However fortunate might be the issue of Dettingen, it served at least its purpose in preventing the despatch¹ of French reinforcements to the Danube and to Bohemia; and the campaign of 1743 closed with the utter collapse² of Belleisle's great schemes and with the expulsion of the French from Germany. It was now clear that the war would be carried on in the familiar cockpit of the Austrian Netherlands. Such a theatre was convenient for France, since it lay close to her own borders, and convenient for the Allies, because the Dutch had at last been persuaded to join them, and because the British would be brought nearer to their base at Ostend. Marshal Saxe, whose fine talent had hitherto been wasted under incompetent³ French Generals in Bohemia, was appointed to the chief command of the French in Flanders; and every effort was made to give him a numerous and well-equipped army, and to enable him to open his campaign in good time.
1744.

In England the preparations by no means corresponded with the necessities of the position. The estimates indeed provided for a force of twenty-one thousand British in Flanders in 1744 as against sixteen thousand in the previous year, but only at the cost of depleting⁵ the weak garrison⁶ left in England; for the actual number of men voted for the two years was the same. All British officers of experience strongly urged upon the Government the importance of being first in the field,[177][104] but when an army was to be made up in different proportions of English, Dutch, Germans, and Austrians it needed a Marlborough to bring the discordant⁷ Courts into harmony as well as to make ready the troops for an early campaign. By the beginning of April eighty thousand French soldiers had marched from their winter quarters, and were concentrated on the frontier between the Scheldt and the Sambre, while the Allies were still scattered⁸ about in cantonments, not exceeding even then a total strength of fifty-five thousand men.

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