n still held out; but, even as Tallard read the letter,
Rhain had fallen, and the terrible business of the harrying of Bavaria had
begun. For Baden and Marlborough proceeded to ravage the country, a cruel
piece of work, which Marlborough believed necessary, because it was his
supreme intention to bring such pressure to bear upon the Elector as might
dissuade him from taking further part in the war.

The villages began to burn (one hundred and twenty were destroyed), the
crops to be razed. The country was laid waste to the very walls of Munich,
and that capital itself would have fallen had the Englishman and his
imperial ally possessed a sufficient train to besiege it.

Tallard was still hesitating to abandon the siege of Villingen when, upon
the 21st of July, came yet a _third_ message from Marcin, which there was
no denying. Tallard learnt from it of the fall of Rhain, of the ravaging
of Bavaria, of the march of Marlborough and Baden upon Munich, of the
crucial danger in which France lay of seeing the Elector of Bavaria
abandon her cause.

Wholly insufficient as the provisioning of the route was, Marcin assured
Tallard it was just enough to feed his men and horses during the dash
eastwards; and, with all the regret and foreboding necessarily attached to
leaving in his rear an unconquered fortress and marching in haste upon an
insufficiently provided route, Tallard, on the next day, the 22nd, raised
the siege of Villingen and risked his way across the mountains down to the
valley of the Danube.

The move was undoubtedly necessary if the Bavarian alliance was to be
saved, but it had to be accomplished in fatal haste.

Sickness broke out among Tallard's horses; his squadrons were reduced in a
fashion that largely determined the ultimate issue at Blenheim.

His troops, ill fed and exhausted, marched upon wretched rations of bread
and biscuit alone, and with that knowledge of insecurity behind them which
the private soldier, though he can know so little of the general plan of
any campaign, instinctively feels when he is taking part in an advance of
doubtful omen.

A week later, upon the 29th of July, the army was in sight of Ulm. It
found there but six thousand sacks of flour. It knew that it would find no
sufficient provisionment in Augsburg at the end of its advance, yet
advance it must unless the forces of Bavaria were to be lost to the cause
of Louis XIV.

Five days later the junction was effected, and upon Mond