The shock of the new

The French soldiers marching south through Lorraine pulled their grey-white coats tightly around them and wrapped their necks in scarves to ward off the frigid weather of north-eastern France in December 1674. They belonged to the command of Marshal Henri de La Tour d’Auvergne, Viscount of Turenne – the 63-year-old veteran of many wars and campaigns, who had first risen to prominence decades earlier during the Thirty Years War. The marshal now planned to launch a surprise attack on the imperial army fielded by the Holy Roman Empire in Upper Alsace. His own army had therefore set out on 5 December on a 150-mile trek in order to bear down on the much larger imperial host. Field Marshal