THE ACTION
Though the accounts of the Battle of Poitiers, both contemporary with and
subsequent to it, show, like most mediaeval chronicling, considerable
discrepancies, it is possible by comparing the various accounts and
carefully studying the ground to present a collected picture of that
victory.
The reader, then, must first seize the position, character, and numbers of
Edward's force as it lay upon the early morning of Monday the 19th of
September.
Three considerable bodies of men arranged in dense formation, faced west
by a little north upon the level which intervenes between the modern farm
of Cardinerie and the wood of Nouaille. These three bodies of men stood
armed, one rank behind the other, and all three parallel. The first was
commanded by Salisbury. It was drawn up along the hedge that bounded the
vineyards, and it stretched upon either side of the lane which led and
leads from Poitiers to Nouaille. With Salisbury was Suffolk; and this
first line, thus facing the hedge, the depression, and the fields beyond,
from whence a French attack might develop, was certainly the largest of
the three lines. The reader must conceive of the road astraddle of which
this command of Salisbury's and Suffolk's stood as lying flush with the
fields around, until the edge of the depression was reached, and there
forming for some yards a sunken road between the vines that stood on
either side of it. The reader should also remember that further to the
left, and covered by the last extension of this line of men, was the
second diverging lane, crossing through vineyards precisely as did the
other, and sunk as the other was sunk for some yards at the crest of the
little depression. It is this lane which now passes by the tile-works and
leads later to the ford over the river in the valley beyond. The line thus
holding the hedge, and commanded by Suffolk and Salisbury, contained the
greater number of the archers, and also a large proportion of men-at-arms,
dismounted, and ready to repel any French attack, should such an attack
develop in the course of the morning to interfere with the retirement
which Edward had planned; but as yet, in the neighbourhood of six o'clock,
there was no sign of the enemy in the empty fields upon the west beyond
the depression. The King of France's camp was more than two miles away,
and it looked as though Edward would be able to get his whole force beyond
the river without molestation.
So much for what we will call the first line, for the position of which,
as for that of its fellows, I must beg the reader to refer to the coloured
map forming the frontispiece of this book.
Immediately behind the first line so drawn up came a second line, under
the command of Warwick and Oxford, but it was a much smaller body, because
it had a very different task to perform. Its business was to act as an
escort for certain of the waggon-loads which Edward, both on account of
their value and of the difficulty of getting them up and down the banks of
the steep ravine of the river behind them, had determined to send forward
at the head of his retirement. This escort, then, we may call the second
line. Before the retiring movement began it stood parallel to and
immediately in the rear of the first line.
The third line was a somewhat larger command, principally of Gascon
men-at-arms under the direct leadership of the Black Prince himself.
To this picture of the three lines standing one behind the other and
facing away from the sunrise of that Monday morning, we must add a great
body of waggons, parked together, upon the right of the first line and
defending it from any turning movement that might be attempted upon that
flank, should a French advance develop after all. We must suppose some few
of the more valuable waggon-loads, carrying the best booty of the raid, to
have been put last in this park, so that their drivers should have the
opportunity of filing off first when the middle or second line, which was
to be their escort, began the retirement. Further, we must remark teams
harnessed and drivers mounted in front of those special waggons, while the
mass of the wheeled vehicles still lay closely packed together for the
purposes of defence against a possible attack, their teams standing to the
rear, ready to harness up only when the retirement was in full swing, and
to come last in the retreating column, saving perhaps for a small
rearguard that might be left to watch the extremity of the line after
everyone else had got safely off the field. We must see the Black
Prince's command, such of it as was mounted, all on horseback already, and
the men-at-arms of the second line or escort under Warwick similarly in
the saddle; but the first line, which formed the bulk of the whole force,
we must picture to ourselves all on foot, the mounted men as well as the
small proportion of foot-sergeants: for if there should be occasion to
repel some attack developing during the retirement, it was in the essence
of the Plantagenet tactics to dismount the men-at-arms during the
defensive, and to hold a position entirely on foot.
I have said that no sign of the enemy appeared upon the empty fields to
the west beyond the depression while these dispositions were being made;
and, when all was ready, perhaps between seven and eight o'clock, the
order for the first movement of the retirement was given. Warwick and the
escort he commanded turned from line to column and began to file off by
the left, down towards the ford. The special waggons, whose safety was
thus being first anxiously provided for, followed, and the whole of the
second line thus got clear of the space between the first and the third.
It marched south towards the river, with its little body of wheeled
vehicles following up its mounted men.
When the second line had thus got clear of the original formation, Edward,
preceded by his banner and accompanied by a certain number of men from the
third line (how many we cannot tell, but presumably no great force), rode
off over the fields to the left of Warwick's string of cavalry and
waggons, to superintend the difficult passage of the Miosson. He left
behind him, standing to arms at the hedge, the whole of the strong first
line under Salisbury and Suffolk, and the bulk of his own third line
marshalled in parallel behind this first line.
At this moment, then, somewhere between seven and eight o'clock, the
situation is thus: the Prince and the band with him are riding off towards
the edge where the land falls somewhat steeply towards the Miosson. He and
his men have their backs turned to the bulk of the army, which, in two
bodies, the larger one lining the hedge and a smaller one behind it, are
holding the chosen defensive position in case there should be any sign of
a French pursuit. We must presume that if no such pursuit appeared to be
developing it was Edward's intention, when he had got the special waggons
and their escort safely across the ford, to withdraw the bulk of his force
thus left behind by the road through Nouaille and across its bridge. The
smaller body would go first; then, section by section, the first line
would fall into column and retire by the Nouaille road, leaving at last no
more than a small rearguard at the hedge, which, when all the waggons of
the park had been harnessed up and were filing down the Nouaille road,
would itself fall into column and bring up the extreme end of the retreat.
By this plan the valuable waggon-loads with their escort, which had
crossed at the ford under Warwick, would be joined in, say, an hour or an
hour and a half by the bulk of the army, which would have rejoined by the
Nouaille road, and the junction would be effected at the spot where, at
the bottom of the frontispiece-map, the dotted line passing the ford
reaches the main road. Well before noon the whole command, with its heavy
and cumbersome train of wheeled vehicles, would be on the heights there
called Le Bouilleau and would be approaching in safety, with the obstacle
of the Miosson _behind_ them, the great south-western road to Bordeaux,
along which the rest of the retreat would take place.
This plan would have every advantage, always supposing that there was no
French pursuit, or that that pursuit should develop too late to interfere
with the Black Prince's scheme. The more valuable of the booty would have
been got clean away by a side track which was also a short cut, and which
would put it, when the whole retirement was effected, ahead of the column,
that is upon the safe side of the force, furthest from an enemy's attack.
It would have got away early without suggesting to the enemy the line of
its escape or the opportunity of using the ford. The retirement of the
mass of the army by the Nouaille road would lead the pursuit, if any,
along that road and towards the bridge, the cutting of which after the
Anglo-Gascon force had passed would leave that force with the obstacle of
the river between it and its enemy.
As it happened, a French pursuit did develop, and, luckily for the Black
Prince, it developed within a very few minutes of his setting off to
superintend Warwick's passage of the ford. Had it come an hour later, when
the mass of the force was in column of route and making for Nouaille, he
might have had to record not a triumph but a disaster.
The French camp was, as I have said, rather more than two miles away from
the defensive position of Maupertuis. It lay on all that open land which
now forms the fields of La Miletrie farm and lies to the south-west of
that steading, between the great Lussac road and that country road to
Nouaille along which the march of the French army had proceeded, and
across which, further along, the Black Prince's command lay astraddle.
King John had no accurate knowledge of his enemy's dispositions. In spite
of the coming and going of the day before, he still knew no more than the
fact that somewhere two or three miles ahead down the road, and between
him and Nouaille, the Black Prince's force was gathered. He appears to
have made no effort to grasp things in greater detail upon that Monday
morning, and when he marshalled his host and set out, it was with the
intention (which he pursued) of merely going forward until he found the
enemy, and then attacking. The host was arranged in four bodies; three
main "battles" or lines, comparable to the English three lines--it was the
universal formation of a mediaeval army--were brought up in column for the
advance, to deploy when the field should be reached. The first was
commanded by the heir to the throne, the Dauphin, Charles, Duke of
Normandy; the second by the Duke of Orleans, the king's brother; the
third was commanded by the king himself, and was the largest of the three.
The attempt to estimate the numbers which John could bring against his
enemy as he set out on that Monday morning is beset with difficulties, but
must nevertheless be made.
Froissart, with his quite unreliable and (let us be thankful) romantic
pen, speaks of over 40,000. That is nonsense. But it is not without some
value, because, like so many of Froissart's statements, it mirrors the
tradition of the conflict which future years developed. If we had no other
figures than Froissart's we should not accept them, but we should accept,
and rightly, an impression of great superiority in numbers on the part of
the attack.
On the other hand, we have the evidence of a man who wrote from the field
itself, and who wrote from the English side--Burghersh. If anything, he
would exaggerate, of course; but he was a soldier (and Froissart was at
the other psychological pole!). He actually wrote from the spot, and he
thought that everything mounted in front of him came to about 8000, to
which he added 3000 men upon foot. Now, Burghersh may have been, and
probably was, concerned to mention no more than what he regarded as
fighting units worth mentioning: infantry more or less trained and
properly accoutred men-at-arms. For these latter, and their number of
8000, we have plenty of independent testimony, and especially Baker's.
Baker gives the same number. As regards the trained infantry, we know that
John had 2000 men armed with the arbalest (a mechanical cross-bow worked
with a ratchet), and we know that he also had, besides these cross-bowmen,
a number of trained mercenaries armed with javelins.
We may set inferior and exterior limits to the numbers somewhat as
follows: the French host included 8000 fully-armed mounted men; that is,
not quite double the Gascon and English units of the same rank and
equipment. It had somewhat less than the English contingent of
missile-armed soldiers, and these armed with a weapon inferior to their
opponents. Count these two factors at 10,000 against the Anglo-Gascon 7000
or 8000. There you have an inferior limit which was certainly exceeded,
for John's command included a number of other rougher mounted levies and
other less trained or untrained infantry. Above that minimum we may add
anything we like up to 10,000 for the untrained, and we get a superior
limit for the total of 20,000 men all told. Averaging the probabilities
from the various accounts, we are fairly safe in setting this addition at
5000, and perhaps a little over. So that the whole force which John could
have brought into the field, and which, had it been properly led and
organised, he might have used to full effect in that field, was about
double the numbers which the Black Prince could oppose to him. The
Anglo-Gascons, standing on the defensive, had from 7000 to 8000 men, and
the force marching against them on the offensive was presumably in the
neighbourhood of 15,000 to 16,000; while an analysis of the armament gives
you, in the capital factors of it, an inferior number of French missile
weapons to the missile weapons of the English prince, but double the
number of fully-armed knights.
As a fact, the organisation of the two sides offered a more striking
contrast than the contrast in their numbers. The Plantagenet force worked
together and was one well-handled command. The Valois force was in
separate commands, so little cohesive that one of them, as we shall see,
abandoned the struggle without orders. For the other causes of the defeat
I must ask the reader to wait until we come to the actual engagement.
To the three "battles" thus marshalled and advancing along the road, John
added a special vanguard, the constitution of which must be carefully
noted. It was sent forward under the two marshals, Audrehen and Clermont.
They commanded: _first_, 300 fully-armoured and mounted men-at-arms, who
rode at the head; _next_, and following immediately behind these, certain
German auxiliaries, also mounted, in what precise numbers we do not know,
but few; _thirdly_, 2000 spearmen on foot, and with them the whole 2000
cross-bowmen using the only missile weapons at John's disposal.
It will be seen that something like a third of John's whole force, and
nearly half the trained part, was thus detached to form the vanguard in
front of the three marching columns. Its function and mishap we shall
gather when we come to the contact between them and Edward's force.
Meanwhile, we must conceive of the French army as breaking camp some time
between six and seven o'clock of the Monday, forming in three columns upon
the Nouaille road, with the king commanding the largest rear column, his
brother, the Duke of Orleans, the column immediately in front, and the
King's son and heir, the Duke of Normandy, in front of Orleans; while
ahead of all these three columns marched the 4000 or 5000 men of the
vanguard under the marshals, with their 300 picked knights leading the
whole.
It must have been at about eight o'clock that the men thus riding with the
marshals in front of the French advance came up the slight slope near La
Moudurerie, topped the hill, and saw, six or seven hundred yards in front
of them, beyond the little depression, the vineyards and the hedge behind
the vineyards, and behind that hedge again the massed first line of the
Black Prince's force. Off in the rear to the right they could see the
Black Prince's banner, making away down towards the river, and soon
dropping out of sight behind the shoulder of the hill. The special waggons
of booty, with Warwick and their escort, must already have disappeared
when the French thus had their first glimpse of the enemy.
The sight of the Black Prince's banner disappearing down into the valley
on the right rear, rightly decided the French vanguard that their enemy
had determined upon a retreat, and had actually begun it. The force in
front of them, behind the hedge, large as it was, they rightly conceived
to be the rearguard left to protect that retreat. They determined to
attack at once; and the nature of the attack, which had carefully been
planned beforehand under the advice of Douglas, the Scotchman who was
fighting on King John's side, and who had experience of the new
Plantagenet tactics, must next be grasped.
The experience and the memory of Crecy ten years before had left with the
Valois a clear though very general idea that the novel and overwhelming
superiority of the English long-bow could not be met by the old-fashioned
dense feudal cavalry charge. Any attempt to attack the front of a line
sufficiently defended by long-bowmen in this fashion meant disaster, many
horses would be shot long before their riders could come within lance
thrust, the dense packed line of feudal knights, thousands in number,
would be thrown into confusion by the maddened and fallen animals, the
weight of the remainder as they pressed forward would only add to that
confusion, and the first "battle," delivering the regular traditional
first-charge with which every old feudal battle had opened, would in a few
minutes degenerate into a wild obstacle of welter and carnage stretched
in front of the defensive line, and preventing anything behind them from
coming up.
It was to avoid misfortune of this kind that the vanguard of which I have
spoken was formed. Its orders were these:--The picked three hundred
knights of that vanguard were to ride straight at the English archers, and
almost certainly to sacrifice themselves in so doing. But as their numbers
were few, their fall would not obstruct what was to follow. It was their
business in this immolation of their bodies to make it possible for the
mass of infantry, especially those armed with missile weapons, to come
close in behind and tackle the English line. That infantry, aided by the
mounted German mercenaries and meeting missile with missile by getting
hand to hand with the English bowmen at last, would prevent those English
bowmen from effective action against the next phase of the offensive. This
next phase was to be the advance of the first "battle," that of the
Dauphin, the Duke of Normandy. His men-at-arms were to go forward
dismounted, and to close with the whole English line while its most
dangerous portion, the bowmen, were still hampered by the close pressure
of the vanguard.
The plan thus ordered by the French king at the advice of his Scotch
lieutenant was not so incompetent as the results have led some historians
to judge. It suffered from four misconceptions; but of these one was not
the fault of the French commander, while the other three could only have
been avoided by a thorough knowledge of the new Plantagenet tactics, which
had not yet been grasped in the entirety of their consequences even by
those who had invented them.
The four misconceptions were:--
(1) The idea that the attack would only have to meet the force immediately
in front of it, behind the hedge. This was a capital error, for, as we
shall see, Warwick with his men escorting the waggons came back in time to
take a decisive part in the first phase of the action. But it was not an
error which anyone on the French side could have foreseen; Warwick's men
having disappeared down the slope of the hill towards the ford before the
French vanguard caught its first sight of the enemy.
(2) The underrating of the obstacle afforded by the vineyard in front of
the English line, and the consequent "bunching" of the attack on to the
lane which traversed that vineyard. Probably the archers themselves did
not know what an extraordinarily lucky accidental defence the vineyard
provided for their special weapon. It was exactly suited to giving them
the maximum effect of arrow-fire compatible with the maximum hindrance to
an advancing enemy.
(3) The French king and his advisers had not yet grasped--nor did anyone
in Europe for some time to come--the remarkable superiority of the
long-bow over the cross-bow. Just so modern Europe, and particularly
modern Prussia, with all its minute observation and record, failed for ten
good years to understand that rate of delivery and not range is what turns
the scale with modern artillery. The cross-bow shot an uglier missile,
inflicted a nastier wound, was more feared by the man in danger of that
wound than the long-bow was. In range the two weapons might be regarded as
nearly equal, save for this deciding difference, that the trained
long-bowman could always count upon his maximum range, whereas the
cross-bow varied, as a machine always will, with conditions independent of
the human will behind it. You could not extend its pull to suit a damp
string, for instance, and if your ratchet caught, or your trigger jammed,
the complicated thing held you up; but delivery from the long-bow was,
from the hands of the strong and trained man, the simplest and most
calculable of shots, variable to every condition of the moment. Its
elasticity of aim was far superior, and, most important of all, its rate
of fire was something like three to one of the arbalest.
(4) Douglas and the French king rightly decided that horses were so
vulnerable to the long-bow as to prevent a mounted charge from having a
chance of success, if it were undertaken in a great mass. They decided,
upon that account, to dismount their men-at-arms, and to attack on foot.
But what they did not allow for was the effect of the new armour upon foot
tactics of that kind. It was one thing for a line holding the defensive,
and not compelled to any forward movement, to dismount its armoured
knights and bid them await an attack. It was quite another thing for such
armoured knights to have to make a forward movement of half a mile or more
on foot, and to engage with the sword or the shortened lance at the end of
it. Armour was at that moment in transition. To the old suit of chain
mail, itself quite ponderous enough to burden a man on foot, there had
been added in that generation plate in various forms. Everyone had plate
armour at least upon the elbows, knees, and shoulders, many had it upon
all the front of the legs and all the front of the arms, some had adopted
it as a complete covering; and to go on foot thus loaded over open fields
for the matter of eight hundred yards was to be exhausted before contact
came. But of this men could not judge so early in the development of the
new tactics. They saw that if they were to attack the bowmen successfully
they must do so on foot, and they had not appreciated how ill-suited the
armoured man of the time was for an unmounted offensive, however well he
might serve in a defensive "wall."
These four misconceptions between them determined all that was to follow.
* * * * *
It was a little before nine when the vanguard of the Valois advanced
across the depression and began to approach the slight slope up towards
the vineyards and the hedge beyond. In that vineyard, upon either side of
the hollow road, stood, in the same "harrow" formation as at Crecy, the
English long-bowmen.
The picked three hundred knights under the two French marshals spurred and
charged. Small as their number was, it was crowded for the road into
which the stakes of the vineyard inevitably shepherded them as they
galloped forward, and, struggling to press on in that sunken way, either
side of their little column was exposed to the first violent discharge of
arrows from the vines. They were nearly all shot down, but that little
force, whose task it had been, after all, to sacrifice their lives in
making a way for their fellows, had permitted the rest of the vanguard to
come to close quarters. The entanglement of the vineyard, the unexpected
and overwhelming superiority of the long-bow over the cross-bow, the
superior numbers of the English archers over their enemies' arbalests,
made the attack a slow one, but it was pressed home. The trained infantry
of the vanguard, the German mounted mercenaries, swarmed up the little
slope. The front of them was already at the hedge, and was engaged in a
furious hand to hand with the line defending it, the mass of the remainder
were advancing up the rise, when a new turn was given to the affair by the
unexpected arrival of Warwick.
The waggons which that commander had been escorting had been got safely
across the Miosson; the Black Prince had overlooked their safe crossing,
when there came news from the plateau above that the French had appeared,
and that the main force which the Black Prince had left behind him was
engaged. Edward rode back at once, and joined his own particular line,
which we saw just before the battle to be drawn up immediately behind the
first line which guarded the hedge and the vineyard. Warwick, with
excellent promptitude, did not make for Salisbury and Suffolk to reinforce
their struggling thousands with his men, but took the shorter and more
useful course of moving by his own left to the southern extremity of his
comrade's fiercely pressed line (see frontispiece near the word "Hedge";
the curved red arrow lines indicate the return of Warwick).
He came out over the edge of the hill, just before the mass of the French
vanguard had got home, and when only the front of it had reached the hedge
and was beginning the hand-to-hand struggle. He put such archers as he had
had with his escort somewhat in front of the line of the hedge, and with
their fire unexpectedly and immediately enfiladed all that mass of the
French infantry, which expected no danger from such a quarter, and was
pressing forward through the vineyards to the summit of the little rise.
This sharp and unlooked for flank fire turned the scale. The whole French
vanguard was thrown into confusion, and broke down the side of the
depression and up its opposing slope. As it so broke it interfered with
and in part confused the first of the great French "battles," that under
the Dauphin, whose ordered task it was to follow up the vanguard and
reinforce its pressure upon the English line. Though the vanguard had been
broken, the Dauphin's big, unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men
managed to go forward through the shaken and flying infantry, and in their
turn to attack the hedge and the vineyard before it. Against them, the
flank fire from Warwick could do less than it had done against the
unarmoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of the vanguard which it had just
routed. The Dauphin's cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the
main English position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for
the effort then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a
weight of iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come
back, the full weight of his command--every man of it except a reserve of
four hundred--was massed to meet the Dauphin's attack. Warwick's men
hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the
melee was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a
defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which should,
by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.
Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was
that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten o'clock,
which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the
fight, the Dauphin's unequal struggle was one of the finest feats of arms
in all the Hundred Years' War. Nothing but a miracle could have made it
succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in which the English
defending line had itself suffered heavily and the Dauphin's attack had
been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a third phase in the battle
which quite cancelled not only the advantage (for that was slight) but
also the glory gained by the Dauphin's great effort.
Next behind the Dauphin's line, the second "battle," that of the Duke of
Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and to have
launched yet another wave of men against the hedge which had been with
such difficulty held. Had it done so, the battle would have been decided
against Edward. The Dauphin's force, though it was now broken and the
remnants of it were scattering back across the depression, had hit the
Anglo-Gascon corps very hard indeed. Edward had lost heavily, his missile
weapon was hampered and for the moment useless, many of his men were
occupied in an attempt to save the wounded, or in seeking fresh arms from
the train to replace those which had been broken or lost in the struggle.
What seems to have struck most those who were present at the action upon
the English side was the exhaustion from which their men were suffering
just after the Dauphin's unsuccessful attempt to pierce the line. If
Orleans had come up then, he could have determined the day. But Orleans
failed to come into action at all, and the whole of his "battle," the
second, was thrown away.
What exactly happened it is exceedingly difficult to infer from the short
and confused accounts that have reached us. It is certain that the whole
of Orleans' command left the field without actually coming into contact
with the enemy. The incident left a profound impression upon the legend
and traditions of the French masses, and was a basis of that angry
contempt which so violently swelled the coming revolt of the populace
against the declining claims of the feudal nobility. It may almost be said
that the French monarchy would not have conquered that nobility with the
aid of the French peasantry and townsmen had not the knights of the second
"battle" fled from the field of Poitiers.
What seems to have happened was this. The remnant of the Dauphin's force,
falling back in confusion down the slight slope, mixed into and disarrayed
the advancing "battle" of Orleans. These, again, were apparently not all
of them, nor most of them, dismounted as they should have been, and, in
any case, their horses were near at hand. The ebb tide of the Dauphin's
retirement may have destroyed the loose organisation and discipline of
that feudal force, must have stampeded some horses, probably left
dismounted knights in peril of losing their chargers, and filled them with
the first instinct of the feudal soldier, which was to mount. We may well
believe that to all this scrimmage of men backing from a broken attack,
men mounting in defiance of the unfamiliar and unpopular orders which had
put them on foot, here riderless horses breaking through the ranks, there
knots of men stampeded, the whole body was borne back, first in confusion,
afterwards in flight. So slight are the inequalities of the ground, that
anyone watching from the midst of that crest could have made nothing of
the battle to the eastward, save that it was a surging mass of the French
king's men defeated, and followed (it might erroneously have been thought)
by the Black Prince and his victorious men.
At any rate, the whole of the second "battle," mixed with the debris of
the first, broke from the field and rode off, scattered to the north. It
is upon Orleans himself that the chief blame must fall. Whatever error,
confusion, stampede, or even panic had destroyed the ordering of his line,
it was his business to rally his men and bring them back. Whether from
personal cowardice, from inaptitude for command, or from political
calculation, Orleans failed in his duty, and his failure determined the
action.
The pause which necessarily followed the withdrawal of the central French
force, or second "battle," under Orleans gave Edward's army the breathing
space they needed. It further meant, counting the destruction of the
vanguard and the cutting to pieces of the Dauphin's "battle," the
permanent inferiority through the rest of the day of anything that the
French king could bring against the Plantagenets. The battle was lost from
that moment, between ten and eleven o'clock, when Orleans' confused
column, pouring, jostled off the field, left the great gap open between
King John and the lead of his third battle and the English force.
Had strict military rule commanded the feudal spirit (which it never did),
John would have accepted defeat. To have ridden off with what was still
intact of his force, to wit, his own command, the third "battle," would
have been personally shameful to him as a knight, but politically far less
disastrous than the consequences of the chivalrous resolve he now made. He
had left, to make one supreme effort, perhaps five, perhaps six thousand
men. Archers wherewith to meet the enemy's archers he had none. What
number of fully-armoured men-at-arms he had with him we cannot tell, but,
at any rate, enough in his judgment to make the attempt upon which he had
decided. The rest of the large force that was with him was of less
considerable military value; but, on the other hand, he could calculate
not unjustly upon the fact that all his men were fresh, and that he was
leading them against a body that had struggled for two hours against two
fierce assaults, and one that has but just emerged--unbroken, it is
true--from a particularly severe hand-to-hand fight.
John, then, determined to advance and, if possible, with this last reserve
to carry the position. It was dismounted, as he had ordered and wished all
his men-at-arms to be, and the King of France led this last body of
knights eastward across the little dip of land. As that large, fresh body
of mailed men approached the edge of the depression on its further side,
there were those in the Black Prince's force who began to doubt the issue.
A picturesque story remains to us of Edward's overhearing a despairing
phrase, and casting at its author the retort that he had lied damnably if
he so blasphemed as to say the Black Prince could be conquered alive.
I have mentioned some pages back that reserve of four hundred
fully-equipped men-at-arms which Edward had detached from his own body and
had set about four hundred yards off, surrounding his standard. The exact
spot where this reserve took up its position is marked to-day by the
railway station. It overlooks (if anything can be said to "overlook" in
that flat stretch) the field. It is some twelve or fifteen feet higher
than the hedge at which, a couple of furlongs away, the long defence had
held its own throughout that morning. The Black Prince recalled them to
the main body. Having done so, he formed into one closely ordered force
all the now mixed men of the three lines who were still able to go
forward. John was coming on with his armoured knights on foot, their
horses almost a mile away (he was bringing those men, embarrassed and
weighted by their metal under the growing heat of the day, nearly double
the distance which his son's men had found too much for them). Edward bade
his men-at-arms mount, and his archers mounted too. It will be remembered
that six men out of seven were mounted originally for the raid through
Aquitaine. The fighting on foot had spared the horses. They were all
available. And the teams and sumpter animals were available as well in so
far as he had need of them. John's men, just coming up on foot to the
opposite edge of the little dip, saw the low foot line of the
Anglo-Gascons turning at a word of command into a high mounted line. But
before that mounted line moved forward, Edward had a last command to
give. He called for the Captal of Buch, a Gascon captain not to be
despised.
This man had done many things in the six weeks' course of the raid. He was
a cavalry leader, great not only with his own talent, but with the
political cause which he served, for of those lords under the Pyrenees he
was the most resolute for the Plantagenets and against the Valois. The
order Edward gave him was this: to take a little force all mounted, to
make a long circuit, skirting round to the north and hiding its progress
behind the spinneys and scrub-wood until he should get to the rear of the
last French reserve that was coming forward, and when he had completed the
circuit, to display his banner and come down upon them unexpectedly from
behind. It was an exceedingly small detachment which was picked out for
this service, not two hundred men all told. Rather more than half of them
archers, the rest of them fully-equipped men-at-arms. Small as was this
tiny contingent which the Black Prince could barely spare, it proved in
the event sufficient.
That order given, the Black Prince summoned his standard-bearer--an
Englishman whose name should be remembered, Woodland--set him, with the
great banner which the French had seen three hours before disappearing
into the river valley when Edward had been off watching the passage of the
ford, at the head of the massed mounted force, and ordered the charge. The
six thousand horse galloped against the dismounted armoured men of John
down the little slope. The shock between these riders and those foot-men
came in the hollow of the depression. The foot-men stood the charge. In
the first few minutes gaps were torn into and through the French body by a
discharge of the last arrows, and then came the furious encounter with
dagger and sword which ended the Battle of Poitiers. It was the mounted
men that had the better of the whole. The struggle was very fierce and
very bewildered, a mass of hand-to-hand fighting in individual groups that
swayed, as yet undetermined, backwards and forwards in the hollow. But
those who struck from horseback had still the better of the blows, until,
when this violence had continued, not yet determined, for perhaps half an
hour, the less ordered and less armoured men who were the confused
rearmost of John's corps heard a shout behind them, and looking back saw,
bearing down upon them, the banner of St George, which was borne before
the Captal, and his archers and his men-at-arms charging with the lance.
Small as was the force of that charge, it came unexpectedly from the rear,
and produced that impression of outflanking and surrounding which most
demoralises fighting men. The rear ranks who pressed just behind the place
where the heaviest of the struggle was proceeding, and where John's
knights on foot were attempting to hold their own against the mounted
Gascons and English, broke away. The Captal's charge drove home, and the
remnant of the French force, with the king himself in the midst of it,
found themselves fighting against a ring which pressed them from all
sides.
King John had with him his little son Philip, a boy of fourteen, later
most properly to be called "The Bold." And this lad fought side by side
with his father, calling to the king: "Father, guard to the right! Father,
guard to the left!" as the lance-thrusts and the sword-strokes pressed
them. The lessening and lessening group of French lords that could still
hold their own in the contracting circle was doomed, and the battle was
accomplished.
Scattering across those fields to the west and northward bodies of the
Plantagenet's men galloped, riding down the fugitives, killing, or
capturing for ransom, the wounded. And Edward, his work now done, rode
back to the old position, rested, sent messengers out to recall the
pursuers (some of whom had pressed stragglers for four miles), and watched
his men gathering and returning.
He saw advancing towards him a clamorous crowd, all in a hubbub around
some centre of great interest for them, and slowly making eastward to
where the banner of the Black Prince was now fixed. He sent to ask what
this might be, and was told that it was the King of France who had been
taken prisoner at last, and for whom various captors were disputing. John,
pressed by so many rivals, had given up his sword to one of Edward's
knights. That knight was a man from the Artois, who had said to the
Valois, his lawful king, "Sir, I am serving against you, for I have lost
my land, and, owing no allegiance, therefore, I became the man of the King
of England."
Edward received his great captive, and that was the end of the Battle of
Poitiers.
It was noon when the fight was decided. It was mid-afternoon when the last
of the pursuers had been called back into the English camp.