ench lay in the north, upon the frontier of Holland, the valley of
the Meuse, and the Lower Rhine. The successes of Bavaria in the previous
year had given the Bavarian army, with its French contingent, a firm grip
upon the Upper Danube, and the possibility of marching upon Vienna itself
when the campaign of 1704 should open.

The great march upon the Danube which Eugene had conceived, and which
Marlborough was to execute so triumphantly, was a plan to withdraw the
weight of the allied forces suddenly from the north to the south; to
transfer the main weapon acting against France from the Netherlands to
Bavaria itself; to do this so rapidly and with so little leakage of
information to the enemy as would prevent his heading off the advance by a
parallel and faster movement upon his part, or his strengthening his
forces upon the Danube before Marlborough's should reach that river.

* * * * *

Such was the scheme of the march to the Danube which we are now about to
follow; but before undertaking a description of the great and successful
enterprise, the reader must permit me a word of distinction between a
strategic move and that tactical accident which we call a battle. In the
absence of such a distinction, the campaign of Blenheim and the battle
which gives it its name would be wholly misread.

A great battle, especially if it be of a decisive character, not only
changes history, but has a dramatic quality about it which fixes the
attention of mankind.

The general reader, therefore, tends to regard the general movements of a
campaign as mere preliminaries to, or explanations of, the decisive action
which may conclude it.

This is particularly the case with the readers attached to the victorious
side. The French layman, in the days before universal service in France,
wrote and read his history of 1805 as though the march of the Grand Army
were deliberately intended to conclude with Austerlitz. The English reader
and writer still tends to read and write of Marlborough's march to the
Danube as though it were aimed at the field of Blenheim.

This error or illusion is part of that general deception so common to
historical study which has been well called "reading history backwards."
We know the event; to the actors in it the future was veiled. Our
knowledge of what is to come colours and distorts our judgment of the
motive and design of a general.

The march to the Danube was, like all str