by Dan Davis
It was a good place to fight.
But the English were afraid. Fear was in the air. At Crecy, we had been as confident as an army could be.
On that hillside outside Poitiers, there was a sense of impending doom.
Every man was hungry but even worse was the thirst. After the twenty mile march the day before and the hundreds of hard miles before that, legs and arses were like jelly and thighs raw.
All the men knew we were outnumbered, with at least two of them for every one of us. Many were shaken by the fact we had missed meeting up with Lancaster. Those two thousand men were on everyone’s minds and some were even convinced they would come to our rescue in time, no matter how much it was explained that was impossible.
Also missed, desperately, were the thousands we had left behind to guard Gascony. All of them sitting warm and dry for months, eating all the food, drinking the wine and bedding the women, while we stood shivering and thirsty waiting to die on a French hillside.
The French sent their priests and envoys out into the fields between the two armies.
Prince Edward and the leading nobles rode a little way forward toward them and they came closer to meet him.
I jumped on my horse.
“Sir?” Walt said.
“Stay here.”
I rode out after the Prince and the great lords, feeling the eyes of the army on me. I was disgraced, an outcast, practically a criminal.
Ever since I had escaped my half-hearted imprisonment in Gascony, I had kept well away from the lords of the army. My presence was barely tolerated within the mass of the general soldiery but still, I rode out alone behind the great lords and their retinues and lurked where they could not see me without turning. No one else came to stop me. I knew none would dare.
A French cardinal came forward toward the Prince on foot with his arms stretched out, tears in his eyes.
“Your Grace,” he said, voice quivering. “I beg of you that you listen.”
Edward sighed. “Say it quickly. This is no time for a sermon.”
The cardinal stuttered into his speech. “Your Grace, I beg that you consider the appalling deaths of the good Christians that shall happen in this place if battle is joined. Your men, there, so many good and decent men, will surely be slaughtered. Your royal person, your loyal nobles beside you, and the common folk that follow you, are in the gravest peril where you stand. Please, my lord, let you not tempt God with pride and vainglory. I beg you, in the name of God and by the honour of Christ and the Blessed Virgin to grant a short truce so that negotiations may be held. I swear to you that my brothers and I shall do all in our power to assist you to come to some accommodation in this matter. If you will allow it, we should have a conference between the kings of England and France and so avoid the terrible slaughter that you must suffer.”
I laughed and a few men turned around to look at me.
“What are you doing here?” Salisbury growled, pointing his ample nose in my direction.
“You cannot mean to treat with the French, Your Grace?” I called out.
Edward turned and gave me a death stare. I gave him one back and mine was far more practised.
“Get him away from here,” Edward said to Oxford, who nodded. However, he wisely made no move toward me.
The cardinal and his men glared at me. “Your Grace, a truce would be—”
“Yes, yes,” Edward said, waving his hand. “I suppose a short negotiation would be in order. We owe it to God, do we not?”
The cardinal beamed. “Praise God! We shall at once return to the King of France. There is a hill just there, between the hedge and the vines, where two groups may sit in peace.”
Bowing and praising God and the Prince, they left and rode away over the hill.
I shook my head as they went. “We hold a fine position,” I said loudly as the lords turned in to each other.
“You do not hold anything,” Salisbury called. “You are not welcome here.”
Oxford nodded. “You may take yourself away from the Prince’s presence. Immediately.”
“We can kill them all,” I shouted. “We can murder the lot of them, Your Grace. Why delay?”
Warwick sneered. “Our men need rest, you fool. This way, our men can recover from the march.”
Humphrey Ingham took up the haranguing. “Hold your tongue, Hawkedon, you blustering bastard. You claim to know so much about—”
“There is no water here, sire,” I said to Edward, projecting my voice over theirs. “Our men will have to ride to and from the rivers for as long as we stay in this place. All the enemy has to do is guard the banks and wait for us to die of thirst or attack. We must invite an attack now, today.”
The Prince pursed his lips and looked back at our army. The men stood, spattered in filth and all cloth darkened and heavy with rain not yet dried. They looked anxiously down at their lord and future king.
“It is done, now,” he said, his tone surprisingly reasonable. He looked at his lords. “Let us see what they have to offer. In the meantime, send companies to collect as much water as we can and have them drink while they are there.”
They glared at me but again made no move to drive me away. Each of them had experience and they were good soldiers. But they knew my reputation. Most had seen me fight. They had heard my advices over the years to the King and to his nobles and they knew that whether my words were listened to or not, I was usually right.
But despite all that, the negotiations out between the armies lasted all day and continued after sundown. For all his confident talk, it was clear that Edward wanted to avoid a battle.
He, too, was infested with the sense that we could not win.
I had to force the battle or else I could not kill Geoffrey de Charny. I needed them to come for us and whether de Charny fought in the open or under the black banner, I would cut my way toward him and tear his heart out.
But only if there was battle.
The proposal from the French was galling. They said Edward had to surrender all his conquests in France over the last three years and he had to pay tens of thousands of pounds for the damage caused by the great raids. In return, the Prince asked to be betrothed to a daughter of King John, and she would bring the entire county of Angouleme as dowry.
“Absurd,” I said when I heard the details but Edward seemed to be open to it.
When it went back to the French, they changed their minds and after sundown their message came back to us.
“You have destroyed too much of France to be paid for by any sum. You are trapped in your position, your men are exhausted from their ceaseless destruction and you are out of supplies. You have no source of water and so you cannot stay where you are. But you cannot escape. Any agreement you make with us would have to be confirmed by your father the King and in the meantime you would throw away our terms and continue your onslaught upon our soil. You will have no agreement from us.”
“Why did they go through all this?” Oxford said. “Merely to throw it all back in our faces?”
“They are delaying because it suits them, you bloody preening fools,” I said, unable to contain my anger at their stupidity. “We can only lose by such delay while they only gain. We eat the last of our supplies while their numbers continue to grow beyond that damned hill.”
Although they knew it was true, they despised me for my disrespect towards them and they pretended I was not there.
The men of our army sat all through the day and in the night each man lay down on the ground and slept.
Thousands of men laying across the hillside beneath the stars. Small fires flickered everywhere. A few fellows gathered around a candle or two, talking in low voices. Pages and other servants traipsed back and forth through the mass of men, some holding lamps aloft as they went.
“How can there not be a battle?” the men in my company asked me. “How can we be here and them over there and not come to blows?”
“Ain’t you daft sods never seen two blustering
drunks?” Walt answered them. “The two biggest mouths in the alehouse, shouting each other hoarse and cursing each other’s mother and puffing up their chests, only to allow themselves to be pulled away by their mates? Seems like that’s what this is here, if you ask me. Two biggest bastards in the room, each afraid of getting his block knocked off.”
“How do you make such men come to blows?” I asked Walt.
He shrugged. “No one wants to see that, do they, sir. Just want to finish your ale and go home to a woman, that time of night.”
Rob leaned forward. “Some craven old bastards wait for a man to turn away before thumping him on the crown.”
I nodded, the germ of an idea taking root.
“Nah,” said Walt. “You want to drive your knuckles into a man’s kidneys, if you be hitting from the back. Liable to break your hand, cracking him on the dome in such a manner.”
“Unlike you, Walt, I ain’t got experience hitting a fellow in the back.”
The men laughed.
“Come now, Robert,” Walt countered, “from what I hear it told, you like most of all to pound a man solely from behind.”
I walked away while they roared and argued with each other. Most of the soldiers on the dark hill were quiet and pensive but men prepare for battle in a thousand ways and it has always been the same.
Some laugh and joke, others tremble and others weep. Many, I know, think of home and family and what they might go back to if they live through the next day. And they dread to never see it again.
Myself, I had no home. Not really. And yet I thought of Cecilia and the home that I might have had with her, for a time, if things had been different. If I had chosen differently. If there was any home at all, it was the house in London and if I had any family it was Eva and Stephen alone. Poor Thomas, and Hugh with him, were gone forever.
Both men, I had given a longer, ageless life than they would have had otherwise. But still they were dead because I had not done my duty protecting them from the danger I exposed them to.
I walked by an armourer who sat hammering dents from pieces of armour plate while another sharpened weapons nearby. Pages queued up for either one man or the other, their arms full of blades or helms.
I had lost John, and Thomas, and Hugh, to Geoffrey de Charny.
He had taken so much. His reputation as the greatest knight in Christendom irked me almost as much as anything else. The fame that he had cultivated had come from his prowess in battle and in tourneys and jousts. Prowess enhanced due to his immortal strength and speed. It was deceitful, dishonest and I wished I had done it.
The soldiers around me on that hillside joked and complained and said their private prayers.
My prayers would wait. Instead, I swore by God and Jesus and all His saints that I would have vengeance.
In the morning, a rider came to ask for a truce of one year. Prince Edward replied that he would agree to a truce extending from that day to next spring but no longer.
“They will give us no truce,” I said, exasperated. “This is nought but to delay us further. We must force battle today or we will wither and die like vines in a drought.”
“How can we force them to attack,” Warwick said, “when they are seeking to delay.”
I had been thinking about it. “The hotheads amongst the French lords will have been urging King John to attack us since yesterday, or even earlier. Especially the ones who were not at Crecy. They will see us as weak, needing only to be assaulted for us to crumble. They are surely being held back by cooler heads and the reticence of the King. All we need do is tip the balance.”
“Yes, yes,” Warwick said, scowling. “But how, man?”
“We turn our backs.”
They stared at me.
“We withdraw.” I smiled back at them. “At least, we should appear to be withdrawing. What can they see of us, from over the hill?”
They looked out across the rolling hills and hedges.
“Nothing,” Oxford said.
“Their men see us,” Salisbury said, nodding at the scores of riders atop the far hill a mile away. “And they will ride back, frantic, telling their masters all at once what they see. And they will surely act to catch us while we are in disorder.”
Salisbury may have been a miserable bastard who disliked me intensely, but he was a damned fine soldier. He smiled and the others began nodding with him. Even Sir Humphrey Ingham, who seemed delighted by the proposition. Salisbury and Ingham turned expectantly to the Prince.
“Raise your men’s banners aloft at the rear,” Edward said to Warwick, “and have them advance them into the wood. Go with him, Humphrey.”
They turned to make it happen, enjoying the prospect of tricking the French.
“Best tell the men, my lords,” I said to them, loudly. “We would not want any of them thinking we were running away.” I raised my voice. “Not when we are about to slaughter the French.” A few of the common men near us raised their voices to cheer me and I grinned at them. “Pass the word, lads. The Prince is going to trick the French. But we are all staying right here. This hill is England, today, boys. Pass the word.”
Salisbury nodded once at me and turned to make his way to the right flank.
I made my way to my company.
“Going to be a fight then, is it?” Walt said. He lowered his voice. “The lads are getting a bit thirsty, sir.”
“I know. There will be a battle today if I have to ride out and charge the French alone. We shall be away from here tomorrow. They can drink then.”
“If any of us live to see tomorrow,” Walt said. “Sounds like there’s a lot of French knights.” He spat at his feet.
“We are in a very fine position. Do you see? Their numbers do not matter so much as they cannot get around our left due to the marshes and the hill. How will they get through those hedges, there?”
Walt frowned. Rob answered. “They’ll have to come through the gaps where there’s no hedge. They just have to. Proper hedges, them.”
“And so they will have to come on in a narrow front there, and over there, and right here, before spreading out again to attack our front line.”
Rob was grinning as he strung his bow. “They’ll be all herded together. All nice and tight and packed in there. It’ll be lovely work, lovely.”
“It’ll be a bloody slaughter, all right,” Walt said, nodding. “And then they’ll be through and they’ll slaughter us in turn.”
The priests came out and started to say Mass.
Many men-at-arms filed away up the hill with their lords.
Walt jerked his head at them. “Knights up there, sir. Knights dubbing their men, making them knights also. Great honour, that, if we win. Great honour for a loyal man to be so dubbed by his knightly lord.” He looked at me expectantly.
“The day you are knighted, Walt, will be the day the notion has lost all its meaning.”
He hung his head and walked away by himself.
Edward came forward on his magnificent horse and turned to his men. A hush fell on the army as we strained to hear his shouted words. He had a fine, loud voice and it carried well but the wind blew most of it away.
The Prince’s men came around, shouting out the written orders as they went. “You shall keep strictest discipline in the lines! No man shall waste time securing prisoners! Do you hear? No prisoners to be taken.”
Rob looked over his shoulder at Warwick’s banners on our left as they waved rearward into the wood. “Supposing it ain’t a trick, sir?”
“What’s that, Rob?”
“Oh, nothing, sir.”
“Spit it out, man.”
“It proper looks like Warwick is retreating, don’t it? Look at Ingham’s banner, there. It’s halfway to bloody Bordeaux. But still the enemy waits up there. And if the French don’t attack now, then we might as well make it an actual retreat, right, sir? The rest of us can follow him?”
I had a sudden thought. Perhaps it was I who had been tricked by the Prince.
Perhaps he had in fact ordered Warwick and Ingham to retreat and that was what he intended.
Aghast at the thought, I rode out through the rows of vines toward the French. “Fight me!” I shouted at the men on the far hill. “Come and fight, cowards. Any of you, come fight me. All of you, come to me and fight.”
A mass of horsemen crept over the brow of the hill and began to cross the fields toward us. More and more appeared and streamed after the ones in front. I counted scores, then a hundred and when I saw it was perhaps five hundred men mounted on destriers with their lance points glinting and their pennants snapping in the wind, I turned and rode back toward the Prince.
“Here they come, Your Grace.”
“Yes,” Oxford said as I rode up, “thank you for you pointing it out.”
“They are aiming for Warwick,” I said, watching the Prince closely. He screwed up his face and turned to a man on a swift courser at his side. “Ride to Warwick! Tell him to hold his position against the assault.”
“Look!” Chandos said, pointing with his sword. “Their men separate. Two columns.”
I nodded, seeing the riders pick their way through the trees and bushes. “They mean to charge the archers on both flanks. Drive them away or kill them before the main assault.”
“Oxford,” the Prince snapped. “Lead the archers into the marsh around the left flank.”
The Earl of Oxford blinked once and then charged his horse along the front lines toward the men. In the distance, the two columns of French cavalry formed as they drew closer to us, ready to smash into our formations.
They charged into the disarray on our left flank and penetrated the lines where Warwick’s men had pulled back. They were fighting to hold the French from breaking through and sweeping in behind us. Out beyond them, on the farthest left flank, Oxford ordered the archers to slog out further into the marsh. The horses could not charge them there but they were able to shoot into the rear and flanks of the French horses. The horses died. Falling, throwing their riders, and panicking, the enemy horses took terrible damage from the storm of arrows and the attackers were driven off.
