The Last Full Measure (9 page)

The Roman army was designed to engage, and its tactical ideal was to close, kill, and conquer. But on occasion the discipline, cohesion, and determination of the legion were neutralized by an enemy who simply would not agree to fight according to the Roman rule book. By standing off and bleeding their enemy with long-distance archery, they denied him any tactical traction and robbed him of his most valued assets.

The Roman consul Marcus Crassus was eager to strengthen his political position in Rome by a successful military adventure and to that end invaded Parthia (modern northeastern Iran) with an army of about 40,000. At the battle of Carrhae (53 BCE) his force, deployed in a defensive square, was surrounded by a much smaller Parthian host consisting primarily of horse archers and
cataphracts
(heavy cavalry). The well-supplied horse archers kept up a galling enfilade, and Crassus, desperate to bring on a close-up engagement in which his tactical strengths could be deployed, sent out his son Publius with eight cohorts (about 4,800 men), 500 archers, and 1300 cavalry.
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It was an instinctive response to tactical frustration, as is seen on many occasions throughout history. It is a particular characteristic of colonial warfare; one thinks, for example, of the US Army in the Indian wars (Fetterman massacre), the British in nineteenth-century Afghanistan (the Kabul expedition), and the French Foreign Legion fighting the Morrocan Rif uprising. The heads tend to come back on pikes, which was precisely the fate of Publius’s and, not long after, Crassus’s. The Romans were stalked and decimated by the archers and then hit hard with Parthian
cataphract
. None of the abandoned Roman wounded were spared, and the eventual death toll for the legions was 20,000–30,000. Ironically, however, one survivor, the officer Gaius Cassius, would later come to be bitterly regretted—by Julius Caesar.

V
ISBY. THE ISLAND
of Gotland, Sweden. 1361. The peasant army (
army
is perhaps too grand a word for this motley crew) stood outside the walls of the town. Inside, the worthy burghers, merchants, and assorted tradesfolk were disinclined to take up arms and later, when the bloody work was finished, would pay off the army that threatened them. In the meantime they bolted the gates and left the ragtag defenders to do battle with the invading Danes. The combat was swift, predictable, and merciless. After the slaughter, the peasant-soldiers—about eleven hundred of them—were stripped of their pitiably inadequate weaponry (mainly glaives and bills, the spearlike adaptations of farming implements) and armor (a few had some chain mail) and tossed unceremoniously into grave pits.

The naked bodies fell like puppets with their strings cut, limbs akimbo, jumbled and tumbled together in a gruesome confraternity, appalling in its mimicry of intimacy. They would lie together, lost, unnamed, and unremembered, until the pits were uncovered in 1905 and each skeleton was examined to determine the likely cause of its death. Those without marks on their bones—the majority—were killed by lethal flesh wounds, mainly spear and sword thrusts to the abdomen. Four hundred fifty-six wounds spoke of being struck by cutting weapons such as swords and axes. Piercing weapons such as arrows, spears, and the macelike “morning star,” a ball studded with metal spikes and attached to a handle, accounted for 126 wounds. One skull shows evidence of multiple hits. In its base it has three bodkin-tipped arrowheads lodged in a neat cluster. Was the man trying to flee? Or had he turned his back in an instinctive response to a hail of arrows? In addition, though, as a testament to the ferocity of a medieval battlefield, he was also struck twice toward the back of his head with devastating blows from a war hammer that left its telltale square imprint in his shattered skull. The destructive power of medieval weaponry is seen everywhere at Visby, but particularly in the cuts to the legs, where in more than one case a single sword or ax blow had severed both legs in one tremendous scything swipe.

The fate of the anonymous dead of Visby was the lot of most of the slain common soldiers of the time. In many battles the foot soldiers, the archers, the crossbowmen who, through some unlucky turn of battle’s fortune, were left exposed and unprotected, were invariably slaughtered. They had little value, could not be ransomed, and were more profitable dead and stripped of their gear, however meager. In a sense, though, they were condemned to death for the same tactical reasons their social betters, the knights, also perished. If they became isolated, unsupported, separated, they would be shot to death by bowmen, ridden down by cavalrymen, or hacked and stabbed by the exultant infantry.
The battle of Falkirk in Scotland (1298) is a good example. The English knights drove off the Scottish cavalry and archers who provided some protection for the pikemen of the infantry massed in dense, circular formations—the
schiltrons
—that were a characteristic of Scottish battle formations of the period. Faced with the bristling hedge of pikes, the English cavalry milled about, unable to break in, but nor could the Scots advance or retreat for fear of being broken. So they stood and died under the devastating hail of Edward I’s longbowmen (a significant proportion of whom were Welsh). Their defensive cohesion shot to pieces, the survivors were hacked down by the English horse followed by the infantry. Of the original ten thousand Scots pikemen, more than half were dispatched.
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On occasion the infantry were tricked into breaking their defensive unity and suffered the consequences. At Hastings in 1066, the Norman cavalry, riding up and down the Saxon line, had fruitlessly tried to break down the
shieldburgh
—the formidable shield wall behind which the Saxon
frydmen
, the foot militia, stood fast. It was only by feigning retreat that the Normans induced a large block of the Saxons to break ranks and chase downhill, abandoning their strong defensive position on a ridge, in what seemed like victorious pursuit, only to have the pursuer turn around and cut down to a man the exposed Saxon foot soldiers. By nightfall the flower of the English army lay dead around the fallen dragon standards and its slain king.

If the fate of the medieval infantry soldier was in many instances brutal and bloody, what of the warrior from the opposite end of the social and economic scale? How did the knight fight and die?

One of the most significant differences—in both combat and death—between the noble warrior and the common soldier was identity. The medieval knight’s surname was a specific identifier, whereas the common soldier had a generic surname very often
drawn from his trade—Tanner, Cooper, Fletcher, et cetera. Similarly, the medieval samurai had surnames, whereas the common soldier, the
ashigaru
(literally, “light feet,” meaning unarmored), had none. In the time before 1587, when it was possible for an
ashigaru
to fight his way into samurai status, his first acquisition was a surname.
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By the mid-twelfth century, the heraldic symbols painted onto the knight’s shield proclaimed him uniquely, unlike the signifiers of generic tribal membership with which common soldiers’ shields were decorated. The knight’s symbol also told the story of his ancestral history and proclaimed his position in the world. Of course, the heraldic advertising had one decided disadvantage in that it attracted the attention of the enemy—either those intent on capture and ransom or those somewhat more homicidally inclined who wished to decapitate (often literally) their opponent’s command structure and thereby demoralize his army. The
horo
, a ballooning capelike cloak worn by elite samurai, advertised not only his identity but also his role as a key battlefield messenger (roughly equivalent to an aide-de-camp). As a particularly conspicuous target (similar to the standard-bearer in the Western tradition) it also increased his risk and would serve as the receptacle of his severed head should he be killed in battle. It not only invited attack but, ironically, served to guarantee that its wearer’s body would be treated with respect.

In an echo of the Homeric proclamation, knights would on occasion ride out to pronounce their lineage and seek an opponent of similar caste. Like their European counterparts, the samurai were fixated by lineage and determined to establish their status before battle. In the first clash between the Taira and Minamoto clans on July 29, 1156, two samurai approached an opponent and declared: “We are Oba Kageyoshi and Saburo Kagechika, descendants of Kamakura Gongoro Kagemasa, who when he was sixteen years old … went out in the van of battle and was hit in
the left eye by an arrow.… The arrow tore his eye out and left it hanging on the plate of his helmet, but he sent an arrow in reply and killed his enemy.” Quite a declaration before even one blow has been exchanged.
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One of the paradoxes of both knight and samurai is that the passion to establish identity through heraldry and proclamation is countered by the anonymity of armor. For example, the close resemblance between the Viking helmet and face mask of the Sutton Hoo burial trove and a samurai mask, complete with its false mustaches, is striking. Other examples of “hiding” identity behind decoration are seen, for example, in the painted faces of North American Indian warriors and the “Huron” haircuts and painted faces of American airborne warriors going into Normandy on D-Day. All chose an adopted identity, terrifying to the beholder and reassuring to the wearer. It is as though the battleground is a theater, and to step into a role, to become a character, makes the warrior’s task easier.

The knight was a warrior designed to fight warriors of a similar caste. The mode of fighting—the technology (the most advanced of his day) and the method (drummed in by training since a tender age)—was intended to be not only practically effective but symbolically charged. The way he fought was meant both to overcome his enemy and to proclaim his status. The high stylization of combat (the way the knight was trained in specific techniques; the weaponry and armor that distinguished him; the protocols of combat he was honor-bound to observe; and, almost above all, the identity proclaimed by his heraldic logo) was a reflection and a projection of his social and economic standing. And it was war that sustained him and gave him identity. The noble troubadour Bertran de Born (who ends up in Dante’s hell, carrying his severed head before him) revels in it: “I tell you I have no such joy in eating, drinking or sleeping as when I hear the cry from both sides, ‘up and at ’em!’ or when I hear the riderless horses whinny
under the trees, and groans of ‘Help me! Help me!’ and when I see both great and small fall in the ditches and on the grass, and see the dead transfixed by spear shafts! Barons, mortgage your castles, domains, cities, but never give up war.”
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Dueling—the mano a mano contest of equally paired opponents—was the gold standard of knightly combat, and considered a direct contact with the perceived nobility of the ancient Greek and Roman tradition. It was the honor paid to an opponent in recognition of a shared culture and social status. Even if the honor ended in death, the combatants were brothers under the skin. The image of the knight riding directly against another knight, the couched lances splintering against or piercing the plate armor of the enemy, is the image most evocatively associated with medieval warfare—but inevitably, it is not the whole story. There was a jarring collision between the rhetoric and the reality. That is not to say that dueling was not a cherished ideal among the knightly class, but only to recognize that sometimes the ideal ended up in the mire of the battlefield.

Our focus on the chivalric as the defining characteristic of medieval warfare reflects a desire, as true now as it was for the balladeers, saga poets, and chroniclers of the Middle Ages, to romanticize the awful truth that the battlefield had more to do with the bloody chaos of a mêlée than with the noble symmetry of the duel. The knight stood as much chance of dying in the bloody scrum of battle (for very often he fought on foot), where he could be stabbed by a peasant-soldier sticking a dagger into an armpit or crotch, or up the unprotected rear end, or ramming it through the slit of a helmet visor, as he did of facing off with his peer. Once unhorsed, by design or accident, he might literally be hammered to death, as was the fate of many French knights at Crécy and Agincourt who fell to the mauls (mallets used to drive in the sharpened stakes that protected the English archers against frontal cavalry assault) of “base villeins.”

Agile and skilled infantrymen developed techniques for dealing with mounted knights. Almogavars, for example, were rugged warriors from the mountainous regions of Aragon and Catalonia who wore no armor and fought with javelin and short stabbing sword. They were used extensively as mercenaries in Italy and Greece. One, who was captured by a Crusader army in thirteenth-century Greece, was pitted against a fully armed and armored mounted Angevin knight as an entertainment for his captors,
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the assumption being that the knight would easily overwhelm so lightly equipped an opponent: “The almogavar awaited the knight’s charge, then at the last moment hurled his javelin—the azcona—into his opponent’s horse, dodged the latter’s lance then jumped on the unfortunate knight as he fell from his wounded horse and held a knife to his throat. At this point the duel was stopped.”
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Armed with a
colltell
, a cross between a knife and a butcher’s cleaver, an Almogavar foot soldier could do very serious damage to a knight, armored as he might be. A contemporary source records that at the battle of Kephissos in 1311 the Spanish light infantrymen ran in among the heavily armored Frankish knights of the Duke of Athens and massacred them. One “gave such a cut that the greave with the leg came off in one piece and besides it entered half a palm into the horse’s flank.”
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