safety was offered the enemy
towards Noerdlingen.

While the French fourriers were ordering the lines of the encampment--the
tents stretching, the streets staking out--the English duke and Eugene
overlooked the business from the church tower of Tapfheim and saw what
Tallard designed. Between the main of their own forces and the camp which
the Franco-Bavarians were pitching was a distance of about five miles. The
location of each body was therefore perfectly well known to the other, and
rarely have two great hosts lain in mutual presence for full twenty-four
hours in so much doubt of an issue, in such exact opposition, and each
with so complete an apprehension of his opponent's power.

At this point--let us say noon of Tuesday, August 12th--it is essential
for us to dwell upon the character of such battles as that upon which
Marlborough was already determined; for by the time he had seen the French
disposition of their camp, the duke had determined upon forcing an action.

It is the characteristic of great captains that they live by and
appreciate the heavy risk of war.

When they suffer defeat, history--which soldiers and those who love
soldiers so rarely write--contemns the hardiness of their dispositions.
When victory, that capricious gift, is granted them, history is but too
prone to fall into an opposite error, and to see in their hardihood all of
the calculating genius and none of the determined gambler.

Justice would rather demand that the great captain should be judged by the
light in the eyes of his men, by the endurance under him of immense
fatigues, by the exact accomplishment of one hundred separate things a
day, each clearly designed and remembered, by his grasp of great sweeps
of landscape, by his digestion of maps and horizons, and finally and
particularly by this--that the great captain, whether he loses or he wins,
_risks_ well: he smells the adventure of war, and is the opposite of those
who, whether in their fortunes or their bodies, chiefly seek security.

Judged by all these tests, John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, was a
supreme commander; and it is not the least part in our recognition of
this, that the first and chief of the great actions upon which his fame
reposes was an action essentially and typically hazardous, and one the
disastrous loss of which was as probable as, or more probable than, the
successful issue which it obtained.

He could not know the special factor of weakness in hi