The dismal swamp was safely passed, and, just on the stroke of midnight, they halted at last before the Boulogne Gate of Calais, and saw above them the dim outline of the great tower, dark and silent as a tomb. Above or below there was neither sign nor sound of life, and the gate was still fast shut.
“Yon loitering Lombard is in no haste to open to us,” growled De Chargny. “Were he half as cold as I am he would make better speed.”
“No doubt he is making sure that the crowns are in full tale, and that no light one hath slipped in by chance,” sneered Sir Pepin de Werre. “These Lombards are ever careful folk with money.”
“Patience, fair sirs,” said De Ribeaumont; “it is not yet midnight. Hark! there sounds the first stroke even now.”
Slowly and solemnly the twelve strokes of midnight boomed through the ghostly stillness, like the knell of those who were about to die. Hardly had the last toll echoed through the silent town, when there came a clang and a rattle as the gate was flung open, and, with a deafening shout of “Manny to the rescue!” a mass of armed men burst from the gloomy archway with the rush of a mighty wave right into the midst of the startled French!
Then began a fight such as the oldest warrior there had never seen. In the depth of the cold black gloom, with death hungering for them on either side of the narrow path on which they fought, the contending hosts closed and battled. To and fro swayed the fight like a stormy sea, “each man,” in the grim words of the old chronicler, “doing such work as he might in the darkness”—friend often striking friend instead of foe, and death coming blindly, no one knew whence or how.
Brave Harry Woodstall, whose stout steel cap and harder skull availed nothing against the thunderbolt blow that cut him down, never knew that he had got his death from the noblest sword in France, that of Eustace de Ribeaumont. Poor young Beauchamp, who had hoped to win fame and knightly spurs by measuring himself with De Chargny, gained his wish and his death-wound with it. By the hand of Sir John Chandos, “the flower of England’s chivalry,” fell gay young Pepin de Werre, laughing as he died. Sturdy Mat Bowyer was smitten through bone and brain by Alain de St. Yvon, but the next moment his slayer fell dead beside him, crushed by the terrible mace of Walter de Manny; and as Raoul sprang forward to avenge his brother, Sir Peter Audley cut him down.
At the same instant Hugo de Claremont, who had come hand-to-hand with the third brother, Huon (little dreaming that the foe who faced him so stoutly was the blithe guest with whom he had once sat at meat in Motte-Brun Castle), was beaten to his knees, and would in a moment more have been crushed to death by the trampling feet around him, had not his brother Alured and two stout men-at-arms dragged him out by main force.
In truth, the peril of the sword was the least of all the dangers that the combatants braved that night. More than one brave knight on either side was trampled to death in the press; and many a gallant youth who had come into the fray that night with bright eye and bounding heart, eager to win fame and honour, was hurled headlong over the edge of the causeway into the deadly quagmire below, to sink inch by inch in its foul black slime and perish miserably, unaided and unknown.
So, amid clashing steel and streaming blood, shouts, groans, yells, curses, the moans of dying men, and the shrieks of those who were perishing in the horrible pit below, came in that New Year morn. A strange celebration, in truth, of the blessed season of “peace on earth and good-will towards men”! but in an age when ceaseless bloodshed was held the only occupation worthy of Christian men, and when Christian kings sang praise to God for the destruction of thousands of their fellow-men by sword and fire and famine, that midnight butchery was “a very goodly and gentle passage of arms”!