IAIN GALE
JACK STEEL ADVENTURE SERIES BOOKS 1-3:
Man of Honour, Rules of War, Brothers in Arms
Contents
IAIN GALE
Man of Honour
Jack Steel and the Blenheim Campaign,July to August 1704
For Sarah
Contents
Upper Bavaria, July 1704
They had come here by stealth to carry the war deep into the south. An army of many nations: English and Scots, Hanoverians and Prussians, Hessians, Danes and Dutch. They had but one purpose: the defeat of France and her ally, Bavaria. The French King, Louis XIV, they knew to be a power-mad maniac, styling himself the Sun King. It was clear that he would not be content until he possessed all Europe, from Spain to Poland. And so it was, on this sultry day in early July, as afternoon drifted into evening, that fate brought these many thousands of men to Donauwörth, a little Bavarian town with its ancient high walls and ramparts.
Above it, at the top of a steep slope, stood a fort whose hill, inspired by its distinctive shape, the local people had long ago christened ‘Schellenberg’ – The Hill of the Bell. It was abundantly and worryingly clear to all the soldiers who now stood in its shadow, that before any decisive victory could be won, before they could bring the French to battle, drive them back to Paris and remove forever the Sun King’s threat, that this hill and its little fort would have to be taken.
The tall young officer stood a few yards out in front of the company of redcoats and stared up at the fort that towered above them on the hill. For two hours now he had been awaiting the order to advance and with every passing moment the enemy position looked more forbidding. Like almost every man in the army, he had the greatest admiration and respect for his Commander-in-Chief. But at this precise moment he had begun to wonder whether, truly, this entire enterprise might not be doomed to failure. He tried to banish the thought. To maintain some degree of sang-froid before his men. But as he did so, the first cannonball fell in front of the three ranks of red-coated infantry, bounced up from the springy turf with grisly precision, and carried away four of them in a welter of blood and brains.
‘Feeling the heat, Mister Steel?’
The Lieutenant looked up. Silhouetted against the sun a tall figure in a full-bottomed wig peered down at him from horseback.
‘A trifle, Sir James.’
‘A trifle, eh? I’d have thought that you’d have been used to it after, how many years a soldier?’
‘Nigh on a dozen, Colonel.’
‘But of course. How could I forget? You earned your spurs in the Northern wars, did you not? Fighting the