Battle of the Schellenberg, 1704: Marlborough storms the Danube crossing

It was over in a summer evening. The allied columns had marched since before dawn along roads churned to mud, and they went up the hill at six with a bundle of brushwood on every man's back. By nightfall the hill was theirs, and thousands of its defenders lay dead on the slopes or in the Danube.²

Background: the march to the Danube

In 1704, in the War of the Spanish Succession, Austria was under heavy French pressure. France had an ally in Bavaria, ruled by the Elector Maximilian II Emanuel, and a Franco-Bavarian army threatened Vienna itself. To prevent an Austrian collapse, as Britannica puts it, the Duke of Marlborough marched his army from the Low Countries to the Danube.³

The imperial commander on the upper Rhine, Margrave Louis William of Baden, had spent the previous year holding off a stronger Franco-Bavarian army. Adolf Schinzl, in his article on the margrave in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, writes that at the start of the 1704 campaign Louis joined Marlborough, and the two advanced together against Donauwörth.⁴

Donauwörth mattered because of its bridge, the nearest crossing of the Danube. The Elector, guessing what the allies intended, sent a picked detachment under Count Jean-Baptiste d'Arco to hold the Schellenberg, the hill that commanded the town.⁵

Armies and commanders

The two allied commanders had agreed to hold the command on alternate days, and 2 July was Marlborough's day. Both Fortescue and Atkinson stress what that meant: Marlborough was determined that if the hill was to be stormed, it must be stormed that same day, before the defenders could finish their works or be reinforced.⁶

Arco had, by Fortescue's count, about 10,000 foot and 2,500 horse, close to the 10,000 John Rickard puts on the hill. Marlborough's army had about 35,000 men on the march, in Rickard's figure, though only part of it would fight that evening.⁷

The Schellenberg is a bell-shaped hill with a flat top, where the defenders had pitched their camp. An entrenchment ran for nearly two miles round its summit, from the outworks of Donauwörth to the river. It was strongest on the north, where the slope was easiest, and on the side toward the town stood an old star fort with guns, the Sternschanze.⁸

The battle in phases

The approach march. Before daybreak an advance guard left the allied camp at Amerdingen: about 6,000 picked foot, drawn in equal detachments from all the battalions of Marlborough's wing, with thirty or more squadrons of horse. The main body followed two hours later. The camp lay some twelve to fourteen miles from the hill, and recent rain had made the roads so bad that it took the troops until the afternoon to get there.⁹

Marlborough looks at the hill. Riding ahead in the morning, Marlborough found the defenders still digging. Across the Danube he could see tents pitched on the wings of a camp with an empty space in the middle, a sure sign that infantry reinforcements were expected. The bridges over the Wörnitz had been broken, and it was three in the afternoon before pontoon bridges were ready and the troops were across.¹⁰

The first assault. The attack went in at about six in the evening, after five by Atkinson's reckoning, against the northwest corner of the lines, with the English on the left by the edge of a wood. Every foot soldier carried a fascine. The defenders held their fire until the attackers were about eighty yards away, and then the slaughter became frightful. In front of the lines ran a hollow way cut by the rain, and the leading men, mistaking it for the ditch, threw their fascines into it and found themselves stopped at the real entrenchment.¹¹

The counterattack. The French and Bavarians rushed out with the bayonet, and the assault seemed lost. It was saved by the British battalions of the main body, the Guards, the Royal Scots and the Welshmen of the 23rd, who stood their ground and threw the counterattack back. Attack followed attack under General Goor, and each time the allies were thrown back with heavy losses. To hold the line the defenders drew men from the rest of their works.¹²

Turning point: the unfinished lines by the town

That was their undoing. At about half past seven the second allied column, the imperial and German troops under Louis of Baden, came up on the right, near the town, and found the lines between the star fort and the town ditch unfinished and almost empty. They crossed with little loss, beat off a counterattack by French and Bavarian dragoons and came in on the flank of the defenders fighting Marlborough's men.¹³

At the same time General Lumley ordered the Scots Greys to dismount and attack on foot, and the allied infantry made one more effort. This time the line broke. Arco, outflanked, had to pull back, and under hard pursuit by the allied cavalry the retreat turned into a rout.¹⁴

Aftermath

The defenders fled toward the Danube. Many were cut down before they could reach Donauwörth, others were driven into the river, and the bridge of boats broke under the crowd. Of some 12,000 men, Fortescue writes, not more than a quarter rejoined the Elector's army, and Atkinson says that 10,000 of Arco's force are believed to have perished. The Geopark Ries, which looks after the battlefield, gives a still higher figure, 16,000 dead in a single day, without a breakdown; it should be read with caution, since Rickard puts only about 10,000 defenders on the hill.¹⁵

The cost to the allies was high too. Fortescue puts their loss at no fewer than 1,400 killed and 3,800 wounded, Atkinson at over 5,000 in all. The British suffered worst, with about 1,500 casualties, more than a third of those engaged by Fortescue's estimate and nearly a third of their infantry by Atkinson's. Among the allied dead was the imperial field marshal Hermann Otto, Count of Limburg-Styrum, who led the cavalry and, Carl von Duncker records, died of his wounds on 9 July. Louis of Baden himself was badly wounded, and Schinzl writes that the wound never fully healed.¹⁶

Donauwörth fell without a siege, and the allies crossed the Danube. The Elector broke down the bridge over the Lech and entrenched himself at Augsburg to wait for help from France, and Marshal Tallard set out across the Black Forest to join him, losing five days on the way in a fruitless siege of Villingen. Rather than make terms, the Elector held on at Augsburg in hope of that help, and left his country to be ravaged by the allies, a work Fortescue says Marlborough detested but felt obliged to carry out.¹⁷

Legacy and memory

The victory soured relations between the two commanders. In Schinzl's words, Marlborough was the author of the plan of battle and Louis of Baden the man who actually won it, and the ill feeling between them led Prince Eugene of Savoy to complain bitterly about their inactivity after the Schellenberg. It was Eugene, Schinzl adds, who reconciled the two.¹⁸

With the Danube crossing in their hands, the allies were in Bavaria. On 13 August, at Blenheim, about ten miles from Donauwörth, Marlborough and Eugene destroyed the Franco-Bavarian army, saved Vienna and knocked Bavaria out of the war. Louis of Baden, meanwhile, besieged Ingolstadt and then, Schinzl writes, took the fortress of Landau on the Rhine after a stubborn defense in November.¹⁹ › Battle of Blenheim, 1704

For the British regiments the Schellenberg was one of the costliest fights of the war. The First Guards, the two battalions of the Royal Scots and the 23rd each lost two hundred men or more, and both Fortescue and Atkinson single out their stand against the French counterattack as the moment the first assault was saved.²⁰

Visiting today

The Schellenberg rises on the northeastern edge of Donauwörth. The Geopark Ries, which looks after the site, notes that traces of the ramparts of 1704 can still be seen there, near the old star fort, and that a Calvary, the Kalvarienberg, was built on the side of the hill facing the town in memory of the battle. Its trail leads there from the town center through the old Ochsentörl gate.²¹