We came up about the time a man eats his bread and drinks his small beer after his first prayers. We dismounted again and stood by our horse’s heads in a deep fold in the ground, and we couldn’t see a thing.
John Thornbury came by and ordered us, on pain of death, not to enter the woods in front of us to look at the enemy.
An hour later, when we could clearly hear fighting, Sir John Hawkwood came in person. In my small battle — Seguin de Badefol’s division — we had 600 men-at-arms. There were four of these divisions.
Petit Mechin had all the archers, crossbowmen and spearmen.
Sir John reined in two horse lengths from where I sat. Harness is heavy, so most of us were sitting in the wet grass.
‘Messieurs!’ he called. Some dozen men were already mounting — there’s always some excited bastard who moves before he’s ready. It was their horses that pay the toll.
‘Mechin has beaten the archpriest — held the ridge and driven de Cervole down the hill with heavy loss.’ He held his hand for silence. ‘Twice. Now the Count de Tancraville’s banners are moving forward.’ He grinned. ‘By the time I’m done speaking, Tancraville will be past our position and well up the ridge.’ He looked back and forth. ‘In two hours, we will all be very rich, or very dead. It’s at the points of your lances, messieurs. Fight hard, and France is ours.’ His smile didn’t crack when he said, ‘Fail, and we’ll all hang like criminals.’
I think that’s when I realized that we had no priests among us. Listen, friends, no man likes to imagine himself to be the villain, eh? But we were all excommunicate, by the Pope himself, and we didn’t even say prayers as we formed. That got me in the gut. It made my insides roil.
Perhaps for comfort, I dismounted, reached into my purse, took out Emile’s favour and pinned it to my aventail. I knelt in the wet grass and thought of being the lowliest man-at-arms following the Three Kings.
We mounted, and filed off from the right, passing in long files through the wood to our front; the manoeuvre seemed to take for ever. In fact, it took longer than de Badefol intended, and the hammer of Tancraville’s attack fell fully on the spearmen and archers.
And they held. That wasn’t the plan, and I know damn well from John Hughes that they were cursing us by then, thinking themselves abandoned, or that we had lost our way in the darkness. The plan was risky — too complex — and we were late.
I remember emerging into the full light of a moist March day. The sky was full of water, and while it wasn’t raining, the cold wind that blew from the north was damp.
The French host was laid out below us like a carpet of eastern stuff — all colours and glitter, in patterns made by the more uniformed conroys of the great nobles. By the gentle Jesus, they looked like the mightiest host in the history of Christendom, with more banners than I’d seen at Poitiers, all in one great mass, pressing into our poor footmen.
In once glance, I saw Tancraville’s banner. And pressed close behind it, Bourbon’s banner, and close to it, my friend the Count d’Herblay’s. And just downhill from that, the banner of the Marshal of Savoy.
All packed into the bowl of open ground at my feet. There was nothing between us but a gentle slope of grassland that rolled from the edge of the forest all the way down to the castle of Brignais, a little more than two leagues away.
De Badefol was tense, and even Sir John was nervous. It was plain as the nose on your face that we were late, and waiting for the next 300 men-at-arms to trickle out of the forest was killing us, the more especially as our surprise was over. As soon as we emerged, the game was up — the French commanders saw us and began to wheel the third battle to face us. Bourbon, with the Burgundian lords and the Savoyards.
Christ, it was close.
They were badly ordered, and had already been ordered forward into the slowly folding footmen at the top of the next hill.
Our men were losing. Step by step, the foot were driven back. The shafts no longer flew fast from our archers, and any veteran of Poitiers could tell that our archers were too few.
I was among the first of the men to emerge from the wood; the rest of our men-at-arms seemed to be picking their way with ludicrous slowness, so that I despaired.
I watched the left flank spears — Gascons — fold. They had stout hearts, but more and more of the fresh French knights got into their ranks and cut them down. They didn’t run; they just seemed to collapse like a tent with its ropes cut.
Now the enemy had their third division formed. They were eager to be at us, and so on they came.
On the far flank, the archpriest rallied his mercenaries for one more charge into our archers. You’d think, the way the archpriest’s men been sacrificed, that they might have changed sides. But they didn’t. Damn them.
Seguin de Badefol sat on his war horse, watching men emerge from the woods behind us. He watched us and watched the Bourbon division. I could read his mind. At some point, we would have to act — or retreat and abandon Mechin.
That point was close.
Sir John Hawkwood had all his men in line. They were mounted, lances up, ready to ride. He trotted over to me.
‘William, if this goes like a sow’s belly, follow me out. We’ll get clear or surrender to someone I know.’ He gave me a friendly nod. ‘There’s better pickings than this in Lombardy.’
I nodded, but I had already pretty much settled on dying. A ransom would break me. I had nothing.
In fact, I was tired to death. I had spent everything — my soul, if you like — the last few weeks. To see it all lost. .
Men were shifting.
When the field is lost, and all about you quail, that is where you find out who you are.
I rode out ahead of my section of the line and pushed up my visor.
‘Par dieu, friends!’ I called. ‘We have nothing to worry about.’ I pointed my lance, one-handed, at the French chivalry. ‘There’s enough ransoms there for every man here! Stop squabbling.’
When I returned to my rank, John Thornbury slapped me on the back, and other men grinned.
Seguin made his decision. He raised his lance, held it over his head — no mean feat — and called out.
‘To hell!’ he shouted.
In terms of pre-battle speeches, it was the best I’ve ever heard. We knew we were beaten. We knew where we were going. He didn’t pour honey on it.
We had about 2,000 men-at-arms when we started down the long hill at a walk. The wet wind had become a rain. I was to the right of the centre and had become aware that d’Herblay was opposite me. My last conscious thought was not about strategy or tactics, honour or chivalry, or even ransoms and wealth, but whether Emile would thank me for making her a widow.
I shouted with the rest, and we fell down the hill like an avalanche of steel and horse flesh.
I aimed my priest’s horse at d’Herblay.
We came together at the speed of two galloping horses. It had taken two days to get to this point, and then the battle ran faster and faster — like a runaway cart on a downslope, suddenly there was no controlling it. No predicting its course.
I don’t remember the moment of impact. I remember the long charge — the rain, the sound of 2,000 horses rumbling down a hill. The feeling of a wonderful horse under me. The knowledge that, for once, my lance-point was on target, steady and easy.
It was. . beautiful.
And then I was through their line, my lance shattered in my hand, and I was drawing my sword while a pair of coustilliers — lesser men — tried to pound me from the saddle with spears.
I couldn’t see any of my men — Perkin generally stayed at my shoulder, but the only man I could see was Seguin de Badefol, and he was surrounded.