The Battle of Blenheim Read Online Free PDF Page A

captains as obstacles of the first moment.
     
     

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    Map showing the peril of Marlborough’s march to the Danube,
beyond the hills which separate the Rhine from the Danube.
     
     
    The reason that obstacles of any sort present the difficulty they do to an army, and present it in the high degree which military history discovers, is twofold.
    First, an army consists in a great body of human beings, artificially gathered together under conditions which do not permit of men supplying their own wants by agriculture or other forms of labour. They are gathered together for the principal purpose of fighting. They must be fed; they must be provided with ammunition, usually with shelter and with firing, and if possible with remounts for their cavalry; reinforcements for every branch of their service must be able to reach them along known and friendly (or well-defended) roads, called their lines of communication . These must proceed from some base , that is from some secureplace in which stores of men and material can be accumulated.
    Next, it is important to notice that variations in speed between two opposed forces will nearly always put the slow at a disadvantage in the face of the more prompt. For just as in boxing the quicker man can stop one blow and get another in where the slower man would fail, or just as in football the faster runner can head off the man with the ball, so in war superior mobility is a fixed factor of advantage—but a factor far more serious than it is in any game. The force which moves most quickly can “walk round” its opponent, can choose its field for action, can strike in flank, can escape, can effect a junction where the slower force would fail.
    It is these two causes, then—the artificial character of an army, with its vast numbers collected in one place and dependent for existence upon the labour of others and the supreme importance of rapidity—which between them render obstacles that seem indifferent to a civilian in time of peace so formidable to a General upon the march.
    The heavy train, the artillery, the provisioning of the force, can in general only proceed upon good ways or by navigable rivers. At any rate, if the army departsfrom these, a rival army in possession of such means of progress will have the supreme advantage of mobility.
    Again, upon the flat an army may proceed by many parallel roads, and thus in a number of comparatively short columns, marching upon one front towards a common rendezvous. But in hilly country it will be confined to certain defiles, sometimes very few, often reduced to one practicable pass. There is no possibility of an advance by many routes in short columns, each in touch with its neighbours; the whole advance resolves itself into one interminable file.
    Now, in proportion to the length of a column, the units of which must each march one directly behind the other, do the mechanical difficulties of conducting such a column increase. Every accident or shock in the long line is aggravated in proportion to the length of the line. Finally, a force thus drawn out on the march in one exiguous and lengthy trail is in the worst possible disposition for meeting an attack delivered upon it from either side.
    All this, which is true of the actual march of the army, is equally true of its power to maintain its supply over a line of hills (to take that example of an obstacle); and therefore a line of hills, especially if thesehills be confused and steep, and especially if they be provided with but bad roads across them, will dangerously isolate an army whose general base lies upon the further side of them.
    What the reader has just read explains the peculiar character which the valley of the Upper Danube has always had in the history of Western European war.
    The Rhine and its tributaries form one great system of communications, diversified, indeed, by many local accidents of hill and marsh and forest, with which, for the purposes of this study, we need