Читать книгу Marlborough and the War of the Spanish Succession - G. W. L. Nicholson - Страница 12

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Marlborough recommended to the Allied planners a vigorous offensive in Flanders that would compel the French to reinforce their army there, and so curtail their activities along the Upper Rhine. As usual the Dutch, clinging to the idea that "to reduce fortresses was the whole art of war", would agree only to besieging Bonn, the capture of which would free the whole Lower Rhine (the fortress of Rheinberg having been taken early in February in a winter siege).

The investment of Bonn began on 27 April, much earlier than the French had expected Allied campaigning to start. Marlborough took personal charge of the operation, placing a covering army of 15,000 men under the Dutch Marshal Overkirk between Liége and Maastricht. This relatively small force was soon attacked by Villeroi, who, surprised and angered by Marlborough's sudden move, thought to recapture Liége while the Allies were occupied with the siege of Bonn. A heroic stand at Tongres by two Allied battalions delayed a French army of 40,000 men more than a day, and the timely arrival of 10,000 British reinforcements, coupled with the support of the fortress guns of Maastricht, provided Overkirk with a sufficiently powerful argument to compel a French retirement. This check of the enemy at the Meuse gave Marlborough the time he needed at Bonn. By pressing the siege with the utmost vigour (the general bombardment employed the unprecedented fire-power of ninety large mortars of up to 8 inches in calibre, 500 smaller mortars and more than 500 guns) he forced a capitulation on May 15—less than forty-eight hours after Villeroi had shamefacedly withdrawn from before Maastricht.

The Duke hastened back to the Meuse, and immediately set afoot his next project. He called it "the great design", and aptly so, for it was a bold plan to capture Antwerp by mounting four widely separated attacks against the French. The thrust on the big port itself was to be made by General Opdam advancing southward from Bergen-op-Zoom, to which base twenty battalions from the Bonn operation were transported in troop barges down the swiftly flowing Rhine. At the same time a diversionary attack would be made sixty miles to the west against Ostend by another force under the noted Dutch engineer, Baron Cohorn, a master of siege warfare and inventor of the small grenade-throwing mortar to which he gave his name. Marlborough himself would pin down Villeroi by moving his main army south-westward from Maastricht to threaten the fortress of Huy, which commanded the Meuse between Liége and Namur. A final diversion was assigned to the fleet, which was to simulate an assault against Dieppe on the French coast.

But "the great design" failed, less from any weakness in the plan or strength of enemy opposition, than from the failure of Marlborough's subordinates to carry out their allotted tasks. The Commander-in-Chief himself succeeded in drawing Villeroi well down towards Huy, but in the north Cohorn, whose merit as a tactician seems to have fallen short of his skill as an engineer, instead of attacking Ostend obtained permission from The Hague to go on a plundering raid into the region between Antwerp and Bruges. For nearly three weeks the armies of Marlborough and Villeroi faced each other north of Huy while the Duke waited in vain for the States-General to make Cohorn carry out his original assignment, and so force a detachment from the garrison at Antwerp. At the end of June, Opdam, without co-ordinating his actions with the other Allied forces, advanced with 10,000 troops to within four miles of Antwerp. He was met and defeated by Marshal Boufflers' army of nearly 40,000, which Villeroi had rushed northward behind the Brabant Lines.

The main armies on both sides had been drawn towards Antwerp by Opdam's ill-timed move, but Marlborough's proposal to force an engagement a few miles south of the city was rejected. Throughout the summer the Dutch refused to sanction any attack on the French lines, and he had to be content with the siege of two not very important fortresses—Huy, which fell on August 25, and Limbourg, ten miles east of Liége, which was taken on September 27.

The obstruction of the Dutch parliament and its generals was intolerable to Marlborough (indeed, he made up his mind to resign his command), for a victory in Flanders was particularly desirable in view of Allied setbacks elsewhere. Marshal Villars, after capturing the fortress of Kehl on the east bank of the Rhine opposite Strasbourg, had crossed the Black Forest and joined the Elector Max Emmanuel, so that now the French had a clear path from Lorraine to Bavaria. On September 20 Villars and the Elector soundly defeated an Imperial army at Hochstadt on the Danube, and the Elector's capture of Augsburg shortly afterwards still further opened a way to Vienna. Only a spirited uprising by the peasantry of Tyrol against the Elector's attempt to overrun their country prevented his Bavarian army from linking up with Marshal Vendôme, who was ready to come through the Brenner Pass from Italy. Finally, Marshal Tallard's recapture of Landau in November deprived the Grand Alliance of a useful outpost in the valley of the Upper Rhine.

This gloomy balance sheet reflected two minor Allied gains, although neither of them achieved by force of arms. In September Victor Amadeus, whose Duchy of Savoy-Piedmont guarded the Alpine passes between Italy and France, had quarrelled with Louis XIV and declared for the Allies. There had been no major activity at sea; but an alliance with Portugal had given the English and Dutch fleets the use of Lisbon and Lagos.

The Allied reverses do not seem to have greatly worried the Dutch. Far from sharing Marlborough's disappointment they regarded the campaign of 1703 as quite successful, and in celebration struck a medal showing the Duke receiving the keys of the three fortresses he had captured and inscribed with what he must surely have regarded as a most dubious tribute—"Victorious without slaughter, by the taking of Bonn, Huy, and Limburg". While this motto epitomizes the Dutch concept of warfare, it is hard to think of a less appropriate allusion to Marlborough's aspirations and achievements in the campaign just completed. For him it had been a year wasted in passively safeguarding the Dutch frontier; as in 1702, recurring opportunities of smashing the armies of the French king had been thrown away.

But although for two years Marlborough had not been allowed to demonstrate conclusively his tactical skill in battle, he had during that time given ample evidence of the military genius that was to win him the great victories of the next six years. If we may apply to the years 1702-3 the Principles of War generally recognized by modern students of military science[16] we shall see the measure of Marlborough's superiority over his Dutch Allies. The two campaigns demonstrate above everything else his firm belief in the necessity for Offensive Action—a conviction which sets him far apart from most of his contemporaries. Just as apparent was the Allied failure to agree on the Selection and Maintenance of the Aim—the non-observance of this primary principle, as demonstrated in the diverging views on strategy held by Marlborough and the Dutch, was more than anything else responsible for the Allied lack of success. The Dutch insistence on tying down large forces along their borders in a passive role of defence violated the principle of Economy of Effort; fortunately for the Allied cause this was to some extent offset by Marlborough's Flexibility—notably in his manoeuvres between Eindhoven and Helchteren in August 1702, and the speed with which he redisposed his forces after the capture of Bonn in the following May. The mobility with which the Duke executed these tactics enabled him to achieve effective Surprise, although circumstances did not permit him to reap its benefits. We shall see more of this use of mobility, however, in subsequent campaigns, when the genius which employed it will at last be allowed to reap its just rewards.