The campaign opened the 9th of April, 1734, the French crossing the Rhine near Truerbuch, in three strong columns, notwithstanding all the efforts of the Austrians to resist them.  Prince Eugene, by birth a Frenchman, reluctantly assumed the command.  He had remonstrated with the emperor against any forcible interference in the Polish election, assuring him that he would thus expose himself, almost without allies, to all the power of France.  Eugene did not hesitate openly to express his disapprobation of the war.  “I can take no interest in this war,” he said; “the question at issue is not important enough to authorize the death of a chicken.”

Eugene, upon his arrival from Vienna, at the Austrian camp, found but twenty-five thousand men.  They were composed of a motley assemblage from different States, undisciplined, unaccustomed to act together and with no confidence in each other.  The commanders of the various corps were quarreling for the precedence in rank, and there was no unity or subordination in the army.  They were retreating before the French, who, in numbers, in discipline, and in the materiel of war, were vastly in the superiority.  Eugene saw at once that it would be folly to risk a battle, and that all he could hope to accomplish was to throw such embarrassments as he might in the path of the victors.

The young officers, ignorant, impetuous and reckless, were for giving battle, which would inevitably have resulted in the destruction of the army.  They were so vexed by the wise caution of Eugene, which they regarded as pusillanimity, that they complained to the emperor that the veteran general was in his dotage, that he was broken both in body and mind, and quite unfit to command the army.  These representations induced the emperor to send a spy to watch the conduct of Eugene.  Though deeply wounded by these suspicions, the experienced general could not be provoked to hazard an engagement.  He retreated from post to post, merely checking the progress of the enemy, till the campaign was over, and the ice and snow of a German winter drove all to winter quarters.

While recruiting for the campaign of 1735, Prince Eugene wrote a series of most earnest letters to his confidential agent in London, which letters were laid before George II., urging England to come to the help of the emperor in his great extremity.  Though George was eager to put the fleet and army of England in motion, the British cabinet wisely refused to plunge the nation into war for such a cause, and the emperor was left to reap the bitter fruit of his despotism and folly.  The emperor endeavored to frighten England by saying that he was reduced to such an extremity that if the British cabinet did not give him aid, he should be compelled to seek peace by giving his daughter, with Austria in her hand as her dowry, to Carlos, now King of Naples and heir apparent to the crown of Spain.  He well knew that to prevent such an acquisition of power on the part of the Spanish monarch, who was also in intimate alliance with France, England would be ready to expend any amount of blood and treasure.