THE ASPECT OF THESE BATTLES
In closing the coupled and twin stories of Crecy and Poitiers it is not
without advantage to describe the aspect which they would have presented
to an onlooker of their time; and in doing this I must not only describe
the general armament of Western European men in the middle of the
fourteenth century, but that contrast between weapons and methods which
gave the Plantagenets for more than a generation so permanent an advantage
over their opponents.
You would have seen a force such as that of the Black Prince or of King
John camped before a battle, a white town of tents crossing the fields,
with here and there a vivid patch of colour where some great leader's
pavilion was of blue or red and gold. The billeting of men upon
householders was a necessary feature of a long march, or of the
occupation of a town. But when there was question of occupying a position,
or when an army was too large to lodge under roof, it depended upon
canvas. But it must be remembered that not the whole of a force by any
means enjoyed that advantage; a large portion, especially in a
considerable body, was often compelled to bivouac.
Further, the reader must represent to himself a heavier impediment of
vehicles than a corresponding force would burden itself with to-day: a far
heavier impediment than a quite modern army would think tolerable. There
were no aids whatsoever to progress, save those which the armed body
carried with it. No commandeering of horses upon any considerable scale;
no mechanical traffic, of course; and, save under special circumstances
where water carriage could relieve the congestion, no chances of carrying
one's booty (then a principal concern), one's munitions, and one's
supplies, save in waggons.
On the other hand, the enormous supply of ammunition which modern missile
warfare demands, and has demanded more or less for three hundred years,
was absent. There was no reserve of food; an army lived not entirely off
the country, for it always began with a reserve of provisions, but without
any calculated reserve for a whole campaign, and necessarily in such times
without any power of keeping essential nourishment for more than a few
days.
Say that your fourteenth-century corps was more burdened upon the march by
far, but by far less dependent upon its base than a modern force, and you
have the truth.
You must therefore conceive of the marching body, be it 7000 or be it
30,000 or more, as a long column of which quite one-half the length will
usually consist of waggons.
The first thing that would strike the modern observer of such a column
would be the large proportion of mounted men.
Even the Plantagenets, who first, by an accident about to be described,
discovered, and who by their genius for command developed, a revolution in
missile weapons, marched at the head of columns which were, not only for
their spirit and their tradition and command, but for all their important
fighting units, mounted.
Tradition and the memory of a society are all-important in these things.
From the beginning of the Dark Ages until well on into the Middle Ages,
say, from the end of the fifth century to the beginning of the
fourteenth, a battle was essentially a mounted charge; and the noble class
which for generation after generation had learnt and gloried in the trade
of those charges was the class which organised and enjoyed the peril of
warfare.
The armoured man was always an expensive unit. His full equipment was the
year's rent of a farm, and what we should to-day call a large country
estate never produced half a dozen of him, and sometimes no more than one.
He needed at least one servant. That was a mere physical necessity of his
equipment. Often he had not one, but two or three or even four. He and his
assistants formed the normal cell, so to speak, of a fourteenth-century
force. And on the march you would have seen the thousands of these
"men-at-arms" (the term is a translation of the French "gensdarmes," which
means armed people) surrounded or followed by a cloud of their followers.
Now their followers were more numerous than they, and yet far more
vulnerable, and they form a very difficult problem in the estimation of a
fourteenth-century force.
When I say, as I have said with regard both to Crecy and to
Poitiers--though it is truer of Crecy than of Poitiers--that the number
of combatants whom contemporaries recognised as such was far less than the
total numbers of a force, I was pointing out that, by our method of
reckoning numbers, it would be foolish to count Edward III.'s army in 1346
as only 24,000, or the Black Prince's ten years later as only 7000. The
actual number of males upon the march who had to be fed and could be seen
standing upon the field was far larger. But, on the other hand, the value
for fighting purposes of what I may call the domestics was very varied.
Some of those who served the wealthiest of the men-at-arms were themselves
gentry. They were youths who would later be fully armed themselves. They
rode. They had a sword; they could not be denied combat. Even their
inferiors were of value in a defensive position, however useless for
offensive purposes. When we hear of A making a stand against B though B
was "three times as strong" as A, we must remember that this means only
that the counting combating units on B's side were three times A's. If A
was holding a defensive position against B, B would only attack with his
actual fighting units, whereas A could present a dense mass of humanity
much more than a third of B, certainly two-thirds of B, and sometimes the
equal of B, to resist him, though only one-third should be properly
armed. While, on the other hand, if B should fail in the attack and break,
the number of those cut down and captured in the pursuit by the victorious
A would be very much greater than the fighting units which B had brought
against A at the beginning of the combat. All the followers and domestics
of A's army would be involved in the catastrophe, and that is what
accounts for the enormous numbers of casualties which one gets after any
decisive overthrow of one party by the other, especially of a large force
against a small one. It is this feature which accounts for the almost
legendary figures following Crecy and Poitiers.
The gentry, who were the nucleus of the fighting, were armed in the middle
of the fourteenth century after a fashion transitional between the rings
of mail which had been customary for a century and the plate armour which
was usual for the last century before the general use of firearms,
ornamental during the century in which firearms established themselves,
and is still the popular though false conception of mediaeval accoutrement.
From immemorial time until the First Crusade and the generation of the
Battle of Hastings and the capture of Jerusalem, fighters had covered
their upper bodies with leather coats, and their heads with an iron
casque. From at least the Roman centuries throughout the Dark Ages, a
universal use of metal rings linked together over the leather protected
the armed man, and our word _mail_ is French for links, and nothing else.
In time, the network of links came to be used separate from the leather,
and so it was put on like a shirt of flexible iron all through the great
business which saved Europe during the ninth century against the Northmen
in Gaul and Britain, against the Moor in Spain. It was the armour of the
knights in Palestine, of the native armies which drove the Germans from
Italy, and of the Norman Conquest.
But with the end of the thirteenth century, which for simplicity and
virile strength was the flower of our civilisation, armour, with many
another feature of life, took on complexity and declined. Men risked less
(the lance also came in to frighten them more). The bascinet, which had
protected the head but not the face (with later a hinged face-piece
attached), was covered or replaced by a helmet protecting head and face
and all. At the knees, shoulders, elbows, jointed plates of iron
appeared. Scales of iron defended the shin and the thigh, sometimes the
lower arm as well. The wealthier lords covered the front of every limb
with plates of this sort, and there was jointed iron upon their hands. The
plain spur had rowels attached to it; the sword shortened, so did the
shield; a dagger was added to the sword-belt upon the right-hand side.
We must further see in the picture of a fourteenth-century battle great
blazonry.
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 Crecy 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 Crecy 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.