The divorce of the gentry from the common people (one of the fatal eddies of the time) developed in the wealthy this love of colour, and in their dependants the appetite for watching it. Of heraldry I say nothing, for it has nothing to do with the art or history of soldiers. But banners were a real part of tactics and of instructions. By banners men had begun to align themselves, and by the display of banners to recognise the advent of reinforcement or the action at some distant point (distant as fields were then reckoned) of enemies or of friends. Colour was so lively a feature of those fields that shields, even the horses’ armour, cloths hung from trumpets, coats, all shone with it.
Now to the feudal cavalry with their domestics, to the gentry so armed whose tradition was the soul and whose numbers the nucleus of a fourteenth-century army, one must add, quite separate from their domestics and squires, the foot-soldiers; and these were trained and untrained.
At this point a capital distinction must be made. Armies defending a whole countryside, notably the French armies defending French territory during the Hundred Years’ War, levied, swept up, or got as volunteers masses of untrained men. Expeditions abroad had none such: they had no use for them. Edward had none at Crécy and his son had none at Poitiers; and what was true of these two Plantagenet raids was true of every organised expedition made with small numbers from one centre to a distant spot, throughout the Middle Ages. It is important to remember this, for it accounts for much of the great discrepancies in numbers always observable between an expeditionary force and its opponents, as it does for the superior excellence of the raiding tens against the raided hundreds.
But if we consider only the trained force of foot-men in an army of the fourteenth century, we discover that contrast between the Plantagenet and the Valois equipment with which I desire to conclude. England had developed the long-bow. It is a point which has been vastly overemphasised, but which it would be unscholarly and uncritical to pass over in silence. A missile weapon had been produced and perfected by the Welsh, the art of it had spread over the west country; and it was to prove itself of value superior to any other missile weapon in the field throughout the fourteenth and even into the early fifteenth centuries. Outside these islands it was imperfectly understood as a weapon, and its lesson but imperfectly learnt. When it was replaced by firearms, the British Islands and their population dropped out of the running in land armament for two hundred years. The long-bow was not sufficiently superior to other weapons to impress itself dramatically and at once upon the consciousness of Europe. It remained special, local, national, but, if men could only have known it, a decisive element of superiority up to the breakdown of the Plantagenet tradition of government and of Plantagenet society.
I have described in the writing of Crécy how superior was its rate of delivery always, and often its range, to other missile weapons of the time. We must also remember that capital factor in warfare, lost with the Romans, recovered with the Middle Ages, which may be called the instruction of infantry.
The strength of an armed body consists in its cohesion. When the whole body is in peril, each individual member of it wants to get away. To prevent him from getting away is the whole object of discipline and military training. Each standing firm (or falling where he stands) preserves the unity, and therefore the efficacy, of the whole. A few yielding at the critical point (and the critical point is usually also the point where men most desire to yield) destroy the efficacy of nine times their number. Now, one of the things that frighten an individual man on foot most is another man galloping at him upon a horse. If many men gallop upon him so bunched on many horses, the effect is, to say the least of it, striking. If any one doubts this, let him try. If the men upon the horses are armed with a weapon that can get at the men on foot some feet ahead (such as is the lance), the threat is more efficacious still, and no single man (save here and there a fellow full of some religion) will meet it.
But against this truth there is another truth to be set, which the individual man would never guess, and which is none the less experimentally certain—which is this: that if a certain number of men on foot stand firm when horses are galloping at them, the horses will swerve or balk before contact; in general, the mounted line will not be efficacious against the dismounted. There is here a contrast between the nerves of horses and the intelligence of men, as also between the rider’s desire that his horse should go forward and the horse’s training, which teaches him that not only his rider, but men in general, are his masters. What is true here of horses is not true of dogs, who think all men not their masters, but their enemies, and desire to kill them, and what is more, can do so, which a horse cannot. A charge of large mounted dogs against unshaken infantry would succeed. A charge of mounted horses against unshaken infantry, if that infantry be sufficiently dense, will fail.
To teach infantry that they can thus withstand cavalry, instruction is the instrument. You must drill them, and form them constantly, and hammer it into them by repeated statement that if they stand firm all will be well. This has been done in the case of men on foot armed only with staves. It is easier, of course, to inculcate the lesson when they are possessed of missile weapons; for a continued discharge of these is impossible from charging riders, and an infantry force armed with missile weapons, and unshaken, can be easily persuaded by training, and still more by experience, that it can resist cavalry. Under modern conditions, where missile weapons are of long range and accurate, this goes without saying; but even with a range of from fifty to eighty yards of a missile that will bring down a horse or stop him, infantry can easily be made sufficiently confident if it is unshaken. Now, to shake it, there is nothing available (or was nothing before the art of flying was developed) save other men, equally stationary, armed with other missiles. The long-bowman of the Plantagenets knew that he had a missile weapon superior to anything that his enemy could bring against him. He therefore stood upon the defensive against a feudal cavalry charge unshaken, and he was trained by his experience and instruction to know that if he kept his line unbroken, the cavalry charge would never get home. That is the supreme tactical factor of the Plantagenet successes of the Hundred Years’ War.