Larger Image
The line along which the Black Prince threw up entrenchments was the head of the slight slope upon the Nouaillé or eastern side of the depression I have mentioned. It ran from the farm Maupertuis (now called La Cardinerie) to the site of those out-buildings which surround the modern steadings of Les Bordes, and to-day bear the name of La Dolerie. The length of that line was, almost to a foot, one thousand English yards, and it will easily be perceived that even with his small force only a portion of his men were necessary to hold it. Its strength and weakness I shall discuss in a moment. This line faces not quite due west, indeed nearly twenty degrees north ofwest.[4]Its distance as the crow flies from the Watergate of Poitiers is just under seven kilometres, or, as nearly as possible, four miles and six hundred and fifty English yards.[5]While its bearings from the town of Poitiers, or the central part thereof, is a trifle south of due south-east.[6]
The line thus taken up, and the depression in front of it, are both singularly straight, and the slope before the entrenchments, like its counterpart opposite, is regular, increasing in depth as the depression proceeds down towards the Miosson, which, at this point, makes a bend upward to meet, as it were, the little valley. A trifle to the south of the centre of the line there is a break in the uniformity of the ridge, which comes in the shape of a little dip now occupied by some tile-works; and on the further, or French, side a corresponding and rather larger cleft faces it; so that the whole depression has the shape of a long cross with short arms rather nearer its basethan its summit. Just at the end of the depression, before the ground sinks abruptly down to the river, the soil is marshy.
Leading towards this position from Poitiers there was and is but one road, a winding country lane, now in good repair, but until modern times of a poor surface, and never forming one of the great high roads. The importance of this unique road will be seen in a moment.
There had once existed, five hundred yards from the right of the Black Prince’s entrenched line, a Roman road, the traces of which can still be discovered at various parts of its course, but which, even by the time of Poitiers, had disappeared as a passable way. The only approach remaining, as I have said, was that irregular lane which formed the connection between Poitiers and Nouaillé.
Now in most terrains where feudal cavalry was concerned, the existence or non-existence of a road, and its character, would be of little moment in the immediate neighbourhood of the action: for though a feudal army depended (as all armies always must) upon roads for itsstrategics, it was almost independent of them in itstacticsupon those open fields which were characteristic of mediæval agriculture.The mounted and armoured men deployed and charged across the stubble. Those who have read the essay upon the Terrain of Crécy, which preceded this in the present series, will appreciate that the absence of a road uniting the English and French positions in that battle was of no significance to the result.
But in the particular case of Poitiers this road, and a certain cart-track leading off it, must be carefully noted, because between them they determine all that happened; and the reason of this is that the front of the English position was covered withvines.
The French method of cultivating the vine, and the condition of that cultivation in the middle of September (in all but a quite exceptionally early year so far north as Poitou), makes of a vineyard the most complete natural obstacle conceivable against the use of cavalry, and at the same time a most formidable entanglement to the advance of infantry, and a tolerable cover for missile weapons at short range.
The vine is cultivated in France upon short stakes of varying height with varying districts, but usually in this neighbourhood somewhat over four feet above the ground; that is, covering most of a man’s figure, evenas he would stand to arms with a long-bow, yet affording space above for the discharge of the weapon. These stakes are set at such distances apart as allow ordered and careful movement between them, but close enough together to break and interfere with a pressed advance: their distances being determined by the fulness of the plant before the grapes are gathered, a harvest which falls in that region somewhat later than the date of the action.
Wherever a belt of vineyard is found, cultivated after this fashion, the public ways through it are the only opportunities for advance; for land is so valuable under the grape that various allotments or properties are cultivated to their outermost limit. The vineyards (which have now disappeared, but which then stood upon the battlefield) could only be pierced by the roads I have mentioned.[7]
This line, then, already well protected by the vineyards, was further strengthened by the presence of a hedge which bounded them and ran along their eastern edge upon the flat land above the depression.
I have mentioned a cart-track, which branched off on the main lane, and which is marked upon my map with the letters “A-A.” It formed, alongside with the lane, a second approach through the English line, and it must be noticed that, like the main lane, a portion of it, where it breasted the slope, was sunk in those times below the level of the land on either side.
The first thought that will strike the modern student of such a position is that a larger force, such as the one commanded by the King of France, should have been able easily to turn the defensive upon its right.
Now, first, a feudal army rarely manœuvred. For that matter, the situation was such that if John had avoided a fight altogether, and had merely marched down the great south-western road to block Prince Edward’s retreat, the move would have had a more complete effect than winning a pitched battle. The reader has also heard how the Black Prince’s sense of his peril was such that he had been prepared to treat upon any but the most shameful terms. It is evident, therefore, that if the French fought at all it was because they wanted to fight, and that they approached the conflict in the spirit (which was that of alltheir time) disdainful of manœuvring and bound in honour to a frontal attack. A modern force as superior in numbers as was John’s to the Black Prince’s would have “held” the front of the defensive with one portion of its effectives, while another portion marched round that defensive’s right flank. But it is impossible to establish a comparison between developed tactics and the absolutely simple plan of feudal warfare. It is equally impossible to compare a modern force with a feudal force of that date. It had not the unity of command and the elasticity of organisation which are necessary to divided and synchronous action. It had no method of attack but to push forward successive bodies of men in the hope that the weight of the column would tell.
Secondly, Edward defended that right flank from attack by establishing there his park of waggons.
None the less, the Black Prince could not fail to see the obvious danger of the open right upon the plateau beyond the Roman road; even in the absence of any manœuvring, the mere superior length of the French line might suffice to envelop him there. It was presumably upon this account that he stationed a small body of horseupon that slightly higher piece of land, five hundred yards behind Maupertuis and a little to the right of it, which is now the site of the railway station; and this mounted force which he kept in reserve was to prove an excellent point of observation during the battle. It was the view over towards the French position obtained from it which led, as will be seen in the next section, to the flank charge of the Captal de Buch.
There remains to be considered such environments of the position as would affect the results of the battle. I have already spoken of the obstacle of the Miosson, of Nouaillé, of the passages of the river, and of the woods which would further check a pursuit if the pressure following upon a partial defeat, or upon a determination to retire without accepting action, should prove serious. I must now speak of these in a little more detail.
The depression, which was the main feature of the battlefield, is carved like its fellows out of a general and very level plateau of a height some four hundred to four hundred and fifty feet above the sea. This formation is so even that all the higher rolls of the land are within ten or twenty feet of the same height. They are, further, about one hundred feet, or a little more,higher than the water level of the local streams. This tableland, and particularly the ravine of the Miosson, nourishes a number of woods. One such wood, not more than a mile long by perhaps a quarter broad, covers Nouaillé, and intervenes between that town and the battlefield. On the other side of the Miosson there is a continuous belt of wood five miles long, with only one gap through it, which gap is used by the road leading from Nouaillé to Roches and to the great south-western road to Bordeaux.
In other words, the Black Prince had prepared his position just in front of a screen of further defensible woodland.
I have mentioned one last element in the tactical situation of which I have spoken, and which needs careful consideration.
Over and above the passage of the Miosson by a regular bridge and a proper road at Nouaillé, the water is fordable in ordinary weather at a spot corresponding to the gap between the woods, and called “Man’s Ford” or “Le Gué d’Homme.” Now, of the several accounts of the action, one, the Latin chronicler Baker, mentions the ford, while another, the rhymed French story of theChandos Herald, speaks of Edward’s having begun to retire, and ofpart of his forces having already crossed the river before contact took place. I will deal later with this version; but in connection with the ford and whether Edward either did or intended to cross by it, it is worthy of remark that the only suggestion of his actually having crossed it, and of his intention to do so in any case, is to be found in the rhymed chronicle of theChandos Herald; and the question arises—what reliance should be placed on that document?
It is evident on the face of it that the detail of the retreat was not invented. Everyone is agreed that the rhymed chronicle of theChandos Heralddoes not carry the same authority as prose contemporary work. It is not meant to. It is a literary effort rather than a record. But there would be no reason for inventing such a point as the beginning of a retreat before an action—not a very glorious or dramatic proceeding—and the mere mention of such a local feature as the ford in Baker is clear proof that what we can put together from the two accounts is based upon an historical event and the memory of witnesses.
On the other hand, the road proper ran through Nouaillé, and when you are cumbered with a number of heavy-wheeled vehicles, to avoid a road and a regular bridgeand to take a bye-track across fields down a steep bank and through water would seem a very singular proceeding. Further, this track would lose all the advantages which the wood of Nouaillé gave against pursuit, and, finally, would mean the use of a passage that could not be cut, rather than one that could.
Again, we know that the Black Prince when he was preparing the position on Sunday morning, covered its left flank, exactly as his father had done at Crécy ten years before, with what the Tudors called a “leaguer,” or park of waggons.
Further, we have a discrepancy between the story of this retreat by the ford and the known order of battle arranged the day before. In that order of battle he put in the first line, just behind his archers, who lined the hedge bounding the vineyards, a group of men-at-arms under Warwick and Oxford. He himself commanded the body just behind these, and the third or rearmost line was under the command of Salisbury and Suffolk.
How are these contemporary and yet contradictory accounts to be reconciled? What was the real meaning of movement on the ford?
I beg the reader to pay a very particularattention to the mechanical detail which I am here examining, because it is by criticism such as this that the truth is established in military history between vague and apparently inconsistent accounts.
If you are in command of a force such as that indicated upon the following plan, in which A and B together form your front line, C your second, and D your third, all three facing in the direction of the arrow, and expecting an attack from that direction; and if, after having drawn up your men so, you decide there is to be no attack, and determine to retreat in the direction of X,your most natural plan will be to file off down the line towards X, first with your column D, to be followed by your column C, with A and B bringing up the rear. And this would be all the more consonant with your position, from the fact that the very men A and B, whom you had picked out as best suited to take the first shock of an action, had an action occurred, would also in the retreat form your rearguard, and be ready to fight pursuers should a pursuit develop and press you. That is quite clear.
Now, if, for reasons of internal organisation or what not, you desired to keep your vanguard still your vanguard in retreat, as it was on the field, your middle body still your middle body on the march, and what was your rearguard on the field still your rearguard in the long column whereby you would leave that field, the manœuvre by which you would maintain this order would be filing off by the left; that is, ordering A to form fours and turn from a line into a column, facing towards the point E, and, having done so, to march off in the direction of X. You would order B to act in the same fashion next. When A and B had got clear of you and had reached, say, F, you would make C form fours and follow after; andwhen C had marched away so far as to leave things clear for D, the last remaining line, you would make D in its turn form fours and close up the column.
Now, suppose the Black Prince had been certain on that Monday morning that there would be no attack, nor even any pursuit. Suppose that he were so absolutely certain as to let him dispense with a rearguard—then he might have drawn off in the second of the two fashions I have mentioned. Warwick and Oxford (A and B) would have gone first, C (the Black Prince, in the centre) would have gone next, and Salisbury, D, would have closed the line of the retreat. This would have been the slowest method he could have chosen for getting off the field, it would have had no local tactical advantage whatsoever, and to adopt such a method in a hurried departure at dawn from the neighbourhood of a larger force with whom one had been treating for capitulation the day before, would be a singular waste of time in any case. But, at any rate, it would be physically possible.
What is quite impossible is that such a conversion and retirement should have been attempted; for we know that a strong rearguard was left, and held the entrenchments continuously.
To leave the field in the second fashion I have described is mathematically equivalent to breaking up your rearguard and ceasing to maintain it for the covering of your retreat. It is possible only if you do not intend to have a rearguard at all to cover your retirement, because you think you do not need it. As a fact, we know that all during the movement, whatever it was, a great body of troops remained on the field not moving, and watching the direction from which the French might attack. So even if there was a beginning of retirement, a strong rearguard was maintained to cover that movement. We further know that the Black Prince and the man who may be called chief of his staff, Chandos, planned to keep that very strong force in position in any case, until the retirement (if retirement it were) was completed; and we further know that the fight began with a very stout and completely successful resistance by what must have been a large body posted along the ridge, and what even the one account which speaks of the retirement describes as the bulk of the army.
To believe, then, that Warwick filed off by the left, followed by the vehicles, and then by the main command under the Prince, and that all this larger part of thearmy, including its wheeled vehicles, had got across the ford before contact took place and an action developed, is impossible. It is not only opposed to any sound judgment, it is mathematically impossible. It also conflicts with the use of a park of vehicles to defend the left of the entrenched line, and with the natural use of the line of retreat by Nouaillé. I can only conclude that what really happened was something of this sort:
Edward intended to retreat if he were left unmolested. He intended to retreat through Nouaillé and by its bridge, but for safety and to disencumber the road he sent the more valuable of the loot-waggons by the short cut over the ford.
The Prince had got the bulk of his force standing on the entrenched position upon that Monday morning, and bidden it wait and see whether the enemy would attempt to force them or no. As there was no sign of the enemy’s approach from the northwest, and as he was not even watched by any scout of the enemy’s, he next put Salisbury in command of the main force along the hedge, put Warwick and Oxford at the head of a strong escort for leading off the more valuable of the booty—which would presumably be in few waggons—and began to get these waggons away down the hilltowards the ford. They would thus be taking a short cut to join the road between Nouaillé and Roches later on, and they would relieve the congestion upon the main road of retreat through Nouaillé. It is possible that the Black Prince oversaw this operation himself upon the dawn of that day, involving, as it did, the negotiation of a steep bank with cumbersome vehicles, and those vehicles carrying the more precious and portable loot of his raid. This would give rise to the memory of his having crossed the stream. But, meanwhile, the mass of army was still standing where it was posted, prepared for retreat on the bridge of Nouaillé if it were not molested, or for action if it were. Just as this minor detachment of the more valuable vehicles, with its escort, had got across the water, messengers told Edward that there were signs of a French advance. He at once came back, countermanded all provisional orders for the retirement, and recalled the escort, save perhaps some small party to watch the waggons which had got beyond the river. Thus, returning immediately, Edward was ready to instruct and fight the action in the fashion described in all the other accounts.
This, I think, is the rational reconciliation of several stories which are only in apparent contradiction, and which are rather confusing than antagonistic.
Though the accounts of the Battle of Poitiers, both contemporary with and subsequent to it, show, like most mediæval chronicling, considerable discrepancies, it is possible by comparing the various accounts and carefully studying the ground to present a collected picture of that victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the position, character, and numbers of Edward’s force as it lay upon the early morning of Monday the 19th of September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged in dense formation, faced west by a little north upon the level which intervenes between the modern farm of Cardinerie and the wood of Nouaillé. These three bodies of men stood armed, one rank behind the other, and all three parallel. The first was commanded by Salisbury. It was drawn up along the hedge that boundedthe vineyards, and it stretched upon either side of the lane which led and leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé. With Salisbury was Suffolk; and this first line, thus facing the hedge, the depression, and the fields beyond, from whence a French attack might develop, was certainly the largest of the three lines. The reader must conceive of the road astraddle of which this command of Salisbury’s and Suffolk’s stood as lying flush with the fields around, until the edge of the depression was reached, and there forming for some yards a sunken road between the vines that stood on either side of it. The reader should also remember that further to the left, and covered by the last extension of this line of men, was the second diverging lane, crossing through vineyards precisely as did the other, and sunk as the other was sunk for some yards at the crest of the little depression. It is this lane which now passes by the tile-works and leads later to the ford over the river in the valley beyond. The line thus holding the hedge, and commanded by Suffolk and Salisbury, contained the greater number of the archers, and also a large proportion of men-at-arms, dismounted, and ready to repel any French attack, should such an attack develop in the course of the morningto interfere with the retirement which Edward had planned; but as yet, in the neighbourhood of six o’clock, there was no sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon the west beyond the depression. The King of France’s camp was more than two miles away, and it looked as though Edward would be able to get his whole force beyond the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first line, for the position of which, as for that of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer to the coloured map forming the frontispiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn up came a second line, under the command of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much smaller body, because it had a very different task to perform. Its business was to act as an escort for certain of the waggon-loads which Edward, both on account of their value and of the difficulty of getting them up and down the banks of the steep ravine of the river behind them, had determined to send forward at the head of his retirement. This escort, then, we may call the second line. Before the retiring movement began it stood parallel to and immediately in the rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat largercommand, principally of Gascon men-at-arms under the direct leadership of the Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing one behind the other and facing away from the sunrise of that Monday morning, we must add a great body of waggons, parked together, upon the right of the first line and defending it from any turning movement that might be attempted upon that flank, should a French advance develop after all. We must suppose some few of the more valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best booty of the raid, to have been put last in this park, so that their drivers should have the opportunity of filing off first when the middle or second line, which was to be their escort, began the retirement. Further, we must remark teams harnessed and drivers mounted in front of those special waggons, while the mass of the wheeled vehicles still lay closely packed together for the purposes of defence against a possible attack, their teams standing to the rear, ready to harness up only when the retirement was in full swing, and to come last in the retreating column, saving perhaps for a small rearguard that might be left to watch the extremity of the line after everyone else had got safely off the field. We must seethe Black Prince’s command, such of it as was mounted, all on horseback already, and the men-at-arms of the second line or escort under Warwick similarly in the saddle; but the first line, which formed the bulk of the whole force, we must picture to ourselves all on foot, the mounted men as well as the small proportion of foot-sergeants: for if there should be occasion to repel some attack developing during the retirement, it was in the essence of the Plantagenet tactics to dismount the men-at-arms during the defensive, and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy appeared upon the empty fields to the west beyond the depression while these dispositions were being made; and, when all was ready, perhaps between seven and eight o’clock, the order for the first movement of the retirement was given. Warwick and the escort he commanded turned from line to column and began to file off by the left, down towards the ford. The special waggons, whose safety was thus being first anxiously provided for, followed, and the whole of the second line thus got clear of the space between the first and the third. It marched south towards the river, with its little body of wheeled vehicles following up its mounted men.
When the second line had thus got clear of the original formation, Edward, preceded by his banner and accompanied by a certain number of men from the third line (how many we cannot tell, but presumably no great force), rode off over the fields to the left of Warwick’s string of cavalry and waggons, to superintend the difficult passage of the Miosson. He left behind him, standing to arms at the hedge, the whole of the strong first line under Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of his own third line marshalled in parallel behind this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere between seven and eight o’clock, the situation is thus: the Prince and the band with him are riding off towards the edge where the land falls somewhat steeply towards the Miosson. He and his men have their backs turned to the bulk of the army, which, in two bodies, the larger one lining the hedge and a smaller one behind it, are holding the chosen defensive position in case there should be any sign of a French pursuit. We must presume that if no such pursuit appeared to be developing it was Edward’s intention, when he had got the special waggons and their escort safely across the ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force thusleft behind by the road through Nouaillé and across its bridge. The smaller body would go first; then, section by section, the first line would fall into column and retire by the Nouaillé road, leaving at last no more than a small rearguard at the hedge, which, when all the waggons of the park had been harnessed up and were filing down the Nouaillé road, would itself fall into column and bring up the extreme end of the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads with their escort, which had crossed at the ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say, an hour or an hour and a half by the bulk of the army, which would have rejoined by the Nouaillé road, and the junction would be effected at the spot where, at the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line passing the ford reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command, with its heavy and cumbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on the heights there called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in safety, with the obstacle of the Miossonbehindthem, the great south-western road to Bordeaux, along which the rest of the retreat would take place.
This plan would have every advantage, always supposing that there was no Frenchpursuit, or that that pursuit should develop too late to interfere with the Black Prince’s scheme. The more valuable of the booty would have been got clean away by a side track which was also a short cut, and which would put it, when the whole retirement was effected, ahead of the column, that is upon the safe side of the force, furthest from an enemy’s attack. It would have got away early without suggesting to the enemy the line of its escape or the opportunity of using the ford. The retirement of the mass of the army by the Nouaillé road would lead the pursuit, if any, along that road and towards the bridge, the cutting of which after the Anglo-Gascon force had passed would leave that force with the obstacle of the river between it and its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did develop, and, luckily for the Black Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off to superintend Warwick’s passage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when the mass of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaillé, he might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away from the defensive position of Maupertuis. It layon all that open land which now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the south-west of that steading, between the great Lussac road and that country road to Nouaillé along which the march of the French army had proceeded, and across which, further along, the Black Prince’s command lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy’s dispositions. In spite of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more than the fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road, and between him and Nouaillé, the Black Prince’s force was gathered. He appears to have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon that Monday morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it was with the intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until he found the enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four bodies; three main “battles” or lines, comparable to the English three lines—it was the universal formation of a mediæval army—were brought up in column for the advance, to deploy when the field should be reached. The first was commanded by the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of Normandy; the second by the Duke ofOrleans, the king’s brother; the third was commanded by the king himself, and was the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against his enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with difficulties, but must nevertheless be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful) romantic pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not without some value, because, like so many of Froissart’s statements, it mirrors the tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If we had no other figures than Froissart’s we should not accept them, but we should accept, and rightly, an impression of great superiority in numbers on the part of the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the field itself, and who wrote from the English side—Burghersh. If anything, he would exaggerate, of course; but he was a soldier (and Froissart was at the other psychological pole!). He actually wrote from the spot, and he thought that everything mounted in front of him came to about 8000, to which he added 3000 men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may have been, and probably was, concerned tomention no more than what he regarded as fighting units worth mentioning: infantry more or less trained and properly accoutred men-at-arms. For these latter, and their number of 8000, we have plenty of independent testimony, and especially Baker’s. Baker gives the same number. As regards the trained infantry, we know that John had 2000 men armed with the arbalest (a mechanical cross-bow worked with a ratchet), and we know that he also had, besides these cross-bowmen, a number of trained mercenaries armed with javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits to the numbers somewhat as follows: the French host included 8000 fully-armed mounted men; that is, not quite double the Gascon and English units of the same rank and equipment. It had somewhat less than the English contingent of missile-armed soldiers, and these armed with a weapon inferior to their opponents. Count these two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-Gascon 7000 or 8000. There you have an inferior limit which was certainly exceeded, for John’s command included a number of other rougher mounted levies and other less trained or untrained infantry. Above that minimum we may add anything welike up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we get a superior limit for the total of 20,000 men all told. Averaging the probabilities from the various accounts, we are fairly safe in setting this addition at 5000, and perhaps a little over. So that the whole force which John could have brought into the field, and which, had it been properly led and organised, he might have used to full effect in that field, was about double the numbers which the Black Prince could oppose to him. The Anglo-Gascons, standing on the defensive, had from 7000 to 8000 men, and the force marching against them on the offensive was presumably in the neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000; while an analysis of the armament gives you, in the capital factors of it, an inferior number of French missile weapons to the missile weapons of the English prince, but double the number of fully-armed knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two sides offered a more striking contrast than the contrast in their numbers. The Plantagenet force worked together and was one well-handled command. The Valois force was in separate commands, so little cohesive that one of them, as we shall see, abandoned the struggle without orders. For the othercauses of the defeat I must ask the reader to wait until we come to the actual engagement.
To the three “battles” thus marshalled and advancing along the road, John added a special vanguard, the constitution of which must be carefully noted. It was sent forward under the two marshals, Audrehen and Clermont. They commanded:first, 300 fully-armoured and mounted men-at-arms, who rode at the head;next, and following immediately behind these, certain German auxiliaries, also mounted, in what precise numbers we do not know, but few;thirdly, 2000 spearmen on foot, and with them the whole 2000 cross-bowmen using the only missile weapons at John’s disposal.
It will be seen that something like a third of John’s whole force, and nearly half the trained part, was thus detached to form the vanguard in front of the three marching columns. Its function and mishap we shall gather when we come to the contact between them and Edward’s force. Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French army as breaking camp some time between six and seven o’clock of the Monday, forming in three columns upon the Nouaillé road, with the king commanding the largestrear column, his brother, the Duke of Orleans, the column immediately in front, and the King’s son and heir, the Duke of Normandy, in front of Orleans; while ahead of all these three columns marched the 4000 or 5000 men of the vanguard under the marshals, with their 300 picked knights leading the whole.
It must have been at about eight o’clock that the men thus riding with the marshals in front of the French advance came up the slight slope near La Moudurerie, topped the hill, and saw, six or seven hundred yards in front of them, beyond the little depression, the vineyards and the hedge behind the vineyards, and behind that hedge again the massed first line of the Black Prince’s force. Off in the rear to the right they could see the Black Prince’s banner, making away down towards the river, and soon dropping out of sight behind the shoulder of the hill. The special waggons of booty, with Warwick and their escort, must already have disappeared when the French thus had their first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince’s banner disappearing down into the valley on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that their enemy had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it.The force in front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they rightly conceived to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat. They determined to attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which had carefully been planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was fighting on King John’s side, and who had experience of the new Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crécy ten years before had left with the Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and overwhelming superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by the old-fashioned dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack the front of a line sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this fashion meant disaster, many horses would be shot long before their riders could come within lance thrust, the dense packed line of feudal knights, thousands in number, would be thrown into confusion by the maddened and fallen animals, the weight of the remainder as they pressed forward would only add to that confusion, and the first “battle,” delivering the regular traditional first-charge with which every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle ofwelter and carnage stretched in front of the defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I have spoken was formed. Its orders were these:—The picked three hundred knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English archers, and almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as their numbers were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to follow. It was their business in this immolation of their bodies to make it possible for the mass of infantry, especially those armed with missile weapons, to come close in behind and tackle the English line. That infantry, aided by the mounted German mercenaries and meeting missile with missile by getting hand to hand with the English bowmen at last, would prevent those English bowmen from effective action against the next phase of the offensive. This next phase was to be the advance of the first “battle,” that of the Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His men-at-arms were to go forward dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were:—
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick’s men having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of the English line, and the consequent “bunching” of the attack on to the lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably thearchers themselves did not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped—nor did anyone in Europe for some time to come—the remarkable superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile, inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to suit a damp string, for instance, and if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed,the complicated thing held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was, from the hands of the strong and trained man, the simplest and most calculable of shots, variable to every condition of the moment. Its elasticity of aim was far superior, and, most important of all, its rate of fire was something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided, upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on foot. But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour upon foot tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the defensive, and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its armoured knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another thing for such armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of half a mile or more on foot, and to engage with the sword or the shortened lance at the end of it. Armour was at that moment in transition. To the old suit of chain mail, itself quite ponderous enough to burden a man on foot, there had been added in that generationplate in various forms. Everyone had plate armour at least upon the elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon all the front of the legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted it as a complete covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields for the matter of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact came. But of this men could not judge so early in the development of the new tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited the armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however well he might serve in a defensive “wall.”
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to follow.
It was a little before nine when the vanguard of the Valois advanced across the depression and began to approach the slight slope up towards the vineyards and the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon either side of the hollow road, stood, in the same “harrow” formation as at Crécy, the English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals spurred and charged. Small as their number was, itwas crowded for the road into which the stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded them as they galloped forward, and, struggling to press on in that sunken way, either side of their little column was exposed to the first violent discharge of arrows from the vines. They were nearly all shot down, but that little force, whose task it had been, after all, to sacrifice their lives in making a way for their fellows, had permitted the rest of the vanguard to come to close quarters. The entanglement of the vineyard, the unexpected and overwhelming superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow, the superior numbers of the English archers over their enemies’ arbalests, made the attack a slow one, but it was pressed home. The trained infantry of the vanguard, the German mounted mercenaries, swarmed up the little slope. The front of them was already at the hedge, and was engaged in a furious hand to hand with the line defending it, the mass of the remainder were advancing up the rise, when a new turn was given to the affair by the unexpected arrival of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander had been escorting had been got safely across the Miosson; the Black Prince had overlooked their safe crossing, when therecame news from the plateau above that the French had appeared, and that the main force which the Black Prince had left behind him was engaged. Edward rode back at once, and joined his own particular line, which we saw just before the battle to be drawn up immediately behind the first line which guarded the hedge and the vineyard. Warwick, with excellent promptitude, did not make for Salisbury and Suffolk to reinforce their struggling thousands with his men, but took the shorter and more useful course of moving by his own left to the southern extremity of his comrade’s fiercely pressed line (seefrontispiecenear the word “Hedge”; the curved red arrow lines indicate the return of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill, just before the mass of the French vanguard had got home, and when only the front of it had reached the hedge and was beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He put such archers as he had had with his escort somewhat in front of the line of the hedge, and with their fire unexpectedly and immediately enfiladed all that mass of the French infantry, which expected no danger from such a quarter, and was pressing forward through the vineyards to the summitof the little rise. This sharp and unlooked for flank fire turned the scale. The whole French vanguard was thrown into confusion, and broke down the side of the depression and up its opposing slope. As it so broke it interfered with and in part confused the first of the great French “battles,” that under the Dauphin, whose ordered task it was to follow up the vanguard and reinforce its pressure upon the English line. Though the vanguard had been broken, the Dauphin’s big, unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men managed to go forward through the shaken and flying infantry, and in their turn to attack the hedge and the vineyard before it. Against them, the flank fire from Warwick could do less than it had done against the unarmoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of the vanguard which it had just routed. The Dauphin’s cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the main English position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for the effort then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a weight of iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come back, the full weight of his command—every man of it except a reserve of four hundred—was massed tomeet the Dauphin’s attack. Warwick’s men hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the mêlée was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which should, by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten o’clock, which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the fight, the Dauphin’s unequal struggle was one of the finest feats of arms in all the Hundred Years’ War. Nothing but a miracle could have made it succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in which the English defending line had itself suffered heavily and the Dauphin’s attack had been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a third phase in the battle which quite cancelled not only the advantage (for that was slight) but also the glory gained by the Dauphin’s great effort.
Next behind the Dauphin’s line, the second “battle,” that of the Duke of Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and to have launched yet another wave of men against the hedgewhich had been with such difficulty held. Had it done so, the battle would have been decided against Edward. The Dauphin’s force, though it was now broken and the remnants of it were scattering back across the depression, had hit the Anglo-Gascon corps very hard indeed. Edward had lost heavily, his missile weapon was hampered and for the moment useless, many of his men were occupied in an attempt to save the wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from the train to replace those which had been broken or lost in the struggle. What seems to have struck most those who were present at the action upon the English side was the exhaustion from which their men were suffering just after the Dauphin’s unsuccessful attempt to pierce the line. If Orleans had come up then, he could have determined the day. But Orleans failed to come into action at all, and the whole of his “battle,” the second, was thrown away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly difficult to infer from the short and confused accounts that have reached us. It is certain that the whole of Orleans’ command left the field without actually coming into contact with the enemy. The incident left a profound impression upon the legend and traditions of the French masses, andwas a basis of that angry contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the populace against the declining claims of the feudal nobility. It may almost be said that the French monarchy would not have conquered that nobility with the aid of the French peasantry and townsmen had not the knights of the second “battle” fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this. The remnant of the Dauphin’s force, falling back in confusion down the slight slope, mixed into and disarrayed the advancing “battle” of Orleans. These, again, were apparently not all of them, nor most of them, dismounted as they should have been, and, in any case, their horses were near at hand. The ebb tide of the Dauphin’s retirement may have destroyed the loose organisation and discipline of that feudal force, must have stampeded some horses, probably left dismounted knights in peril of losing their chargers, and filled them with the first instinct of the feudal soldier, which was to mount. We may well believe that to all this scrimmage of men backing from a broken attack, men mounting in defiance of the unfamiliar and unpopular orders which had put them on foot, here riderless horses breaking through the ranks,there knots of men stampeded, the whole body was borne back, first in confusion, afterwards in flight. So slight are the inequalities of the ground, that anyone watching from the midst of that crest could have made nothing of the battle to the eastward, save that it was a surging mass of the French king’s men defeated, and followed (it might erroneously have been thought) by the Black Prince and his victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second “battle,” mixed with the debris of the first, broke from the field and rode off, scattered to the north. It is upon Orleans himself that the chief blame must fall. Whatever error, confusion, stampede, or even panic had destroyed the ordering of his line, it was his business to rally his men and bring them back. Whether from personal cowardice, from inaptitude for command, or from political calculation, Orleans failed in his duty, and his failure determined the action.
The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central French force, or second “battle,” under Orleans gave Edward’s army the breathing space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the vanguard and the cuttingto pieces of the Dauphin’s “battle,” the permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that the French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was lost from that moment, between ten and eleven o’clock, when Orleans’ confused column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap open between King John and the lead of his third battle and the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never did), John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was still intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third “battle,” would have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically far less disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he now made. He had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five, perhaps six thousand men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy’s archers he had none. What number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him we cannot tell, but, at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the attempt upon which he had decided. The rest of the large force that was with him was of less considerable military value; but, on the other hand, he could calculate not unjustlyupon the fact that all his men were fresh, and that he was leading them against a body that had struggled for two hours against two fierce assaults, and one that has but just emerged—unbroken, it is true—from a particularly severe hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last reserve to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and wished all his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last body of knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large, fresh body of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its further side, there were those in the Black Prince’s force who began to doubt the issue. A picturesque story remains to us of Edward’s overhearing a despairing phrase, and casting at its author the retort that he had lied damnably if he so blasphemed as to say the Black Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body and had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The exact spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by the railwaystation. It overlooks (if anything can be said to “overlook” in that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet higher than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away, the long defence had held its own throughout that morning. The Black Prince recalled them to the main body. Having done so, he formed into one closely ordered force all the now mixed men of the three lines who were still able to go forward. John was coming on with his armoured knights on foot, their horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those men, embarrassed and weighted by their metal under the growing heat of the day, nearly double the distance which his son’s men had found too much for them). Edward bade his men-at-arms mount, and his archers mounted too. It will be remembered that six men out of seven were mounted originally for the raid through Aquitaine. The fighting on foot had spared the horses. They were all available. And the teams and sumpter animals were available as well in so far as he had need of them. John’s men, just coming up on foot to the opposite edge of the little dip, saw the low foot line of the Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of command into a high mounted line. But before that mounted line moved forward, Edwardhad a last command to give. He called for the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks’ course of the raid. He was a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer—an Englishman whose name should be remembered,Woodland—set him, with the great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until, when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused rearmost of John’s corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw, bearing down upon them, the banner of St George,which was borne before the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance. Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear, and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John’s knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal’s charge drove home, and the remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it, found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen, later most properly to be called “The Bold.” And this lad fought side by side with his father, calling to the king: “Father, guard to the right! Father, guard to the left!” as the lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed them. The lessening and lessening group of French lords that could still hold their own in the contracting circle was doomed, and the battle was accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of the Plantagenet’smen galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and watched his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub around some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making eastward to where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to ask what this might be, and was told that it was the King of France who had been taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were disputing. John, pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to one of Edward’s knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had said to the Valois, his lawful king, “Sir, I am serving against you, for I have lost my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became the man of the King of England.”
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the Battle of Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided. It was mid-afternoon when the last of the pursuers had been called back into the English camp.