Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_d1114be2-6ddc-52b1-957e-64d094c6fc69">7. The railway from Ulm to Donauwörth follows the line of this road exactly, and is almost the only modern feature upon the field.
8. Mr. Fortescue (vol. i. p. 436) writes as though this were not the case. He has overlooked Tallard’s letter to the minister of war of the 4th of September.
9. A small body was left at Unterglauheim, but withdrawn as the allies advanced; and outposts lay, of course, upon the line of Marlborough’s advance, and fell back before it.
10. Mr. Fortescue gives the total force of cavalry under Marcin and the Elector at one hundred and eight squadrons and the infantry at forty-six battalions. The French official record gives forty-two battalions (not forty-six) and eighty-three squadrons in the place of one hundred and eight. Mr. Fortescue gives no authority for his larger numbers; and, on the general principle that, in a contested action, each force knows best about its own organisation, I have followed these official records of the French as the most trustworthy.
11. It is essential to note this point. Mr. Fortescue talks of the dragoons “trotting” to “seal up the space between the village and the Danube.” If they trotted it was as men trot in their boots, for they were on foot. The incident sufficiently proves the ravages which disease accompanying an insufficiently provided march had worked in Tallard’s cavalry.
12. Nearly all the English authorities and many of the French authorities speak of the whole twenty-seven battalions out of Tallard’s thirty-six as being in Blenheim from the beginning of the action, and Mr. Fortescue adds the picturesque, but erroneous, touch that “Marlborough” (before the action) “had probably counted every one of the twenty-seven battalions into it” (Blenheim).
This error is due to the fact that at the close of the battle there actually were twenty-seven battalions within the village, but they were not there at the beginning of the action; and Marlborough cannot, therefore, have “counted” them going in. The numbers, as I have said, were first nine battalions, with four regiments of dismounted dragoons; then, a little later, another seven, making sixteen; then, much later, and when the French were hard pressed, yet another eleven, lying as a reserve behind Blenheim, were called into the village by the incompetence of Clérambault who commanded in Blenheim. He should have sent them to help the centre—as will be seen in the sequel.
13. 1st battalion Royal Scots; 1st battalion First Guards; 8th, 20th, 16th, 24th, and 10th Foot; 3rd battalion 23rd Royal Welsh, 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers.
14. From one to three squadrons each of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 17th Dragoon Guards, 5th Royal Irish Dragoons, and a squadron of the Scots Greys.
15. This is the number given by Eugene. Fortescue (p. 436) and most English authorities give fifty-two.
16. The 10th, 21st, 23rd, and 24th.
17. For some reason or other, the exaggeration of this feature—the marshiness of the banks of the Nebel—mars many an English account of the action. The Nebel, of course, was something of an obstacle, slight as it was, and in places the meadows on its bank widen out and are soft even in the dry weather which had as a whole distinguished the three weeks before Blenheim. But the crossing of that obstacle by the cavalry was nothing in the story of the battle. It was what the cavalry did after they crossed that counted.
18. Marlborough was at this moment fifty-four years and two months old.
TOURCOING
Table of Contents
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 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