Poitiers Part 4

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's men 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.

PART V

THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES

In closing the coupled and twin stories of Crecy and Poitiers it is not without advantage to describe the aspect which they would have presented to an onlooker of their time; and in doing this I must not only describe the general armament of Western European men in the middle of the fourteenth century, but that contrast between weapons and methods which gave the Plantagenets for more than a generation so permanent an advantage over their opponents.

You would have seen a force such as that of the Black Prince or of King John camped before a battle, a white town of tents crossing the fields, with here and there a vivid patch of colour where some great leader's pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The billeting of men upon householders was a necessary feature of a long march, or of the occupation of a town. But when there was question of occupying a position, or when an army was too large to lodge under roof, it depended upon canvas. But it must be remembered that not the whole of a force by any means enjoyed that advantage; a large portion, especially in a considerable body, was often compelled to bivouac.

Further, the reader must represent to himself a heavier impediment of vehicles than a corresponding force would burden itself with to-day: a far heavier impediment than a quite modern army would think tolerable. There were no aids whatsoever to progress, save those which the armed body carried with it. No commandeering of horses upon any considerable scale; no mechanical traffic, of course; and, save under special circ.u.mstances where water carriage could relieve the congestion, no chances of carrying one's booty (then a princ.i.p.al concern), one's munitions, and one's supplies, save in waggons.

On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern missile warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three hundred years, was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived not entirely off the country, for it always began with a reserve of provisions, but without any calculated reserve for a whole campaign, and necessarily in such times without any power of keeping essential nourishment for more than a few days.

Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the march by far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern force, and you have the truth.

You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it 30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will usually consist of waggons.

The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column would be the large proportion of mounted men.

Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described, discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important fighting units, mounted.

Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things.

From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages, say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the n.o.ble cla.s.s which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade of those charges was the cla.s.s which organised and enjoyed the peril of warfare.

The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the year's rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one.

He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his a.s.sistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these "men-at-arms" (the term is a translation of the French "gensdarmes," which means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.

Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a fourteenth-century force.

When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crecy and to Poitiers--though it is truer of Crecy than of Poitiers--that the number of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.'s army in 1346 as only 24,000, or the Black Prince's ten years later as only 7000. The actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied.

Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their inferiors were of value in a defensive position, however useless for offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B was "three times as strong" as A, we must remember that this means only that the counting combating units on B's side were three times A's. If A was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense ma.s.s of humanity much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break, the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics of A's army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost legendary figures following Crecy and Poitiers.

The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle of the fourteenth century after a fas.h.i.+on transitional between the rings of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms, ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves, and is still the popular though false conception of mediaeval accoutrement.

From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected the armed man, and our word _mail_ is French for links, and nothing else.

In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather, and so it was put on like a s.h.i.+rt of flexible iron all through the great business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.

But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less (the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron appeared. Scales of iron defended the s.h.i.+n and the thigh, sometimes the lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the s.h.i.+eld; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side.

We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great blazonry.

The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and in their dependants the appet.i.te for watching it. Of heraldry I say nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers. But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends. Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that s.h.i.+elds, even the horses' armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.

Now to the feudal cavalry with their domestics, to the gentry so armed whose tradition was the soul and whose numbers the nucleus of a fourteenth-century army, one must add, quite separate from their domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and these were trained and untrained.

At this point a capital distinction must be made. Armies defending a whole countryside, notably the French armies defending French territory during the Hundred Years' War, levied, swept up, or got as volunteers ma.s.ses of untrained men. Expeditions abroad had none such: they had no use for them.

Edward had none at Crecy and his son had none at Poitiers; and what was true of these two Plantagenet raids was true of every organised expedition made with small numbers from one centre to a distant spot, throughout the Middle Ages. It is important to remember this, for it accounts for much of the great discrepancies in numbers always observable between an expeditionary force and its opponents, as it does for the superior excellence of the raiding tens against the raided hundreds.

But if we consider only the trained force of foot-men in an army of the fourteenth century, we discover that contrast between the Plantagenet and the Valois equipment with which I desire to conclude. England had developed the long-bow. It is a point which has been vastly overemphasised, but which it would be unscholarly and uncritical to pa.s.s over in silence. A missile weapon had been produced and perfected by the Welsh, the art of it had spread over the west country; and it was to prove itself of value superior to any other missile weapon in the field throughout the fourteenth and even into the early fifteenth centuries.

Outside these islands it was imperfectly understood as a weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly learnt. When it was replaced by firearms, the British Islands and their population dropped out of the running in land armament for two hundred years. The long-bow was not sufficiently superior to other weapons to impress itself dramatically and at once upon the consciousness of Europe. It remained special, local, national, but, if men could only have known it, a decisive element of superiority up to the breakdown of the Plantagenet tradition of government and of Plantagenet society.

I have described in the writing of Crecy how superior was its rate of delivery always, and often its range, to other missile weapons of the time. We must also remember that capital factor in warfare, lost with the Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages, which may be called the instruction of infantry.

The strength of an armed body consists in its cohesion. When the whole body is in peril, each individual member of it wants to get away. To prevent him from getting away is the whole object of discipline and military training. Each standing firm (or falling where he stands) preserves the unity, and therefore the efficacy, of the whole. A few yielding at the critical point (and the critical point is usually also the point where men most desire to yield) destroy the efficacy of nine times their number. Now, one of the things that frighten an individual man on foot most is another man galloping at him upon a horse. If many men gallop upon him so bunched on many horses, the effect is, to say the least of it, striking. If any one doubts this, let him try. If the men upon the horses are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on foot some feet ahead (such as is the lance), the threat is more efficacious still, and no single man (save here and there a fellow full of some religion) will meet it.

But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the individual man would never guess, and which is none the less experimentally certain--which is this: that if a certain number of men on foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will swerve or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between the nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the rider's desire that his horse should go forward and the horse's training, which teaches him that not only his rider, but men in general, are his masters.

What is true here of horses is not true of dogs, who think all men not their masters, but their enemies, and desire to kill them, and what is more, can do so, which a horse cannot. A charge of large mounted dogs against unshaken infantry would succeed. A charge of mounted horses against unshaken infantry, if that infantry be sufficiently dense, will fail.

To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction is the instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and hammer it into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all will be well.

This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only with staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they are possessed of missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is impossible from charging riders, and an infantry force armed with missile weapons, and unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and still more by experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern conditions, where missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this goes without saying; but even with a range of from fifty to eighty yards of a missile that will bring down a horse or stop him, infantry can easily be made sufficiently confident if it is unshaken. Now, to shake it, there is nothing available (or was nothing before the art of flying was developed) save other men, equally stationary, armed with other missiles. The long-bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he had a missile weapon superior to anything that his enemy could bring against him. He therefore stood upon the defensive against a feudal cavalry charge unshaken, and he was trained by his experience and instruction to know that if he kept his line unbroken, the cavalry charge would never get home. That is the supreme tactical factor of the Plantagenet successes of the Hundred Years' War.

PART VI

THE RESULTS OF THE BATTLE

The immediate results of the victory of Poitiers consisted, first, in the immensely increased prestige which it gave to the House of Plantagenet throughout Europe.

Next, we must reckon the local, though ephemeral, effect upon the opinion of Aquitaine, through which the Black Prince was now free to retreat at his ease towards Bordeaux and the secure territories of Gascony.

But though these results were the most immediate, and though the victory of one monarch over the other was the most salient aspect of the victory for contemporaries, as it is for us, there was another element which we must particularly consider because it ill.u.s.trates the difference between the political conditions of the fourteenth century and of our own time.

The real point of the success was the capture of the king's person. The importance of the action lay, of course, to some extent, in the prestige it gave to the Black Prince personally; though that point was lost a very few years afterwards in the subsequent decline of the Plantagenet power in the south. In so far as an action in those days could carry a _national_ effect--that is, could be regarded by distant civilian populations as proof of strength or weakness in contrasting races and societies--Poitiers had not even the claim of Crecy; for it was not princ.i.p.ally an archers'

but a knights' battle, and the knights were mainly the gentry of the South of France, while those who had been broken by the only cavalry movement of the engagement were not even French knights, but levies of German, Spanish, and other origin. But the capture of the King of France at that particular moment of chivalry, that last fermentation of a feudal society which was reaching its term, had a vast positive effect, as well as an almost incalculable moral effect.

There is nothing in modern times to which such an accident can be accurately paralleled. Perhaps the capture of the capital city would be the nearest thing; but there is this grave difference between them, that the capture of the modern capital must mean prolonged and decisive success in war, whereas the capture of John was an accident of the field.

The victory would have been less by far if the whole of the king's command had fled, with the king himself at the head of the rout.

A modern parallel more nearly exact would be the transference in the midst of a conflict of some great financial power from one side to the other; or again, in a naval war, the blowing up of so many capital s.h.i.+ps by contact mines as would put one of the two opposing fleets into a hopeless inferiority to the other. To capture a king was to capture not so much a necessary part of the mechanism of government as the most important and the richest member of a feudal organisation. It meant the power to claim an enormous feudal ransom for his person. It meant, more doubtfully, the power to engage him, while he was yet a prisoner, to terms that would bind his lieges: "more doubtfully," because the whole feudal system jealously regarded the rights both of individual owners and of custom from the peasant to the crown. Finally, to capture the king was to get hold of the chief financial support of an enemy. A feudal king had vast revenues in the shape of rents, not compet.i.tive, but fixed, which came to him as they did to any other lord, but in much greater amount than to any other lord.

The king was the chief economic factor in that autonomous economic federation which we call the feudal organisation of Gaul.

The fact that his capture was an accident in no way lessened the result; it was regarded in the military mind of those days much as we regard the crippling of a modern financial power by some chance of speculation. It was only a bit of good fortune on the one side, and of bad fortune on the other, but one to be duly taken advantage of by those whom it would profit.

The immediate result of that capture was twofold: an admission on the part of John of the Plantagenet claim, and a corresponding spontaneous movement in France which led to the defeat of that claim; the signing (ultimately) of a treaty tearing the French monarchy in two; and, finally, the rejection and nullifying of that treaty by the mere instinct of the nation. But these lengthy political consequences--followed by the further success of the Black Prince's nephew at Agincourt, and again by his successor's loss of all save Calais--do not concern this book.