From the wide cornfields of Blenheim in Bavaria to the dark and bloody woods at Malplaquet, the armies led by John Churchill, the 1st Duke of Marlborough met and defeated every general and every army that King Louis XIV of France could put against them. Born into a family impoverished by the English Civil War, Marlborough learned his trade as a soldier in the French Army of the Sun King. Climbing the slippery ladder of success with deft skill, in middle age he was the Captain-General of England, leading her armies, and those of her allies, to startling triumphs across the breadth of Western Europe. James Falkner brings a keen soldierly understanding of the trials and tribulations of the fateful days of battle fully into play in this exciting and graphic account of the great victories of the Duke of Marlborough at the height of the War of the Spanish Succession.