1356

Men touched their talismans, they prayed to their patron saints, they made the jokes that men always made before battle. ‘Keep your visor lifted, John. Goddamned French see your face they’ll run like hares.’ They watched the wan light grow and the colour come back to a dead world. They talked of old battles. They tried to hide their nervousness. They pissed often. Their bowels felt watery. They wished they had wine or ale. Their mouths were dry. The French numbered twenty-four thousand, thirty thousand, forty thousand! They watched their commanders meet on horseback at the line’s centre. ‘It’s all right for them,’ they grumbled. ‘Who’ll kill a goddamned prince or earl? They just pay the bloody ransom and go back to their whores. We’re the goddamned bastards who have to die.’ Men thought of their wives, children, whores, mothers. Small boys carried sheaves of arrows to the archers who were concentrated at the ends of the line.
    The prince watched the western hill and saw no one there. Were the French sleeping? ‘Are we ready?’ he asked Sir Reginald Cobham.
    ‘Say the word, sire, and we go.’
    What the prince wanted to do was one of the most difficult things any commander could attempt. He wanted to escape while the enemy was close. He had heard nothing from the cardinals and he had to assume the French would attack, so his troops would need to hold them off while the baggage and the vanguard crossed the Miosson and marched away. If he could do it, if he could get his baggage across the river and then retreat, step by step, always fending off the enemy attacks, then he could steal a whole day’s march, maybe two, but the danger, the awful danger, was that the French would trap half his army on one bank and destroy it, then pursue the other half and slaughter that too. The prince must fight and retreat, fight and retreat, holding the enemy at bay with a dwindling number of men. It was a risk that made him make the sign of the cross, then he nodded to Sir Reginald Cobham. ‘Go,’ he said, ‘get the baggage moving!’ The decision was made; the dice were rolled. ‘And you, my lord,’ he turned to the Earl of Warwick, ‘your men will guard the crossing place?’
    ‘We will, sire.’
    ‘Then God be with you.’
    The earl and Sir Reginald galloped their horses south, and the prince, glorious in his royal colours and mounted on a tall black horse, followed more slowly. His handsome face was framed in steel. His helmet was ringed with gold and crested with three ostrich feathers. He paused every few yards and spoke to the waiting men. ‘We will probably fight today! And we shall do in this place what we did together at Crécy! God is on our side; Saint George watches over us! And you will stay in line! You hear that? No man will break the line! You see a naked whore in the enemy ranks you leave her there! If you break ranks the enemy will break us! Stay in line! Saint George is with us!’ Again and again he repeated the words. Stay in line. Don’t break the line. Obey your commanders! Stay together, shield to shield. Let the enemy come to us. Do not break the line!
    ‘Sire!’ A messenger galloped from the line’s centre where there was a great gap in the thick hedge. ‘The cardinal is coming!’
    ‘Meet him, find what he wants!’ the prince said, then turned back to his men. ‘You stay in line! You stay with your neighbour! You do not leave the ranks! Shield next to shield!’
    The Earl of Salisbury brought the news that the cardinal was offering a further five days of truce. ‘In five days we starve,’ the prince retorted, ‘and he knows it.’ The army had run out of food for men and horses and the presence of the enemy meant that no forage parties could search the nearby countryside. ‘He’s just doing the French king’s bidding,’ the prince said, ‘so tell him to go say his prayers and leave us alone. We’re in God’s hands now.’
    The church’s mission had failed. Archers strung their bows. The sun was almost above the horizon and the sky was filled with a great pale light. ‘Stay in line! You will not leave the ranks! Do you hear me? Stay in line!’
    Beneath the hill, beside the river where the shadows of the night still lingered, the first wagons moved towards the ford.
    Because the army would escape.



Fourteen
     
    The axles squealed like pigs being slaughtered at winter’s onset. The carts, wagons and wains, of which no two were alike, lurched on the