s opponent's
cavalry; he was to misjudge the first element in the position when he
broke his best infantry in the futile attack upon the village. But he was
to benefit by those small, hidden, momentary things which determine great
battles, and which make of soldiers, as of men who follow the sea,
determined despisers of success, and as determined worshippers of the
merit which may or may not attain it.

To have led his army as he had led it for now three months, to have
designed the general plan that he had designed, and to have accomplished
it; to have effected the splendid concentration but a few hours since upon
the Kessel--these formed a work sufficient to deserve the reward of
victory, Marlborough had the fortune not only to deserve, but to achieve.

The night of that Tuesday fell with no alarm upon the one side or upon the
other. In the camp of Marlborough and of Eugene was the knowledge that the
twin commanders had determined upon an action; in that of Tallard and the
Elector the belief that it was more probable their opponents would follow
the general rules of war, and fall back to recruit their supplies by the
one route that was widely open to them.

Midnight passed. It was already the morning of Wednesday the 13th before
the one had moved, or the other had guessed the nature of his enemy's
plan.

It was moonless and pitch-dark, save for the dense white mist which, in
the marshy lands of that river valley, accompanies the turn of the August
night. This mist had risen and covered the plain. The little villages were
asleep after their disturbance by the advent of so many armed men. The
cockcrows of midnight were now well past when there was stir in
Marlborough's camp, and from this moment, somewhere about two of the
morning of Wednesday, August the 13th, the action of Blenheim begins.

PART V

THE ACTION

The field of Blenheim has changed in its physical aspect less than any
other of the great battlefields of Europe during the two hundred years and
more that have passed since Marlborough's victory.

He who visits to-day this quiet Bavarian corn-land, with its pious and
happy peasantry, its modest wealth, and its contempt for haste and greed,
sees, if he come in the same late summer of the year, just what the
mounted parties saw who rode out upon that Wednesday before the eight
columns of Marlborough and Eugene under the early morning.

Thus, approaching the field of Blenheim from the east, the v