Master of War (22 page)

The French had arrived.

Sir Gilbert ordered his men to their positions.

‘This is where we stand or die, lads. When the honour of France comes around that hill they’ll have their Oriflamme flutter­ing against the sky. It’s not blood-red without reason. It’s their sacred battle flag, blessed by every whoremongering priest in Christendom, and it means they’ll not be taking prisoners either. Any of us. King, Prince, earl or common man, they’ll mean to kill us all unless we kill them first. God bless you, lads. I’ll not leave this field until I am dead or our King’s enemy is defeated.’

Sir Gilbert took up his position in the front rank.

Elfred went to join his archers on the extreme flank and touched Blackstone on the shoulder as he passed by.

‘Till later, Thomas. Aim true. They mustn’t break the line.’

Blackstone nodded; the fear was already gnawing at his bowels, but he would not let his men see it. The sound of trumpets and kettledrums rolled across the hillside.

The French were coming to slaughter them.

Five thousand Genoese crossbowmen had been hurried along the road from Abbeville. Behind them the French mounted men-at-arms and knights could barely restrain their war horses. The way to fight a war was to charge, lances cut down to six feet to kill the third line of defenders once the first had been skewered by crossbow quarrels and the second smashed by iron-shod hooves. Sword, mace, mallet and axe would scythe or cripple the rest. The world knew that the French army was the most powerful and efficient fighting force and, on this day at Crécy-en-Ponthieu, thirty thousand of them would crush an upstart King with fewer than ten thousand fighting men under his command. They who dared to confront King Philip VI of France were going to die.

As they rode towards the battlefield knights tilted their heads back with open visors, grateful for the rain that offered a respite from the humid air and dusty roads. At this pace they would soon be at the English lines. A long August twilight would give them time enough to end the day in victory.

The veil of rain that swept across the landscape swirled towards the men on the hill awaiting the onslaught. Without need of com­mand the archers unstrung their bows and tucked the cords inside jackets and beneath leather caps. They were taking no chances of the damp stretching them and reducing the arrows’ flight. The downpour passed, the clouds blew further inland and sunlight spread a warm light that turned the wet grassland to gold and glistened off wet French armour and shields.

Blackstone glanced behind him and squinted at the low sun. The King and the marshals had chosen this place more carefully than he had realized. Not only would the attacking French be clambering uphill but they would be facing into the westering sun.

‘Here they come,’ someone said calmly as the archers restrung their bows.

The tramping of thousands of feet and hooves vibrated through the ground. Richard Blackstone could feel it more keenly than most, the trembling land speaking to him. He breathed in the damp air and held it for a moment in his nostrils and lungs. The grass smelled sweet and the air carried a fragrance from meadows and forest. He moaned a sound of contentment. Blackstone turned and looked at his grinning face. The sadness he felt at the loss of the mute boy’s innocence could not be concealed. He reached out and touched the boy’s shoulder. He would give anything not to have known about the girl’s death. Richard read the pain in his brother’s eyes. Blackstone touched his heart and lips and then reached out his hand. A final gesture of love before the uncertainty of battle. The crooked-jawed boy took it and pressed his wet mouth against the rough palm.

Genoese crossbowmen and marines, whose numbers equalled more than half of the English army, roared insults at the stoic English. They were the first of three divisions wide, three deep, the huge Oriflamme battle flag carried by the rear division for all the English to see. The crossbowmen were soaked, and they were tired and hungry. The French treated them with disdain and had hurried them to the battlefield. When crossbowmen loosed their bolts it took time to crank their weapons’ mechanisms to fire again. In a set battle they would normally be protected by large shields big enough to hide behind as they reloaded, but today their French paymasters had left these
paviseurs
with the baggage train. It was expected that the crossbowmen would cut down the English front ranks and then the armoured destriers and knights would do the rest. French impatience and a cloudburst would prove the downfall of the Genoese.

The English faced the bellowing ranks now within crossbow range and watched as several thousand steel-sprung bolts were loosed. As they fluttered earthwards the second rank had moved through them and fired. Massed trumpets and drums picked up their tempo, a cacophony of bravado. But the English and Welsh ranks did not flinch. If those bolts had fallen into them it would have been lethal, but they fell short, striking the ground in front of the English men-at-arms. Facing the sun and shooting uphill, they had misjudged their distance and the twisted rawhide cords on the crossbows had stretched from the rain.

A murmur of satisfaction rippled through English ranks.

‘Poor bastards,’ Will Longdon muttered. ‘Is that the best they can do?’

They could hear the commands of the centenars from the right and left flanks. ‘Nock! Mark! Draw! Loose!’

Blackstone and the others craned their necks as the dense hail of arrows shivered through the air. Then the thunderclaps of the ribalds, bound four-inch barrels mounted on small carts that spewed smoke and metal pieces, added their firepower. Edward had placed them each side of the archers’ flanks. They were not effective killers like the bowmen, but their booming and their belching smoke and flame caused fear and confusion, ending in death when the arrows fell. It was carnage. The English went on loosing and the iron-tipped arrows plummeted into flesh and bone. The Genoese broke and ran.

‘Look at that!’ Blackstone said as he saw hundreds of French knights ride forward, trampling the Genoese and then killing those survivors that sword and lance could find. Sir Gilbert turned where he stood on the front rank, shield raised, sword held in the loop of his belt because every man-at-arms and knight held a lance, ready to jam into the muscles of the French stallions – those that had escaped being crippled by the pits – when they reached the lines.

‘All right, lads, that’s the French King’s brother doing that. He’s an impatient bastard, is the Duke of Alençon, and he wants to get at us. He’s getting a few obstacles out of the way first. If they close on us cry out for Saint George. Shout loud. Not everyone has surcoat or shield to identify themselves. Here they come. Archers!’

The pounding charge surged across the dead Genoese, a line of knights so broad and deep that Blackstone could not see the divisions behind them. War horses, snorting nostrils blood-red, carried the armoured men forward at the charge. The destriers, heads and chests encased in arrow-deflecting plate, galloped shoulder to shoul­der, battle-trained into a ruthless, crushing mass of unstop­pable power. ‘Broadheads!’ Blackstone shouted and the archers nocked the ragged-edged hunting arrows. The triangular barbed heads would rip muscle and tear vital organs. The archers on the flanks loosed another cloud of arrows, and moments before they arced out of the sky Blackstone aimed at the horses’ legs, pushing aside the long cloth coverings, the rich hues of the trappers rustling like the knights’ banners.

‘Draw!’ His left leg went a stride forward, the bow came up, the rough hemp cord pulled back to his ear. A magnificent animal barely controlled by the knight on its back was his target. ‘Loose!’

The fatal, hurtling arrowstorm struck the French from above just as their horses screamed in agony from Blackstone’s lower trajectory. A tumbling, broken mass staggered on the wet grass sluiced with blood, desperate for a foothold.

‘Sweet Christ,’ a pagan Welshman blasphemed, unheard by the archers who had already loosed three more arrows into the flailing hooves and crippled knights. Arrows pierced the terrified horses’ chests and flanks, making deep wounds that bled the vitality and life from them and inflicted more pain than any animal could endure. Legs snapped as they went down under the weight of their riders and the horsemen ploughing on from behind. Mud-spattered knights raked their spurs into their stallions’ flanks, kneeing them to manoeuvre around crippled and crazed horses.

‘Keep it steady!’ Blackstone shouted, as he bent and loosed, creating a rhythm of fire that was unrelenting. ‘Don’t waste your arrows. Aim and shoot. Aim and shoot!’

The French kept coming.

And dying.

A massive heartbeat of French kettledrums thumped louder, urging the knights forward. Trumpets blew a varying pitch as if their power could knock down the English. Packed men herded closer, lances down, shields raised. Some bore wounds but rode on, and those whose wealth afforded quality armour that deflected the archers’ attempts to slaughter them cried
Montjoie!
and came at the English in all their pride and savagery. Horses went nose-down at the pit-traps, others carried horrific wounds, but their courageous hearts pumped blood to muscle and sinew and kept their momentum going, urged on by vicious spurs from men who now gave no thought for the beasts they had once cherished.

Sir Gilbert’s men-at-arms stepped into the fray and cut the surviv­ors down. No man died easily and the heavy clang of sword against armour echoed up and down the lines. It was hard, brutal work that demanded strength and stamina. Men wearing seventy pounds of armour had no chance of regaining their feet if they went down. To slip or be stunned meant death. Thousands of crossbowmen were dead, hundreds of knights lay mortally wounded and not one defender had died. The French men-at-arms fell back to regroup out of the archers’ range. The horses’ screams were pitiful.

‘We should go and finish the wretched creatures,’ Will Longdon said. ‘It’d be a mercy.’

‘You know what the King said, Will: no mercy today,’ said Blackstone as he counted the arrows he had left. ‘Arrows?’ he called to the men.

‘Three,’ Will Longdon said.

‘I’ve five,’ John Weston moaned. ‘Couple of the fletchings look as though they’d throw the flight.’

‘It’ll be close range, John. Aim and loose,’ Blackstone told him. Others in the company were low on arrows. Each man called what he had: two, three, one, four, none. He could see boys and clerics running from the rear carrying tied sheaves to replenish the archers.

Sir Gilbert turned. ‘They’ll get closer next time. There’s so many of them they’ll get through eventually. You archers be ready to move back, you’ve no defence against men like these.’

‘We’ll stand our ground, Sir Gilbert. Once we have arrows we can take them head on.’

Sir Gilbert nodded, too tired to offer either admonition or praise. Boys ran with waterskins and buckets from the baggage train. Fighting men scooped handfuls, tipped the skins, sucked the life-giving moisture into their parched mouths.

The lull in the battle gave men a few moments to lean on their swords, slump onto the grass and loosen their helmets. Blackstone, sweat-soaked and hurting, considered that these armoured men could take no more battering. The fallen horses and pit-traps had slowed the French advance; they were no longer a disciplined attacking line. The ground had forced them to manoeuvre into fighting pockets of men, which left them vulnerable to infantry attack from the sides. Swarming soldiers, knights and spearmen were bringing down horsemen unable to defend themselves on all sides.

Then back came the French. Sweat-slathered horses, white flecks of foam splashing their bridles and legs, charged at full gallop; their sheer weight of numbers would bring them into the English lines. The English watched as another storm of harrowing pain fell from the sky into the determined attackers. Knights held fast in their high-pommelled saddles swayed and slumped, dead or mortally wounded as their brave horses carried them forward. Less than fifty yards from the front line the first of the horses stepped into the foot-deep pits. Men could hear the crack of bone from where they stood.

Despite the leather guard Blackstone felt the skin of his fingers tear from the constant pressure of releasing the bowcord. His strength was not diminishing; if anything, his arms found a strength he never knew existed. He was beyond pain. This butchery was a slaughter that no man had witnessed before.
That’s as much glory as you’ll see in a battle
, Sir Gilbert had told him when he was vomiting at the crossroads in Normandy after he had killed his first man. There could not be enough vomit in the world to puke on this field.

Richard Blackstone was firing at a greater rate than any of the men. Blackstone could almost see his arrow strikes. Whereas some archers would miss because of the swirling mêlée of men and horse, Richard’s arrows struck home every time.

And the French came on. Over their dead comrades, past the white-eyed, terrified horses, flailing in agony, through the rain­storm of high-angled arrows that fell with such velocity that plate armour was no defence. Knights were shot through with a yard of ash, skewered to their saddles.

But still they came, their fury unabated, their lust to kill un­quenched. Even battle-hardened English knights could do little more than admire such awesome courage. And kill them. And still the French had not breached the English lines. The knights urged their horses away from the archers’ flanks, aiming themselves squarely at the Prince of Wales. His banner, and those of the nobles, was the beacon the French sought. The Prince’s surcoat, quartered with the lions of England and lilies of France, was plain for all to see and he had fought this, his first engagement, with the wildness of youth abetting his strength. All the times his tutors had knocked him to the ground, with the King’s permission, in order to teach him the strike and parry blows of swordsmanship were now put to good use. But the moment would come when those in the French vanguard of the attacking force would fall on the front line and the weight of those following horsemen would thrust them into the flimsy ranks of defence that still held.