The Making Of The British Army by Allan Mallinson Page A

Hague and Versailles alike. His intentions, he wrote to London in late April, were
    to march with the English to Coblenz and declare that I intend to campaign on the Moselle. But when I come there, to write to the Dutch States that I think it absolutely necessary for the saving of the Empire to march with the troops under my command and to join with those that are in Germany … in order to make measures with Prince Lewis of Baden for the speedy reduction of the Elector of Bavaria. 31
     
And so, in Churchill’s ever colourful words, the ‘scarlet caterpillar, upon which all eyes were at once fixed, began to crawl steadfastly day by day across the map of Europe, dragging the whole war with it’. The scarlet caterpillar was, like the first polar expeditions, a supreme demonstration of the art of the possible, a masterpiece of organization and planning, and an example for the future. Ever since then, British soldiers, and for that matter politicians, have accepted the idea ofhazarding far from the island fastness, on exterior lines 32 and against an enemy of the first rank. It had become ‘no big deal’.
How did the scarlet caterpillar do it? Captain Parker of the Royal Regiment of Ireland described the routine:
    We frequently marched three, sometimes four, days, successively, and halted a day. We generally began our march about three in the morning, proceeded four leagues 33 or four and a half by day and reached our ground about nine. As we marched through the country of our Allies, commissars were appointed to furnish us with all manner of necessaries for man and horse, and the soldiers had nothing to do but pitch their tents, boil kettles and lie down to rest. Surely never was such a march carried on with more order and regularity, and with less fatigue to both man and horse.
     
Little wonder the troops called Marlborough, affectionately, ‘Corporal John’. His diligence in appointing subordinates and agents to provide such order and regularity – including novelties such as light, two-wheeled carts to carry the tents and camp kettles rather than relying on the troops themselves as beasts of burden – was as inspired as it was uncommon. The simple, but not easy, expedient of breaking camp, marching two hours before first light and halting at nine kept the exertions to the coolest part of the summer day. Eight to ten miles in the day, 40 miles in five days, may seem slow progress, hardly ‘the angel guiding the whirlwind’ as one essayist described Marlborough’s generalship (Churchill’s ‘scarlet caterpillar’ was altogether better chosen). But a march of 350 miles (the route from the assembly area at Bedburg, 20 miles north-west of Cologne, to the Danube at Blindheim) could not have been conducted at any greater speed without considerable attrition in horses, guns
and
men. The non-marching days were filled with work, or ‘interior economy’, too – oiling, cleaning, making and mending, baking bread. And it worked: fewer than 1,000 men – less than 5 per cent of the force that left Bedburg – fell out along the way. On 12 August, as Marlborough and Eugene spied out the French lines from the top of the steeple in Tapfheim, they could be confident the army was fit to fight.
But if the 1704 campaign was a turning point in the army’s strategicconfidence, it did not follow that its campaigning ability was forever assured. Supply of the army would remain in the hands of a civilian commissariat for a century and a half, and it took a strong-minded commander to get the commissary officers to answer to him first rather than to the Treasury. It was not until the Napoleonic Wars that a military Corps of Waggoners was formed – an unglamorous organization in uniform but one which earned the increasing admiration of the troops whose biscuit and powder the Waggoners carried. In the long peace that followed Waterloo the corps would be disbanded, for ‘Soldiers in peace are like chimneys in summer,’ as Queen