin’s retirement may have destroyed the loose organisation and discipline of that feudal force, must have stampeded some horses, probably left dismounted knights in peril of losing their chargers, and filled them with the first instinct of the feudal soldier, which was to mount. We may well believe that to all this scrimmage of men backing from a broken attack, men mounting in defiance of the unfamiliar and unpopular orders which had put them on foot, here riderless horses breaking through the ranks, there knots of men stampeded, the whole body was borne back, first in confusion, afterwards in flight. So slight are the inequalities of the ground, that anyone watching from the midst of that crest could have made nothing of the battle to the eastward, save that it was a surging mass of the French king’s men defeated, and followed (it might erroneously have been thought) by the Black Prince and his victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second “battle,” mixed with the debris of the first, broke from the field and rode off, scattered to the north. It is upon Orleans himself that the chief blame must fall. Whatever error, confusion, stampede, or even panic had destroyed the ordering of his line, it was his business to rally his men and bring them back. Whether from personal cowardice, from inaptitude for command, or from political calculation, Orleans failed in his duty, and his failure determined the action.
The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central French force, or second “battle,” under Orleans gave Edward’s army the breathing space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the vanguard and the cutting to pieces of the Dauphin’s “battle,” the permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that the French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was lost from that moment, between ten and eleven o’clock, when Orleans’ confused column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap open between King John and the lead of his third battle and the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never did), John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was still intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third “battle,” would have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically far less disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he now made. He had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five, perhaps six thousand men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy’s archers he had none. What number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the attempt upon which he had decided. The rest of the large force that was with him was of less considerable military value; but, on the other hand, he could calculate not unjustly upon the fact that all his men were fresh, and that he was leading them against a body that had struggled for two hours against two fierce assaults, and one that has but just emerged — unbroken, it is true — from a particularly severe hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last reserve to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and wished all his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last body of knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large, fresh body of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its further side, there were those in the Black Prince’s force who began to doubt the issue. A picturesque story remains to us of Edward’s overhearing a despairing phrase, and casting at its author the retort that he had lied damnably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body and had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The exact spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by the railway station. It overlooks (if anything can be said to “overlook” in that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet higher than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away, the long defence had held its own throughout that morning. The Black Prince recalled them to the main body. Having done so, he formed into one closely ordered force all the now mixed men of the three lines who were still able to go forward. John was coming on with his armoured knights on foot, their horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those men, embarrassed and weighted by their metal under the growing heat of the day, nearly double the distance which his son’s men had found too much for them). Edward bade his men-at-arms mount, and his archers mounted too. It will be remembered that six men out of seven were mounted originally for the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting on foot had spared the horses. They were all available. And the teams and sumpter animals were available as well in so far as he had need of them. John’s men, just coming up on foot to the opposite edge of the little dip, saw the low foot line of the Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of command into a high mounted line. But before that mounted line moved forward, Edward had a last command to give. He called for the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks’ course of the raid. He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer — an Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland — set him, with the great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John’s corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John’s knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal’s charge drove home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen, later most properly to be called “The Bold.” And this lad fought side by side with his father, calling to the king: “Father, guard to the right! Father, guard to the left!” as the lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed them. The lessening and lessening group of French lords that could still hold their own in the contracting circle was doomed, and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of the Plantagenet’s men galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub around some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making eastward to where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to ask what this might be, and was told that it was the King of France who had been taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were disputing. John, pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to one of Edward’s knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had said to the Valois, his lawful king, “Sir, I am serving against you, for I have lost my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became the man of the King of England.”
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the Battle of Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided. It was mid-afternoon when the last of the pursuers had been called back into the English camp.
PART V. THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES
IN CLOSING THE coupled and twin stories of Crécy and Poitiers it is not without advantage to describe the aspect which they would have presented to an onlooker of their time; and in doing this I must not only describe the general armament of Western European men in the middle of the fourteenth century, but that contrast between weapons and methods which gave the Plantagenets for more than a generation so permanent an advantage over their opponents.
You would have seen a force such as that of the Black Prince or of King John camped before a battle, a white town of tents crossing the fields, with here and there a vivid patch of colour where some great leader’s pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The billeting of men upon householders was a necessary feature of a long march, or of the occupation of a town. But when there was question of occupying a position, or when an army was too large to lodge under roof, it depended upon canvas. But it must be remembered that not the whole of a force by any means enjoyed that advantage; a large portion, especially in a considerable body, was often compelled to bivouac.
Further, the reader must represent to himself a heavier impediment of vehicles than a corresponding force would burden itself with to-day: a far heavier impediment than a quite modern army would think tolerable. There were no aids whatsoever to progress, save those which the armed body carried with it. No commandeering of horses upon any considerable scale; no mechanical traffic, of course; and, save under special circumstances where water carriage could relieve the congestion, no chances of carrying one’s booty (then a principal concern), one’s munitions, and one’s supplies, save in waggons.
On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern missile warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three hundred years, was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived not entirely off the country, for it always began with a reserve of provisions, but without any calculated reserve for a whole campaign, and necessarily in such times without any power of keeping essential nourishment for more than a few days.
Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the march by far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern force, and you have the truth.
You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will usually consist of waggons.
The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column would be the large proportion of mounted men.
Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important fighting units, mounted.
Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things. From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of warfare.
The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the year’s rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one. He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these “men-at-arms” (the term is a translation of the French “gensdarmes,” which means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.
Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a fourteenth-century force.
When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crécy and to Poitiers — though it is truer of Crécy than of Poitiers — that the number of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.’s army in 1346 as only 24,000, or the Black Prince’s ten years later as only 7000. The actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied. Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their inferiors were of value in a defensive position, however useless for offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B was “three times as strong” as A, we must remember that this means only that the counting combating units on B’s side were three times A’s. If A was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense mass of humanity much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break, the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics of A’s army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost legendary figures following Crécy and Poitiers.
The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of mediæval accoutrement. From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected the armed man, and our word mail is French for links, and nothing else. In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.
But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side.
We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great blazonry.
The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and in their dependants the appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers. But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends. Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that shields, even the horses’ armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.
Now to the feudal cavalry with their domestics, to the gentry so armed whose tradition was the soul and whose numbers the nucleus of a fourteenth-century army, one must add, quite separate from their domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and these were trained and untrained.
At this point a capital distinction must be made. Armies defending a whole countryside, notably the French armies defending French territory during the Hundred Years’ War, levied, swept up, or got as volunteers masses of untrained men. Expeditions abroad had none such: they had no use for them. Edward had none at Crécy and his son had none at Poitiers; and what was true of these two Plantagenet raids was true of every organised expedition made with small numbers from one centre to a distant spot, throughout the Middle Ages. It is important to remember this, for it accounts for much of the great discrepancies in numbers always observable between an expeditionary force and its opponents, as it does for the superior excellence of the raiding tens against the raided hundreds.
But if we consider only the trained force of foot-men in an army of the fourteenth century, we discover that contrast between the Plantagenet and the Valois equipment with which I desire to conclude. England had developed the long-bow. It is a point which has been vastly overemphasised, but which it would be unscholarly and uncritical to pass over in silence. A missile weapon had been produced and perfected by the Welsh, the art of it had spread over the west country; and it was to prove itself of value superior to any other missile weapon in the field throughout the fourteenth and even into the early fifteenth centuries. Outside these islands it was imperfectly understood as a weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly learnt. When it was replaced by firearms, the British Islands and their population dropped out of the running in land armament for two hundred years. The long-bow was not sufficiently superior to other weapons to impress itself dramatically and at once upon the consciousness of Europe. It remained special, local, national, but, if men could only have known it, a decisive element of superiority up to the breakdown of the Plantagenet tradition of government and of Plantagenet society.
I have described in the writing of Crécy how superior was its rate of delivery always, and often its range, to other missile weapons of the time. We must also remember that capital factor in warfare, lost with the Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages, which may be called the instruction of infantry.
The strength of an armed body consists in its cohesion. When the whole body is in peril, each individual member of it wants to get away. To prevent him from getting away is the whole object of discipline and military training. Each standing firm (or falling where he stands) preserves the unity, and therefore the efficacy, of the whole. A few yielding at the critical point (and the critical point is usually also the point where men most desire to yield) destroy the efficacy of nine times their number. Now, one of the things that frighten an individual man on foot most is another man galloping at him upon a horse. If many men gallop upon him so bunched on many horses, the effect is, to say the least of it, striking. If any one doubts this, let him try. If the men upon the horses are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on foot some feet ahead (such as is the lance), the threat is more efficacious still, and no single man (save here and there a fellow full of some religion) will meet it.
But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the individual man would never guess, and which is none the less experimentally certain — which is this: that if a certain number of men on foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will swerve or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between the nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the rider’s desire that his horse should go forward and the horse’s training, which teaches him that not only his rider, but men in general, are his masters. What is true here of horses is not true of dogs, who think all men not their masters, but their enemies, and desire to kill them, and what is more, can do so, which a horse cannot. A charge of large mounted dogs against unshaken infantry would succeed. A charge of mounted horses against unshaken infantry, if that infantry be sufficiently dense, will fail.
To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction is the instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and hammer it into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all will be well. This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only with staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they are possessed of missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is impossible from charging riders, and an infantry force armed with missile weapons, and unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and still more by experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern conditions, where missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this goes without saying; but even with a range of from fifty to eighty yards of a missile that will bring down a horse or stop him, infantry can easily be made sufficiently confident if it is unshaken. Now, to shake it, there is nothing available (or was nothing before the art of flying was developed) save other men, equally stationary, armed with other missiles. The long-bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he had a missile weapon superior to anything that his enemy could bring against him. He therefore stood upon the defensive against a feudal cavalry charge unshaken, and he was trained by his experience and instruction to know that if he kept his line unbroken, the cavalry charge would never get home. That is the supreme tactical factor of the Plantagenet successes of the Hundred Years’ War.
PART VI. THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE
THE IMMEDIATE RESULTS of the victory of Poitiers consisted, first, in the immensely increased prestige which it gave to the House of Plantagenet throughout Europe.
Next, we must reckon the local, though ephemeral, effect upon the opinion of Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince was now free to retreat at his ease towards Bordeaux and the secure territories of Gascony.
But though these results were the most immediate, and though the victory of one monarch over the other was the most salient aspect of the victory for contemporaries, as it is for us, there was another element which we must particularly consider because it illustrates the difference between the political conditions of the fourteenth century and of our own time.
The real point of the success was the capture of the king’s person. The importance of the action lay, of course, to some extent, in the prestige it gave to the Black Prince personally; though that point was lost a very few years afterwards in the subsequent decline of the Plantagenet power in the south. In so far as an action in those days could carry a national effect — that is, could be regarded by distant civilian populations as proof of strength or weakness in contrasting races and societies — Poitiers had not even the claim of Crécy; for it was not principally an archers’ but a knights’ battle, and the knights were mainly the gentry of the South of France, while those who had been broken by the only cavalry movement of the engagement were not even French knights, but levies of German, Spanish, and other origin. But the capture of the King of France at that particular moment of chivalry, that last fermentation of a feudal society which was reaching its term, had a vast positive effect, as well as an almost incalculable moral effect.
There is nothing in modern times to which such an accident can be accurately paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the capital city would be the nearest thing; but there is this grave difference between them, that the capture of the modern capital must mean prolonged and decisive success in war, whereas the capture of John was an accident of the field. The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king’s command had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.
A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital ships by contact mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind his lieges: “more doubtfully,” because the whole feudal system jealously regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in the shape of rents, not competitive, but fixed, which came to him as they did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord. The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.
The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result; it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would profit.
The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately) of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the nation. But these lengthy political consequences — followed by the further success of the Black Prince’s nephew at Agincourt, and again by his successor’s loss of all save Calais — do not concern this book.