The Making Of The British Army by Allan Mallinson Page B

Elizabeth’s adviser Lord Burghley had once remarked – and perhaps none more so than those ‘behind the line’. It would take the very public failures of the Crimean War to get supply placed on a regular footing once more. Thereafter, tellingly, the newly formed Army Service Corps would be the only branch of the army to avoid criticism in the Boer War. If not the certainty, then the expectation of success had taken root on that march to the Danube: if the duke of Marlborough had once made his logistics work, so in the future could others.
From the top of their steeple in Tapfheim, Marlborough and Eugene were able to make a fair estimate of Marshal Tallard’s dispositions. The French infantry were bivouacked behind a marshy tributary of the Danube, the Nebel, their flanks secured by the Danube itself and the fortified villages of Blindheim on the right and Lutzingen, itself backed by the rising hills, on the left – in all, a frontage of 5 miles (vastly more than any of the battles of the English Civil War). The cavalry, Marlborough and Eugene supposed, would be posted on either flank in the usual way, but they could see good galloping ground just west of Blindheim, too. Tallard’s dispositions did not look as formidable as they might have been, however. In truth he did not believe the allies would seek battle against a more powerful army, especially when they were running short of supplies, as Tallard believed Marlborough was. And so, expecting the allies to retire north as soon as they discovered the presence of superior forces, he had merely taken the customary defensive precautions of the marching camp. It was a fatal assumption: in the heat of that high summer’s afternoon, Marlborough and Eugene decided to attack the following morning – Sunday.
Not long after midnight, therefore, the allied army was roused silently from its sleep under the stars (and brilliant they were thatnight) in the wooded hills between Tapfheim and Munster to the east. At two o’clock they broke camp and crossed the Reichen stream beyond the village, which Marlborough’s pioneers had been clearing of bosky obstacles all evening, and on across the Kessel stream. In eight columns of double brigades they advanced undetected by Tallard’s patrols, a considerable feat of field discipline almost impossible a decade earlier with glowing slow-matches and clanking tin cartridges. Across the Kessel, on the favourable open ground which Marlborough and Eugene had observed from the church tower, they formed up in line of battle, but with the cavalry (the only arm in which the allies were superior) in the centre, and the infantry on the flanks. Marlborough intended delivering such a violent attack on Blindheim that Tallard would have to reinforce the village or risk his flank being turned. In reinforcing, he would have to weaken the centre, and it was there that the allied cavalry would strike the decisive blow. Meanwhile Marlborough’s guns were being hauled up as stealthily as possible along the Munster – Hochstadt road.
In essentials Marlborough’s artillery was little different from Cromwell’s. It was principally a siege train still, with a few lighter field pieces to thicken up the infantry’s firing line. Marlborough had begun trying to make the heavier guns more manœuvrable, but since the cannon, horse-teams and drivers belonged to the Board of Ordnance he had had only limited success. 34 Had the artillery possessed the handiness even of Wellington’s a century later, he might have had the guns forward sooner at Blenheim en masse to wreak havoc with Tallard’s ponderous dispositions, but the dominance of field artillery in major battles would have to wait for the emergence of Bonaparte, the supreme gunner, and his belief that ‘It is with artillery that war is made’ (although the British army would not fully subscribe to that view until the First World War).
Marlborough could expect some spirited fire, nevertheless, for his