premise without counting for
the preponderant role that cavalry played in the wars of Marlborough.

Facing the victorious English battalions of Orkney, now in possession of
the redans, stood the mile-long unbroken squadrons of the French horse.

The allied cavalry, passing between gaps in its infantry line, began to
deploy for the charge, but even as they deployed they were charged by the
French mounted men, thrust back, and thrown into confusion. The short
remainder of the battle is no more than a melee of sabres, but the nature
of that melee must be clearly grasped, and the character of the French
cavalry resistance understood, for this it was which determined the issue
of the combat and saved the army of Louis XIV.

A detailed account of the charges and counter-charges of the opposing
horse would be confusing to the reader, and is, as a fact, impossible of
narration, for no contemporary record of it remains in any form which can
be lucidly set forth.

A rough outline of what happened is this:--

The first counter-charge of the French was successful, and the allied
cavalry, caught in the act of deployment, was thrust back in confusion, as
I have said, upon the British infantry who lined the captured earthworks.

The great central battery of forty guns which Marlborough had kept all day
in the centre of the gap, split to the right and left, and, once clear of
its own troops, fired from either side upon the French horse. Shaken,
confused, and almost broken by this fire, the French horse were charged by
a new body of the allied horse led by Marlborough in person, composed of
British and Prussian units. But, just as Marlborough's charge was
succeeding, old Boufflers, bringing up the French Household Cavalry from
in front of Malplaquet village, charged right home into the flank of
Marlborough's mounted troops, bore back their first and second lines, and
destroyed the order of their third.

Thereupon Eugene, with yet another body of fresh horse (of the Imperial
Service), charged in his turn, and the battle of Malplaquet ends in a
furious mix-up of mounted men, which gradually separated into two
undefeated lines, each retiring from the contest.

It will be wondered why a conclusion so curiously impotent was permitted
to close the fighting of so famous a field.

The answer to this query is that the effort upon either side had passed
the limits beyond which men are physically incapable of further action.
Any attempt