, the same Villars who is now in Italy, 'stormed the Lines of
Stollhofen;' which made him famous that year.
"The Lines of Stollhofen have now, in 1734, fallen flat again; but
Eugene remembers them, and, I could guess, it was he who suggests a
similar expedient. At all events, there is a similar expedient fallen
upon: LINES OF ETTLINGEN this time; one-half nearer Philipsburg; running
from Muhlburg on the Rhine-brink up to Ettlingen in the Hills. [See map]
Nearer, by twenty miles; and, I guess, much more slightly done. We shall
see these Lines of Ettlingen, one point of them, for a moment:--and they
would not be worth mentioning at all, except that in careless Books
they too are called 'Lines of STOLLHOFEN,' [Wilhelmina (ii. 206), for
instance; who, or whose Printer, call them "Lines of STOKOFF" even.] and
the ingenuous reader is sent wandering on his map to no purpose."
"Lines of ETTLINGEN" they are; related, as now said, to the Stollhofen
set. Duke Ferdinand of Brunswick-Bevern, one of the four Feldmarschalls,
has some ineffectual handful of Imperial troops dotted about, within
these Lines and on the skirts of Philipsburg;--eagerly waiting till the
Reich's-Army gather to him; otherwise he must come to nothing. Will at
any rate, I should think, be happy to resign in favor of Prince Eugene,
were that little hero once on the ground.
On Mayday, Marechal Berwick, who has been awake in this quarter, "in
three divisions," for a month past,--very impatient till Belleisle with
the first division should have taken Trarbach, and made the Western
interior parts secure,--did actually cross the Rhine, with his second
division, "at Fort Louis," well up the River, well south of Philipsburg;
intending to attack the Lines of Ettlingen, and so get in upon the Town.
There is a third division, about to lay pontoons for itself a good
way farther down, which will attack the Lines simultaneously from
within,--that is to say, shall come upon the back of poor Bevern and
his defensive handful of troops, and astonish him there. All prospers to
Berwick in this matter: Noailles his lieutenant (not yet gone to Italy
till next year), with whom is Maurice Comte de Saxe (afterwards Marechal
de Saxe), an excellent observant Officer, marches up to Ettlingen,
May 3d; bivouacs "at the base of the mountain" (no great things of a
mountain); ascends the same in two columns, horse and foot, by the
first sunlight next morning; forms on a little plain on the
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