That evening was the most anxious that the great English leader had ever spent. Fight he must on the morrow, for not a morsel of food was left; and he would have to attack, with barely thirty thousand men, more than one hundred thousand. At Crecy and Poitiers his strong position had won the day against superior numbers, but now all the advantages of numbers and position were with the enemy.
The sun was sinking when his watchful eye saw a small group of horsemen advance a little before the glittering wall of spears and helmets in the Spanish host. They seemed officers of high rank, if not the actual commanders—and, in fact, the tall, handsome man in the centre, with a crown on his helmet, was Henry of Transtamare himself; and the short, square man in black armour, who was speaking to him so earnestly, was Bertrand du Guesclin!
The Breton hero’s advice, if taken, would have sealed the doom of the English, and ended the war ere it had well begun. Warning Henry that his raw levies, though brave, were no match in open field for Edward’s veterans, he pointed out that the unprovided English must either starve or fight at a disadvantage, and that all he had to do was to keep any supplies from reaching the enemy, and let famine and disease do the work for him.
But here, as at Auray, the great general’s wise counsel was overborne by the folly of his hot-headed colleagues. The fiery Henry would hear of nothing but instant battle, and his brother Don Tello, flushed with his slight success, vehemently supported him, saying with a sneer—
“Sir Bertrand has not forgotten, belike, how these English made him prisoner at Auray; perchance he is afraid of the like ill-hap befalling again.”
“On the morrow,” said Du Guesclin, with a look that made even the haughty Spaniard quail, “it shall be seen which of us two is the more afraid.”
When a deserter brought word to the English, an hour later, that the Spaniards meant to come forth and meet them in the field next morning, the shout of stern joy that rolled like thunder from rank to rank startled even their over-confident foes, for then, as in after days, “it was ever the wont of the English to rejoice greatly when they beheld the enemy.”
On the morrow the two hosts joined battle, and Bertrand’s words were amply fulfilled. When Chandos’s column of levelled lances and charging steeds came crashing into Don Tello’s division, the boaster’s heart died within him, and he fled with two thousand of his men, leaving bare the flank of the Spanish centre, on which the Black Prince himself instantly fell like a thunderbolt. And beside him, with a savage glare in his pale-blue eyes, his red beard bristling like a lion’s mane, and his sword reeking with slaughter, rode Pedro the Cruel, athirst for his brother’s blood.
But here the fight went hard, for Henry himself led the centre, and around him fought his bravest followers. The untrained Spanish levies fell like mown grass before men whose whole life had been one long battle; but new thousands succeeded, and the harvest of death went on, while Henry, striking right and left with the force of a giant, made his mighty voice heard above all the din—
“Brave gentlemen, you have made me your king; stand by me now as loyal men and true!”