The Elector, watching all this from just beyond the Lech, was in despair. He proposed to sue for terms unless immediate news of help from the French upon the Rhine should reach him. And if the Elector sued for terms and retired from the contest, France would be left alone to bear the whole weight of the European alliance: its forces would at once be released to act upon the Rhine, in Flanders, or wherever else they would. When, upon the 14th, Marcin wrote that second letter to Tallard, telling him to neglect everything, to march forward at all costs, and to hasten to Bavaria's relief--the letter which Tallard did receive, and which came to him on the 18th of July, just as he was beginning the siege of Villingen--Rhain 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.