(From The Fates of Nations by Paul Colinvaux (1980). Compare The Ghosts of Cannae.)

France, in the second half of the seventeenth century, was the richest, most populous and most technologically advanced nation in Europe. Under Louis XIV the aggression came. French rulers began to squeeze the governments of France's little neighbors, using threats, money and subversion in ways not unfamiliar to enlightened peoples of the twentieth century. It was, of course, necessary to back up this pressure with military force. France used her money to maintain the largest standing army in Europe, and her ingenuity to make it the best-equipped and led by the most learned officers. Bayonets let the French discard pikes and give all their men firearms; they made better and better cannon; they secured political gains with marvellous fortresses, over which their gifted engineers and architects seemed to have had a most enviable free hand. One by one the smaller powers were expected to submit to this glittering force and the French writ would thrust its way across Europe.

But, in spite of their military preparations, the French were anxious to avoid total war. All Europe kept fresh the memories of the Thirty Years' War [1618-1648], its horrible slaughter and its shocking withdrawals from the treasury. France was not to be let in for anything like that. So French soldierly writers put forward a theory of limited war for which their beautiful military toys were to be used. There was to be no unnecessary savagery about their fighting, for they were civilized and would not want unnecessary killing or damage to property.

The object of limited war was "the settling of disputes." When you fought against your little neighbor, you were not engaged in aggression, you did not go to rob him. No, you were simply doing your duty and helping to "settle a dispute." We must not dismiss this fatuous thinking as merely an aberration of the eighteenth-century French, for you will find it echoed in the apologies of modern soldiers too. It is the sort of folly that was in Clemenceau's mind when he said that war was too serious a business to be left to soldiers.

The disputes which France proceeded to settle by limited war were over whether or not there should be more goodies for France. French wars tended to have causes like deciding which royal house had the right to the throne, hence names like "The War of the Spanish Succession". What was really in dispute, however, was always the French right to some of the property or power involved in the "succession". France appealed these disputes to her judge of battle, and since she had the most money to pay the judge, the disputes tended at first to be settled in her favor. But there was another way to appeal this judge's decisions than giving her more money; you could stop limiting the war and force an issue through stricken armies and dead soldiers.

The rock on which the wave of French aggression broke was hewn out of an alliance between Holland and Britain, at first led by William III, Prince of Orange, and then by John Churchill, First Duke of Marlborough under Queen Anne. Britain and Holland were trading nations, populous, full of merchants, rich with a capital collected by trade though poor in resources within their homelands, having turned their comparatively small patches of land into intensively farmed gardens and holding the sea lanes with powerful war fleets as parts of their national traditions. As the appetite and military power of France grew, King William and Marlborough saw themselves manoeuvred into the fatal position of a Carthage before a greedy Roman republic. Once let the French power hold the rest of Europe, then it would be only a matter of time before the resources of the continent were consolidated against Britain. Their people might not be annihilated, but they would be impoverished and their countries would become the exploited provinces of a French superstate. In Marlborough's letters we find this dismal consequence of failure clearly spelt out.

Marlborough was given command of both Dutch and British armies with orders to stop the French. As he brought his small armies against the French, his problem became Hannibal's problem. His policy must be to make the French let go even as Hannibal had tried in vain to make the Romans let go. Yet Marlborough was in nothing like Hannibal's plight. Britain and Holland were not all alone to face a giant power among crowds of impassive or hostile barbarian tribes. On the contrary, they were to struggle in the heart of Christendom, with civilized and by no means helpless powers on every flank of France. So the first step in resistance must be to secure friends. Where Carthage had had to face a continental fury all alone, the British and Dutch sheltered in the shifting patterns of the Grand Alliance.

The second thing in Marlborough's favor was that he could match the military technique of the enemy. The British and Dutch could learn and imitate every technical improvement of the French. All knowledge was common knowledge. Every regiment that Marlborough raised could be confident that its weapons were as good as anything that could be brought against it. As it happened they were better. The French army was slow to replace their matchlock muskets. The British and Dutch issued flintlocks first. They could fire more volleys in the same time.

By 1704, France had been pressing her aggressions to the west for more than a quarter of a century, and the nibbles of land were growing into bites. French armies were in what is now Belgium and looming over the Dutch Republic. To the south, other French armies lapped at the river Rhine along its length, and crossed it. Then Bavaria declared for France, as its ruler decided to opt for safety in appeasement. French armies were now in the heart of Germanic Central Europe. It needed only some other smaller German states to follow Bavaria for a French empire to almost be made.

And caution in the fighting was still the guiding spirit of all sides. French skill at manoeuvre, coupled with the frightening size of her armies, had given the successes. Her soldiers had grown used to winning without desperate loss, and the armies of France were filled with soldiers who were loyal, even after all these years of war, because their generals had been sparing of human life. Governments in the Grand Alliance were equally cautious, particularly the Dutch who had the most to lose. For them a knock-down killing battle might be the final disaster. They were small, and France was big. And the conditions of fighting in the musketry wars were bound to turn any efforts at decisive victory into an affair of horrible losses. A decisive fight would perhaps be worse than the Thirty Years' War, because now every foot soldier had a musket, and the opposing ranks had to shoot each other down as they stood, face to face, thirty or forty yards apart.

Yet General Marlborough and a very tough-minded Austrian, John Wratislaw, resolved that the thing had to be done. They chose the French army in Bavaria as their target, the land of the one German prince who had turned appeaser, threatening a rot in the Grand Alliance. More importantly, the remote battle zone of Bavaria would leave the battle to the generals, out of reach of politicians in London and The Hague who might call them off at the last minute, as they had done before.

Marlborough's British army walked from Holland, three hundred miles through friendly German lands, across the Rhine at Coblenz, across the northern reaches of the Black Forest, into Bavaria, and along the Danube from Ulm to Donauwörth. There the British joined an allied German army from Baden and stormed the Schellenberg fortress which guarded the town. They stormed it the day they arrived, marching grimly at its ramparts, having a third of their men and most of the attacking officers killed rather than fail to secure a fortress needed as their base so far from home.

Then they began setting fire to all the crops and villages of Bavaria. A burning land; this was to be the price of appeasement. And the burning would surely draw out the French regiments to fight. The British were joined by an Austrian army under Prince Eugene of Savoy. Together they came upon a great French army near the village of Blenheim. Now was to be fought one of those frightful battles where the two sides have the same weapons, the same training, the same tactics and the same courage. The French line ran from Blenheim on the bank of the Danube River inland to broken, hilly, wooded ground, a distance of four miles, a very secure and defensible position for an army of fifty thousand, well supplied with cannon. Running straight across the front was a stream which flowed into the Danube; in front of the middle of the French line was a marsh, a most serious obstacle for infantry who must keep formation as they move or be lost. On the right, the French flank rested on the Danube, secure, unturnable, and given the added strength of fortified Blenheim. Their left flank rested on wooded hills, and was equally secure because eighteenth-century armies could not march through woods, nor could cannon shoot through them.

The French generals didn't believe they'd be attacked at all. They slept in their tents, keeping a thousand yards back from the little stream and its unpleasant marsh. Had they fortified the edge of the marsh, the day might have ended differently. But Eugene and Marlborough deployed their armies early, in the dark, and when the sun came up British redcoats and Austrian gray were spreading left and right along the allies' side of the stream, from the river to the woods.

Then, on the flank by the Danube, the British soldiers walked forward by companies, in parallel array, as if on parade, muskets shouldered, under orders to fire no shot until within thirty yards of Blenheim. Cannonballs tore lanes down the marching companies, spaces emptied of living men, but they closed ranks and walked on. Many hundreds of French muskets fired at once through loopholes in their palisade, and one third of the British were dead. The remainder rushed the village, firing back through the loopholes. Every British officer was killed as he struggled to climb the palisade. But behind came more British companies and more; they were shot down; it was unprecedented butchery; but a readcoated sea still lapped around the village and there were mounds of French inside to offset the British mounds without.

Meanwhile Prince Eugene's Austrians stamped with equal fury into the other end of the French line. Picture yourself in the British or Austrian ranks, tramping in your company toward the crowding French strongholds. You walk as you have done before, in company that you know, perhaps toward death. But not everyone will be killed. The better your fire drill, the fewer of you will die. You are, anyway, better than the enemy. At least the cavalry won't get you. While you are in your ranks and have your bayonette no horseflesh can be forced onto you. If you lose your company through panic in front of the French though, their cavalry will kill you for sure. A running soldier is a dead soldier on a field where there are horsemen about; sabering runways is what cavalry are for. If you broke ranks before you got to the French your own cavalry would kill you. Your best chance is to keep closed up; and fire drill; drill, think of your drill.

So the red and gray waves walked and drilled and shot and were smashed by the heavy lead balls; but they held the French soldiers to the redoubts on the wings. And in the center the British infantry was bridging the stream and wading the marsh, forming up on the other side to stand, pounded by cannon, hour after hour, until they attained that local superiority of three to one which is decisive. Then forward, and split the French line and the French army in two. And the Austrian and British cavalry tore on through the gap. The First Army of France was gone in a single day.

Marlborough did it again, in other battles in the following years, though it was harder and harder each time, for the French were learning and were fighting, at the end, in France itself. No battle gave final victory, but the beating the French took was enough. The neighbors of France all took heart, and the French king, much of his treasure spent, looked out to see on all his frontiers angry peoples with weapons in their hands. The French let go, even as Hannibal had hoped in vain that the Romans might let go two thousand years before.

The experiment with limited war had lasting effects on France. The French used up their savings on the enterprise, losing ground in the race of Western powers to secure new territories overseas. They were left with the largest and most aspiring population in Europe penned within constraining national boundaries, with dampened chances for expansion overseas, frustrated in war and balked of the plenty their leaders had promised them. Now the French leaders looked to themselves. They sought refuge in their privilege, and the rising numbers of middle class were made to pay the taxes and accomodate its new condition of rising numbers and rising wealth in a fixed supply of land. The masses grew again ready to battle for loot, under a new general: Napoleon. But it was all in vain. In a few years France was back to the size and shape it had always been.

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Kartik Agaram, 2014-10-28: Historical context on why France was the richest country in Europe at this time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_of_Westphalia#Tenets

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.