Strange, eventful, and bloody, were the incidents that followed. King Edward, burning for glory, had landed in Normandy a little time before, had knighted on these yellow beaches that gallant boy his son, and with the young Prince and some fourteen thousand English troops, ten thousand wild Welshmen, and six thousand Irish, pillaging and destroying as he went, he had marched straight into the heart of unready France. With that handful of men he had burned all the ships in Hogue, Barfleur, and Cherbourg; he had stormed Montebourg, Carentan, St. Lo, and Valognes, sending a thousand sails laden with booty back to England, and now, day by day, he was pressing southward through his fair rebellious territories, deriding the French King in his own country, and taking tithe and taxes in rough fashion with fire and sword.
Nor had we who came late far to seek for the Sovereign. His whereabouts was well enough to be told by the rolling smoke that drifted heavily to leeward of his marching columns and the broad trail of desolation through the smiling country that marked his stern progress. To travel that sad road was to see naked War stripped of all her excusing pageantry, to see gray desolation and lean sorrow following in the gay train of victory.
Gods! it was a sad path. Here, as we rode along, would lie the still smoldering ashes of a burned village, black and gray in the smiling August sunshine. In such a hamlet, perhaps, across a threshold, his mouth agape and staring eyes fixed on the unmoved heavens, would lie a peasant herdsman, his right hand still grasping the humble weapon wherewith he had sought to protect his home, and the black wound in his breast showing whence his spirit had fled indignant to the dim Place of Explanations.
Neither women nor babes were exempt from that fierce ruin. Once we passed a white and silent mother lying dead in mid-path, and the babe, still clasped in her stiff arms, was ruddy and hungry, and beat with tiny hands to wake her and crowed angry at its failure, and whimpered so pitiful and small, and was so unwotting of the merry game of war and all it meant, that the laughter and talk died away from the lips of those with me, as, one by one, we paced slowly past that melancholy thing.
At another time, I remember, we came to where a little maid of some three tender years was sitting weaving flowers on the black pile of a ruined cottage, that, though her small mind did not grasp it, hid the charred bodies of all her people. She twined those white-and-yellow daisies with fair smooth hands, and was so sunny in the face and trustful-eyed I could not leave her to marauding Irish spears, or the cruel wolfdogs who would come for her at sunset. I turned my impatient charger into the black ruin, and, maugre that little maid’s consent, plucked her from the ashes, and rode with her upon my saddle-bow until we met an honest-seeming peasant woman. To her I gave the waif, with a silver crown for patrimony.
Out in the open the broad stream of war had spread itself. The yellow harvests were trodden under foot, and hedge and fence were broken. The plow stood halfway through the furrow, and the reaper was dead with the sickle in his hand. Here, as we rode, went up to heaven the smoke of coppice and homestead; and there, from the rocks hanging over our path, luckless maids and widowed matrons would hail and spit upon us in their wild grief, cursing us in going, in coming, in peace and in war, while they loaded the frightened echoes with their shrieks and wailings.
Now and then, on grass and roadside, were dark patches of new-dried blood, and by them, maybe, lay country cloaks and caps and weapons. There we knew men had fallen singly, and had long lain wounded or dead, until their friends had taken them to grave or shelter. Out in the open again, where skirmishes had happened and bill and bow or spear had met their like, the dead lay thicker. Gods! how drear those fair French fields did lie in the autumn moonlight, with their scattered dead in twos and threes and knots and clusters! There were some who sprawled upon the ground—still clutching in their dread white fingers the grass and earth torn up in the moment of their agony. And here was he who scowled with dead white eyes on the pale starlight, one hand on his broken hilt and the other fast gripped upon the spear that pinned him to the earth. Near him was a fair boy, dead, with the shriek still seeming upon his livid lips, and the horrid rent in his bosom that had let out his soul looming black in the gloom. Yonder a tall trooper still stared out grimly after the English, and smiled in death with a clothyard shaft buried to the feather in his heart. Some there were of these horrid dead who still lay in grapple as they had fallen—the stalwart Saxon and the bronzed Gaul with iron fingers on each other’s throats, smiling their black hatred into each other’s bloodless white faces. Others, again, lay about whose arms were fixed in air, seeming still to implore with bloody fingers compassion from the placid sky.
One man I saw had died stroking the thin, pain-streaked muzzle of his wounded charger—his friend, mayhap, for years in camp and march. Indeed, among many sorrowful things of that midnight field, the dead and dying horses were not least. It moved me to compassion to hear their pain-fraught whinnies on every hand, and to see them lying so stiff and stark in the bloody hollows their hoofs had scooped through hours of untempered anguish. What could I do for all those many? But before one I stopped, and regarded him with stern compassion many a minute. He was a splendid black horse, of magnificent size and strength; and not even the coat of blood and mud with which his sweating sides were covered could hide, here and there, the care that had but lately groomed and tended him. He lay dying on a great sheet of his own red blood, and as I looked I saw his tasseled mane had been plaited not long before by some soft, skilful fingers, and at every point was a bow of ribbon, such as might well have been taken from a lady’s hair to honor the war-horse of her favorite knight. That great beast was moaning there, in the stillness, thinking himself forgotten, but when I came and stood over him he made a shift to lift his shapely head, and looked at me entreatingly, with black hanging tongue and thirst-fiery eyes, the while his doomed sides heaved and his hot, dry breath came hissing forth upon the quiet air. Well I knew what he asked for, and, turning aside, I found a trooper’s empty helmet, and, filling it from the willowed brook that ran at the bottom of the slope, came back and knelt by that good horse, and took his head upon my knee and let him drink. Jove! how glad he was! Forgot for the moment was the battle and his wounds, forgotten was neglect and the long hours of pain and sorrow! The limpid water went gurgling down his thirsty throat, and every happy gasp he gave spoke of that transient pleasure. And then, as the last bright drops flashed in the moonlight about his velvet nozzle, I laid one hand across his eyes and with the other drew my keen dagger—and, with gentle remorselessness, plunged it to the hilt into his broad neck, and with a single shiver the great war-horse died!
In truth, ’twas a melancholy place. On the midnight wind came the wail of women seeking for their kindred, and the howl and fighting of hungry dogs at ghastly meals, the smell of blood and war—of smoldering huts and black ruins! A stern pastime, this, and it is as well the soldier goes back upon his tracks so seldom!
We passed two days through such sights as I have noted, meeting many a heavy convoy of spoil on its way to the coast, and not a few of our own wounded wending back, luckless and sad, to England; and then on the following evening we came upon the English rear, and were shortly afterward part and parcel of as desperate and glorious an enterprise as any that was ever entered in the red chronicles of war. From the coast right up to the white walls of the fair capital itself, King Edward’s stern orders were to pillage and kill and spoil the country, so that there should be left no sustenance for an enemy behind. I have told you how the cruel Irish mercenaries and the loose soldiers of a baser sort accomplished the command. Our English archers and the light-armed Welsh, who scoured the front, were mild in their methods compared to them. They mayhap disturbed the quiet of some rustic villages, and in thirsty frolics broached the kegs of red vintage in captured inns, robbed hen-roosts, and kissed matrons and set maids screaming, but they, unlike the others, had some touch of ruth within their rugged bosoms. But, as for keeps and castles, we stormed and sacked them as we went, and he alone was rogue and rascal who was last into the breach. Our wild kerns and escaladers rioting in those lordly halls, many a sight of cruel pillage did I see, and many a time watched the red flame bursting from the embrasures and windows of these fair baronial homes, and could not stay it. The Frenchmen in these cases, such of them as were not away with the army we hoped to find, fought brave and stubborn, and we piled their dead bodies up in their own courtyards. Many a comely dame and damsel did I watch wringing white hands above these ghastly heaps, and tearing loose locks of raven hair in piteous appeal to unmoved skies, the while the yellow flames of their comely halls went roaring from floor to floor, and in mockery of their sobs, crashing towers and staircases mingled with the yells of the defenders and the shouting of the pillage.