Marlborough by John Hussey

Author:John Hussey [HUSSEY, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

‘Within the Memory of Man There Has Been No Victory so Great as This’:

John to Sarah, 14 August 1704

MARLBOROUGH SPENT PART of the night in prayer. Then in mist and darkness the drums called the army together and by 2 a.m. on Wednesday, 13 August 1704, the approach march began in eight parallel columns along the constricted riverbank: two of Imperialist foot, then two of their cavalry, two of Marlborough’s foot and two of his cavalry. On reaching Wilckes’s outpost line, that force joined eleven other battalions to form a twenty-battalion ninth column on the left under Lord Cutts. Marlborough’s many pioneer bridges facilitated a rapid deployment into open country and by 5 a.m. the army was fanning out on the plain as the sun behind them burned off the last of the mist. In the distance lay the waiting field of battle.

To the south the Danube wound in loops, at places through marshes and at others beneath bluffs some 15 feet high. Between the villages of Blindheim on the river bank and Oberglauheim just over 2 miles away to the north-west the ground rose by no more than 35 feet. Both lay behind the marshy Nebel brook. In the mile and a quarter between Oberglauheim and Lutzingen to the west where the hills close in, the rise was a further 25 feet. Thus for about 3 miles inland the plain was easy though the hanging woods on the steep 400-foot hillsides thereafter created a natural barrier. From east to west the plain had similarly easy gradients: from the Nebel bed to Höchstädt, a distance of nearly 3 miles, the ground rose by no more than 30 feet.

The Nebel’s streams emerged from the hills, combined above Oberglauheim, wandered south-east, past the houses of Unterglauheim amid the marsh, then past two stone mills (which, as they spanned the water, could be forward defences or crossing points) to the great river. A stone bridge existed at Unterglauheim and another further south where ‘the great road’ to Höchstädt crossed above a marshy islet near the first of the two mills. Blindheim stood several hundred yards back from the Nebel, having the parallel Maulweyer brook actually flowing through it. All the villages were typical of Bavaria: stone churches, houses with walled gardens, narrow streets, barns, and plots with thick hedges. So far no work had been done by the French to put these places into a state of defence.

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