We stood aghast to see them. Fools! Madmen! They swept down to the river—a hundred thousand horse and footmen bent upon one narrow passage—and rushed in, every chief and captain scrambling with his neighbor to be first—troops, squadrons, ranks, all lost in one seething crowd—disordered, unwarlike. And thus—quivering and chaotic, heaving with the stress of its own vast bulk—under a hundred jealous leaders, the great army rushed upon us.
While they struggled thus, out galloped King Edward to our front, bareheaded, his jeweled warden staff held in his mailed fist, and, riding down our ranks, and checking the wanton fire of that gray charger, which curveted and proudly bent his glossy neck in answer to our cheering, proud, calm-eyed, and happy, King Edward spoke:
“My dear comrades and lieges linked with me in this adventure—you, my gallant English peers, whose shiny bucklers are the bright bulwarks of our throne, whose bold spirits and matchless constancy have made this just quarrel possible—oh! well I know I need not urge you to that valor which is your native breath. Right well I know how true your hearts do beat under their steely panoply; and there is false Philip watching you, and here am I! Yonder, behind us, the gray sea lies, and if we fall or fail it will be no broader for them than ’tis for us. Stand firm to-day, then, dear friends and cousins! Remember, every blow that’s struck is struck for England, every foot you give of this fair hillside presages the giving of an ell of England. Remember, Philip’s hungry hordes, like ragged lurchers in the slip, are lean with waiting for your patrimonies. Remember all this, and stand as strong to-day for me as I and mine shall stand for you. And you, my trusty English yeomen,” said the soldier King—“you whose strong limbs were grown in pleasant England—oh! show me here the mettle of those same pastures! God! when I do turn from yonder hireling sea of shiny steel and mark how square your sturdy valor stands unto it—how your clear English eyes do look unfaltering into that yeasty flood of treachery—why, I would not one single braggart yonder the less for you to lop and drive; I would not have that broad butt that Philip sets for us to shoot at the narrower by one single coward tunic! Yonder, I say, ride the lank, lusty Frenchmen who thirst to reeve your acres and father to-morrow, if so they may, your waiting wives and children. To it, then, dear comrades—upon them, for King Edward and for fair England’s honor! Strike home upon these braggart bullies who would heir the lion’s den even while the lion lives; strike for St. George and England! And may God judge now ’tween them and us!”
As the King finished, five thousand English archers went forward in a long gray line, and, getting into shot of the first ranks of the enemy, drew out their long bows from their cowhide cases and set the bow-feet to the ground and bent and strung them; and then it would have done you good to see the glint of the sunshine on the hail of arrows that swept the hillside and plunged into those seething ranks below. The close-massed foemen writhed and winced under that remorseless storm. The Genoese in front halted and slung their crossbows, and fired whole sheaves of bolts upon us, that fell as stingless as reed javelins on a village green, for a passing rainstorm had wet their bowstrings and the slack sinews scarce sent a bolt inside our fences, while every shaft we sped plunged deep and fatal. Loud laughed the English archers at this, and plied their biting flights of arrows with fierce energy; and, all in wild confusion, the mercenaries yelled and screamed and pulled their ineffectual weapons, and, stern shut off from advance by the flying rain of good gray shafts, and crushed from behind by the crowding throng, tossed in wild confusion, and broke and fled.
Then did I see a sight to spoil a soldier’s dreams. As the coward bowmen fell back, the men-at-arms behind them, wroth to be so long shut off the foe, and pressed in turn by the troops in rear, fell on them, and there, under our eyes, we saw the first rank of Philip’s splendid host at war with the second; we saw the billmen of fair Bascquerard and Bruneval lop down the olive mercenaries from Roquemaure and the cities of the midland sea; we saw the savage Genoese falcons rip open the gay livery of Lyons and Bayonne, and all the while our shafts rained thick and fast among them, and men fell dead by scores in that hideous turmoil—and none could tell whether ’twas friends or foes that slew them.
A wonderful day, indeed; but hard was the fighting ere it was done. My poor pen fails before all the crowded incident that comes before me, all the splendid episodes of a stirring combat, all the glitter and joy and misery, the proud exultation of that August morning and the black chagrin of its evening. Truth! But you must take as said a hundred times as much as I can tell you, and line continually my bare suggestions with your generous understanding.
Well, though our archers stood the first brunt, the day was not left all to them. Soon the French footmen, thirsting for vengeance, had overriden and trampled upon their Genoese allies, and came at us up the slope, driving back our skirmishers as the white squall drives the wheeling seamews before it, and surged against our palisades, and came tossing and glinting down upon our halberdiers. The loud English cheer echoed the wild yelling of the Southerners: bill and pike, and sword and mace and dagger sent up a thunderous roar all down our front, while overhead the pennons gleamed in the dusty sunlight, and the carrion crows wheeled and laughed with hungry pleasure above that surging line. Gods! ’twas a good shock, and the crimson blood went smoking down to the rivulets, and the savage scream of battle went up into the sky as that long front of ours, locked fast in the burnished arms of France, heaved and strove, and bent now this way and now that, like some strong, well-matched wrestlers.
A good shock indeed! A wild tremendous scene of confusion there on the long grass of that autumn hill, with the dark woods behind on the ridge, and, down in front, the babbling river and the smoking houses of the ruined village. So vast was the extent of Philip’s array that at times we saw it extend far to right and left of us; and so deep was it, that we who battled amid the thunder of its front could hear a mile back to their rear the angry hum of rage and disappointment as the chaotic troops, in the bitterness of the spreading confusion, struggled blindly to come at us. Their very number was our salvation. That half of the great army which had safely crossed the stream lay along outside our palisades like some splendid, writhing, helpless monster, and the long swell of their dead-locked masses, the long writhe of their fatal confusion, you could see heaving that glittering tide like the golden pulse of a summer sea pent up in a crescent shore. And we were that shore! All along our front the stout, unblenching English yeomen stood to it—the white English tunic was breast to breast with the leathern kirtles of Genoa and Turin. Before the frightful blows of those stalwart pikemen the yellow mail of the gay troopers of Châteauroux and Besaçon crackled like dry December leaves; the rugged boar-skins on the wide shoulders of Vosges peasants were less protection against their fiery thrust than a thickness of lady’s lawn. Down they lopped them, one and all, those strong, good English hedgemen, till our bloody foss was full—full of olive mercenaries from Tarascon and Arles—full of writhing Bisc and hideous screaming Genoese. And still we slew them, shoulder to shoulder, foot to foot, and still they swarmed against us, while we piled knight and vassal, serf and master, princeling and slave, all into that ditch in front. The fair young boy and gray-bearded sire, the freeman and the serf, the living and the dead, all went down together, till a broad rampart stretched along our swinging, shouting front, and the glittering might of France surged up to that human dam and broke upon it like the futile waves, and went to pieces, and fell back under the curling yellow stormcloud of mid-battle.
Meanwhile, on right and left, the day was fiercely fought. Far upon the one hand the wild Irish kerns were repelling all the efforts of Beaupreau’s light footmen, and pulling down the gay horsemen of fair Bourges by the distant Loire. Three times those squadrons were all among them, and three times the wild red sons of Shannon and the dim Atlantic hills fell on them like the wolves of their own rugged glens, and hamstrung the sleek Southern chargers, and lopped the fallen riders, and repelled each desperate foray, making war doubly hideous with their clamor and the bloody scenes of butchery that befell among their prisoners after each onset.
And, on the other crescent of our battle, my dear, tuneful, licentious Welshmen were out upon the slope, driving off with their native ardor one and all that came against them, and, worked up to a fine fury by their chanting minstrels, whose shrill piping came ever and anon upon the wind, they pressed the Southerners hard, and again and again drove them down the hill—a good, a gallant crew that I have ever liked, with half a dozen vices and a score of virtues! I had charged by them one time in the day, and, cantering back with my troop behind their ranks, I saw a young Welsh chieftain on a rock beside himself with valor and battle. He was leaping and shouting as none but a Welshman could or would, and beating his sword upon his round Cymric shield, the while he yelled to his fighting vassals below a fierce old British battle song. Oh! it was very strange for me, pent in that shining Plantagenet mail, to listen to those wild, hot words of scorn and hatred—I who had heard those words so often when the ancestors of that chanting boy were not begotten—I who had heard those fiery verses sung in the red confusion of forgotten wars—I who could not help pulling a rein a moment as that song of exultation, full of words and phrases none but I could fully understand, swelled up through the eddying war-dust over the Welshmen’s reeling line. I, so strong and young; I, who yet was more ancient than the singer’s vaguest traditions—I stopped a moment and listened to him, full of remembrance and sad wonder, while the pæan-dirge of victory and death swelled to the sky over the clamor of the combat. And then—as a mavis drops into the covert when his morning song is done—the Welshman finished, and, mad with the wine of battle, leaped straight into the tossing sea below, and was engulfed and swallowed up like a white spume-flake on the bosom of a wave.