GEORGE II. AT DETTINGEN

JUNE 27, 1743

"OWARDS the close of the month of June 1743, a

TOWA

great army of 40,000 gallant men, under a British general, Lord Stair, lay bewildered and helpless in the narrow valley, some eight miles long, betwixt Dettingen and Aschaffenburg. It seemed a doomed army. In the judgment of their exultant enemies, at least, the shadow of swift-coming surrender and captivity lay upon it. In that German valley, the tragedy of the Caudine Forks, they thought, was to be translated into modern terms at British cost! An English king, too, the last crowned British monarch who commanded an army in actual battle, was in that imperilled host. And to the light-tripping French imagination there had already arisen the golden vision of a captive English king, with his subjugated troops, being led in triumph through the streets of Paris; thus compensating distressed French pride for the disasters of Crécy and of Poitiers, and the promenade of John I. as a captive through London!

France, it is to be noted, has enjoyed few "consolations" of this character. Great Britain is not generally looked upon as a "military" nation; her true field is the sea. Yet, to quote Alison :

"She has inflicted far greater land disasters on her

redoubtable neighbour, France, than all the military monarchies of Europe put together. English armies, for one hundred and twenty years, ravaged France, while England has not seen the fires of a French camp since the battle of Hastings. English troops have twice taken the French capital; an English king was crowned at Paris; a French king rode captive through London; a French emperor died in English captivity, and his remains were surrendered by English generosity. Twice the English horse marched from Calais to the Pyrenees; once from the Pyrenees to Calais; the monuments of Napoleon in the French capital at this moment owe their preservation from German revenge to an English general. All the great disasters and days of mourning for France since the battle of Hastings-Tenchebray, Crécy, Poitiers, Azincour, Verneuil, Crevant, Blenheim, Oudenarde, Ramillies, Malplaquet, Minden, Dettingen, Quebec, Egypt, Talavera, Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, Orthes, Waterloo-were gained by English generals, and won, for the most part, by English soldiers. Even at Fontenoy, the greatest victory of which France can boast since Hastings, every regiment in the French army was, on their own admission, routed by the terrible English column, and victory was snatched from its grasp solely from want of support on the part of the Dutch and Austrians. No coalition against France has ever been successful in which England did not take a prominent part; none in the end has failed of gaining its objects, in which she stood foremost in the fight."-Alison's "Life of Marlborough," ii. 432.

By all the known and ordinary rules of war, the

position of the allied army at Dettingen was hopeless. To the north rose, steep and trackless, and black with pines, the Spessart hills. To the south-its banks here and there liquefying into a sour morass-flowed the river Maine. The strip of valley betwixt river and hills averaged not more than half a mile in width; and

on the high southern bank of the Maine, which commanded, as the broadside of a frigate might command a yacht, the low and narrow valley, wet and treacherous with bogs, where the British were stranded, was a great French army, 70,000 strong, under the most famous of living French generals, the Marshal de Noailles. A

master of the art of war, De Noailles had thrust a strong force over the bridges at Aschaffenburg across the van of the allied army, barring its march. He had drawn 23,000 men across the Maine at Dettingen, cutting Lord Stair from his base at Hanau. And from Dettingen to Aschaffenburg French batteries, perched on the high southern bank of the Maine, stood ready to scourge with fire the narrow valley opposite, crowded with a stranded and starving army.

The most serious feature in the position of the allied army was the fact that its communications were cut, and its supplies exhausted. An army, according to Frederick the Great, "moves on its stomach," and the British stomach, in that strait little valley north of the Maine, had got past the marching stage. There was a scanty supply of unripe rye for the horses, and a yet scantier supply of unnutritious ammunition bread for the men; but the interval betwixt that host of 40,000 hungry soldiers and mere famine was measurable by hours. De Noailles, in a word, was applying, in 1743, to the British army he had caught in so pretty a trap, the very treatment which Bismarck applied to Paris in 1870. He was allowing it to "stew in its own juice," and was superintending the process with a dainty ingenuity which, from the abstract military point of view, was altogether admirable.

Of that imperilled 40,000 only 16,000 were pure British; the rest were Hanoverians, Hessians, &c., hired and nourished by British gold. But the experiment of trying to starve into tame surrender 40,000 soldiers of British or German stock, with muskets in their hands, is a somewhat perilous business for even the