The Duke of Marlborough commanded the combined Anglo-Dutch armies of the War of the Spanish Succession, and his plan for the 1703 campaign was to take Antwerp. The main force of 55,000 men under himself and Ouwerkerk would pin the French commander Villeroy down near Liege. Two smaller Dutch divisions would close on Antwerp from either side of the Scheldt - Coehoorn and Sparre from the west, Count Wassenaer Obdam from the east with 13 battalions and 26 squadrons. The flaw was obvious to Obdam's own subordinates, Slangenburg and Tilly, who said so out loud: the two divisions were cut off from each other by the river, and the Franco-Spanish army had shorter interior lines. When Marlborough's diversion ran out of forage and pulled back early, the Duke of Boufflers covered fifty-five kilometers in a single forced march to join the Marquis of Bedmar at Antwerp. Obdam woke on 30 June surrounded.

Obdam saw at once that the only escape lay through Oorderen, and ordered an attack on the village at four in the morning. The Dutch took it quickly. In the polders beyond, Slangenburg, Tilly, and Fagel held off the Franco-Spanish infantry as it stormed forward in waves supported by ten field guns. The ditches and hedges of the reclaimed land broke up the attacks, reducing the battle to dozens of isolated, knee-deep fights. Sometime after six in the afternoon, French dragoons charged through and separated Obdam himself from his army. He and a handful of riders stripped the green cockades from their hats and tucked away their orange sashes; mistaken for Frenchmen, they slipped through the lines. From a farmhouse some kilometers off, Obdam wrote a letter to The Hague reporting that his army had been destroyed. It had not. Slangenburg, supported by Tilly and the wounded Fagel, simply took over.

It was at this point that Fagel, his head bandaged from a wound, ordered the tin buttons used as bullets. The improvisation matters because it sums up the kind of fight Ekeren was: improvised, exhausting, refusing to break. Tilly sent fifteen hundred Franco-Spanish cavalry tumbling off a dyke. Hompesch chased them more than a kilometer, then turned and dispersed several French infantry battalions. The Baron of Friesheim and the Count of Dohna waded their men through waist-deep water with fixed bayonets to flank Oorderen from a direction the French had not bothered to fortify. The main Dutch force came over the Scheldt embankment from Wilmerdonk and stormed in from the other side. By ten that night Oorderen was Dutch again. The Dutch army slept in the village it had retaken, was reinforced from across the river by Coehoorn at dawn, and marched unhindered to Fort Lillo.

Both sides claimed Ekeren. The French held the battlefield the next day; the Dutch had escaped the trap. Strategically the day changed almost nothing. But its smaller human verdicts stuck. Boufflers, blamed for letting the chance slip, was not given another field command by Louis XIV until 1709. Obdam, who had panicked and ridden away, was officially cleared by the States of Holland but never recovered his career. Slangenburg became a hero - and a difficult one. He spent the next two years feuding with Marlborough, who he believed had set the trap, and with the peers who would not back his accusations. By 1705 he had been dismissed. The Dutch infantry, Boufflers admitted, fired with marvelous order; the Dutch cavalry, the chaplain Samuel Noyes wrote, had done wonders. And for the French infantry, Ekeren was the last battle in which they carried pikes. The new socket bayonet, invented by Vauban, had made the long weapon obsolete in a single afternoon of polder fighting.