d power the
Schellenberg could not be held.

[6] Of seventeen officers of the Guards, twelve were hit; of the total
British force at least a third fell; more than a third of these, again,
were killed.

[7] The railway from Ulm to Donauwoerth follows the line of this road
exactly, and is almost the only modern feature upon the field.

[8] Mr Fortescue (vol. i. p. 436) writes as though this were not the case.
He has overlooked Tallard's letter to the minister of war of the 4th of
September.

[9] A small body was left at Unterglauheim, but withdrawn as the allies
advanced; and outposts lay, of course, upon the line of Marlborough's
advance, and fell back before it.

[10] Mr Fortescue gives the total force of cavalry under Marcin and the
Elector at one hundred and eight squadrons and the infantry at forty-six
battalions. The French official record gives forty-two battalions (not
forty-six) and eighty-three squadrons in the place of one hundred and
eight. Mr Fortescue gives no authority for his larger numbers; and, on the
general principle that, in a contested action, each force knows best about
its own organisation, I have followed these official records of the French
as the most trustworthy.

[11] It is essential to note this point. Mr Fortescue talks of the
dragoons "trotting" to "seal up the space between the village and the
Danube." If they trotted it was as men trot in their boots, for they were
on foot. The incident sufficiently proves the ravages which disease
accompanying an insufficiently provided march had worked in Tallard's
cavalry.

[12] Nearly all the English authorities and many of the French authorities
speak of the whole twenty-seven battalions out of Tallard's thirty-six as
being in Blenheim from the beginning of the action, and Mr Fortescue adds
the picturesque, but erroneous, touch that "Marlborough" (before the
action) "had probably counted every one of the twenty-seven battalions
into it" (Blenheim).

This error is due to the fact that at the close of the battle there
actually were twenty-seven battalions within the village, but they were
not there at the beginning of the action; and Marlborough cannot,
therefore, have "counted" them going in. The numbers, as I have said, were
first nine battalions, with four regiments of dismounted dragoons; then, a
little later, another seven, making sixteen; then, _much later_, and when
the French were hard pressed, yet another _eleven_, lying as a reserve