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 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.

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 melee of sabres, but the nature of that melee 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.