“True, but you have already set my son, Andre, to training trainers, and we can use the men he has already trained to teach the newcomers. How many arbalesters have you under command in Aquitaine?”
“In Aquitaine? Not many. I have more in Anjou, and others in Poitou …” Richard pursed his lips, calculating. “Aquitainians, perhaps five hundred remaining, perhaps six. I brought two hundred of them here with me to England—twenty ten-man squads.
“And what of lesser weapons, other crossbows?”
“The same, I would think, if you are still speaking of Aquitaine. Perhaps a hundred or two more … say, close to a thousand. But again, I have more in Anjou and in Poitou. And before you ask, I have a thousand English longbows in my train and will add at least a thousand more before we quit England.”
Richard now settled his shoulders against the tree at his back and sat staring into the distance, reviewing the numbers he had quoted. Overall, they made up a very small percentage of the hundred-housand-strong army he was raising against Saladin with the French king and their other, lesser allies, but he realized that it was due to him alone, and he reluctantly added credit to his father, too, that they had even that many. His spies had brought word that Frederic Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor, was rumored to be raising an army of two and a half hundred thousand from his German territories as his contribution to the Pope’s new war, but Richard had had his spies at work and he now thought it unlikely that the German emperor’s battalions would contain many bowmen of any kind.
Richard’s gaze focused again and he looked back at St. Clair. “Have you given any thought at all to how we should deploy these new forces you have dreamed up?”
“Aye, I have. The strategy is easily enough explained, but I have not yet worked out the precise tactical details. Now that I have your concurrence on the need to proceed, I will spend more time on that.”
“And this is what you meant by stability and consolidation?”
“Aye, it is. As I said, the small moves are still unclear—they have not yet crystallized in my mind— but I know that we must use the new weaponry in tactical blocks, mobile but capable of standing in place and repulsing an attack in strength, and we must use them in support of our chivalry.”
“And what of our infantry?”
“Again, to be used in blocks, in the manner of the ancients, where each man relied upon the support and strength of his neighbor.”
Richard nodded with slow deliberation. “The ancients … You mean the ancient Roman legions?”
“Aye, exactly. Solid, unyielding, hard hitting, selfreliant, tightly disciplined, and virtually indestructible.”
“I see. That is quite a list of attributes.”
“Aye, but it’s achievable. And necessary, if we are to go against the legions Saladin will throw at us. We can do it, but we have no time to waste.”
“What about these hailstorms of arrows?”
St. Clair shrugged. “If needs must, we will reinvent the Roman tortoise and cover our soldiers with shells of solid steel shields.”
Richard contemplated the older man for long moments, then nodded. “Very well, do it. Is there anything more in your mind?”
“Aye, there is. The Saracen captured all the Frankish fortifications and cities in Outremer, and that means we will have to take them back by siege. I had thought to inform you of the need for siege engines for that, but we discussed that this morning and it seems well in hand.”
“Aye. What we really need is training and trainers, both for infantry and bowmen. So here is what we will do. You will spend this night with me—all night, if necessary—and we will work on the principles and the logistics of these new ideas of yours until I am familiar with all that we will need. After that, I will attend to the rest of it myself and ensure that the right men are chosen and charged as a cadre to put those principles into practice. You, in the meantime, will return home as soon as may be and start training a new, greatly expanded corps of men to use these crossbow weapons—all of them. Use volunteers at first, since they are most likely to learn quickly, but raise others as you need them, from whatever source you deem suitable. I will give you carte blanche on that. I suspect that our French allies, and perhaps even several of the others, will wish to send some of their men to you for training, now that we can openly use these weapons against the Muslim. But what they should do first is send their best smiths to our armories in Anjou and Aquitaine, to learn the making of an arbalest.” He checked himself, noticing the expression on St. Clair’s face. “What is it, man?”
Sir Henry looked puzzled. “Your pardon, but do you mean me to go home before your coronation, or after it?”
“Are you mad, Henry? Before it, of course. This new need is far too important to put off for an entire month, especially over religious mummery. I want to see you gone within the week. I’ll tell you all about the coronation when next we meet, you and I. Now, let us be up and away, for we have several miles to go and I want to start work on these plans tonight.” He twisted his body to look at Baldwin of Bethune, who was sitting some distance aside from them, waiting to be summoned. “Baldwin, we are leaving now. Gather up what needs to be gathered and follow us, quickly as you can.”
As Baldwin rose smoothly to his feet, Richard did the same, then reached down his hand to Sir Henry and pulled him up. “You have done well, Henry … justified my faith in you. Don’t ever stop thinking the way you do. Now, mount up.”
FIVE
Sir Henry St. Clair sat spear-straight on his horse, looking down from a reviewing stand at the top of a high, sloping ramp. In front of him, stretching away on both sides, lay an enormous drilling field, its edges lost in distance. At his back, beyond the width of its protective moat, the high walls of the Castle of Baudelaire towered above him, cloaking him in a late-afternoon shadow that stretched far ahead of where he sat. The entire area to his right was given over to horses and horsemen, groups of knights and formations of mounted men-at-arms riding hither and yon, all of them deeply involved in their exercises. Henry was content to leave them to themselves. He was far more interested in what was happening in the left half of the field, where seemingly endless rows of crossbowmen, the closest of them almost directly below his reviewing stand, shot in aimed volleys at ranked targets far ahead of them. Farther away, beyond the concentrations of crossbowmen, he knew Richard’s English yeomen were working with their deadly longbows, but they were so far distant that St. Clair could barely see them and could only guess at their activities. Like the horsemen that afternoon, they claimed but little of his attention, for his focus was concentrated upon the crossbowmen, the sole reason for his unexpected return to Aquitaine in mid-August of the previous year. It was now the middle of June in the year of Our Lord 1190, and ten months had passed him by like a headlong, badly fractured dream.
The task facing him on his return to Poitiers had been formidable, and he had barely known where to begin. But in the first week after his arrival, he had sent out teams of recruiters from Poitiers to visit every one of Richard’s vassals in Aquitaine, Poitou, and Anjou and to stage demonstrations of their weapons’ potency. These recruiters performed in Tours, Angers, Nantes, Nevers, Bourges, Angouleme, and Limoges, along with another hundred villages and hamlets scattered between and among those, and they announced after every demonstration that Duke Richard was looking for volunteers to fill the ranks of his new, elite artillery corps. More than a thousand men came forward to Poitiers within the first month of that campaign, and Henry set his trained Angevin arbalesters to work immediately, teaching the newcomers. By that time, too, the first new weapons had begun to arrive from the manufactories in Poitiers and Tours, the former supplying arbalests and the latter more simple, light, and versatile crossbows, and once the production had begun, the capacity rose steadily.
Now, after ten months of hard, grinding work, Henry had twelve hundred new crossbowmen fully trained— three hundred of them on arbalests—and more than two thousand new men under arms in various stages of training. More than four hundred of the latter group had been sent to him by the King of France, Philip Augustus, who requested with great civility that Sir Henry consent to train, on Philip’s behalf, a cadre of men who could, in turn, return to teach more of their own in France.
All things considered, Henry felt the efforts he had expended had been more than worthwhile. Word had reached him that morning of Richard’s arrival in France the previous week, and the same missive had warned him that the Duke, now crowned King of England, could be expected to arrive in Baudelaire sometime in the afternoon of that same day. That knowledge had prompted Henry to arrange this mass gathering of his new troops.
