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The Elements of the Action of Blenheim.

The village of Oberglauheim itself, and all that stretched to the left of it up the Nebel as far as the base of the hills, was occupied by the army of Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria. This force was forty-two battalions and eighty-three squadrons strong. The cavalry in this second army, the left of the whole force, had been less severely tried by disease, rapid marching, and ill provisionment than that of Tallard. We may reckon it, therefore, at its full or nearly its full strength, and say that Marcin and the Elector commanded over 20,000 men and close upon 10,000 horse. In a word, the total of the Franco-Bavarian forces, though we have no documents by which to estimate their exact numbers, may be regarded, from the indications we have of the losses of the cavalry, etc., as certainly more than fifty and certainly less than fifty-three thousand men, infantry and cavalry combined. To these we must add ninety guns, disposed along the whole front after the fashion of the time, and these under the general and separate command of Frézelière.[10]

This disposition of the guns in a chain along the whole front of the line the reader is begged especially to note.

The particular dispositions of the Franco-Bavarian forces must now be seized, and to appreciate these let us first consider the importance of the village of Blenheim.

Blenheim, a large scattered village, with the characteristic Bavarian gardens round each house, lay so close to the course of the Danube as it then ran that there was no possibility of an enemy’s force passing between it and the river. It formed a position easy to be defended, lying as it did on a slight crest above the brook Nebel, where that brook joined the main river.

Blenheim, therefore, if it were soundly held, blocked any attempt to turn the French line upon that side; but if it were carried by the enemy, that enemy would then be able to enfilade the whole French line, to take it in flank and to roll it up. Tallard, therefore, with perfect judgment, posted in the village a very strong force of his infantry. This force consisted at first of nine battalions, shortly after, by reinforcement, of sixteen battalions of foot, and further of four regiments of dragoons dismounted.[11]

Not content with throwing into Blenheim between 8000 and 10,000 men, Tallard placed behind the village and in its neighbourhood a further reserve of at least eleven battalions. Of his thirty-six battalions, therefore, only nine remained to support his cavalry over the whole of the open field between Blenheim and Oberglauheim, a distance of no less than 3500 yards. Consequently, this great gap had to be held in the main by his insufficient and depleted cavalry. Eight squadrons of these (of the red-coated sort called the Gendarmerie) formed the first section of this line, stretching from Blenheim to the neighbourhood of the main road and a little beyond it. Further along, towards Oberglauheim, another ten squadrons of cavalry were lined up to fill the rest of the gap. In a second line were ten more squadrons of cavalry under Silly; and the nine battalions of infantry remaining, when those in and near Blenheim had been subtracted, lay also in the second line, in support of the cavalry of the first line.

Such was Tallard’s disposition, of which it was complained both at the time and afterwards that in putting nearly the whole of his infantry upon his right in the village of Blenheim and behind it he far too greatly weakened the great open gap between Blenheim and Oberglauheim. His chief misfortune was not, however, lack of judgment in this, but the character of the man who commanded the troops in Blenheim. This general officer, whose name was Clérambault, was of the sort to be relied upon when orders are strict and plain in their accomplishment: useless in an emergency; but it is only an emergency that proves the uselessness of this kind of man. The army of the Elector and Marcin, which continued the line, similarly disposed their considerable force of cavalry in front, along the banks of the stream; their infantry lay, in the main, in support of this line of horse and behind it; they had also filled Oberglauheim with a mass of infantry; but the disposition of this left half of the French line is of less interest to the general reader, for it held its own, and contributed to the defeat only in this, that it did not at the critical moment send reinforcements to Tallard upon the right.