Chapter II (2)

By one o’clock the Duke’s preparations were finished, and after a preliminary cannonade four Dutch battalions were launched against Taviers; twelve battalions of the same nationality attacked Ramillies; while a great body of Dutch cavalry stood waiting to advance when one or other of these villages had fallen into the hands of the infantry. The garrison of Taviers fought well, but owing to the blundering of a French staff officer the reinforcements sent to its support did not arrive in time to prevent its capture, and as soon as the Dutch cavalry saw that their left flank could not be enfiladed from the village they charged the French horse, crashed through the first line, and then were so roughly handled by the second that Marlborough had to bring up many squadrons to their help. But these fresh squadrons did not turn the scale, and before the Dutchmen could be induced to rally, Marlborough--the Commander-in-Chief of the allied army, on whose life depended not only the issue of the battle, but of the whole war--had to plunge into the thick of the _mêlée_ and exert his personal influence with the troopers, to all of whom he was well known by sight. But his face and figure were familiar also to the enemy. Some French dragoons broke from their ranks to surround him. He was unhorsed, and would have been killed or captured had not his aide-de-camp mounted him on his own charger. The Dutch then recovered themselves, and the timely arrival of twenty more squadrons turned the tide against the French. While this cavalry fight was in progress, the Danish Horse and the Dutch Guards forced their way through the marshes on the bank of the Mehaigne, turned the French right flank, and fell furiously upon their rear. Encouraged by this good news the main body of Dutch cavalry returned to the charge, and with a final effort shattered the enemy in front of them. Thus assailed on three sides, the cavalry of de Villeroi’s right wing lost heart, left the infantry to shift for themselves, and galloped madly off the field.

The battalions who defended the village of Ramillies, mindful of the fate of their comrades at Blenheim, determined to retire before they were completely hemmed in, but as they “could not get out but in great disorder our Horse fell in with them and cut most of them to pieces.”[43] The Duke then ordered the brigades of infantry which were massed round Ramillies to bring up their left shoulders and advance against the still unbroken troops at Offuz; but the French did not await their attack; and a couple of British regiments from the extreme right worked through the swamps near Autre-Eglise, and drove the enemy from that hamlet. Though a few of the best French cavalry regiments fought hard to cover the retreat, the greater part of de Villeroi’s army was routed and fled in panic, hotly pursued by Marlborough’s horsemen, among whom the British squadrons were well to the front.

The French lost in killed, wounded, and prisoners about 11,000 men, 80 standards and colours, 50 guns, and much of the baggage of their army. The Allies on their side lost between 4000 and 5000 men, chiefly among the Dutch and the Danes, to whom the honour of this great victory is mainly due.

There is a curious conflict of evidence as to the part played by the Royal Irish in this battle. According to Kane and Parker, the XVIIIth was among the British regiments which, on the extreme right of the allied line, stood all day on a hill without firing a shot. Stearne, on the other hand, records in his journal that the regiment was “greatly mauled” at the attack on the village of Ramillies; and Millner, at the end of his casualty return (in which the losses of the different nationalities are not given), mentions that “upwards of three hundred of our Horse and Dragoon horses were killed or disabled at the head of the Royal Regiment of Foot of Ireland.” If Stearne and Millner are correct, it would appear that the XVIIIth was not only employed in the attack on Ramillies, but was also in close support of the mounted troops during some part of the pursuit.[44]

Marlborough’s enemies had blamed him for slackness in not profiting by his victory at Blenheim; but not even his most virulent political opponents could impute want of vigour to him after Ramillies. Although his infantry had paraded before 3 A.M., had marched many miles and had won a great victory, he gave them no rest till 1 A.M. on the 24th, when they were allowed to halt for two hours; then they trudged on “with all the expedition they could without observing any other order than this, that every regiment kept their men as close together as they possibly could, and none of them halted above an hour at a time.”[45] Marlborough drove the French back into their own country, and within a fortnight of the battle all the great trading towns had opened their gates to the Allies, while very few fortresses in Flanders remained in the hands of Louis XIV.’s troops. Over the walls of Ostend, Dendermonde, and Menin the French flag still flew, but these towns were attacked and taken in the course of a few weeks.

At the capture of Menin, one of Vauban’s masterpieces of fortification, the XVIIIth won much glory. In July the Duke detached 20,000 troops to besiege it; and though the garrison of 5000 men fought admirably and disputed every inch of ground, by the end of the month most of the guns were dismounted, and the approaches of the British brigade had reached the foot of the glacis. The next step was to capture the covered way and counterscarp; and about eight o’clock on the evening of the 7th of August, nine complete battalions, of which the XVIIIth was one, delivered the assault. As Stearne remarks, “this proved warm service,” for, as the Allies were swarming up the glacis, two mines were sprung upon them; and when the inevitable confusion was over and the attack was resumed, the French fired venomously at the crest of the glacis, where the British were covering the advance of the working parties bringing wool-packs and fascines with which to throw up entrenchments. The Royal Irish and Lauder’s, an unnumbered corps since disbanded, appear to have been at the head of the column, and were so much annoyed by this musketry that without orders they began to reply to it. The flashes of their firelocks gave the French a target, and before the officers could stop the firing the losses in these two regiments had been great. Stearne, who was in command of the XVIIIth, says that the action cost him six officers and more than eighty of the other ranks killed and wounded. Parker, the adjutant of the regiment, mentions that two captains and five subalterns were killed and eight other officers wounded, but is silent about the casualties among the sergeants and private soldiers. Millner agrees with the adjutant about the officers and with the colonel about the men.[46] Notwithstanding their losses, the Allies held the crest of the glacis until eight o’clock next morning, when the working parties had finished the entrenchments; then fresh batteries began to play upon the walls, and in a short time the resistance was fairly beaten down and the garrison surrendered on honourable terms. The siege lasted thirty-one days, and cost the French eleven hundred officers and men, while the Allies’ strength was diminished by two thousand six hundred combatants.

In the spring of 1707, the Allies assembled at Bethlehem, where the British contingent was joined by the Royal Irish from their winter quarters at Ghent. Owing to the underhand conduct of the Emperor of Austria, who for his private ends made a secret treaty with Louis XIV. for the neutralisation of Italy, the French were able to withdraw their troops from that country and largely reinforce the Marshal de Vendôme, who had succeeded de Villeroi in command of their “army of Flanders.” But de Vendôme had no wish to fight Marlborough, and a long spell of very bad weather helped him to evade all the Duke’s efforts to bring him to battle. Stearne in his journal mentions that “there fell such rain that our men were not able to draw their legs after them, neither could they keep their arms or ammunition dry.” On one occasion the Allies were struggling over nine miles of country, along which the French had just retreated, “but what with the enemy marching before us, and our Horse which followed them, and the rain continuing the roads were so deep and miry that the most part of our infantry were not able to reach the camp that night, and it was three or four days before the rear came up, and several of them perished by the way.”[47]

In the hope of raising a rebellion in North Britain, Louis XIV. attempted early in 1708 to land the Pretender in Scotland, with a handful of French soldiers to train the partisans who were expected to flock to the standard of the Stuart Prince. The expedition sailed long before the campaign opened on the Continent; to meet it the XVIIIth and nine other regiments were hurriedly shipped off to Shields, where the transports anchored while their escort of men-of-war joined in the chase of the enemy’s vessels, which were driven back to France. As soon as the danger was over the troops were sent off to Ostend, where they arrived in full time to rejoin Marlborough’s army.

Early in the year it became evident that Louis intended to make a great effort to regain the ground he had lost in Flanders, for he assembled a hundred thousand men behind his frontier fortresses, and placed them under the command of his grandson the Duke of Burgundy, with de Vendôme as his military tutor and adviser. As Marlborough had but eighty thousand troops at his immediate disposal, he arranged that Eugene, the Prince of Savoy, who was in charge of the allied forces on the Rhine, should support him whenever he wanted help. This help was soon required, for the French took the initiative, and at the end of May advanced to the forest of Soignies. While Marlborough concentrated at Hal, de Vendôme rapidly despatched detachments to Bruges and Ghent, where the civil authorities were in his pay; and when Louis’ soldiers appeared outside the walls, the gates stood open before them. Having thus secured two very important points in the system of waterways connected with the Lys and the Scheldt, de Vendôme next threatened Brussels; and by forcing Marlborough to move to Asche for its protection, gained time to prepare for the attack on Oudenarde, the capture of which would make him master of the greater part of the Scheldt. He proposed to cover the siege operations from Lessines, a place about thirteen miles south-east of Oudenarde, and hoped to establish his main body there before Marlborough had grasped his plan; but the Duke’s secret service agents did not fail him, and when he learned that de Vendôme was to move southwards from his camp at Alost on July 9, he determined to outstrip him by starting from Asche long before dawn on the same day. As the reinforcements from the Rhine had not yet arrived, in point of actual numbers the Allies were considerably weaker than the French; but Eugene, leaving his own troops many marches behind him, had recently joined the English general--and the mere presence of Eugene was in itself worth many thousand men. In a straight line the Allies and the French had about the same distance, twenty miles, to march, but by the roads followed by the Allies the mileage was nearly fifty per cent greater. Almost without a pause, Marlborough’s troops tramped steadily from 2 A.M. till noon, when, with fifteen miles to their credit, they halted till the evening, though Cadogan’s detachment of eight squadrons and as many battalions was allowed only four hours’ rest before starting for Lessines, thirteen miles farther on. Throughout the night the main body pressed forward and reached their destination to find that their exertions had not been thrown away--they had outmarched the French: no enemy was in sight, and Cadogan, who had struggled into Lessines at midnight, had already thrown several pontoon bridges across the river Dender. Not until the Allies had reached their camping ground did the heads of the French columns begin to show on the horizon; and when de Vendôme and the Duke of Burgundy realised that Marlborough lay between them and France, they abandoned all hope of besieging Oudenarde, and fell back on the Scheldt to secure the safety of Bruges.

Marlborough decided to follow them, and Cadogan with eleven thousand troops of all arms, including Sabine’s brigade of the 8th, XVIIIth, 23rd, and 37th regiments, quietly left the camp in the small hours of July 11. The duty of this advance-guard was to make all preparations for the crossing from the right bank of the Scheldt to the left by the main body, which was due to arrive at Oudenarde a few hours after Cadogan. Between 10 and 11 A.M. its cavalry scouts had crossed the river a few hundred yards below the town, and were riding up to the thickly enclosed table-land between the principal stream and its northern affluent, the Norken,[48] when they saw to their front a number of French troopers scouring the country for forage. Vendôme had marched down the right bank to Gavre, a few miles below Oudenarde, and was then in process of crossing the Scheldt. These foraging parties were part of the French advance-guard, for de Vendôme, who apparently had taken no steps to watch the movements of the Allies, was so unconscious of danger that many of his men had been allowed to disperse. The French Horse, however, quickly recovered from their surprise at finding Marlborough on their heels, and drove back our scouts, discovering in the course of the pursuit that a body of his cavalry was on the plateau near the village of Eyne, and that some of the bridges over the river near Oudenarde were in his hands.

As soon as de Vendôme realised the situation he decided to form along the slopes overlooking the Scheldt; the line was to stretch from Heurne on his left to Mooregem on his right, and after ordering a detachment of cavalry and seven battalions to occupy Heurne, he rode back to report his dispositions to the Duke of Burgundy, whom he found at breakfast. French writers say that the Prince greatly disliked any interruption at his meals, and the news that the Allies were on the same bank of the river as himself was very unwelcome. There was already great friction between the Prince and his military “bearleader”; and to vent his spleen upon the Marshal the Duke of Burgundy peremptorily rejected the veteran’s plan, and insisted on preparing to give battle, not close to the bank of the Scheldt, where there was a good chance of crushing Marlborough’s columns as they came piece-meal into action, but two miles farther back, on the far side of the Norken, with his left at Asper and his right at Wannegem. From that moment things began to go wrong with the French. In the confusion caused by the rejection of the Marshal’s scheme no one thought of recalling the cavalry and infantry ordered to Heurne: and these luckless troops marched steadily towards a village which they believed to be Heurne, though it proved to be the hamlet of Eyne, well within the reach of Cadogan’s infantry.

While the French generals were laboriously forming their army behind the Norken, Cadogan was throwing pontoon bridges over the Scheldt, and anxiously scanning the horizon for the clouds of dust which would herald the march of the main body of the Allies. But the day was stifling, the roads narrow and bad; it was not until two o’clock in the afternoon that the heads of the columns began to reach the river, and thus set Cadogan free to secure for his chief a good foothold on the left bank. The first thing to be done was to drive the French out of Eyne; and a body of Hanoverian cavalry and three brigades of infantry from the advance-guard were ordered to attack the village. Sabine’s brigade of British was in front, and as it was led by the Royal Irish, the XVIIIth was the first regiment under fire at the battle of Oudenarde. Though the garrison of Eyne were conscious that they had been stranded in an impossible position, so far in advance of their main line that they could not hope to be reinforced, they fought well at first; but when they realised that they were heavily outnumbered they lost heart: three battalions surrendered: the others were hustled out of the village at the point of the bayonet, and then fell into the hands of the Hanoverians, who after cutting them to pieces charged the detachment of French cavalry posted near Eyne and chased it into the marshes of the Norken.[49] Cadogan followed up his success by pushing two Prussian regiments towards Groenewald, thus to some extent protecting the right flank of the main body as it crossed the Scheldt.

The French troops who had been powerless to help their comrades at Eyne became clamorous to avenge them, and the Duke of Burgundy, seeing how slowly the Allies defiled over the bridges, determined to take the offensive, and ordered his right and centre to advance. About five o’clock a formidable mass of infantry threatened Groenewald, where the Prussians would have fared badly had they not been reinforced at once by twelve battalions of the advance-guard, who, as they came into action, prolonged the line to the left--_i.e._, southwards, towards the hamlet of Schaerken. But as the French continued to gain ground on this part of the field twenty battalions from the main body were flung into the fray, and by continuing to extend to the left as they joined the fighting line, repulsed a dangerous attempt by the enemy to turn the left of the Allies at this point.

In the enclosures round Groenewald every hedge and ditch became a miniature fortress, taken and retaken as the tide of battle ebbed and flowed; and near the village of Schaerken the Allies could hardly keep the enemy in check until the Duke reinforced this part of the line. Then slowly, and with great difficulty, the Dutch and Hanoverians forced the French back a few hundred yards to Diepenbeck; but there they met with so stubborn a resistance that they could gain no further ground. Some writers say that the French infantry had fallen back to a belt of abattis prepared earlier in the day; be that as it may, the fact remains that at this point de Vendôme’s infantry fought magnificently, and brought Marlborough’s foot soldiers to a standstill. Fortunately the Duke had in hand a reserve of some twenty battalions and many squadrons, all of whom had so recently crossed the river that they had not yet come into action; and with these troops he turned the right of the enemy’s line, drove in the outer flank of their infantry, and after dispersing a body of de Vendôme’s cavalry fell upon the right rear of the French army. About this time, but far too late to influence the issue of the battle, the Duke of Burgundy ordered his left to move forward; but his foot soldiers did nothing, and his horsemen were paralysed by the sight of the British regiments of cavalry, drawn up on the far side of the swamp across which they were called upon to advance. Thus the combat resolved itself into a struggle round the villages of Groenewald and Diepenbeck, and as night fell the flashes of the muskets showed that the French line, ever growing thinner and narrower, was hour by hour more closely hemmed in on front and flank and rear by Marlborough’s infantry. Soon it became too dark to distinguish friend from foe, and after parties from the right and left wings of the Allies had met in rear of the French position and fired into each other, Marlborough ordered his weary troops to break off the battle, to halt where they stood, and be ready to resume the combat at dawn next day. But at daybreak there was no enemy to fight. When the French right flank was turned the Duke of Burgundy again quarrelled fiercely with de Vendôme. The General tried to keep the army together; the Prince insisted on an immediate retreat; the troops lost their discipline, and following the example of Louis XIV.’s grandson, a mass of runaways--generals and private soldiers, horse, foot and artillery--streamed off the field. Not all the French broke, however: by dint of de Vendôme’s personal exertions he rallied enough officers and men to form the rear-guard, with which he covered the “stampede” to Ghent.

The French lost about 6000 killed and wounded, and 9000 prisoners;[50] and (according to Millner) we took from them 10 guns, 56 pairs of colours, 52 standards, and 4500 horses. The casualties among the Allies were about 3000 killed or wounded, more than half of which were among the Dutch. The British suffered very little, 53 officers and men being killed and 177 wounded. The Royal Irish, though the first regiment to come in action, were extremely lucky in losing only a lieutenant and 8 private soldiers killed and 12 wounded.[51]

While Marlborough’s troops were enjoying forty-eight hours’ well-earned rest, an audacious project was forming itself in their great leader’s brain. He knew that an expedition was being prepared in England for a descent on the coast of Normandy, and that to meet it many battalions would be drawn off from the centre of France. The Duke of Burgundy’s army was reeling under the stroke of Oudenarde, and would take weeks to recover itself. Why should not the Allies profit by this favourable combination of circumstances, and leaving a detachment to watch the garrison of Lille, neglect that great frontier fortress and carry the war into the very heart of France? But the scheme was too daring, even for Eugene, who insisted that Lille must be captured as a preliminary to a serious invasion. So the Duke made up his mind to reduce Lille, and marching across the French frontier formed a camp near Commines, levying large contributions from the neighbouring towns, while he began his preparations for the siege. A single detail will be enough to show how enormous these preparations were--the staff had to collect 16,000 horses to drag the big guns and ammunition over the seventy-five miles of villanous road between Lille and Brussels, where the heavy ordnance was stored.

The arrival of the Duke of Berwick[52] with large reinforcements from the Rhine raised the Duke of Burgundy’s strength to at least 100,000 combatants. To meet them Marlborough had only 84,000 troops; but when after many weeks’ delay his huge convoy started from Brussels, he manœuvred so brilliantly that the enemy was never able to come within striking distance of its cumbrous length. It was not until the 22nd of August that the Allies broke ground before Lille, which every Frenchman regarded as impregnable, for on its fortification Vauban had lavished all his skill, 150 guns and mortars frowned from its works, and Marshal de Boufflers commanded its garrison of 15,000 picked men. The siege was to be carried on by Eugene, while from Helchin on the Scheldt Marlborough covered the operations with the field army. Among Eugene’s troops the British were not strongly represented: “only five regiments were detailed for regular work in the trenches”[53]--the 16th, 21st, 23rd, 24th, and as hard knocks were to be expected, it is scarcely necessary to add, the XVIIIth also. The Duke had hardly finished his lines of circumvallation, or, in modern language, the works protecting his own front and Eugene’s rear, when he learned that the Duke of Burgundy was advancing to the relief of Lille. For a week the armies lay opposite each other. Marlborough and Eugene were anxious to attack the French, whose position was so bad that Berwick saw nothing but defeat in store for them if they gave battle; but once again the Dutch deputies threw away splendid chances by refusing to allow their troops to fight. The French generals, though under positive orders from Louis to wipe out their disgrace at Oudenarde by winning a great battle near Lille, declined the combat, and withdrew to devote themselves to the safer task of harassing the Allies’ line of communication. By taking up and holding strongly positions running along the Scheldt and the Scarpe from Ghent to Douai, they hoped to intercept all convoys from Brussels, at that time the Duke’s chief source of supply, but they forgot that in Ostend, which Marlborough had recaptured two years before, he possessed on the open sea a port within easy distance of England. The troops which had just returned from the expedition to Normandy--an expedition as futile as most of our similar enterprises seemed fated to be--were landed at Ostend, where they were employed most usefully in forming a new base.

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]

As soon as Marlborough saw that the defence of Tournai was weakening, he marched a large force towards the lines of La Bassée; again demonstrated against de Villars, whom he puzzled completely, and then, after a march of forty-nine miles in fifty-six hours, in pouring rain over roads knee-deep in mud, swooped upon Mons, a town important to the French, though at that time only weakly held. When de Villars slowly realised that the Duke had no intention of wasting his strength in storming highly fortified lines, he advanced with 95,000 men, and entrenched himself at the Trouée d’Aulnoit, one of the few gaps in a belt of woodland which lay a few miles to the south of Mons. He outnumbered the Allies so greatly that they decided not to attack him until the troops left to level the siege-works at Tournai had rejoined headquarters, and thus made Marlborough’s numerical strength equal to that of his opponent. These troops, among which were the XVIIIth and several other British regiments, were ordered up at once, but while they were on the march de Villars, by working night and day, rendered his position very formidable. His right rested on the forest of Laignières, half a mile from the village of Malplaquet,[59] which has given its name to the battle of the 11th of September, 1709: his centre ran across the southern end of the gap, which was open, fairly level, and about 2000 yards in width: his left was thrown forward into the continuous series of woods known respectively as those of Taignières, Blangies, and Sart. Across his centre he built long lines of trenches, gun emplacements, chains of abattis, and many strong redans; the woods on his flanks were similarly protected, and when the attackers had forced their way through the abattis which fringed the edges they came under the fire of field-works hidden in the depths of the forest. The weak point of the position was that cavalry could only act offensively on the plain--_i.e._, the gap between the woods; and as this open ground was covered with defences Villars had to draw up his Horse in rear of the rest of his troops, where they would be unable to come into action unless the Allies broke through some part of the front line.

For the attack of this position, which from the nature of its fortifications had virtually become a fortress, the Duke issued the following orders: The Prince of Orange with thirty-one battalions, most of which were Dutch, was to make a demonstration against the right of the French line; sixty-eight battalions were to assail the northern and eastern faces of the woods of Taignières and Sart; while General Withers, with five British and fourteen foreign battalions, was to strike and turn the extreme left of the enemy’s line at the village of La Folie. As the pressure on the French left became intense, the Duke expected (as did actually happen) that de Villars would draw largely from his centre to reinforce the point of danger; then fifteen British battalions and other infantry, till then held back in the centre, were to be launched at the works in the gap, capture them, and thus win a passage for the allied cavalry, which was then to crash through Villars’ centre and cut his army in twain. The heavier guns were massed into two great batteries--one playing on the enemy’s right, the other on his left.

Though the advanced parties of the hostile armies watched each other throughout the night at little more than a musket’s shot distance, nothing happened to disturb the few hours’ rest which the Duke allowed his men.[60] Long before daylight the troops were under arms, and when morning service had been read at the head of every regiment, the Duke rode through his army, correcting faulty dispositions and sending to their places in the line of battle the horse and dragoons who during the night had arrived from Tournai. They had left behind them on the road the infantry, who came on as best they could, the last to reach the battlefield being the Royal Irish, whose march was retarded by the slow-moving guns they had to escort.[61] After an hour’s artillery duel Marlborough began to carry his plan into effect, and launched his infantry columns against Villars’ flanks. At first things went well. His right made some progress, though in the woods of Taignières and Sart the French fought superbly, disputing every inch of ground, and by vigorous counter-attacks often sending their assailants reeling back upon their supports; and on his left the Prince of Orange kept the enemy occupied in the forest of Laignières by his feigned attack. Suddenly, in direct defiance of his orders from the Duke, this General took upon himself to attack in real earnest; but the French fell upon his column with such resistless energy that the Dutch, stubborn fighters as they were, were driven back with hideous slaughter. Marlborough received this startling news with composure; he directed the Prince of Orange to content himself with holding the French without again attacking them; and confident of ultimate success, in no way altered his original dispositions.

While the Prince of Orange was being buffeted on the left, Eugene, who commanded on the right flank, was forcing the French backwards through the woods. The process, though slow and very costly, was sure; and when de Villars, who had taken charge of the French left, heard that the red-coats of Withers’ column were appearing on his flank at La Folie, he did exactly what Marlborough expected him to do, and weakened his centre to reinforce his left. Three brigades, one of them composed of the Irishmen who had done so well at Blenheim, hurried up to de Villars’ help, plunged into the wood, and drove the Allies back on their supports. In this charge the Irish Brigade with reckless valour pursued so far that they lost their formation, and the whole or part of one of its battalions found itself alone in a glade, where it was attacked by the Royal Irish. The XVIIIth had come so late into action that it had been sent off to the extreme right of the whole army, where, in modern phraseology, it seems to have acted “on its own,” and according to Parker marched on till it came

“to an open in the wood. It was a small plain, on the opposite
side of which we perceived a battalion of the enemy drawn up.
Upon this Colonel Kane who was then at the head of the regiment,
having drawn us up and formed our Platoons, advanced gently
towards them, and the six Platoons of our first fire made ready.
When we had advanced within a hundred yards of them, they gave us
a fire of one of their ranks, whereupon we halted, and returned
them the fire of our six Platoons at once; and immediately made
ready the six Platoons of our second fire, and advanced upon
them again. They then gave us the fire of another rank, and we
returned them a second fire, which made them shrink; however they
gave us the fire of a third rank after a scattering manner, and
then retired into the wood in great disorder, on which we sent
our third fire after them, and saw them no more. We advanced
cautiously up to the ground which they had quitted and found
several of them, killed and wounded; among the latter was one
Lieutenant O’Sullivan, who told us the battalion we had engaged
was the Royal Regiment of Ireland in the French service.”

In this skirmish the XVIIIth, or Royal regiment of Foot of Ireland, had but few casualties; while the Iro-Gallic regiment, as “their opposite number” in Louis’ army was termed, is said to have lost several officers and about forty men.[62]

While the Irishmen were settling their quarrel, the climax of the battle was approaching. Eugene had rallied his infantry in the wood of Taignières, and was struggling to hold his own against the fresh troops which de Villars in person led against him. Both generals were wounded--Eugene was struck on the head by a musket-ball, but refused to leave the fighting line to have his injury attended to by a surgeon; de Villars, hard hit in the leg, made a gallant effort to direct the battle from a chair, but swooning from pain was carried away insensible to the nearest village. Though deprived of their leader, the French fought obstinately, and on the right of the allied line the combat raged without any decisive result, neither side knowing that when the three brigades were moved from the centre to the left of de Villars’ line, Marlborough had ordered the Dutch forward on his left, and had hurled himself against the heart of the French position. Orkney’s fifteen battalions of British infantry, who for many hours had been waiting for their chance, were let loose against the redans across their front, and carrying them after a sharp fight, promptly lined with marksmen the reverse parapets--_i.e._, those looking backwards into the enemy’s second line. On the left, the Dutch infantry atoned for their mistake in the morning by capturing not only the wood of Laignières, but the abattis and trenches connecting it with the works now in the hands of the red-coated battalions, and the Dutch cavalry poured through the openings won by their infantry comrades. But in the scramble over shelter trenches and abattis their ranks became disordered, and before they had time to re-form they were attacked by the Gendarmerie, and forced to take shelter under the muskets of Orkney’s battalions, whose steady shooting beat off the French and gained time for Marlborough to come up with the British and Prussian horse. These were driving the Gendarmerie backwards, when a splendid counter-attack of the French Household troops crashed through their first line, penetrated the second, and threw the third into confusion. At that moment Eugene, dashing up bloodstained from his wound, threw his last squadrons against the enemy’s flank; Louis’ Bodyguard wavered and gave way, and de Boufflers, on whom the command had devolved after de Villars was wounded, seeing that his centre was pierced, his right dislodged, and his left beaten though not routed, ordered a retreat.

His retirement was quite unmolested by the Allies, who were too much exhausted to pursue an enemy who after such a desperate struggle was still able to retire in good order. Marlborough had begun the engagement with about 95,000 troops, but by three o’clock in the afternoon twenty thousand of his men were killed or wounded. Millner’s analysis of the casualties shows that the Germans lost 5321 officers and men; the Prussians, 1694; the Hanoverians, 2219; the Dutch (thanks to the Prince of Orange’s untimely movement), 8680; and the British, 1783. In the British contingent 32 officers were killed and 111 wounded; among the other ranks, 492 were killed and 1073 wounded. Of the XVIIIth, two officers were wounded, four men killed and six wounded.[63] Though the French lost the day, only twelve thousand of their men fell; and the only trophies of the victory left in the hands of the Allies were sixteen guns, five hundred prisoners, and many standards.

Three days after the battle the Duke resumed the siege of Mons, where the Royal Irish were among the regiments of the covering force, and when the fall of the fortress brought the campaign to an end, the XVIIIth returned to its usual winter quarters in the town of Ghent.

OUDENARDE
July 11, 1708

BLENHEIM
August 13, 1704

RAMILLES
May 23, 1706

MALPLAQUET
Sept. 11, 1709

W. & A.K. Johnston Limited, Edinburgh & London.]

Though no great battle occurred in 1710, the army in Flanders was by no means idle. As Marlborough failed to induce Villars to try conclusions with him in the field, he began to prepare for a future invasion of France by the successive capture of the fortresses of Douai, St Venant, Bethune, and Aire. The XVIIIth was in the besieging force at Aire, where the small garrison defended itself gallantly for nearly ten weeks, not surrendering until it had lost about 1400 men and inflicted nearly five times as many casualties on the attackers. Nothing is known of the work done in this siege by the XVIIIth; Stearne and Parker contented themselves with recording that owing to the capture of a convoy food was very scarce in camp,[64] and that the regiment had three officers killed and five wounded, with about eighty casualties among the other ranks.[65]