Behind the crossbowmen, thousands of knights were pouring into the valley from the south, spreading left and right behind the crossbowmen. The sun came out again, lighting up the bright colours of their banners and the horses’ coats. Ralph recognized the coat-of-arms of Charles, count of Alençon, King Philippe’s brother.
The crossbowmen stopped at the foot of the slope. There were thousands of them. As if at a signal, they all gave a terrific shout. Some jumped up in the air. Trumpets sounded.
It was their war cry, meant to terrify the enemy, and it might have worked on some foes, but the English army consisted of experienced fighting men who were at the end of a six-week campaign, and it took more than shouting to scare them. They looked on impassively.
Then, to Ralph’s utter astonishment, the Genoese lifted their crossbows and shot.
What were they doing? They had no shields!
The sound was sudden and terrifying, five thousand iron bolts flying through the air. But the crossbowmen were out of range. Perhaps they had failed to take account of the fact that they were shooting uphill; and the afternoon sun behind the English lines must have been shining in their eyes. Whatever the reason, their bolts fell uselessly short.
There was a flash of flame and a crash like thunder from the middle of the English front line. Amazed, Ralph saw smoke rising from where the new bombards were. Their sound was impressive, but when he returned his gaze to the enemy ranks he saw little actual damage. However, many of the crossbowmen were shocked enough to pause in their reloading.
At that moment, the prince of Wales shouted the order for his archers to shoot.
Two thousand longbows were raised. Knowing they were too distant to shoot in a straight line parallel with the ground, the archers aimed into the sky, intuitively plotting a shallow trajectory for their arrows. All the bows bent simultaneously, like blades of wheat in a field blown by a sudden summer breeze; then the arrows were released with a collective sound like a church bell tolling. The shafts, flying faster than the swiftest bird, rose into the air then turned downwards and fell on the crossbowmen like a hailstorm.
The enemy ranks were densely packed, and the padded Genoese coats gave little protection. Without their shields, the crossbowmen were horribly vulnerable. Hundreds of them fell dead or wounded.
But that was only the beginning.
While the surviving crossbowmen were rewinding their weapons, the English fired again and again. It took an archer only four or five seconds to pull an arrow from the ground, notch it, draw the bow, take aim, shoot and reach for another. Experienced, practised men could do it faster. In the space of a minute, twenty thousand arrows fell on the unprotected crossbowmen.
It was a massacre, and the consequence was inevitable: they turned and ran.
In moments the Genoese were out of range, and the English held their fire, laughing at their unexpected triumph and jeering at the enemy. But then the crossbowmen encountered another hazard. The French knights were moving forward. A dense herd of fleeing crossbowmen came head to head with massed horsemen itching to charge. For a moment there was chaos.
Ralph was amazed to see the enemy begin to fight among themselves. The knights drew their swords and started to hack the bowmen, who discharged their bolts at the knights then fought on with knives. The French noblemen should have been trying to stop the carnage but, as far as Ralph could see, those in the most expensive armour and riding the largest horses were at the forefront of the fight, attacking their own side with ever-greater fury.
The knights drove the crossbowmen back up the slope until they were again within longbow range. Once again the prince of Wales gave the order for the English archers to shoot. Now the hail of arrows fell among knights as well as bowmen. In seven years of warfare Ralph had seen nothing like this. Hundreds of the enemy lay dead and wounded, and not a single English soldier had been so much as scratched.
At last the French knights retreated, and the remaining crossbowmen scattered. They left the slope below the English position littered with bodies. Welsh and Cornish knifemen ran forward from the English ranks on to the battlefield and began finishing off the French wounded, retrieving undamaged arrows for the longbowmen to reuse, and no doubt robbing the corpses while they were at it. At the same time, boy runners got fresh stocks of arrows from the supply train and brought them to the English front line.
There was a pause, but it did not last long.
The French knights regrouped, reinforced by new arrivals who were appearing in their hundreds and thousands. Peering into their ranks, Ralph could see that the colours of Alençon had been joined by those of Flanders and Normandy. The standard of the count of Alençon moved to the front, then the trumpets sounded, and the horsemen began to move.
Ralph put his faceplate down and drew his sword. He thought of his mother. He knew she prayed for him every time she went to church, and he felt a moment of warm gratitude to her. Then he watched the enemy.
The huge horses were slow to start, encumbered as they were by riders in full plate armour. The setting sun glinted off the French visors, and the flags snapped in the evening breeze. Gradually the pounding of the hooves grew louder and the pace of the charge picked up. The knights yelled encouragement to their mounts and to one another, waving their swords and spears. They came like a wave on to a beach, seeming to get bigger and faster as they got nearer. Ralph’s mouth was dry and his heart beat like a big drum.
They came within bowshot, and again the prince gave the order to shoot. Once more, the arrows rose into the air and fell like deadly rain.
The charging knights were fully armoured, and it was a lucky shot indeed that found the weak spot in the joints between plates. But their mounts had only faceplates and chain-mail neck cowls. So it was the horses that were vulnerable. When the arrows pierced their shoulders and their haunches, some stopped dead, some fell, and some turned and tried to flee. The screams of beasts in pain filled the air. Collisions between horses caused more knights to fall to the ground, joining the bodies of Genoese crossbowmen. Those behind were going too fast to take evasive action, so they just rode over the fallen.
But there were thousands of knights, and they kept coming.
The range shortened for the archers, and their trajectory flattened. When the charge was a hundred yards away, they switched to a different type of arrow, with a flattened steel tip for punching through armour instead of a point. Now they could kill the riders, although a shot that hit a horse was almost as good.
The ground was already wet with rain, and now the charge encountered the pitfalls dug earlier by the English. The horses’ momentum was such that few of them could step into a hole a foot deep without stumbling, and many fell, pitching their riders on to the ground in the path of other horses.
The oncoming knights shied away from the archers so, as the English had planned, the charge was funnelled into a narrow killing field, fired upon from left and right.
This was the key to the English tactics. At this point, the wisdom of forcing the English knights to dismount became clear. If they had been on horseback they could not have resisted the urge to charge – and then the archers would have had to cease shooting, for fear of killing their own side. But, because the knights and men-at-arms remained in their lines, the enemy could be slaughtered wholesale, with no casualties on the English side.
But it was not enough. The French were too numerous and too brave. Still they came on, and at last they reached the line of dismounted knights and men-at-arms in the fork between the two masses of archers, and the real fighting began.
The horses trampled over the front ranks of English, but their charge had been slowed by the muddy uphill slope, and they were brought up short by the densely packed English line. Ralph was suddenly in the thick of it, avoiding deadly downward blows from mounted knights, swinging his sword at the legs of their horses, aiming to cripple the beasts by the easiest and most reliable method, cutting their hamstrings. The fighting was fierce: the English had nowhere to go, and the French knew that if they retreated they would have to ride back through the same lethal hail of arrows.