Blenheim

It's hard to come to terms with the sheer size of a battle. Reading Churchill's Marlborough, on the battle of Blenheim; the front line covered some five and a half k, just about the distance I take the train in to work every morning. That's about twenty minutes by train, half an hour by taxi. And along that entire line there were enough people to put them a metre apart ten deep (they weren't actually in line ten deep, because of reserves and artillery and the like, but it could have been done if they'd wanted, say, to decide the thing by rugby scrum). Half the skill of the general must have been simply finding a place to put them.

No wonder it took Eugene a few hours to reach the right flank.

The polar opposite from 300, which not only cut the front down to 300 men - about 75 metres - but couldn't cope with that on-screen, never showing a front more than about 15 metres guarding a mountain pass that was more like the scale of a railway underpass.