Chapter 4
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.
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.
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.[14]
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
PRINTED BY NEILL AND CO., LTD., EDINBURGH.
BRITISH BATTLE BOOKS
_Illustrated with Coloured Maps_
BY HILAIRE BELLOC
_F'cap 8vo, cloth, 1s. net; leather, 2s. 6d. net_
_HISTORY IN WARFARE_
The British Battle Series will consist of a number of monographs upon actions in which British troops have taken part. Each battle will be the subject of a separate booklet illustrated with coloured maps, illustrative of the movements described in the text, together with a large number of line maps showing the successive details of the action. In each case the political circumstances which led to the battle will be explained; next, the stages leading up to it; lastly, the action in detail.
1. BLENHEIM 2. MALPLAQUET 3. TOURCOING 4. WATERLOO
Later volumes will deal with Crecy, Poitiers, Corunna, Talaveras, Flodden, The Siege of Valenciennes, Vittoria, Toulouse.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
THE PARTY SYSTEM
BY HILAIRE BELLOC AND CECIL CHESTERTON
_Crown 8vo. 3s. 6d. net_
_THE THOUGHTS OF THINKING MEN_
No book of the present season has been so much praised--and so much reviled: reviled by most of the Party organs, praised by independent papers. And yet mark the agreement of the following, as wide asunder as the poles often in their views.
"Embodies the silent thoughts of almost all thinking men of to-day."--_The Evening Times._
The _Star_ says:--"Says in plain English what everybody in touch with reality thinks."
LORD ROBERT CECIL, in the _Morning Post_, says:--"So far the authors of 'The Party System' only say in plain terms what everyone who has been in Parliament knows to be in substance true."
"A complete proof of the necessity of restoring power to the people."--_The Daily Express._
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
GORDON AT KHARTOUM
BY WILFRED SCAWEN BLUNT
_15s. net_
_PRIVATE AND INTIMATE_
This book follows the lines of the author's works on Egypt and India, consisting mainly of a private diary of a very intimate kind, and will bring down his narrative of events to the end of 1885.
The present volume is designed especially as an answer to Lord Cromer's _Modern Egypt_, in so far as it concerned Gordon, and contains several important and hitherto unpublished documents throwing new light upon a case of perennial interest.
It also includes an account of the author's relations with Lord Randolph Churchill, Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, Mr Gladstone, Mr Parnell, and other political personages of the day, as well as of the General Election of 1885, in which the author stood as a Tory Home Ruler.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
AN ENGLISHMAN IN NEW YORK
BY JUVENAL
_Crown 8vo. 5s. net_
_VIVID ORIGINALITY_
In these notes and studies on life in New York, Juvenal, by his vivid originality and his masterly deductions, has surpassed all other writers who have written on the same subject.
Mr Eden Phillpotts writes of the Author: "The things seen are brilliantly set down. He writes with great force and skill."
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
PRINCE AZREEL
A Poem with Prose Notes
BY ARTHUR LYNCH
_Crown 8vo. 5s. net_
_DIRECT--INSPIRING--COMPELLING_
The cry for something new in literature, the indefinable, the unexpected, has been answered. Prince Azreel comes to claim his place, not as one who has sounded the depths and shoals of the current modes of the day, but as one entirely careless of these things, discoursing freely of life, easily throughout its whole purport and scope.
The Devil comes into the action, but he also is new--rather the Spirit of the World, "man's elder brother." His methods are those neither of _Faust_ nor of _Paradise Regained_. His temptations are suasive, his lures less material.
In the search for the Ideal of statesmanship Azreel and the Devil come to our own Parliament, Azreel filled with warm enthusiasm, high conceptions. They see, they learn; they discover "types," and discuss them. We find the Devil at length defending the Commons, supplying the corrective to Azreel's strange disillusions. This part will not be the least piquant.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
POEMS
BY CHARLES GRANVILLE
_F'cap 4to. 5s. net._
_REAL POETIC TALENT_
The present volume is composed of a selection from the previous poetical works of the Author, who is also well known as a writer of prose. The distinctive feature of the poems in this collection--the feature, indeed, that marks off and differentiates the work of this poet from the mass of verse produced to-day--is their spiritual insight. Mr Granville is concerned with the soul of man, with the eternal rather than the transitory, and his perception, which is that of the seer, invests his language with that quality of ecstasy that constitutes the indisputable claim of poetry to rank in the forefront of literature.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
THE HUMOUR OF THE UNDERMAN
And Other Essays
BY FRANCIS GRIERSON
_F'cap 8vo. 3s. 6d. net_
_CHARACTERISTICALLY INCISIVE_
This volume contains the latest work of the greatest Essayist of our time. Maurice Maeterlinck has said of the Author, "He has, in his best moments, that most rare gift of casting certain shafts of light, at once simple and decisive, upon questions the most difficult, obscure, and unlooked for in Art, Morals, and Psychology ... essays among the most subtle and substantial that I know."
This opinion has been endorsed by every critic of note in the British Isles and in the United States of America. Indeed, in the latter country a veritable Grierson cult has sprung into existence.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
LA VIE ET LES HOMMES
BY FRANCIS GRIERSON
_F'cap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net_
_PENSÉES PIQUANTES, INDÉPENDANTES_
SULLY PRUDHOMME (de l'Académie Française):--"J'ai trouvé ces méditations pleines d'aperçus profonds et sagaces. J'ai été frappé de l'originalité puissante de la pensée de l'auteur."
JULES CLARETIE (de l'Académie Française):--"J'ai été charmé par les idées originales et justes."
L'Abbé JOSEPH ROUX:--"Il y a là des vues originales, des appréciations neuves et frappantes."
FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL:--"Ces pensées m'ont paru neuves et piquantes, et indépendantes de cette ambiance de préjugés à laquelle il est si difficile d'échapper."
Le Père P. V. DELAPORTE, S.J. (Rédacteur des Etudes Religieuses):--"J'ai admiré dans ces pages délicates l'artiste, le penseur et l'écrivain, et j'ai été singulièrement touché de la façon dont vous appréciez le génie français. Vous avez su le comprendre et vous avez dit votre pensée franchement, je pouvais ajouter _françaisement_."
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS
Nature Essays
BY G. G. DESMOND
_Crown 8vo. Cloth. 5s. net_
_A NATURE BOOK FOR TOWN FOLK_
This book for all Nature-lovers appeals perhaps most strongly to those in cities pent, for whom a word in season can call up visions of the open moor, the forest, the meadow stream, the flowered lane, or the wild sea-shore. The extreme penalty for reading one of these spring, summer, autumn, or winter chapters is to be driven from one's chair into the nearest field, there to forget town worries among the trees. The author does not spare us for fog, rain, frost, or snow. Sometimes he makes us get up by moonlight and watch the dawn come "cold as cold sea-shells" to the fluting of blackbirds, or he takes us through the woods by night and shows us invisible things by their sounds and scents. The spirit, even if the body cannot go with it, comes back refreshed by these excursions to the country.
London: STEPHEN SWIFT & CO., LTD., 10 John St., Adelphi
THE MASTERY OF LIFE
BY G. T. WRENCH, M.D. LOND.
_Demy 8vo. 15s. net_