The Great Frost 1709 was an interesting year in Europe. It started out as the coldest. Rivers froze, Louis XIV in Versailles was having his wine freeze on the table before he could drink it, Liselotte was barely able to write for shivering, icicles were hanging from the ceilings, and if that's what it was like in the palaces, you can imagine what it was like for the peasants. Death, mostly.
(I ran across the Great Frost while researching the winters in early 18th century Europe for my fix-it fic, because there's going to have to be some winter traveling, and it turns out 1730 was a very mild winter (which is also good to know for real-life people who had to take off their shirt on the morning of November 6), but 1709 was the coldest between about 1500 and the present day. Then I realized Katte would have been just barely old enough to remember: 4-5 years old, and therefore some of his earliest memories may well have been about being freezing cold.)
Even once spring came, there was massive flooding due to the melting snow and ice, which meant poor crops, which meant even more famine.
Peace Talks So now Louis has an army he can't pay, feed, or clothe, and his ministers are actually at the point of, "Do we feed the peasants, or do we hope they revolt over the price of bread so we can crush them and confiscate their supplies and feed our army again?"
To make matters worse, the French army has been getting its butt kicked for several years now. In part because Louis' gotten overconfident, in part because Eugene and Marlborough are actually really good at what they do, and in part because the selection process for "Who gets to command the French armies" is "Who's from the best families and BFFs with Louis?" not "Who can kick Allied butt?"
So in the spring of 1709, Louis has actually offered peace on pretty demanding terms. He's offered to give up territory and to acknowledge Archduke Charles as the King of Spain. But the Allies are so drunk on success, they refuse his terms.
So he manages to supply his army by dint of letting his generals ravage the countryside and take what food they can find, which has the added benefit (?) of making it more lucrative to be in the army than not to. So the French army gets a lot of "volunteers" consisting of people who don't want to starve.
Meanwhile, by 1709, the French have run through a bunch of fail-generals, and they've actually got a good one now (Villars)! So they've got a fighting chance!
But they've only got the one chance, so they have to use it well. One army, which is not very well supplied even now, and the Allies are prowling up and down the border with the Netherlands capturing fortresses.
Strategery The Battle of Malplaquet revolves around these very simple strategies:
Allies: Force our way past the French border and march on Paris. French: Don't let the Allies into France!
So Malplaquet is fought on what is today the French/Belgian border (like, literally, the battlefield straddles the border), and my sources differ on where exactly the border was in 1709 (possibly because it was currently being hotly contested!), but either there or close, anyway.
Here's a map with a marker showing the battle site. The Allies are in present-day Belgium and want to advance on Paris. The French have one army with which to defend France.
The two armies meet near the village of Malplaquet.
Who's There Eugene and Marlborough, of whom we know. (I have a late 19th century bio of Eugene that's fairly out of date but was the best I could find two years ago. Will read it or find osmething better at some point.)
Grumbkow, busy two-timing as per usual.
FW, still Crown Prince.
Alte Dessauer, learning a lot from watching Marlborough in this war, lessons that he will apply to the restructuring of the Prussian army, and which will therefore have a huge impact on Frederician warfare. (Fritz was not a big innovator when it came to the army. He made some changes, mostly to the cavalry, but kept a great many things the way FW had left them: meaning, Marlborough-style.)
Old Pretender/James III, son of James II. Suffering from a fever but determined, he takes a bunch of quinine and fights like his claim to the throne depends on it.
Hans Heinrich von Katte, widowed about a year and a half ago. Five-yo son currently being raised by Grandpa Wartensleben, apparently.
Maurice de Saxe/Moritz von Sachsen, illegitimate son of August the Strong, future famous general, currently 12 years old.
And some 180,000 other people. Most nationalities in Europe (and since there are more and smaller nations, that means a *long* list) are represented. Except Spain, ironically.
The Battlefield Rather than walk you through the stages of this battle, because it was complicated and involves many, many actors and phases, I'm going to give you a visual to go with a description of the basic tactics, and then talk about why the battle ended up being the bloodiest of its century.
Here's the battlefield. Black rectangles are the Allies, white are the French. The Allies are coming down from Belgium, the French are trying to block the way to Paris.
What you need to know about the battlefield:
1) There was a forest on each side: the woods of Sars and of Lainieres.
2) There was a gap between the woods, in which the French stretched out their army from one wood to the other.
3) The French built a bunch of earthwork-and-palisade type fortifications.
4) The roads were very important, because the Allies were trying to press into France and the French were trying to stop them.
So the Allies are trying to push toward the lower left of the map, so they can head toward Paris after crushing the French army, while the French are trying to interpose themselves and hopefully crush the Allied army so they can't even think about making a move on Paris.
Why So Bloody? This was an unusual battle in many respects, and a number of factors combined to make it a very bloody battle. Here are some of those factors.
1) Aggressive generals on both sides: Marlborough, Eugene, and the French commander Villars. Most generals like marching around and attacking supply lines. These are three oddities for their time.
And let's not even get started on the Prince of Orange, who just kept ordering suicidal attacks against a fortified French position despite being badly outnumbered. His troops would attack, be slaughtered, have to fall back, and he'd order another attack. And he kept doing that! He survived, but almost no one else in that spot did. (He's controversial because it's not clear to what extent he was following orders versus being gratuitously suicidally brave.)
Furthermore, Marlborough writes to his wife Sarah shortly before the battle that if he has an army this size and an opportunity this good to end the war, and he doesn't take it, it's all over for the Marlboroughs. They're already starting to slide out of favor.
2) Paradoxically: the hesitation of all three commanders to attack. Both sides had ample opportunity to attack in the 5 days leading up to the battle, but neither side felt confident enough to do so.
You see, when you're marching around, you can more or less control your army and the outcome of events (modulo some desertion). You can keep track of what's going on, and have some assurance that at the end, you'll still have an army. Once you start a battle, you lose almost all control over events, you can't predict what's going to happen, you have very little idea of what's going on except in your immediate vicinity, and you may or may not still have an army at the end.
So, for example, on September 6-7, the marching Allies are strung out and disunited, and the already-in-position French could have attacked and done some serious damage, maybe won a decisive battle...but the French were still barely able to feed their army, it was the last army they had, the stakes (Paris) were high, and they hesitated.
Instead, the French decided to start fortifying their position and fight a defensive battle.
Conversely, on September 8-10, the Allies had an opportunity to attack the French when they were vulnerable, but they hesitated, because much of their army hadn't arrived yet, they particularly didn't have the artillery they were expecting in a couple days, and the French were in a much stronger position. So they held off on the attack.
And then the French realized that with every passing day, their fortifications became stronger, so they bought as much time as they could.
3) The longer everyone waited, the more troops arrived, and so the armies got bigger and bigger. Since 20% casualties in a big army is a much bigger number than 20% casualties in a smaller army, the fact that both sides had somewhere in the 75,000-90,000 range (my sources differ) meant that when this turned out to be a hard-fought battle, the ultimate casualties were high.
4) French fortifications. You don't normally, in the 18th century, have a pitched battle on a plain with this kind of entrenchments. That's siege stuff.
Normally, in a pitched battle like this, one side gets out of the kitchen when they can't stand the heat: meaning they flee. Meaning the next day, they're still fighting soldiers. But because of the fortifications, both sides at various points in the battle ended up in situations where they had nowhere to retreat, or they had to expose themselves to artillery to do so.
5) Ditto the forests.
Between the forests and the fortifications, you ended up with hand-to-hand combat between soldiers with bayonets, which went against the grain for most of them. Normally, advancing infantry would fire en masse at an opposing line, not aiming at anything in particular, and one side would advance, and when casualties got high, one side would break and run, and the other side would be too relieved and disorganized to pursue.
Honestly, if you were an infantry soldier in the 18th century, there was a decent chance you couldn't even tell if you'd killed anyone. Between muskets having basically no ability to aim and the tactics of firing blindly, and the tendency of nervous and sometimes conscripted soldiers to instinctively or intentionally fire too high, the rate of fired bullets meeting their targets could be 1 in 100 or 1 in 200.
But here, toward the middle of the battle in Malplaquet, once the Allies had advanced on the fortifications and broken past them in some cases, they were trapped in a small space having to stab people while looking them in the eye (and sometimes rescuing each other), which was deeply traumatic in a way that their experience and training had not equipped them to deal with. So casualties are high, and the whole experience is just shocking in a way that even a normal battle--already stressful!--wasn't.
6) And then we come back to our aggressive generals. Most generals, having met with the kinds of reverses that Eugene and Marlborough met with early on in the battle, would have decided this wasn't working, pulled back their troops, and tried marching off in a different direction to attack a fortress or a supply line or something.
Marlborough and Eugene: "The attack isn't working? ATTACK HARDER."
(This seeing eye to eye on not doing things the normal way is one of the reasons they got along so well.)
For an example of how these factors worked together, consider that there were 6 cavalry charges between 1 and 2 pm, in what ended up being the biggest cavalry battle of the age. Normally, you can't get a cavalry to attack 6 times. Never mind the men, the horses won't stand for it! Once there's a bunch of loud noises and blood and dead bodies to trip over, everything dissolves into chaos. You get one charge, and that's it.
The fact that Seydlitz managed to charge twice in Rossbach was a sign of just how one-sided the battle was, and the fact that he held off at Zorndorf under threats from Fritz to have his head, was precisely because he knew he'd get one chance, and he'd better make the most of it. (Fritz later, with the benefit of hindsight, admitted Seydlitz made the right call there.)
But here we are at Malplaquet, and you've got commanders that won't give up, and an army, both infantry and cavalry, that can't effectively retreat because of fortifications.
And the slaughter is immense.
Aftermath The French end up abandoning their position and marching off, thus giving the Allies a tactical victory (whoever is in possession of the field at the end of the day is the winner). However, the Allies are in absolutely no condition to stop them from doing so in good order, meaning the French still have an army at the end of the day, one that can defend Paris.
Critically, they've even saved their artillery, which is highly unusual for a retreating army (see the tactics post for details).
Furthermore, there is no way that the Allies can even think about marching on Paris now. Their casualties are about 25,000, compared to French casualties of ~12,000 (hard to get accurate numbers, as discussed in the Blenheim post).
Villars writes to Louis that if France loses any more battles like this, the Allies are guaranteed to be destroyed, thus making a play on Pyrrhus' famous quote about defeating the Romans at high cost: "Another such victory and we are lost."
So at the end of the day, it's a tactical Pyrrhic victory for the Allies, who get to end the day on the field of Malplaquet, and a strategic victory for the French, who've managed to save Paris.
The war does not end, there's no way it can end this year, and the British (Anne) are not pleased. September 11 is too close to the end of the campaigning season to start a whole new campaign now. In the 1710 election, there will be a landslide Tory victory, because the Tories campaign on a platform of "No more endless war!" And the heavy losses at Malplaquet didn't immediately lead to Marlborough's 1711 downfall, but they contributed.
Conversely, losing this battle this way was as good for French morale as it was bad for the Allies. The situation went from the French offering humiliating terms and the Allies rejecting them because the terms weren't humiliating enough, to the Allies wanting peace, and the French getting better terms in 1712-1714 than those they had offered in 1709. It's a cautionary tale against overconfidence!
Meanwhile, in Russia... Speaking of 1709 being an interesting year for Europe, if I manage to study the Great Northern War, I'll be able to tell you more, but for now what I know is that 1708/1709 is the last winter that Charles XII's "travel light and live off the army" spends in Russia. After Russia's scorched earth policy plus the coldest winter on record, Charles XII's army is really hurting by the time it confronts Peter's at Poltava (today in Ukraine) in July 1709. The Swedish defeat at the Battle of Poltava pretty much ends Sweden as a military superpower, and nothing is ever the same for Sweden after that.
Meanwhile, in Prussia... Wilhelmine was born in interesting times, is all I can say. She was born 5 days before the battle of Poltava and 2 months and 8 days before Malplaquet, which means FW has a 2-month old daughter when he's off fighting at Malplaquet.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
Edited 2021-05-23 18:04 (UTC)
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
*applauds again at the complicated battle made accessible presentation*
For cahn, something from Horowski that illustrates what Winston C. means with "model husband" and fleshes out Marborough somewhat. As opposed to everyone else at this point, Marlborough had been updated via letter just before the battle by his wife Sarah about the way her relationship with the Queen was getting worse and worse. She'd even accused him of not supporting her enough in this because she thought it would be helpful if he wrote to Anne himself and accused her of a lack of gratitude. (Which Marlborough, somewhat more realistic about the likely result of such a letter, hadn't done.) Now, before the battle, he's started a letter to Sarah which said:
In the meantime I can't hinder saying to you, that though the fate of Europe if these armies engage may depend upon the good or bad success, yet your uneasiness gives me much greater trouble. After this bloodiest of battles, he continued the letter thusly: I am so tired that I have but strength enough to tell you that we have had this day a very bloody Bataille, the first part of the day we beat their foot and afterwards their horse. God almighty be praised, it is now in our powers to have what peace we please, and I may be pretty well assured of never being in another battle, but that nor nothing in the world can make me happy if you are not kind.
Let's hope that Sarah was kind when next they met, because this was the first big battle for which Marlborough did not receive a personal letter of congratulations from Queen Anne afterwards, and the Tories, as Mildred said, won the next elections largely as an anti-Marlborough-and-wars-on-the-continent party. When Eugene visited England in 1712, Marlborough was down and out, and not able to help with Eugene's attempt to keep the alliance together despite Charles' accession to the throne.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
This is something all modern biographers I've read seem to agree on - i.e. that Malplaquet is responsible for FW being that odd creature, a militarist of the first order with an extreme reluctance to engage in actual war. Note that cousin G2 didn't participate in the battle.
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
I honestly have nothing coherent to say about this, but it's really interesting! (I'm not as into military battles as you are -- who is? -- but I do find them interesting, especially when explained accessibly like this :) ) Particularly how it ends up to be a tactical Pyrrhic victory.
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
I'm not as into military battles as you are -- who is?
Haha, well, no one in salon, certainly! But my interest is very casual, and if you start getting into the subject, you find that there are people who are waaaaay more into them than I am.
but I do find them interesting, especially when explained accessibly like this :)
I'm glad it was accessible. My problem with a book like The War of the Spanish Succession, is that events are presented in chronological order. So you get bogged down in years of battle tactics and marches before you even have a clear picture of what's going on.
I would write military history like this:
- First, the politics, diplomacy, and personalities. - Then, military strategy. - Then, tactics.
Instead, I get, "I'm in my tenth flanking maneuver in 7 years of the war and I don't even know why this battle was important."
This is why learning not to feel bad about reading books out of order was so important! I was able to do the Spanish Succession by approaching the material strategically ;) instead of passively.
ALSO MAPS WHY NO MAPS AUTHOR?? There were maps, but aside from the march up the Rhine, the wrong maps, and too few, and I was like, "But what even is going on here???" (This is one reason you didn't get any of the battles in Spain; I don't know Spanish geography and topology nearly as well, so it was like, "Let's talk about the Rhineland and the Low Countries, where Mildred can fill in the gaps!")
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Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
1709 was an interesting year in Europe. It started out as the coldest. Rivers froze, Louis XIV in Versailles was having his wine freeze on the table before he could drink it, Liselotte was barely able to write for shivering, icicles were hanging from the ceilings, and if that's what it was like in the palaces, you can imagine what it was like for the peasants. Death, mostly.
(I ran across the Great Frost while researching the winters in early 18th century Europe for my fix-it fic, because there's going to have to be some winter traveling, and it turns out 1730 was a very mild winter (which is also good to know for real-life people who had to take off their shirt on the morning of November 6), but 1709 was the coldest between about 1500 and the present day. Then I realized Katte would have been just barely old enough to remember: 4-5 years old, and therefore some of his earliest memories may well have been about being freezing cold.)
Even once spring came, there was massive flooding due to the melting snow and ice, which meant poor crops, which meant even more famine.
Peace Talks
So now Louis has an army he can't pay, feed, or clothe, and his ministers are actually at the point of, "Do we feed the peasants, or do we hope they revolt over the price of bread so we can crush them and confiscate their supplies and feed our army again?"
To make matters worse, the French army has been getting its butt kicked for several years now. In part because Louis' gotten overconfident, in part because Eugene and Marlborough are actually really good at what they do, and in part because the selection process for "Who gets to command the French armies" is "Who's from the best families and BFFs with Louis?" not "Who can kick Allied butt?"
So in the spring of 1709, Louis has actually offered peace on pretty demanding terms. He's offered to give up territory and to acknowledge Archduke Charles as the King of Spain. But the Allies are so drunk on success, they refuse his terms.
So he manages to supply his army by dint of letting his generals ravage the countryside and take what food they can find, which has the added benefit (?) of making it more lucrative to be in the army than not to. So the French army gets a lot of "volunteers" consisting of people who don't want to starve.
Meanwhile, by 1709, the French have run through a bunch of fail-generals, and they've actually got a good one now (Villars)! So they've got a fighting chance!
But they've only got the one chance, so they have to use it well. One army, which is not very well supplied even now, and the Allies are prowling up and down the border with the Netherlands capturing fortresses.
Strategery
The Battle of Malplaquet revolves around these very simple strategies:
Allies: Force our way past the French border and march on Paris.
French: Don't let the Allies into France!
So Malplaquet is fought on what is today the French/Belgian border (like, literally, the battlefield straddles the border), and my sources differ on where exactly the border was in 1709 (possibly because it was currently being hotly contested!), but either there or close, anyway.
Here's a map with a marker showing the battle site. The Allies are in present-day Belgium and want to advance on Paris. The French have one army with which to defend France.
The two armies meet near the village of Malplaquet.
Who's There
Eugene and Marlborough, of whom we know. (I have a late 19th century bio of Eugene that's fairly out of date but was the best I could find two years ago. Will read it or find osmething better at some point.)
Grumbkow, busy two-timing as per usual.
FW, still Crown Prince.
Alte Dessauer, learning a lot from watching Marlborough in this war, lessons that he will apply to the restructuring of the Prussian army, and which will therefore have a huge impact on Frederician warfare. (Fritz was not a big innovator when it came to the army. He made some changes, mostly to the cavalry, but kept a great many things the way FW had left them: meaning, Marlborough-style.)
Old Pretender/James III, son of James II. Suffering from a fever but determined, he takes a bunch of quinine and fights like his claim to the throne depends on it.
Hans Heinrich von Katte, widowed about a year and a half ago. Five-yo son currently being raised by Grandpa Wartensleben, apparently.
Maurice de Saxe/Moritz von Sachsen, illegitimate son of August the Strong, future famous general, currently 12 years old.
And some 180,000 other people. Most nationalities in Europe (and since there are more and smaller nations, that means a *long* list) are represented. Except Spain, ironically.
The Battlefield
Rather than walk you through the stages of this battle, because it was complicated and involves many, many actors and phases, I'm going to give you a visual to go with a description of the basic tactics, and then talk about why the battle ended up being the bloodiest of its century.
Here's the battlefield. Black rectangles are the Allies, white are the French. The Allies are coming down from Belgium, the French are trying to block the way to Paris.
What you need to know about the battlefield:
1) There was a forest on each side: the woods of Sars and of Lainieres.
2) There was a gap between the woods, in which the French stretched out their army from one wood to the other.
3) The French built a bunch of earthwork-and-palisade type fortifications.
4) The roads were very important, because the Allies were trying to press into France and the French were trying to stop them.
So the Allies are trying to push toward the lower left of the map, so they can head toward Paris after crushing the French army, while the French are trying to interpose themselves and hopefully crush the Allied army so they can't even think about making a move on Paris.
Why So Bloody?
This was an unusual battle in many respects, and a number of factors combined to make it a very bloody battle. Here are some of those factors.
1) Aggressive generals on both sides: Marlborough, Eugene, and the French commander Villars. Most generals like marching around and attacking supply lines. These are three oddities for their time.
And let's not even get started on the Prince of Orange, who just kept ordering suicidal attacks against a fortified French position despite being badly outnumbered. His troops would attack, be slaughtered, have to fall back, and he'd order another attack. And he kept doing that! He survived, but almost no one else in that spot did. (He's controversial because it's not clear to what extent he was following orders versus being gratuitously suicidally brave.)
Furthermore, Marlborough writes to his wife Sarah shortly before the battle that if he has an army this size and an opportunity this good to end the war, and he doesn't take it, it's all over for the Marlboroughs. They're already starting to slide out of favor.
2) Paradoxically: the hesitation of all three commanders to attack. Both sides had ample opportunity to attack in the 5 days leading up to the battle, but neither side felt confident enough to do so.
You see, when you're marching around, you can more or less control your army and the outcome of events (modulo some desertion). You can keep track of what's going on, and have some assurance that at the end, you'll still have an army. Once you start a battle, you lose almost all control over events, you can't predict what's going to happen, you have very little idea of what's going on except in your immediate vicinity, and you may or may not still have an army at the end.
So, for example, on September 6-7, the marching Allies are strung out and disunited, and the already-in-position French could have attacked and done some serious damage, maybe won a decisive battle...but the French were still barely able to feed their army, it was the last army they had, the stakes (Paris) were high, and they hesitated.
Instead, the French decided to start fortifying their position and fight a defensive battle.
Conversely, on September 8-10, the Allies had an opportunity to attack the French when they were vulnerable, but they hesitated, because much of their army hadn't arrived yet, they particularly didn't have the artillery they were expecting in a couple days, and the French were in a much stronger position. So they held off on the attack.
And then the French realized that with every passing day, their fortifications became stronger, so they bought as much time as they could.
3) The longer everyone waited, the more troops arrived, and so the armies got bigger and bigger. Since 20% casualties in a big army is a much bigger number than 20% casualties in a smaller army, the fact that both sides had somewhere in the 75,000-90,000 range (my sources differ) meant that when this turned out to be a hard-fought battle, the ultimate casualties were high.
4) French fortifications. You don't normally, in the 18th century, have a pitched battle on a plain with this kind of entrenchments. That's siege stuff.
Normally, in a pitched battle like this, one side gets out of the kitchen when they can't stand the heat: meaning they flee. Meaning the next day, they're still fighting soldiers. But because of the fortifications, both sides at various points in the battle ended up in situations where they had nowhere to retreat, or they had to expose themselves to artillery to do so.
5) Ditto the forests.
Between the forests and the fortifications, you ended up with hand-to-hand combat between soldiers with bayonets, which went against the grain for most of them. Normally, advancing infantry would fire en masse at an opposing line, not aiming at anything in particular, and one side would advance, and when casualties got high, one side would break and run, and the other side would be too relieved and disorganized to pursue.
Honestly, if you were an infantry soldier in the 18th century, there was a decent chance you couldn't even tell if you'd killed anyone. Between muskets having basically no ability to aim and the tactics of firing blindly, and the tendency of nervous and sometimes conscripted soldiers to instinctively or intentionally fire too high, the rate of fired bullets meeting their targets could be 1 in 100 or 1 in 200.
But here, toward the middle of the battle in Malplaquet, once the Allies had advanced on the fortifications and broken past them in some cases, they were trapped in a small space having to stab people while looking them in the eye (and sometimes rescuing each other), which was deeply traumatic in a way that their experience and training had not equipped them to deal with. So casualties are high, and the whole experience is just shocking in a way that even a normal battle--already stressful!--wasn't.
6) And then we come back to our aggressive generals. Most generals, having met with the kinds of reverses that Eugene and Marlborough met with early on in the battle, would have decided this wasn't working, pulled back their troops, and tried marching off in a different direction to attack a fortress or a supply line or something.
Marlborough and Eugene: "The attack isn't working? ATTACK HARDER."
(This seeing eye to eye on not doing things the normal way is one of the reasons they got along so well.)
For an example of how these factors worked together, consider that there were 6 cavalry charges between 1 and 2 pm, in what ended up being the biggest cavalry battle of the age. Normally, you can't get a cavalry to attack 6 times. Never mind the men, the horses won't stand for it! Once there's a bunch of loud noises and blood and dead bodies to trip over, everything dissolves into chaos. You get one charge, and that's it.
The fact that Seydlitz managed to charge twice in Rossbach was a sign of just how one-sided the battle was, and the fact that he held off at Zorndorf under threats from Fritz to have his head, was precisely because he knew he'd get one chance, and he'd better make the most of it. (Fritz later, with the benefit of hindsight, admitted Seydlitz made the right call there.)
But here we are at Malplaquet, and you've got commanders that won't give up, and an army, both infantry and cavalry, that can't effectively retreat because of fortifications.
And the slaughter is immense.
Aftermath
The French end up abandoning their position and marching off, thus giving the Allies a tactical victory (whoever is in possession of the field at the end of the day is the winner). However, the Allies are in absolutely no condition to stop them from doing so in good order, meaning the French still have an army at the end of the day, one that can defend Paris.
Critically, they've even saved their artillery, which is highly unusual for a retreating army (see the tactics post for details).
Furthermore, there is no way that the Allies can even think about marching on Paris now. Their casualties are about 25,000, compared to French casualties of ~12,000 (hard to get accurate numbers, as discussed in the Blenheim post).
Villars writes to Louis that if France loses any more battles like this, the Allies are guaranteed to be destroyed, thus making a play on Pyrrhus' famous quote about defeating the Romans at high cost: "Another such victory and we are lost."
So at the end of the day, it's a tactical Pyrrhic victory for the Allies, who get to end the day on the field of Malplaquet, and a strategic victory for the French, who've managed to save Paris.
The war does not end, there's no way it can end this year, and the British (Anne) are not pleased. September 11 is too close to the end of the campaigning season to start a whole new campaign now. In the 1710 election, there will be a landslide Tory victory, because the Tories campaign on a platform of "No more endless war!" And the heavy losses at Malplaquet didn't immediately lead to Marlborough's 1711 downfall, but they contributed.
Conversely, losing this battle this way was as good for French morale as it was bad for the Allies. The situation went from the French offering humiliating terms and the Allies rejecting them because the terms weren't humiliating enough, to the Allies wanting peace, and the French getting better terms in 1712-1714 than those they had offered in 1709. It's a cautionary tale against overconfidence!
Meanwhile, in Russia...
Speaking of 1709 being an interesting year for Europe, if I manage to study the Great Northern War, I'll be able to tell you more, but for now what I know is that 1708/1709 is the last winter that Charles XII's "travel light and live off the army" spends in Russia. After Russia's scorched earth policy plus the coldest winter on record, Charles XII's army is really hurting by the time it confronts Peter's at Poltava (today in Ukraine) in July 1709. The Swedish defeat at the Battle of Poltava pretty much ends Sweden as a military superpower, and nothing is ever the same for Sweden after that.
Meanwhile, in Prussia...
Wilhelmine was born in interesting times, is all I can say. She was born 5 days before the battle of Poltava and 2 months and 8 days before Malplaquet, which means FW has a 2-month old daughter when he's off fighting at Malplaquet.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
For
In the meantime I can't hinder saying to you, that though the fate of Europe if these armies engage may depend upon the good or bad success, yet your uneasiness gives me much greater trouble. After this bloodiest of battles, he continued the letter thusly: I am so tired that I have but strength enough to tell you that we have had this day a very bloody Bataille, the first part of the day we beat their foot and afterwards their horse. God almighty be praised, it is now in our powers to have what peace we please, and I may be pretty well assured of never being in another battle, but that nor nothing in the world can make me happy if you are not kind.
Let's hope that Sarah was kind when next they met, because this was the first big battle for which Marlborough did not receive a personal letter of congratulations from Queen Anne afterwards, and the Tories, as Mildred said, won the next elections largely as an anti-Marlborough-and-wars-on-the-continent party. When Eugene visited England in 1712, Marlborough was down and out, and not able to help with Eugene's attempt to keep the alliance together despite Charles' accession to the throne.
Later, FW will celebrate the anniversary of Malplaquet every year (yay battle!) but also decide that maybe battles are to be avoided as much as possible (boo casualties!). Which may in part have to do with imprinting on the bloodiest European battle of the century.
This is something all modern biographers I've read seem to agree on - i.e. that Malplaquet is responsible for FW being that odd creature, a militarist of the first order with an extreme reluctance to engage in actual war. Note that cousin G2 didn't participate in the battle.
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
Re: War of the Spanish Succession: 1709 and Malplaquet
Haha, well, no one in salon, certainly! But my interest is very casual, and if you start getting into the subject, you find that there are people who are waaaaay more into them than I am.
but I do find them interesting, especially when explained accessibly like this :)
I'm glad it was accessible. My problem with a book like The War of the Spanish Succession, is that events are presented in chronological order. So you get bogged down in years of battle tactics and marches before you even have a clear picture of what's going on.
I would write military history like this:
- First, the politics, diplomacy, and personalities.
- Then, military strategy.
- Then, tactics.
Instead, I get, "I'm in my tenth flanking maneuver in 7 years of the war and I don't even know why this battle was important."
This is why learning not to feel bad about reading books out of order was so important! I was able to do the Spanish Succession by approaching the material strategically ;) instead of passively.
ALSO MAPS WHY NO MAPS AUTHOR?? There were maps, but aside from the march up the Rhine, the wrong maps, and too few, and I was like, "But what even is going on here???" (This is one reason you didn't get any of the battles in Spain; I don't know Spanish geography and topology nearly as well, so it was like, "Let's talk about the Rhineland and the Low Countries, where Mildred can fill in the gaps!")