I nodded. I was by my horse. Richard was nowhere to be seen, and all the Earl’s noble squires were, as it proved, struggling to come up from the baggage.
I rode back along the base of the ridge to keep clear of the French, then up the hill, into the Forest of Noailles at the back of our army, and along our ridge to the middle of our line, where I could see the Prince’s banner. The ride only took me as long as it takes to read a Gospel reading, maybe a little longer, but when I left the Earl, the French were far away, suffering under our shafts, and by the time I reached the standard. .
The fighting had started.
What I hadn’t known, because I was with the Earl, was that at the top of the ridge, the whole face of the English army was protected by a trio of hedges, with two great gaps. The gaps were about forty men wide.
The whole of the Battle of Poitiers was played out in those gaps.
Only about a hundred men at a time could fight. It was like some kind of terrible tourney, because a thousand English men-at-arms duelled eight times their number of French men-at-arms, but both sides were able to rotate men out of the line. The fighting was fierce and protracted in a way I’ve seldom seen.
In fact, I’ll say that I think the hand-to-hand fight at Poitiers was the worst I ever saw. The French sent their very best, and the English wouldn’t give a foot.
When I rode to the standard, the Dauphin’s division had crashed into Salisbury’s at the right-hand gap, and the fighting sounded like a riot, with pots and pans as participants. The French roared, ‘St Denis!’ and the English roared, ‘George and England!’
The Prince stood by his banner with his war horse. Around him stood Chandos and the Captal and twenty other commanders and great lords. They were watching.
Chandos spotted me and called, ‘Messenger from Oxford, my lord.’
I slid from my horse and knelt. ‘The Earl of Oxford sends his respectful greetings, my lord. We are behind the right flank of the French advance, holding the line of the marsh. We have defeated one party and captured the Marshal d’Audreham. The Earl desires to hear what my lord wishes.’
The Prince smiled at me. ‘That was nicely put. Have you fought?’
‘Yes, my Prince.’ Now that made me glow.
He smiled. Then he started walking. He walked to the hedge, and archers got out of his way. Fifty knights followed him.
The archers had hacked an opening in the hedge too narrow to crawl through, and the other side of the hedge was crawling with Frenchmen, but it gave a view, like the crenellation on a castle curtain wall. The hedges themselves were twice the height of a man, and as thick as a road is wide.
He looked out over the swarm of French knights who filled the hillside, though in no particular order.
‘Where is the Earl of Oxford?’ the Prince asked me.
I pointed down the ride and well off to the left. ‘My Prince, you can just see the leftmost tail of our division — the light-armed men and some Welsh — see?
The Welsh were men of Cheshire, in green and white parti-colour that blended into the marsh reeds all too well.
‘Par dieu — that far? So the French are behind us, too?’ he said.
The Captal leaned in to us. ‘The hill is nearly round, n’est pas? So of course the Earl is almost behind us, and yet on the flank of the French.’
The Prince nodded. ‘Anything the Earl can do to prick the flank of the French assault will help relieve the pressure on Salisbury and Warwick,’ he said. ‘Go with God, boy.’
To be sure, I sat my horse for three long breaths, watching the shocking havoc of the two melees at the gaps. Blood actually flew — it rose like a hideous mist off the stour.
Then I rode down the ridge and through the marsh, back to the Earl.
By the time I returned — perhaps half an hour after I’d left — our archers were utterly spent of shafts. Let me be frank, they had hit many men, and every hit from a heavy arrow wears a man, saps his courage, reminds him of his mortality and the weight of his sins. But the archers hadn’t slain more than two or three hundred, for all the weight of their shafts had darkened the sun.
On the other hand, the whole French right wing had flinched, perhaps unconsciously, away from us. And as the morning wore into afternoon, the archers who had no place to loose their shafts up on the ridge — blocked by the hedge or by the melees — came in twenties and hundreds down to us on the flank, pouring their murderous barbs on the flank of the French again, galling them like spur rowels and pushing them a little further. And as our archers gained this ground, so the Earl moved his banner forward, so that by the time the sun was high in the sky, the Earl’s banner was more than a hundred paces clear of the marsh. The result — I had no idea of this at the time, but I understand it now — was to take almost all the pressure off Warwick’s men.
In the centre, the flower of the English knighthood stood chest to chest with the French chivalry. Neither side gave. From our newest position, I could see it all, and they were all intermixed, a great, writhing steel millipede.
About that time, Burghersh released the last reserves of arrows. Our archers were spread along the whole line of the Moisson, as far as the marsh protruded into the French lines, and there was no particular order. Our men would go forward to within range of the French and launch two or three shafts with great care, and return, discussing their shots. It was like watching a village archery contest. The French had all their archers — mostly crossbowmen — with their last division under the King of France’s hand, and they didn’t loose a shaft at us.
But when we received about a hundred sheaves of arrows, just at nones, Master Peter gathered his men and gave them ten arrows apiece. He had a brief exchange with the Earl, and the Earl sent me for the rest of the squires, who were busy watering horses. With the squires and all the men-at-arms, we had perhaps a hundred armoured men.
With the best of the archers, we were perhaps 300, arrayed as we used to say ‘en haye’, like a plow, with the cutting edge, the men-at-arms in the centre, and the archers on either flank. We went forward boldly, the Earl with his standard, carried now by John Hawkwood, who had a bandage on his head.
The Earl halted us less than a hundred paces from the flank of the French main battle, and the archers didn’t loose at random. Instead, for the first time, they loosed in great volleys to the orders of the master archers, so that all the shafts fell together. The range was short.
‘Nock!’ called Master Peter.
‘Draw!’
‘Loose!’
You could hear the bodkins strike.
Men screamed.
‘Nock!’ roared Peter.
‘Draw!’
‘Loose!’
The Dauphin’s division was broken in two volleys. It was like watching a herd of horses panic, or a flock of sheep — first a few men died, then others began to shuffle back — then the next flight struck and more men fell, and there was screaming everywhere, and then Master Peter called ‘Nock’, like the Archangel Gabriel’s trumpet, and they knew the wrath was coming upon them again.
Flesh can only take so much, even nobly armoured flesh.
In Italy, they say the Dauphin was the first to run. I was there.
It’s true.
I’m not sure what to think of him. He was my age, wearing the best armour on the field, surrounded by superb knights, men of true worth and high reputation. At that point in the fight, I had faced four or five men for perhaps ten minutes, and to be fair, the Dauphin stood in the stour for almost two hours. I have no idea how much fighting he did.
But I’ll tell you this for nothing. I don’t know one English man-at-arms, nor one Gascon, even a lying bastard like the Bourc Camus, who claims to have swaggered swords with the Dauphin. Maybe his father’s men hurried him out of danger when we moved against their flank. Or perhaps he’s the cowardly bastard everyone says he is. But he was the first to go. I saw him. Golden lilies powdering a field azure.