Savoy Carignan. His father had been married to one of Mazarin's
nieces. Eugene was her fifth son, and at this moment not quite forty years
of age.

His character, motives, and genius must be clearly seized if we are to
appreciate the campaign and the battle of Blenheim.

It was the Italian blood which formed that character most, but he was
thoroughly French by birth and training. Born in Paris, and desiring a
career in the French army, it was a slight offered to his mother by the
French king that gave his whole life a personal hatred of Louis XIV. for
its motive. From boyhood till his death, between sixty and seventy, this
great captain directed his energies uniquely against the fortunes of the
French king. When, later in life, there was an attempt to acquire his
talents for the French service, he replied that he hoped to re-enter
France, but only as an invader. It has been complained that he lacked
precision in detail, and that as an organiser he was somewhat at fault;
but he had no equal for rapidity of vision, and for seizing the essential
point in a strategic problem. From that day in his twentieth year when he
had assisted at Sobiesky's destruction of the Turks before Vienna, through
his own great victory which crushed that same enemy somewhat later at
Zenta, in all his career this quality of immediate perception had been
supremely apparent.

He was at this moment--the end of the campaign of 1703--the head of the
imperial council of war; and he it was who first grasped the strategic
necessity which 1703 had created. The determination to carry the defence
of the empire into the valley of the Upper Danube was wholly his own. He
wrote to Marlborough suggesting a withdrawal of forces as considerable as
possible from the northern field to the southern.

By a happy accident, the judgment of the Englishman exactly coincided with
his own, and indeed there was so precise a sympathy between these two very
different men that when they met in the course of the ensuing campaign
there sprang up between them not only a lasting friendship, but a mutual
comprehension which made the combination of their talents invincible
during those half dozen years of the war which all but destroyed the
French power.

* * * * *

Such was the origin of Marlborough's advance southward from the
Netherlands in the early summer of 1704, an advance famous in history
under the title of "the march to the Danube."