Hilaire Belloc

“ The force employed for containing the citadel and for prosecuting its siege had no necessity to be very large.
It was warfare of a terrible kind. Men met underground in the mines, were burned alive when these were sprung, were exhausted, sometimes to death, in the subterranean and perilous labour. The mass of the army was free to menace Villars and his main body.
But the admirable engineering which had instructed and completed the lines of La Bassée still checked the allies, in spite of superior numbers and provisionment still superior. ”

“ The outstanding feature of this terrain is not that it is the summit of a watershed; indeed, as I have said, but for a map one would not guess that it bore this character, and to the eye it presents the appearance of a plain; it is rather the symmetrical arrangement of it as a broad belt of open land, flanked upon either side north and south by two great woods. That upon the right is known as the wood of Lanière, that upon the left bears several names in its various parts, and is easiest to remember under the general title of “The Forest of Sars.” ”

“ Although the subject of this Æsopian biography is drawn in such a way as to suggest now one and now another familiar figure in modern life, yet these fleeting and shadowy resemblances are in reality an indication of the archetypal nature of Sir Edward; he is not a caricature but a symbol; not any particular individual but a composite type—a materialisation into one grotesque shape of the drifting ideas and false ideals of a muddled civilisation. ”

“ Schulemberg’s command felt the advantage of the pressure being exercised on the other side. The French weakened before it, and in the neighbourhood of eleven o’clock a great part of the forest of Sars was already filled with the allies, who were beating back the French in individual combats from tree to tree. Close on noon the battle upon this side stood much as the sketch map upon the opposite page shows, and was as good as won, for it seemed to need only a continuation of this victorious effort to clear the whole wood at last and to turn the French line. ”

“ Boufflers at this moment was in his 66th year, and seemed older. His masterful, prominent face, large, direct, humorous in expression, full of command, was an index of a life well lived in the business of organisation, of obedience, and at last of supreme direction. Years ago at Namur his tenacity, under the pressure of a superior offensive, had earned him the particular character which he now bore. ”

“ As they came near the French earthworks, a French battery right upon their flank at the edge of the wood opened upon them, enfilading whole ranks and doing, in the shortest time, terrible execution. The young leader managed to reach the earthworks. The breastwork was forced, but Boufflers brought up men from his left, that is, from the centre of the gap, drove the Dutch back, and checked, at the height of its success, this determined assault. ”

“ Strategically the victory meant that an army which it was intended to destroy had maintained itself intact; morally, the battle left the defeated more elated than the victors; and for this reason, that the result was so much more in their favour than the expectation had been. In what is most important of all, the general fortunes of the campaign, the victory of the allies at [Pg 23] Malplaquet was as sure a signal that the advance on Paris could not be made, and as sure a prevention of that advance as though Marlborough and Eugene had registered, not a success, but a defeat. ”

“ Upon the French side the plan was purely defensive, as their inferior numbers and their reliance upon earthworks both necessitated and proved. It was Villars’ plan to hold every part of his line with a force proportionate to its strength; to furnish the woods a little more heavily than the entrenchments of the open gap, but everywhere to rely upon the steadiness of his infantry and their artificial protections in the repelling of the assault. ”

“ Sometimes he makes us get up by moonlight and watch the dawn come “cold as cold sea-shells” to the fluting of blackbirds, or he takes us through the woods by night and shows us invisible things by their sounds and scents. The spirit, even if the body cannot go with it, comes back refreshed by these excursions to the country. ”

“ The operations against the citadel proved far more severe and a far greater trial to Marlborough’s troops than those against the general circumvallation of the town. The subterranean struggle of mine and counter-mine particularly affected the moral of the allies, and after a week a proposal appeared [4] that the active fighting should cease, the siege be converted into a blockade, and only the small number of men sufficient for such a blockade be left before the citadel until the 5th of September, up to which date, a month ahead, at the utmost, it was believed the garrison could hold out. ”

“ In general, therefore, we must conceive of the French position as strong entrenchments thrown across the gap and lined with infantry, the cavalry drawn up behind to pass through the infantry when occasion might demand, through the line of entrenchment, and so to charge; the two woods upon either side thickly filled with men, and the position taken up by these defended by felled tree trunks and such earthwork as could be thrown up with difficulty in the dense undergrowth. ”

“ It was wise to put the greater part of the force into a double attack upon the forest of Sars, for this forest, with its thick woods and heavy entrenchments, was at once the strongest part of the French position in its garnishing and artificial enforcement, yet weak in that the salient angle it presented was one that could not, from the thickness of the trees, be watched from any central point, as can the salient angle of a fortification. ”

“ Rain fell continually, and though their command of the Scheldt lessened in some degree the problem of transport, rain in those days upon such roads as the allies drew their supplies by was a heavy handicap. The garrison of Tournai numbered thirteen and a half battalions, five detached companies, the complement of gunners necessary for the artillery, and a couple of Irish brigades—in all, counting the depleted condition of the French units at the moment, some six to seven thousand men. Perhaps, counting every combatant and non-combatant attached to the garrison, a full seven thousand men. ”

“ But it was in England that the effect of the battle was most remarkable.
In England, where opinion had but tardily accepted the necessity for war nine years before, and where the fruits of that war were now regarded as quite sufficient for the satisfaction of English demands, this negative action, followed by no greater fruit than the capitulation of the little garrison at Mons, began the agitation for peace. Look closely at that agitation through its [Pg 25] details, and personal motives will confuse you; the motives of the queen, of Harley, of Marlborough’s enemies. ”

“ Eastern Morning News.—“There can be nothing but praise—and that of a high quality—for a man who writes with Mr Granville’s sympathy and charm ... his art is so sure that he puts a world of life and reality into a few pages.” ”

“ The landscape which lay before the French commanders when upon the Monday morning their line was drawn up and immediate battle expected, has changed hardly at all in the two hundred years between their day and ours. I will describe it.
From the valley of the Sambre (which great river lies a day’s march to the south of the French position) the land rises gradually upward in long rolls of bare fields. At the head of this slope is a typical watershed country, a country that is typical of watersheds in land neither hilly nor mountainous ”

“ The allied army to march to the extreme right of the positions which the French could hope to defend. There the allies would contain the little garrison of Mons. Thither the mass of the French forces must march in order to bar the enemy’s advance upon Paris, and upon some point near Mons the whole weight of the allies could fall upon them, destroy them, and leave the way to the capital open. ”

“ But when we consider war as alone it should be considered for the serious purposes of history—that is, in its political aspect; and when we ask what Malplaquet was in the political sequence of European events, the withdrawal of the French from the field in the early afternoon of September 11, 1709, has no significance comparable to the fact that the allies could not pursue. ”

“ The “block” of Malplaquet (to use the metaphor which is common in French history) , the unexpected power of resistance which this last of the French armies displayed, and the moral effect of that resistance upon the allies, have an historical meaning almost as high as that of Blenheim upon the other side. It has been well said that one may win every battle and yet lose a campaign; there is a sense in which it may be said that one may win a campaign and suffer political loss as the result. ”

“ The honour of carrying them fell to Lord Orkney and his British battalions. His men flooded [Pg 86] over the earthworks at the first rush, breaking the depleted infantry behind them (for these, after the withdrawal of the Irish, were no more than the men of Bavaria and Cologne) , and held the parapet.
The French earthworks thus carried by the infantry in the centre, the modern reader might well premise that a complete rout of the French forces should have followed. But he would make this premise without counting for the preponderant rôle that cavalry played in the wars of Marlborough. ”

“ In this perhaps the learned historian of the British army was misled by Coxe’s atlas to Marlborough’s campaign, a picturesque but grossly inaccurate compilation. The student who desires to study this action in detail will do well to consult the Belgian Ordnance Map on the scale of 1⁄40,000 contours at 5 metres, section Roisin, and the French General Staff Map, 1⁄80,000, section Maubeuge, south-western quarter; the action being fought exactly on the frontier between Belgium and France, both maps are necessary. ”

“ Marlborough’s victory at Malplaquet was both honourable and great. The French [Pg 22] were compelled to withdraw; the allies occupied upon the evening of the battle the ground upon which the struggle had taken place. It is with justice that Malplaquet is counted as the fourth of those great successful actions which distinguish the name of Marlborough, and it is reckoned with justice the conclusion of the series whose three other terms are Blenheim, Ramillies, and Oudenarde. So much might suffice did war consist in scoring points as one does in a game. ”

“ Of French offensive action against the overwhelming forces of their enemies there could be no question. Villars, who commanded the armies of Louis XIV. upon the north-eastern frontier, opposing Marlborough and Eugene, drew up a line of defence consisting of entrenchments, flooded land, and [Pg 17] the use of existing watercourses, a line running from the neighbourhood of Douai away eastward to the Belgian frontier. Behind this line, with his headquarters at La Bassée, [1] he waited the fatal assault. ”

“ It was not until the Friday that it was able to march back again from the field in which [Pg 90] it had triumphed at so terrible an expense of numbers, guns, and colours, and with so null a strategic result, and to take up once more the siege of Mons. Upon the 9th of October Mons capitulated, furnishing the sole fruit of this most arduous of all the great series of Marlborough’s campaigns.
No battle has been contested with more valour or tenacity than the battle of Malplaquet. The nature of the woodland fighting contributed to the enormous losses sustained upon either side. ”

“ Every department of the national life manifested an extreme vitality, and, while the orderly and therefore convincing scheme of French culture imposed itself upon Western Europe, there followed in its wake the triumph of French arms ”

“ It was stipulated that Louis should so act (if his grandson should show resistance and still clung to his throne) in company with those who had been for so many years his bitter and successful foes.
[Pg 16] This last small item in the programme of the victors changed all. It destroyed in the mind of Louis and of his subjects the advantages of the disgraceful peace which they had thought themselves compelled to accept; and, as Louis himself well put it, if he were still compelled to carry on the war, it was better to fail in pursuing it against his enemies than against his own household. ”

“ The troops should march out with arms and colours, and should have safe escort through the French lines to Douai. They reached that town and camp upon the 4th, and an exchange of prisoners against their numbers was soon effected.
Thus after two months ended the siege of Tournai, a piece of resistance which, as the reader will soon see, determined all that was to follow. Six thousand four hundred men had held the place when it was first invested. ”

“ The delay during which the French had been permitted to entrench themselves so thoroughly naturally threw the great balance of the loss upon the assailants. In no battle, free, as Malplaquet was free, from all pursuit or a rout, or even the breaking of any considerable body of troops (save the Dutch troops and Highlanders on the left in the earlier part of the battle, and the Bavarians and Cologne men in the redans at the close of it) , has the proportion of the killed and wounded been anything like so high. ”

“ The author shows how the patriarchal system and values have always been the foundation of peoples, who have been distinguished for their joy in and power over life, and have expressed their mastery in works of art, which have been their peculiar glory and the object of admiration and wonder of other peoples. ”

“ It presents an intellectual conflict which is also a passionate conflict of individualities, and the theme is treated with sympathy and humanity. The portrait of life in a colony of revolutionists alone would make “Civil War” something of a dramatic curiosity, but it is more than that. ”

“ The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action. Any attempt of the French to advance in force after two o’clock would have led to their certain disaster, for the allies were now in possession of their long line of earthworks. ”