The Making Of The British Army by Allan Mallinson

Marlborough had made sure this innovation was exploited to the utmost. Fifteen years earlier, when first appointed to command the army in Flanders, he had written to the secretary at war, Blathwayt, to ‘desire that you will know the King’s pleasure whether he will have theRegiments of Foot learn the Duch
[sic]
exercise, or else to continue the English, for if he will I must have it translated into English’. What he meant was the standardization of volley fire, for the practice had generally been for each rank (perhaps two companies in line – up to 200 men) to fire as a single entity, with the rank behind firing the next volley while the first rank reloaded, and so on. Since this involved ‘dressing’ (the realignment of the rank about to fire after it had stepped forward of the previous front rank) there was inevitably a hiatus between volleys. In Marlborough’s ‘Duch system’, however, the companies were subdivided into ‘platoons’, each firing independently, so that a rolling fire could be kept up. 29
Musketry was now therefore a decisive force on the battlefield, where before it had been more often than not a hazard, an irritant, and secondary to the
arme blanche
, as the knightly sword and lance or the ‘puissant pike’ were known. The British infantry became hugely adept at this system of fire control: time after time their disciplined volleys won the day in Marlborough’s battles. And they would continue the ascendancy in the later continental wars of the eighteenth century – and then most spectacularly of all at the hands of that master of the tactical battle, the duke of Wellington. Tight, platoon-based fire control is still today the hallmark of the British infantry. Its deep-seated importance in the collective subconscious of the army is demonstrated in the annual Queen’s birthday parade on Horse Guards (‘Trooping the Colour’), for the drill evolutions through which the Foot Guards are put in that magnificent hour – sharp, precise, emphatic – are the relict of the battlefield drill that got the serried ranks of infantrymen to deliver volleys in whichever direction was needed and in the shortest possible time. No other troops in the world save those of the old Commonwealth look like the British on parade, for their drill comes from a different period and purpose. 30
By 1704 the War of the Spanish Succession was in its fourth year. Marlborough had achieved much, but in strategic terms it had beeninconclusive. Indeed, the year before had been one of consistent success for France and her allies, particularly on the Danube. Vienna itself was now within French grasp, and the Austrian and Imperial capital’s fall would no doubt be followed by the collapse of the Grand Alliance. To hasten it, Marshal Tallard’s army of 50,000 were to strike out from Strasbourg (then in French territory) and east along the Danube, while 46,000 Frenchmen under Marshal Villeroi kept the Anglo-Dutch army pinned down at Maastricht. Which left only Prince Louis of Baden’s force of 36,000 in the Lines of Stollhofen 30 miles north-east of Strasbourg, and a much smaller force at Ulm, standing in the way of Tallard’s march on Vienna.

John Churchill, first duke of Marlborough, ‘Captain-General of Her Majesty’s Armies at Home and Abroad’.
     
On learning of this, Marlborough at once saw the imperative. His most recent biographer, Professor Richard Holmes, quotes Clausewitz writing a century and more later that in a coalition war the very cohesion of the coalition is of fundamental importance. Holmes goes on to say that ‘Marlborough was, first to last, a coalition general, supremely skilled at holding the Grand Alliance together’. And holding the alliance together now meant that Marlborough had to prevent the fall of Vienna. But the problem was the Dutch: they would simply not let the allied army quit the Spanish Netherlands to march deep into Bavaria. So he devised a ruse, disguising his purpose from The