The Wolf Cub

by David Pilling

  Only at the town of Louviers, where the citizens had repaired and enlarged the fortifications, was Clarence obliged to lay siege for any length of time. The town held out stubbornly for three weeks, and refused to surrender even after our cannon had blown massive holes in the walls. Bored and irritated by their defiance, Clarence sent in the pick of his men-at-arms to take the place by storm.

  I took no part in the assault, thanks to a bout of dysentery caused by gorging on too much rich cheese, over-ripe apples and strong French wine. My view of the final battle was interrupted by frequent dashes to the latrine pits, though I saw enough to realise the French were making a fight of it. They had thrown up barricades behind the shattered walls, and our men were required to clear them out, street by street, in an entire day and night of vicious struggle.

  Clarence, who had counted on an easy victory, flew into a rage when he saw our casualties being fetched back to camp on stretchers, or carried by their comrades. When the town was finally taken after a tremendous battle in the marketplace, he ordered two hundred of the leading citizens brought before him.

  They were made to appear before the duke in just their nightshirts, with halters around their necks. This was how Clarence’s famous ancestor, King Edward, had treated the burghers of Calais. The duke was aware of the legend, and deliberately aped it to remind all present of his noble descent.

  The burghers were a pathetic crowd of knock-kneed old men, many with white beards trailing down past their waists, roped together and driven like cattle. It was difficult to believe these ancients had given our soldiers so much trouble. Many bore the scars of battle: one had lost an arm in the fight, and had to be carried on a litter. Delirious through loss of blood, he raved like a madman, beating his chest with his remaining hand and screaming at the top of his lungs.

  “Beg,” cried the duke, trotting his destrier back and forth in front of the prisoners, “get on your knees and beg for your lives, you traitors, and I may show mercy.”

  He went red in the face, working himself into a passion. “Yes, traitors, who defied your rightful liege lord and raised arms against his soldiers! By rights I should hang every one of you, and leave you for the crows to pick!”

  The burghers could see Clarence was in earnest. They knelt in the dust and wept for their lives, groaning and weeping and imploring him to think of their families and loved ones.

  Clarence basked in their terror. He loved to play the stern-faced conqueror, and in his mind probably compared himself to Caesar, scowling at the beaten Gauls after the fall of Alesia.

  To do him credit, he shed no more blood at Louviers. The burghers were permitted to ransom themselves - for a hefty sum of fifteen thousand écus, if I remember rightly - and an English garrison was installed in the town.

  The armies of winter advanced with frightening speed, and turned the idyllic summer country of Normandy into a frozen hell. We marched west, struggling along roads half-buried under layers of snow and ice, to join the King at Falaise.

  Our column was frequently attacked by bands of Norman partisans, like so many Robin Hoods hidden in the white forest. They leaped out to pick us off with their bows and slings, and melted back into the wild before we could give chase. Clarence’s knights managed to catch a few, and hanged them from the trees as a warning, but it did little to dissuade their comrades. If anything the attacks grew more savage and persistent, until Clarence was forced to post a strong mounted guard to patrol our flanks on the march.

  The partisans reminded me of Robert Stafford and his band of outlaws. I started to wonder sadly if I would ever return to the quiet woods and fields of Sussex. It was unlikely, since naught save a gallows waited for me at home. Many years were to pass before I beheld the time-weathered old house at Kingshook again, and stood quiet vigil beside my mother’s tomb.

  We found the King’s division mired before the walls of Falaise, where the citizens had chosen to follow the example of Caen and Louviers, and reject our demands for surrender. It turned out that many of the soldiers of Caen, whom Henry released after the town fell, found their way to Falaise and stiffened the ranks of the garrison. Thus the King’s mercy rebounded on him, and I believe hardened him even further. The French, it was clear, would not be conquered with kindness.

  The army spent a miserable Christmas camped outside Falaise. We were at least well-supplied, and suffered none of the evils of starvation and dysentery that had carried off so many of our troops at Harfleur.

  I often saw the King, a slender figure in burnished silvery armour adorned with the royal arms, a golden circlet upon his helm, ride out to inspect the defences of Falaise. Secure in God’s protection, he was careless of his safety and often ventured within bow-shot of the defenders. The arrows and bullets they aimed at him all fell wide of the mark, which can only have reinforced his belief that the invasion of France was a holy mission.

  “My brother sees himself as the agent of Christ,” Clarence remarked one night.

  He had invited his favourite knights and men-at-arms, myself included, to dinner. We sat huddled together for warmth, even as the guns roared outside and the canvas of his pavilion creaked and sagged under the ghastly howl of the wind. It was a dire night in late December, the day after the Feast of Saint Stephen, and the snow had been swept away by an entire week of rain and gales.

  Clarence took a long swallow of ruby-red wine. He was quite drunk, and the steady flow of wine had loosened his tongue. “The Lord’s strong right arm,” he murmured, “sent to chastise the perfidious French, who have turned away from God and wallow in the pit of sinfulness.”

  The duke grinned at us. “He talks like that, you know. Conversation with Henry is like being subjected to an endless sermon. He was always the same. Even when we were children Humphrey used to call him the Little Priest.”

  His words met with silence. The little group of fawners and flatterers who usually applauded the duke’s every word, and laughed uproariously at his feeble jests, were careful not to respond. Any criticism of the King veered dangerously close to treason, and unlike Clarence none of us enjoyed the protection of royal blood.

  The duke, who hated silence, barked at his minstrels to play. While they filled the pavilion with a solemn air, I finished off the last of my venison and listened to the rain hammering outside. The King had ordered shelters to be erected over our guns, so they could fire in the wet. I knew his tactics by now, and that the barrage of gunstones would continue until morning. Then the storming parties would go in.

  My brief bout of dysentery had passed, and I couldn’t plead sickness this time to excuse me from being sent to the breach. What little sleep I got after the meal was haunted by images of unspeakable agony: steel-clad demons thrust dirty blades into my flesh, and laughed as they twisted them in my bowels. Childish nightmares of hellfire, reinforced by the murals I had seen every Sunday on the walls of the little church in Kingshook, mingled with every soldier’s terror of death.

  I crawled out of my damp tent at dawn, cold and exhausted, to arm and swallow a bite of bread and cheese. My head pounded from too much wine, and my hands shook as they fumbled with the strap of my helm.

  For once God took pity on poor soldiers. A cheer rippled through the camp as a flag of truce was raised over the gatehouse of the town. After some shouted negotiations with men on the rampart, Henry permitted a group of envoys to ride out and meet him to discuss terms.

  His relentless cannonade had broken the spirit of the citizens. Not so the garrison, which continued to hold out in the castle. Many of those inside were soldiers from Caen, who could not expect to be shown mercy a second time. They held out with desperate valour for another six weeks.

  I was no longer at Falaise to witness their final surrender, and the execution of the men of Caen. Henry left a portion of his force to besiege the castle, while the rest marched away to begin the long-planned siege of Rouen.

  So far I had experienced some of the trials and hardships of war, but nothing prepared
me for Rouen. Twenty-four weeks of siege, one of the worst sieges any Christian ever endured.

  That horror lay ahead of me as our victorious army advanced through the grey winter landscape of Normandy in high spirits, led by an all-conquering monarch whose life was already passing into legend.

  On we marched. To Rouen, and Hell on earth.

  16.

  “A more solemn siege was never set,

  Since Jerusalem and Troy were got.”

  These lines appear at the beginning of my one serious attempt at poetry. The poem itself, titled (appropriately enough) The Siege of Rouen, has enjoyed some small fame, and I occasionally hear it quoted even to this day.

  Not, I suspect, for its literary qualities. I wrote it during the long months of siege, scribbled on bits of parchment by the light of candles and campfires. “All in rough and not in rhyme,” as I admit in the final verse.

  Englishmen like to remember the poem because it captures a glorious moment in time, now long past and never to be redeemed. Our hero-king was still alive, our victories were endless, and our enemies, the accursed French, fled from us like whipped dogs. The catastrophe of Agincourt was still fresh in their minds, and even their bravest captains refused to face King Henry in the field. To them he had become an ogre, merciless and unstoppable, a bloody-handed slaughterer intent on wiping out the entire French race.

  Look closer, and you will see the poem is no false celebration of glory. I was careful to flatter the king and his nobles - part of the reason I wrote it was to gain their approval - but it doesn’t shy away from the evils of that siege.

  “There men might see great pity,

  Children of two years or three.

  Go about to beg for their bread,

  Their mothers and fathers were dead.

  Under the rain they stood,

  And lay crying for food.

  And some starved to death,

  And others ceased to breathe.

  Some crooked in the knees,

  And others lean as any trees...”

  There. It is mere doggerel, really, though I did my best to capture the misery and suffering of the wretched citizens, turned out of the city by their own people when food ran too short to feed them. Henry would not let them pass through his siege lines, so they were condemned to starve in the ditch below the walls.

  I will speak more of that later. Henry’s reputation has suffered greatly for his supposed cruelty at Rouen, and I wish to provide an antidote to a few of the more poisonous lies. He was neither the stainless hero that our people make him out to be, nor the cold-hearted monster the French remember him as.

  Our army arrived on the eastern fringes of the city near the end of July, some ten months after I slew my cousin and fled Kingshook. By this time the whole of the duchy, save Rouen, was in English hands. We had fought no pitched battles, since the Normans preferred to hide behind strong walls and the Dauphin sent no troops to aid them. He was too busy fighting - or rather, running away from - his hated rival John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, to deal with us.

  I had thought Southampton and Caen impressive, yet both were mere hamlets compared to the size and grandeur of the ancient capital of Normandy. My first glimpse of the city walls was obscured by clouds of smoke, since the citizens had copied the Sieur de Montenay’s strategy at Caen and razed the suburbs outside the walls to deny us supplies.

  Gradually, as our vanguard advanced down the highway that led from Rouen to Paris, the smoke started to clear. I counted twelve strong towers, besides those that flanked the city gate. The broad waters of the Seine lay to the south, and the curtain wall stretched away over green fields and pastures to the north.

  The cheerful singing of our soldiers died away at the sight of the city’s monstrous defences. At the foot of the wall there was a ditch, deep and wide, and stuffed full of caltrops. Every one of the towers was mounted with cannon, small bombards and serpentines and even a few old ribaults, multi-barreled guns mounted on wooden platforms.

  There were other engines mounted on the ramparts, ballistas and onagers and trebuchets, and the battlements were crammed with troops. The bright summer sun flashed off their helmets and rows of lances and spear-heads, an endless fence of metal teeth.

  I toyed with the ring on my finger, as was my habit in times of worry, and wondered at my father’s thoughts when he first beheld the walls of La Charité-sur-Loire.

  The capture of La Charité, a walled town on an island in the Loire south of Paris, was the first and perhaps the greatest of my father’s victories. He was just a common soldier then, and led several thousand English and Gascon routiers to victory in a single night.

  As I looked over the mighty walls of Rouen, rising like a white tide before me, it seemed unlikely I would repeat the feat. I pictured myself being sent forward to scale the walls, through a storm of bullets, arrows and gunstones, boiling pitch, burning straw and hails of rocks, only to die under the crush of bodies in that dreadful ditch.

  I should have known the king could not afford to waste the lives of his soldiers. His army had whittled away, thanks to the need for garrisons to hold the towns he had won, and now he had only some seven or eight thousand men left to besiege Rouen.

  The French equalled or even outnumbered us. Their garrison was divided among seven captains, including two hell-hounds named Gaunt Jakys and The Bastard of Thian. Both these men were fond of peeling the skins from captured soldiers and hanging their raw, bleeding bodies, still alive, over the walls.

  Each French captain had at least a thousand men under his command, though I deliberately exaggerated the figures in my poem:

  “And every one of these captains had,

  Five thousand men and more at hand...”

  The purpose of my exaggeration was to make the enemy appear stronger than they were, and thus celebrate our achievement in defeating them.

  Or rather, King Henry’s achievement. I wrote the poem both to win royal favour, and as a way of passing the time. While the summer months died away into a cold and dank autumn, we sat outside the walls and did - nothing. Henry would risk no assaults, and seemed reluctant to turn his guns against the town.

  Many of his soldiers were baffled by this sudden inertia. “Harry was keen enough to blow holes in Caen and Falaise,” grunted Robert Caunfield around the supper fire one night, “why does he tarry now?”

  “And Cherbourg,” agreed another man-at-arms, who served in the Duke of Gloucester’s retinue, “the walls of Rouen are bigger and stronger, I grant you, but they wouldn’t stand up for long against our guns. We should batter the whoresons into surrender.”

  I was confident enough by now to make my own voice heard. “The King wants Rouen for himself,” I said, “he wants to rule the duchy from here. If he fires on the city, he will damage his own property, and have to pay for the repairs.”

  “True,” agreed Caunfield, “and we all know Harry doesn’t like to open his purse-strings. Got that from his father. Old Bolingbroke was ever tight with money, and short of it too.”

  There was some truth in all this. The King was reluctant to damage a city he regarded as his own, and meant to use as the capital of Normandy. If the defences were seriously damaged, Rouen might also be vulnerable to a French counter-attack.

  There was another consideration. He wanted to test the will of the French to fight, to defend their own. By sitting outside Rouen for months on end, doing little to storm the walls or bombard the place into surrender, he dared his enemies to come on and face him in open battle.

  The Dauphin, whom I regarded as a weak and helpless creature, surprised us all. As the weeks passed rumours started to pass through the camp that the French were raising a large army to relieve Rouen.

  At first I dismissed them as mere gossip. Bored soldiers love to try and frighten each other with tall tales of the enemy, and the dreadful threats that lurk just over the horizon.

  Still the rumours persisted. At the end of October, a full year after my flight
from England, they could no longer be denied. The Dauphin had raised the oriflamme and issued an arriére-ban or general muster, summoning all his loyal vassals to hurl the accursed Goddams out of Normandy.

  Through the whole of that month and into a vile, rain-soaked December we waited for French banners to appear on the skyline. The King ordered his knights and men-at-arms to sleep in their armour, and every day drew his army up in companies with our backs to the city walls. If the French had attacked, they would have found us ready for them, day or night.

  Ready in body, perhaps, but not in mind. In spite of all our bravado and boasting, I believe few of us relished the notion of fighting another Agincourt. Even the most devoted of Henry’s admirers would have to admit that God smiled on him that day, and might not be so generous twice.

  The tension broke when a messenger galloped into camp and was escorted to the royal pavilion. I glimpsed him, bareheaded and sweating from his furious ride, slide from his horse and kneel before the king.

  Moments later the Duke of Gloucester, standing immediately to Henry’s left, uttered a cry of joy and threw his hat into the air. A babble of voices rose, all at once, and a drum started to pound.

  “What did he say?” I shouted, my words drowned in the sudden rush of noise.

  Roger Floure, he of the forked beard and utter contempt for all Frenchies, seized me in a bone-crushing hug and slapped me on the back.

  “The silly little Dauphin” (he pronounced it Daw-fin) “has lost his nerve!” he bawled into my ear, “marched his army up to Beauvais, and then turned around and marched away again! The spineless turd has run away! No battle! There will be no battle!”

  He was wrong in that regard, poor fellow. Inside a few days he would be dead, his skull crushed by a pick-axe, while I choked and gasped for breath in the dark beneath the earth.