The chief interest in this part of the campaign is centred in Marlborough’s success in keeping the besiegers supplied with food and ammunition, for the French could range at will over the greater part of the country between Ostend and Lille, and they had possession of the sluices that could inundate the districts through which the convoys had to pass. After the brilliant little fight at Wynendal, where a valuable convoy fought its way through a very superior force, de Vendôme laid the neighbourhood of Ostend under water; but the Duke organised a service of punts in which, despite the attentions of French gunboats, stores were transported over the deepest part of the flood, and then transferred to vehicles fitted with very high wheels to keep their loads above the level of the water.[54]
The strain upon the Commander-in-Chief at this time must have been indescribable, for in addition to the constant anxiety about his commissariat, things did not always go well at Lille, where de Boufflers defended himself in a masterly manner: Eugene was so badly wounded that for some weeks he could not direct the operations: the engineers made mistakes, and the supply of ammunition was always scanty. When to these troubles was added the arrival from the Rhine of a large body of the enemy under the Elector of Bavaria, who laid vigorous siege to Brussels, the nerves of most men would have suffered; but with unbroken serenity Marlborough prepared to rescue Brussels from the danger threatening it. After misleading the French by false reports about his movements, he burst through their line of defences on the Scheldt, and so alarmed the Elector that he hurriedly decamped, leaving behind him his sick, his wounded, and his guns.
The details of the doings of the XVIIIth in the siege of Lille are very scanty; but it is known that in a great, though not very successful assault on September 7, when Eugene lost about 3000 men, his five British regiments between them had 350 casualties, or from a fifth to a sixth of their whole strength.[55] In a desperate attack on the counterscarp a fortnight later, Eugene was followed by a number of British troops, among whom were some regiments lent for the occasion by the covering army. In his memoirs he relates that after two assaults had been repulsed with great slaughter, he spoke a few words in English to the brave fellows who rallied round him, and then led them back to the fire, where a musket-ball knocked him senseless. The men thought he was dead; but an intelligent soldier remembered that he was a great friend of the Duke’s, and after looking for some conveyance on which to transport him to his quarters, carried him back on a dung cart! On the 9th of December de Boufflers surrendered on excellent terms, granted him as a proof of Marlborough’s admiration for his splendid defence, which had cost France 8000 men, and the Allies about 14,000 in killed and wounded alone. The returns of the British losses are incomplete: Millner states that from the beginning of the siege to October 22, when the French abandoned the town and retreated in the citadel, the five British regiments in Eugene’s force lost 1600 officers and men; the casualties for the remainder of the siege he was unable to obtain. Stearne briefly dismisses the services of the XVIIIth at Lille in the following words: “Our regiment suffered very much, having two captains and three subalterns killed: our major, with several other officers wounded, and upwards of 200 men killed and wounded.”[56]
It would be deeply interesting to know how many of the Royal Irish who watched the garrison of Lille march out with all the honours of war had seen the ceremonial at Namur thirteen years before. Unfortunately it occurred to none of the literary officers of the XVIIIth to record the numbers. The mental attitude of these old warriors is very curious: they seem to have grown tired of writing about battles and sieges, and as the war went on cut their descriptions shorter and shorter, though they were ready to dilate on any departure from the usual routine of warfare. Thus, for example, they all give accounts of a daring attempt to throw reinforcements of powder into Lille. Two thousand cavalrymen started from Douai, carrying large bags of powder behind them, and wearing in their hats “boughs of trees,” in imitation of the Germans who always decorated themselves in this way when on an expedition—or as the British soldier would now express it, “when on the job.” In the dusk they rode up to the outer barrier of the line of circumvallation, gave over the pass-word, and stating they were a detachment of German Horse with prisoners, were allowed to enter. Then they rode on undetected, until one of the party, to use modern slang, “gave the show away,” by remarking in French to a comrade that they had got through the barrier very easily. A watchful sentry overheard him, drew his own conclusions, and by promptly firing at the speaker gave the alarm. The troops, says Millner,
“instantly turned out of their Tents in only their Shirts and Cartridge Boxes with their Ammunition, and seiz’d their Arms from their Belts, and in a Trice form’d themselves into as good Order as could be expected, and with undaunted Courage, though in the Dark, fired amongst the thickest of the Enemy putting them in great Disorder and Confusion, so that in the Hurly-Burly thereof, several of the Bags of Powder fell off on a Causeway, and was broke; the which by the prancing of the Horses’ Feet, took Fire, and thereby blowed up and tore to pieces upwards of one Hundred Men of them, and likewise destroyed a good many of their Horses; but in the interim thereof, a few of them slipt into the City with some Ammunition also; but the major Part was obliged to retire, and that in very great Haste, Disorder and Confusion back again to Tournai.... The Besieged made a great Huzzaing that Night because they had got those few in with some Relief of Powder.”
While de Boufflers was discussing with Marlborough the terms of capitulation, the other French Generals, thinking that the Duke was as much worn out by the campaign as they were themselves, sent their men into winter quarters and went off to Paris. But they reckoned without their host. Marlborough sprang at Ghent, and invested it, repulsed a great sortie on Christmas Day, and accepted the surrender of the garrison on January 2, 1709. The French troops in Bruges did not wait to be attacked, but abandoned the town and citadel: and then, but not till then, the Allies were allowed to disperse to their winter quarters.
During the greater part of the year 1708 the regiment was deprived of the services of the adjutant, Captain Robert Parker, who was specially selected to act as instructor in discipline and drill to the regiments at that time quartered in Ireland. To any officer the compliment would have been great; but in Parker’s case it was especially flattering, because he was a self-made man who had risen from the ranks. His story is an interesting one. His father was a farmer near Kilkenny, where the boy was sent to a school which boasted of a company of cadets (as we should now call them), who were “armed with wooden guns and took great delight in marching and exercising.” These cadets must have been a remarkable set of lads, as more than thirty of them obtained commissions, and some indeed became General officers. Parker soon discovered that soldiering was the trade for him, and running away from home, enlisted in an independent company commanded by Captain Frederick Hamilton, the future Colonel of the XVIIIth Regiment. During the Tyrconnel troubles both Hamilton and Parker were disbanded, but April, 1689, found them in Meath’s regiment, the one a major, the other a full private. Parker joined with a strong determination to get on in his profession. “I determined to be very circumspect in my behaviour, by which I gained the esteem of my Major and most of the officers of the regiment. I applied myself diligently to the use of arms, and soon became expert in it.” Whether he had risen to be a sergeant in the Irish wars is not known: all he tells us about himself at that time is that at Athlone in throwing up an entrenchment he “received a favourable shot on the crown of the head; the ball only grazed on a good thick skull and went off”; and that at the end of the siege he was much injured by a stone dropped on him by the defenders of the castle. He must have been a non-commissioned officer in 1695; desperately wounded at Namur, he found when he returned to duty after seven months in hospital, that he had been gazetted to a commission, with seven ensigns junior to him. Eleven years later he was Captain-Lieutenant and Adjutant, and after receiving at Menin “a contusion on the side of the head which was likely to be fatal,” was promoted to be captain of the grenadier company. Parker was so successful in disciplining the infantry in Ireland that, when after two years he returned to duty with the regiment in Flanders, Government made him a present of two hundred pounds.
Though Louis had suffered heavily in 1708, the enormous resources of his kingdom enabled him to send large numbers of fresh troops to the Marshal de Villars, whom early in 1709 he placed in command of the army of Flanders. De Villars’ first care had been to secure the safety of Arras, the key to the north-east of France, by throwing up to the east of the town a great line of works which stretched from the Lys to Douai; and from behind these works, known as the lines of La Bassée, he watched the Allies, who owing to the lateness of the season did not take the field till June. Marlborough’s first move was to make open, even ostentatious preparations to force the lines; de Villars concentrated to resist them, calling up as reinforcements a large portion of the garrison of Tournai, a fortress some sixteen miles east of Lille. As Tournai was Marlborough’s immediate objective, he marched swiftly upon it, and invested it before de Villars discovered how completely he had been outwitted. At the beginning of the siege the XVIIIth took part in an expedition to reduce various small forts in the neighbourhood, and after marching night and day returned “greatly fatigued,”[57] but in time to help to storm the breaches of the ravelin, and to repulse a determined sortie by the garrison, who strove to make up for the weakness of their numbers by the vigour of their defence. Up to the time that the town surrendered and the troops retired into the citadel, the siege had run on normal lines; but when the attack on the citadel began things became very different, for this stronghold was celebrated throughout Europe for its subterranean defences, and the ground outside its walls was honeycombed with casemates, mines, and secret passages. To reach these hidden works the besiegers had to sink deep shafts, and then to drive tunnels fathoms deep under the earth, at any moment liable to be blown sky-high by the explosion of a mine. The desperate work done by the XVIIIth in this phase of the siege is well described by Stearne.
“The enemy and we met several times underground and fought it out with bayonet and pistol, and in twelve days the French sprang sixteen mines, which blew up a great many of our men; and one mine did so much execution that it blew up part of the town wall, two branches of our trenches with a parallel between them, and ruined two of our mines, with a Captain and Lieutenant of our regiment and another officer and forty men, all of which happened on our attack.... Our miners discovered the branches of another mine, and as they were busy in finding out the mine itself, they heard the enemy at work in one of their galleries, whereupon a Lieutenant and twenty Grenadiers were ordered to dislodge them, but the Lieutenant being killed at the first onset the Grenadiers retired immediately; after that another officer with a fresh detachment was ordered for that service, but the enemy throwing a great many grenades and making a great smoke with combustible stuff, forced them to retire being suffocated. The next day, the miners being supported by a Lieutenant and sixteen Grenadiers, were at work, to pierce through a gallery they had discovered, but upon their breaking into it, the enemy threw in upon them a great quantity of straw, hemp, powder and other combustible matter, and being set on fire the Lieutenant and ten of the Grenadiers were stifled. After this manner was this terrible siege carried on, till by degrees we wrought ourselves almost into the ditch. The enemy sprang a mine which was their last effort, with which we had near four hundred men killed, but notwithstanding we lodged ourselves that night on our attack near their palisades, where we raised a prodigious quantity of cannon.”
The citadel capitulated on the 3rd of September, after more than 3000 French officers and men had fallen. The besiegers’ casualties are given in Millner’s return as 1233 killed, 4055 wounded, or a grand total of 5288. Millner is not as clear as usual about the loss of the British, but it seems probable that 178 were killed and 521 wounded, or 699 of all ranks. To what extent the Royal Irish suffered it is impossible to say, but it is probable that in such continuous fighting more officers and men were placed hors de combat than are mentioned in Stearne’s narrative.[58]