Knight with Armour

by Alfred Duggan

  The day wore on, in heat and dust and smoke; the knights were exhausted by wrestling with the heavy ladder in their cumbersome armour, and the foot could not be driven to leave the protection of the mantlets. Nowhere in the whole front of the attack did anyone succeed in scaling the wall and exchanging swordstrokes with the enemy. At last, as the sun was setting, the trumpets blew for a retreat; the sullen little groups who had been standing in the ditch, waiting for someone else to climb the ladders first, withdrew out of range, reeling with fatigue, hunger, and heat-exhaustion. Jerusalem could not be carried by a coup de main, there would have to be a formal siege.

  Next day there were the usual recriminations that always follow the defeat of an allied army; each contingent was certain that they had done all the fighting and that the beastly foreigners had let them down. Luckily no one had the energy left to follow up words with blows and all could unite in cursing Prince Bohemund and his Italian Normans for their selfish absence. It was true that the pilgrims were now weaker in numbers than they had ever been; of course, they had been losing men by sickness and desertion ever since they left home, quite apart from their casualties in battle, and the reinforcements that had reached them in the Italian fleets hardly counted as warriors. Nobody ever counted heads accurately, not even the clerks who were supposed to give out the rations, but the leaders estimated that only about thirteen hundred knights had formed up for the assault, with about ten times as many miscellaneous foot carrying some sort of weapon; and the casualties had been heavy. In their earlier battles the Turkish arrows had not killed many of the knights; good armour was strong enough to keep them out, and the few who had died in battle had generally been first unhorsed and then murdered as they lay on the ground, too shaken to get quickly to their feet. In this assault it had been quite different; of course, the knights had led the way, and their armour had not saved them either when they were dashed from the top of the ladders or under the blows of the great blocks of stone. The losses in fully-armed knights had been heavier than in any battle since Dorylaeum two years ago, and the pilgrimage could not survive another such costly set-back.

  Meanwhile they spent the 14th of June resting, burying their dead, and grousing to one another. Roger was bruised and stiff all over as a result of the fall he had suffered when Geoffrey was killed just in front of him; he was too tender to wear armour, and thought it wise to spend the day very near the Duke’s pavilion, where there would be no danger of getting into a quarrel with a Provençal or Lotharingian. He joined a group of the lesser knights who lay in the shade of a piece of canvas stretched on a few spears, and tried to rest in a position where his aching hip would be comfortable. To add to their unhappiness, they were all thirsty; there was only just enough water to be found to give them a very small allowance morning and evening, if the indispensable warhorses were to be kept alive, and for the time being there was only enough wine for Mass. Arnulf de Hesdin was resting near him; by birth he was one of the greater barons, but now that his lands in England were forfeit to the King his poverty often drove him to the society of his inferiors. It seemed that he felt that in his present company he was entitled to lay down the law.

  “Good morning, Messer de Bodeham,” he said. “I remember you at Antioch, and I see that you have changed your mind after all. It was you, wasn’t it, who was all for staying behind and taking service under the Prince?”

  “Well, Messer Arnulf,” Roger answered. “I also am surprised to see you here. Surely in Antioch you were definitely one of Prince Bohemund’s men. What made you follow the Duke? I had heard that your allegiance sat rather lightly on you.” This was a very cheeky reply, especially to one superior by birth; but Roger was in a bad temper, like everybody else, and they were all unarmed.

  Arnulf took it well; he smiled and shrugged his shoulders, then answered pleasantly:

  “Now please, Messer Roger, don’t begin to insinuate that I am a traitor. You were in England at the time of my trial, and you ought to remember that God Himself proved me innocent of that accusation.”

  He clenched his fist and flexed his right arm to show the muscle under his tunic. Everybody laughed; trial by battle was a privilege of Norman barons, but only the most obviously guilty underwent it, and all knights knew enough about fighting to realize that acquittal was the reward of strength, luck and skill, and not a proof of innocence. This did not affect their belief in the other ordeals by fire and the red-hot iron, for somehow miracles are easier to believe in where flames are concerned.

  Roger felt rather ashamed of his rudeness, and the other’s soft reply had put him into a better temper.

  “We are all loyal knights, Messer Arnulf,” he said, “otherwise we would not be here, still following the Duke after three years of this pilgrimage. But you are a veteran warrior, and the best-born knight here. Tell me what you think of our prospects, and what we ought to be doing.”

  “That’s none of my business, thank God,” said Arnulf cheerfully. “When in doubt, follow your lord’s banner (which is all that I did in England). But if you want my opinion, I think we are in a very nasty place. To begin with, it was a mistake to plunge on here through the midst of the infidel castles, with the nearest Christian county as far away as Antioch. We are in no hurry; I have no home to go back to, and I believe that you haven’t either. We could have worked our way south slowly all this summer, taking every town and castle in our way, so that we always had plentiful supplies in our camp; and then we would have reached Jerusalem some time next year, if it is God’s will that we should have it. Above all, we should never have given up any enterprise once we had undertaken it. We cut our way from Nicaea to Antioch like a sword going through cheese, and the infidels at the end were too frightened to meet us in the open field. But our failure before Acre has ruined our record. Those devils sitting behind their wall know that we had to leave Acre untaken, and of course they think they may have the same sort of luck. As a matter of fact, it is only too probable that they are right. I don’t see how we are going to take the town.”

  “We could batter it, like we did Nicaea, or starve it out,” put in another knight, “and there is always the chance of treachery.”

  “I’m afraid none of those are any good,” said Arnulf slowly, with a frown on his brow. “Treachery won us Antioch, but it is not the sort of thing that can happen twice. I’ll wager anything you like that the infidel Count in command has made sure that there are no perverted Christians in charge of a tower or a gate, and keeps a strict watch for any negotiations. Blockade might work; there seem to be a lot of people inside the walls, and they didn’t have much notice of our coming. But what should we eat ourselves while we were starving them out? This countryside is quite barren, and it would be difficult to draw supplies from the north, while there are so many infidel garrisons in the way. The odds are we should starve first, if it came to a fasting-match. Remember that a great army of relief will probably come from Egypt in the autumn, so we must keep our horses, and dare not eat them. As to battering, I am not very hopeful. At Nicaea we had those clever Greek engineers to help us, and the Emperor’s ships brought us all the material we asked for; now that wily Emperor seems to be on the other side, blast him, and we haven’t got the skilled carpenters to build catapults and rams. In any case, there isn’t a tree for miles that would furnish a decent beam.”

  This open pessimism fitted in well with the mood of the others, for all were thinking of the defeat they had suffered yesterday, and of the friends they had lost under the walls; there was a general chorus of disillusioned agreement. Roger wanted to keep the conversation going; he was afraid that if he sat in silence and dwelt on the sad plight of the whole pilgrimage, he would break down and weep, or start planning to desert. Without much conviction, he began to put the other point of view.

  “You can say what you like, but Jerusalem must be ours. It’s only by a series of the most startling miracles that we have reached here at all. I thought all was lost at Dorylaeum, and I’m sure t
hat all Normans thought the same. That was a miraculous deliverance. Then Antioch was betrayed to us at the very last moment, when we couldn’t have carried on the siege for another week. God helped us there again. In the big battle outside the town we had to charge on foot against an enormous army of horsemen, and there again we won a great victory. I’m not saying it was the Holy Lance, I never believed in that very much, but some power in Heaven must have been on our side. Now finally, against all those odds, and after all those narrow escapes, we have reached the walls of the Holy City, and it must be God’s will that we shall free the Holy Sepulchre.”

  Arnulf gave an indulgent smile.

  “That’s right, Messer Roger. You keep on saying that to yourself and you will find that you fight all the better for it. But you have forgotten one thing, our failure before Acre. When we left Antioch I had the same belief at the back of my mind; I thought that with God’s help we were bound to overcome all our enemies. But what happened? We sat down before a poor little fishing-port, and after three months we had to burn our engines and march away with our tails between our legs. That cured me of thinking that we could count on assistance from God. After all, though Roland did great deeds at Roncesvalles, the infidels killed him in the end, and the same sort of thing may happen to us.”

  “Do you think we should retreat, then?” Roger persisted.

  “It might be a good idea,” Arnulf answered cheerfully, “if we had anywhere to retreat to; but we seem to be rather cut-off just now. Prince Bohemund won’t be at all pleased to see us, since we left him after such hard words on both sides, and the Greek Emperor will set his soldiers on us if we try to go home by land. I haven’t the money to buy a passage from Saint Simeon, or any other friendly port, and I have nowhere to go if I did get on a ship. No, I shall stay here until the pilgrimage breaks up, which may happen any day now. Then I shall try for a fief in the north, or take service as a soldier with some rich and generous master. You had all better make up your minds to do the same.”

  “Nevertheless, Dorylaeum was a bit of a miracle,” argued a quiet elderly knight with a bandage over one eye.

  “Nonsense! We should never have let them get into the camp if we had been properly arrayed,” objected another in an angry voice.

  Soon the discussion of the past battle merged into reminiscence, and they were all boasting happily of the infidels they had slain, forgetting their present danger. So the time passed until nightfall, when it was cool enough to sleep.

  Next day everyone was gloomy. There was plenty of scrub and brushwood on all the neighbouring hills, and the foot had been set to making mantlets out of the flimsy brittle branches. That had been useful as far as it went; the line of mantlets was thick and close up to the wall, so that the crossbowmen dominated the infidel archers; a crossbowman could shoot through quite a small loophole, with his weapon held to his shoulder, but an archer had to stick out his left arm and expose most of the upper part of his body. Mere arrows, however, could not harm a city wall, and the enemy had only taken cover behind the merlons of the battlements and left the crossbows with nothing to shoot at; they could still dodge out in plenty of time to beat back an escalade. If the pilgrims could not batter the wall for lack of timber to build siege-engines, the obvious alternative was to dig a mine. This was a well-known method of siege-craft; the gallery was driven right under the wall to be destroyed, the roof carefully propped up with stout timbers; then the chamber at the end was filled with oil and straw and set alight; when the props were burnt through the earth should cave in and bring down the wall above it. It was a foolproof method of taking a city, though it wasted time and cost much labour. But to-day skilled miners from southern Germany had been prospecting all round the city walls, and they reported that the ground was everywhere so rocky that a mine would take years to excavate; it would also have to be unusually deep to get under the city ditch, which had been dug with this very contingency in view. Accordingly, mining was out of the question. This had been made known to the whole army, and the leaders had invited suggestions as to what to do next; no wonder that the Norman knights, munching their biscuit and drinking a measured ration of water, were depressed about the future.

  For two more days the pilgrims remained in their camp, or manned the line of mantlets, with no prospect of getting any further. The allowance of water was scanty, and much of it stank and caused dysentery in its consumers; the waterskins were old and foul, and it was hard to keep the multitude of warhorses and draught-animals out of the few and shallow pools. The town was impregnable to direct assault, and no one could think of a better way of taking it with the available materials. The army only kept together out of obstinacy, because they all knew they had reached the end of their journey at last, and would be able to disband when Jerusalem was Christian once more; and because it was so difficult to desert in small parties. The long ride north to the Principality through a hostile countryside was more than the faint-hearted cared to face. Roger, in particular, steeled his heart and determined to see the business through to the end, for he could not bring himself to go back to the city that held Robert and Anne. In any case, all agreed that this was the last campaign of the pilgrimage; when the weather cooled a great army from Egypt must come to drive them from the walls, and they would have to embark for home, unless they had first overcome the garrison.

  He was beginning to face the fact that, if he survived the retreat and the embarkation, he would have to end his life as a soldier of King William. He had done his best to fulfil his vow to live and die in the East, but he could not serve Prince Bohemund while his wife lived, and it would be foolish to court death by staying behind if the main body of the pilgrims gave up the enterprise and went home. The Duke of Normandy ought to be grateful for his long and faithful service, but he knew that Duke Robert, probably a landless man at the present time, would be unable to reward him even if he wished to. He was very lonely, which increased his depression; there was no one, except Father Yves, that he could talk to openly about his private affairs and the disastrous tangle of his married life; and the priest was very busy just now, when so many other clergy were sick and the whole army in very great need of spiritual consolation. He was afraid to join with the other knights in their grumbling-parties during the heat of the day or after supper, for he knew that he was marked as an unfortunate and ridiculous husband, and he dreaded to hear some ribald joke that he would have to resent by single combat. Tom was a friendly soul, and he had long chats with his servant as they sat together scouring his armour, but his pride would not allow him to be seen walking about the camp with a crossbowman. There was no need for fully-armed knights behind the mantlets, that was a job for the foot, and the five days after the unsuccessful assault were the saddest and loneliest he had spent since he started on the pilgrimage.

  But on the morning of the 18th of June, the Feast of Saint Ephraim, the camp was buzzing with the most splendid and heartening news. A messenger had ridden all night from the coast with intelligence that Jaffa was in Christian hands. On the 17th a Genoese fleet had sailed into the harbour, the Christian townspeople had taken up arms, and the small infidel garrison had fled to the south. Best of all, the fleet had been equipped for a long siege of the seaport, and was laden with food, wine, and timber for building siege-engines. This was the nearest port on the sea-coast, only forty miles away, and the presence of the Italians there meant that they could start at once to construct machines to batter down the walls. The leaders immediately held an excited and tumultuous council to plan the new operations, while knights and even footmen shouted their own views to anyone who would listen. In the afternoon a strong body of mounted men rode out to escort the first convoy into the camp, and when they saw the laden camels, swaying along with a great beam carried on each side of the packsaddle, all rejoiced and counted Jerusalem already won.

  Next day they began to put into execution the plans of the leaders; it seemed that the council, in their joy and relief, had decided to try every tric
k of siegecraft at once. Mines, of course, were still out of the question, but the skilled carpenters from the ships were at once set to building catapults, while others were weaving and plaiting thin boughs and thornbushes to make arrow-proof shelters for battering-rams and bores. The Duke of Lotharingia set an example by working with his own hands, and all the knights and nobles did their clumsy best to help. Once again, as at Dorylaeum and Antioch, the pilgrimage had been saved by unexpected help in the nick of time. After three years in the field they all knew something about making mantlets, and the shelters they were constructing were essentially the same thing, with a pent-house roof. Many hands made light work of it, and by dawn on the 20th they were ready to be placed in position.

  The original line of shields for crossbowmen, that they had erected when all seemed hopeless, proved of great value now; the defenders dared not lean over the battlements to take long shots, and they could advance in safety to the foot of the wall. Roger had helped to make the covering for a battering-ram, and now that it was finished he got himself armed and joined in pushing it up. It consisted of a gabled roof, made in three layers; on top a sail filled with sand as a protection against fire-arrows, then a thick mattress of springy boughs to take the shock of heavy stones, and a stout framework of beams below. It was supported on sixteen vertical posts, each carried by four men, and all agreed that it was a splendid piece of machinery.