[10] Mr Fortescue gives the total force of cavalry under Marcin and the Elector at one hundred and eight squadrons and the infantry at forty-six battalions. The French official record gives forty-two battalions (not forty-six) and eighty-three squadrons in the place of one hundred and eight. Mr Fortescue gives no authority for his larger numbers; and, on the general principle that, in a contested action, each force knows best about its own organisation, I have followed these official records of the French as the most trustworthy. [11] It is essential to note this point. Mr Fortescue talks of the dragoons "trotting" to "seal up the space between the village and the Danube." If they trotted it was as men trot in their boots, for they were on foot. The incident sufficiently proves the ravages which disease accompanying an insufficiently provided march had worked in Tallard's cavalry. [12] Nearly all the English authorities and many of the French authorities speak of the whole twenty-seven battalions out of Tallard's thirty-six as being in Blenheim from the beginning of the action, and Mr Fortescue adds the picturesque, but erroneous, touch that "Marlborough" (before the action) "had probably counted every one of the twenty-seven battalions into it" (Blenheim). This error is due to the fact that at the close of the battle there actually were twenty-seven battalions within the village, but they were not there at the beginning of the action; and Marlborough cannot, therefore, have "counted" them going in. The numbers, as I have said, were first nine battalions, with four regiments of dismounted dragoons; then, a little later, another seven, making sixteen; then, _much later_, and when the French were hard pressed, yet another _eleven_, lying as a reserve _behind_ Blenheim, were called into the village by the incompetence of Clérambault who commanded in Blenheim. He should have sent them to help the centre--as will be seen in the sequel. [13] 1st battalion Royal Scots; 1st battalion First Guards; 8th, 20th, 16th, 24th, and 10th Foot; 3rd battalion 23rd Royal Welsh, 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers. [14] From one to three squadrons each of the 1st, 3rd, 5th, 6th, 17th Dragoon Guards, 5th Royal Irish Dragoons, and a squadron of the Scots Greys. [15] This is the number given by Eugene. Fortescue (p. 436) and most English authorities give fifty-two. [16] The 10th, 21st, 23rd, and 24th. [17] For some reason or other, the exaggeration of this feature--the marshiness of the banks of the Nebel--mars many an English account of the action. The Nebel, of course, was something of an obstacle, slight as it was, and in places the meadows on its bank widen out and are soft even in the dry weather which had as a whole distinguished the three weeks before Blenheim. But the crossing of that obstacle by the cavalry was nothing in the story of the battle. It was what the cavalry did _after they crossed_ that counted.