To such a summons there could be but one answer; and, in as few days as sufficed to muster and equip their followers, the twin nobles, with heavy hearts at the thought of how few of the brave fellows around them would ever see their homes again, were on their way to the most shameful and disastrous victory won by England during the whole of the Hundred Years’ War.
CHAPTER XXXI
A Strange Meeting
Rarely has the world beheld, even in that age of ceaseless surprises, so strange a spectacle as the English invasion of Spain in 1367. The bravest and most honourable man alive championing the falsest and most cruel; free Englishmen fighting to bring a gallant nation in bondage to a tyrant; a handful of heroes cutting their way into an unknown land, and braving pestilence, famine, and the attacks of an army thrice as strong as their own, in a quarrel with which they had nothing to do, and for a faithless despot who was all the while overreaching and betraying them—such were the startling contradictions produced by the resolve of a man like the Black Prince to aid a man like Pedro the Cruel.
But no such thoughts troubled the stout English who followed the prince through the Pyrenees in that memorable February; for, in a whole generation of constant war they had acquired, alas! such a love of it that (as the Wars of the Roses were to prove to the horror of all Europe a century later) when no foes were to be found, they would fight each other rather than not fight at all. If no “good wars” were to be had in France, even an invasion of Spain was better than nothing; and in after days the few survivors of that ill-fated expedition bitterly recalled with what boyish, unthinking gaiety they had set out on it.
“Marry, this be a brave sight!” cried Will Wade, in whose untravelled eyes these glittering snow-peaks were a thing to be remembered for ever. “How bonnily yon snow glistens; for all the world like sugar on a Christmas cake! This is better sport than hammering horseshoes at Deerham—hey, Ned Smith?”
“Yon jackanape whom our lord overcame at sword-play,” replied the smith, “spake truth for once when he said that a man who hath not seen the world is nought. Mark me, Will, when we go home to merry Hampshire when this job is done, we shall have tales to tell that shall make the Romaunt of Sir Bevis look pale as a half-heated iron.”
“Hark ye, comrade Laneham!” cried Wade to an older man, “thou hast been in foreign parts before. Know’st thou the name of this valley?”
“Marry, that do I; it is called the Pass of Roncesvalles.”
“Roncesvalles?” echoed Will. “What, the place where the good knight Messire Roland, the chief of King Charles’s twelve Paladins, was slain by the Saracens? Well, now, to think that I myself should tread the very ground where he died! I heard a minstrel sing the tale in our lord’s hall one Christmas Eve, and I shame me not to own that I let fall a tear or two when he came to the good knight’s death; but that I should one day see the very spot with mine own eyes, this could I never have dreamed!”
“I marvel not the good knight came by the worse, if the heathen dogs beset him in a place like this!” cried Ned Smith, eyeing wonderingly the shaggy woods and frowning precipices around him. “But tell me, Robin Laneham, what is yon thing perched on that high rock before us? A man, a mountain-goat, or a demon?”