Poitiers Part 3

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 larger command, princ.i.p.ally 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 ma.s.s 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 see the 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.sage 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 thus left behind by the road through Nouaille 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 Nouaille 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 Nouaille 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 Nouaille road, and the junction would be effected at the spot where, at the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line pa.s.sing the ford reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command, with its heavy and c.u.mbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on the heights there called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in safety, with the obstacle of the Miosson _behind_ them, 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 French pursuit, 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 ma.s.s of the army by the Nouaille road would lead the pursuit, if any, along that road and towards the bridge, the cutting of which after the Anglo-Gascon force had pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when the ma.s.s of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaille, 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 lay on 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 Nouaille 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 Nouaille, 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 mediaeval 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 of Orleans, 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 to mention 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 we like 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 a.n.a.lysis 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 other causes 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 const.i.tution 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 Nouaille road, with the king commanding the largest rear 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 ma.s.sed 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 Crecy 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 of welter 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 ma.s.s 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 the archers 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 ma.s.s. 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 generation plate 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 Crecy, the English long-bowmen.

The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals spurred and charged. Small as their number was, it was 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 ma.s.s 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 there came 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 prompt.i.tude, 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 (see frontispiece near 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s of the French infantry, which expected no danger from such a quarter, and was pressing forward through the vineyards to the summit of 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 c.u.mbered 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 ma.s.sed to meet the Dauphin's attack. Warwick's men hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the melee 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 a.s.sault.

Nevertheless, that a.s.sault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was that pa.s.sage 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 hedge which 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 ma.s.ses, and was a basis of that angry contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the populace against the declining claims of the feudal n.o.bility. It may almost be said that the French monarchy would not have conquered that n.o.bility 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 ma.s.s 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 inapt.i.tude 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 s.p.a.ce they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the vanguard and the cutting to 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 unjustly upon 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 a.s.saults, 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 d.a.m.nably 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 railway station. 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, embarra.s.sed 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, Edward had 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 pa.s.sage of the ford, at the head of the ma.s.sed 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 ma.s.s 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.