Footnotes:
[1] It was this success which to Marlborough’s existing earldom added the high dignity of Duke, by letters patent of December 16, 1702.
[2] As the French dispatch goes, 7500 men, every horse, and all the waggons, save 120, which had got into difficulties on the way; Fortescue’s note suggesting that 1500 men only reached the Franco-Bavarians (vol. i. p. 42) is based on Quincy.
[3] It is, of course, an error to say, as is too often done in our school histories and the official accounts of our universities, that the French commanders had no idea of a march upon the Danube. A child could have seen that the march upon the Danube was one of the possible plans open to Marlborough, and Villeroy expressly mentions the alternative in his letter of the 30th of May. The whole point of Marlborough’s manœuvres was to leave the enemy in doubt until the very last moment as to which of the three, the Danube, the Moselle, or Alsace, he would strike at; and to be well away upon the road to the former before the French had discovered his final decision.
[4] It is worthy of remark that the opportunity for victory which the weak forces under Marcin and the Elector of Bavaria offered at this moment to the superior forces of the allies would have led to an immediate attack of the last upon the first when, two generations later, war had developed into something more sudden and less formal, through the efforts of the Revolution.
Marlborough and the Duke of Baden, with their superior forces, would have attacked Marcin and the Elector had they been their own grandsons. Napoleon, finding himself in such a situation as Marlborough’s a hundred years later, would certainly have fallen on the insufficient forces to his south, for it was known that reinforcements were coming over the Black Forest to save the Franco-Bavarian forces. To break up those forces before reinforcement should come was something which a sudden change of plan could have effected, but not even the genius of Marlborough was prepared, in his generation, for a movement necessitating so great a disturbance of calculations previously made. Donauwörth was his objective, and upon Donauwörth he marched, leaving intact this inferior hostile force which watched his advance from the south.
[5] As a fact, the advance along this “isthmus” on to the Schellenberg is slightly downhill, and against artillery of modern range and power the Schellenberg could not be held.
[6] Of seventeen officers of the Guards, twelve were hit; of the total British force at least a third fell; more than a third of these, again, were killed.
[7] The railway from Ulm to Donauwörth follows the line of this road exactly, and is almost the only modern feature upon the field.
[8] Mr Fortescue (vol. i. p. 436) writes as though this were not the case. He has overlooked Tallard’s letter to the minister of war of the 4th of September.