On the right, meanwhile, things were not going well for the Allies. The Elector, disregarding de Tallard’s order to keep the troops high up on the slope, had moved his infantry right down to the edge of the broken ground near the Nebel, and thus met Eugene’s men while they were scattered and exhausted by the difficulties of the crossing; thrice did the Prince of Savoy make a formidable attack upon the Bavarians, and thrice was he beaten back. On the left, however, Cutts was fulfilling his mission admirably, for his rolling musketry detained within the entrenchments of Blenheim the enormous mass of infantry, whose presence on other parts of the field might have turned the scale in favour of the French. But the fate of the battle was to be decided in the centre, where Marlborough had now succeeded in placing eight thousand cavalry in two long lines on the lower slope of the natural glacis which de Tallard had abandoned so unaccountably to his enemy. To meet this danger, the French Commander-in-Chief called up the nine battalions which in the morning he had considered unfit to use in the forefront of the battle, and posted them level with the first line of his cavalry. The Duke met this move by bringing to his front a battery and three battalions of Hanoverians, who engaged the French infantry at short range, and so greatly shook them that they were unable to withstand a charge of cavalry which swept them away, leaving a huge gap in de Tallard’s line. That general now had to pay for the vicious dispositions by which the cavalry in his centre had been posted without proper arrangements for combined action. The horsemen of de Marsin’s right wing played, not for the safety of the whole French army, but for that of their own commander, and instead of flinging themselves into the breach and presenting an unbroken front to Marlborough, wheeled backwards in order to protect the flank of the column to which they belonged. De Marsin had his hands too full to be able to spare a man to help de Tallard, and before any of the infantry from Blenheim could come to the rescue the Duke’s eight thousand troopers were charging up the slope; for a moment the French cavalry stood, then seized with a mad panic they wheeled about and galloped furiously for the river, riding down everything they met in their haste to escape from the German horsemen, who sabred hundreds of them and drove hundreds more into the Danube.