The Guardian

by Jack Whyte

  “Aye, but we can’t go now. There’s no place for us on that road, and anyway no one would make way for us. Until the blood starts to spill they won’t tolerate us among them. We’ll wait until the way is clear and then go down with the Hospitallers and the other priests. Do you know any of the Hospitallers?”

  “No. I met their commander, when the army assembled weeks ago. His name’s Reynald, and he has a cadre of about fifteen brethren with him, plus a score or two of ancillaries, I believe. But he would not remember me.”

  “Probably not, but I’ll wager he will not refuse your services today. Nor mine. I think we should align ourselves with them. We’ll go and find Brother Reynald now, and travel down with his people.”

  It was the right thing to do, I knew, for once the fighting started, it would be left to the Hospitallers and their helpers to tend to the wounded. And they would do so with perfect impartiality. There were no enemies among the gravely injured; all were equal in being victims of the evil that is war.

  We had no difficulty in finding Brother Reynald and his companions, for the black robes they wore, adorned on breast and back with the eight-pointed white cross of St. John, made it impossible not to recognize them. We found them making their preparations for the fighting that lay ahead, busily loading eight sturdy wagons with equipment and materiel, none of which looked familiar to me.

  We told Brother Reynald who we were—I saw no need to maintain my pretense of being Basque—and asked if he could use our assistance.

  “Have you done this kind of thing before, Father James? Have you been involved in a battle?”

  “No,” I said, “but a priest is a priest and his duties apply under all circumstances.”

  One side of his mouth quirked slightly upwards. “True,” he said. “I merely wondered … I have found there is no worse place on earth than in the midst of a battleground when there are people dying all around you and you are powerless to influence anyone or anything. That is what you face today, my friend. But as you say, a priest is a priest. And of course we can use your help. Yours and that of everyone else for miles around, could we but enlist them. Pardon me.”

  He called to someone behind him, and an enormous fellow came towards us.

  “This is Frère Etienne,” Brother Reynald said. “Brother Steven. Steven, we have two new volunteers, chaplains of the Earl of Surrey’s household. They would like to be of help to us, and our Heavenly Father knows how grateful we will soon be for whatever assistance is offered. Will you introduce them to the others and show them what will be required of them?”

  Brother Steven nodded and smiled, but said not a word, and Reynald turned back to us.

  “I will leave you in Steven’s hands, knowing you could not be better served. He will have no shortage of work for you, and he will keep you sufficiently occupied that you will be ready to sleep well by the end of this day. Go with God, and we may meet again later.”

  Less than an hour later, we were walking behind one of their wagons as we wended our way down the castle hill, aware that we could already hear the rising sounds of conflict in the distance ahead of us.

  And so I went to war, real war, for the first time.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE STIRLING FIGHT

  The most astonishing part of the journey we took at the tail end of the Earl of Surrey’s army that September day, wending our way down the steep slope from Stirling Castle towards the Carse of Stirling and the causeway, was that most of us had no notion at all of what we were walking into.

  The marching troops were far ahead of us, hidden from our sight by the twisting of the road, and we walked sedately in procession behind the Knights of the Hospital and their wagons as if we were on pilgrimage to some hallowed event. The high ground under our feet was dry and rocky, and there was nothing to indicate that the river valley below might be different, but the truth was that the heavy, sustained rains of the previous ten days had thoroughly soaked the ground on both sides of the causeway, making it too soft to withstand the churning feet of Warrenne’s ten thousand marching soldiers, and too dangerous to trust with the weight of mounted men. The army that preceded us down the hill had been in high spirits, moving jauntily along in the expectation of a short fight and a swift victory, and we followed them in silence for the most part, a few of us praying, perhaps, but most of us simply talking quietly and feeling grateful to varying degrees, I am quite sure, that we were non-combatants and therefore not at risk.

  Most of us among the hundred or so volunteers that day were priests, forbidden by our calling to spill blood yet driven by our very humanity to minister to those who fought and whose blood was spilt. Our allotted task—Brother Steven had appointed me to be in charge of six two-man teams of stretcher-bearers—was to roam the battlefield, identifying wounded men and taking them on stretchers to the wagons at the Hospitallers’ site, where their wounds would be treated.

  Anyone who has ever been in battle will already have seen the extent of our naivety, in our failure to ask what was meant by “roam the battlefield, identifying wounded men.” But even had we asked, I doubt that anyone would have seen a need to explain the absurdity of the mere thought of roaming anywhere on a battlefield without being killed. That should have been self-evident to anyone with a brain in his head, and so no one saw a need to warn us that we would have no need to roam; that we would literally be surrounded by dead and dying men.

  We were aware, at some cerebral level, that men were going to die. We knew, too, again in that same abstract sense, that some of those wounded men were going to be gravely wounded and would require our assistance to reach the care of the Hospitallers. But we were simple priests, sheltered by our blessed vocation from the harsh realities of armies and fighting men. In our stupid, credulous gullibility we could never have suspected that the God-filled, safe, and prayerful world in which we lived and worked was about to be destroyed—set at naught as though God Himself had turned His back on it. We could not possibly have known that Satan and his cohorts, with all their swarming minions, were about to be loosed in havoc on the field surrounding us.

  We had no sense of anything being amiss—at least I, for one, did not—until we reached the quarter-mile-long stretch of level plain leading to the south bank of the river and the narrow wooden bridge over the Forth. But when our single file of loaded wagons slowed and then stopped altogether, unable to proceed farther, we were able to tell from the tumult ahead that something had gone wrong. I shifted the knapsack containing all my priestly tools until it hung comfortably at my back, then hauled myself up to perch on the hub of a rear wheel of the wagon in front of me, and from there I was able to see that the brothers driving our wagons were all standing on their benches, peering forward to the north and shouting questions to those in front of them. Behind them—for there was no room to spread on either side—we could see and hear nothing, and so all we could do was speculate among ourselves about what might be happening.

  From my vantage point of the wheel hub, I saw Brother Reynald coming straight towards us, leaning slightly sideways because of the closeness of the wagons on his left, and I jumped down from my perch to let him pass. He thanked me with a nod and clambered up onto the wagon’s side and thence to the tailboard, and we clustered around to hear what he had to say.

  The Scots had taken the initiative, he said gravely, by launching an attack across terrain that the English scouts had deemed to be impassable after weeks of torrential rain and rising water levels. It had proved to be as impassable as predicted, he reported, for both “our” cavalry and infantry formations—he was a Norman-French Englishman, born and bred—but not for the Scotch hordes who ran across it lightly, many of them barefoot and wearing little or no armour. My astonishment grew to awe as he then explained that the road on the far side of the bridge was long and straight, built up above the surrounding flatlands for a full half-mile, and that the Forth River enclosed much of it in a loop to the right of the bridge, forming a spur of marsh
y land surrounded on three sides by the river. The Scotch attack, swift, unexpected, and unstoppable, had been devastating, capturing that entire spit. Armed with light, abnormally long spears that enabled them to reach their tightly restricted enemies without being reached in return, they had come running from the northeast, down from the woods at the base of the Abbey Craig, in a great, sweeping charge that arced from right to left to cut across the road at the end of the causeway and then drive south on both sides of it, isolating and containing the hapless English cavalry and infantry units, thousands of men in all, who had crossed the bridge but remained stranded on the causeway, far short of its northern end.

  The high banks on either side of the road had thus become a kind of prison, for their height and steepness ensured that any mounted man seeking to leap or ride down to the valley floor risked plunging his mount into soft ground that could swallow his animal to the chest and break its legs. In similar fashion, though to a lesser extent, the ranks of heavily armoured men crowding the road would be hampered and weighted down upon reaching the flats, their very numbers churning the muddy ground to the consistency of softened butter. Thus the people on the bridge were cut off, Reynald said. They had been stopped and rendered useless, their front ranks facing annihilation as they marched four abreast against the hordes awaiting them at the causeway’s end, while the men and horses behind them, being pressed unbearably from their rear, were unable even to turn around on the narrow roadway in order to retreat. De Warrenne had halted the advance and ordered the remnants of his force on the south side of the bridge, something close to half his army, to deploy to each side of the entrance, so that the bridge itself was now relatively clear.

  This was our sole chance to cross the Forth, Reynald said, and we would have to take it now, before the hard-pressed army on the other side could turn itself around and render the bridge impassable again. We would cross on foot, and we would carry with us what we needed, for our wagons would be useless on the causeway. Once across, we would set up a hospital directly west of the bridge, on the southward bend of the river where we would be close to both the water and the fighting.

  In crossing that bridge, we walked into Hell.

  We found ourselves floundering ankle-deep in a sea of blood, slipping and falling and close to drowning in it and surrounded by sundered corpses and dying men, severed limbs and spilled entrails, and gouting fountains of fresh gore from deep-trenched wounds, as though the crimson ocean already spilt by then was nowhere near sufficient. We heard the screams of dying, maimed men mingle insanely with the shrieks and cries and frantic, despairing pleas of wretches who fought in abject terror for their very lives, fought in the crazed belief that their survival lay in slaughtering or maiming every panting, screaming wretch who faced them.

  At one point—and I have no idea when this occurred or how long the battle had been going on by then—I remember coming to a halt, sobbing with exhaustion and looking about me in despair, feeling the knotted rope across my shoulders digging into my flesh like an iron rod. My role as supervisor had changed to that of porter when a young Dominican priest called Alaric, one of my twelve charges, suddenly dropped to his knees in front of me with the lethal barbs and bloodied shaft of a broadhead arrow jutting from his shattered neck. He dropped his end of the stretcher and toppled forward onto the man he had been carrying, and the sudden weight tore the stretcher from the hands of the man on the front end. I heaved the Dominican aside and snatched up the end of the stretcher, signalling to the other bearer to do the same, and from that moment on I scarce remember anything. I recall my hands being so sore at one time that I could no longer hold the stretcher, and so I snatched up a fallen length of rope and tied its ends to the arms, with great difficulty because of my bruised and bleeding fingers, then laid it across my shoulders, transferring much of the weight from my arms to my back.

  Another time, caught in the middle of vicious fighting between two large groups, I was struck heavily from behind and sent flying. I landed awkwardly, face down and momentarily stunned, aware that I had lost my stretcher and had no idea where or how. I lay there for a while, gasping to regain my breath and quite incapable of movement, though I was being trampled and kicked within what appeared to be, from where I lay, a forest of straining, pushing legs. Unable even to try to roll over, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was covered with a heavy, stifling blanket of appalling sounds: grunts and thuds and smashing, concussive, meat-cleaving sounds; clanging, clashing, slithering sounds of metal blades and the incisive, clean-edged strikes of hard-swung blows; there were spitting, hissing, snarling, keening sounds of human voices in there, filled with rage, confusion, and terror and mingled with panic-stricken whines and unintelligible snatches of half-formed words, prayers, or curses; and one awful, instantly recognizable combination of two sounds close to my ear: the heavy strike of a pointed blade—a spear or a broadsword—piercing mail and driving deep with a squealing noise of metal scraping metal and a gritty rending of flesh and bone, and the instant, chilling scream of agony and grief that accompanied it.

  And then, in the blink of an eye, it seemed, all the legs that had surrounded me were gone, moving away from where I lay gasping, and taking much of the deafening noise with them. I was alone for a while then, safe from the madness for long enough to catch my breath, then roll over onto my back and explore myself for injuries. There was blood everywhere, of course, thinning and liquefying the glutinous mud underfoot. I was awash in it, my clothing slick and greasy with it, much of it in clotted lumps and clumps, but none of it appeared to be my own. My right arm and shoulder, where the blow had landed, were numb and lifeless, but even as I probed the area with my left hand, the numbness started to wear off and the pain from the blow began to assert itself, forcibly, so that my vision blurred.

  I gritted my teeth, and after a while, squirming and grunting, I succeeded in hauling myself into a sitting position, my back supported by a hard object that I hoped was a boulder and not a corpse, and I sat there for a while with my eyes screwed tightly shut, fighting desperately not to think of the carnage around me. I dug my fingers hard into my damaged shoulder, trying to focus my mind on the pain there and use it to my own ends. But then I heard a high, wavering scream and the approaching sounds of a running fight that seemed to be coming directly at me. I opened my eyes and turned my head slightly to see a knot of men rushing towards me, flailing at one another with heavy weapons. I could not tell which of them were Scots or Englishmen, for they were uniformly filthy and indistinguishable one from another, but within moments they were on top of me, their blades hissing all around me. I saw one man go to his knees, blank-eyed with shock as he lowered his head to look at the heavy spear that had plunged into his chest and killed him. Dully, I saw someone standing in front of him and raising one leg to brace his foot on the dead man’s torso as he hauled on the spear’s shaft, but the weapon’s barbs were buried deep in the flesh it had pierced and would not be dislodged. The fellow cursed and heaved again, but then a long blade struck him sideways from the rear, splitting his face wide open at the junction of the jaw and throwing him aside like a discarded garment. I did not turn to look at his assailant, nor did I move to see where the dead man fell. I willed myself to stay motionless, my eyes closed again, and some time later, I have no idea how long, I noticed there was silence around me. The knot of fighters had all died or moved on.

  I managed to struggle to my feet, and then I simply stood swaying and looking around me for a while. The entire landscape, every yard of it, it seemed to me, was strewn with dead and dying men, some of them piled deep in places, and it occurred to me, incongruously, that no army I had ever seen had looked as large or numerous as this battalion of the dead. We tend to look at soldiers, when we see them, in terms of units and formations: densely packed, shoulder-to-shoulder foot soldiers, archers, or men-at-arms. It is not until you see those disciplined units scattered and heaped and piled in banks and rows and swaths of sprawling, stiffening limbs and th
e lifeless, unnatural attitudes of violent death that you see just how much space they really do take up.

  I was alone there, I realized, the only man left standing in a wilderness of death.

  I could still hear the far-off noise of the fighting, though there were other, more urgent noises all around me, a chorus of them, all human, all filled with misery, and all demanding my attention. They ranged from quiet whimpers to sustained groans and sudden cries, and occasionally to harrowing, demented screams born of unbearable agony. And then, looking down at one of the whimperers, a disembowelled but still living man who lay at my feet, I discovered one more novelty to add to my growing list of appalling non-clerical realities. I became aware of the stink that filled my nostrils, the stomach-turning stench of battle-slaughter: the sharp and acrid tang of new-spilt, visceral fluids from ruptured entrails and other riven and severed organs, mingled with urine and feces. The smell of hot, fresh blood is in there, too, with its coppery, metallic, almost tangible texture. And all of those are added to the predominant military stink of mouldy fustian; dirt-encrusted, too-long-worn chain mail; rank, sweat-stained leather; unwashed bodies; and rancid human and equine sweat.

  The man at my feet was speaking to me, though I could hear no sound from his moving lips. I stooped, reaching out carefully like an old, weak man to stop myself from falling on top of him, and bent forward to where I could hear his words. He wanted me to kill him. I felt mindless panic welling up in me as I stared back into his imploring eyes. He would die soon, of that I had no doubt, for his intestines lay beside him on the ground, trodden into the blood-thick mud. A voice inside my head was telling me that it would be an act of mercy to kill this man and free him from his torment, but I ignored it, knowing I could never kill another human being, and searched my mind instead for some other way I could aid him. The answer shocked me like a sudden dousing with cold water, for in all the disorientation of my surroundings, I had forgotten what I was.