Marshal d’Audrehem and the Lord of Douglas led the heavily armoured horsemen whose task was to shatter the archers on the left wing of the English army. They had three hundred and twenty men, all of them experienced and renowned, all of them able to afford horse armour that could resist an English arrow. The destriers wore chamfrons, metal plates over their faces with holes for their eyes, while their chests were protected by leather, mail and even plate. The armour made the big horses slow, but almost invulnerable.
D’Audrehem and Douglas expected to attack across the valley and up the long slope towards the forest of Nouaille, then skirt about the end of the hedge that protected and hid the enemy troops. They would walk their heavy horses across the valley, and walk up the slope, trusting to the armour to protect the great beasts. Once they had rounded the hedge they would spur the destriers into a lumbering gallop and so drive into the mass of English archers they expected to find. Maybe a thousand bowmen? And the big horses would carry them deep into that panicked mass where they would lay about with swords and axes. Destroy the archers, force them to run from the field, and then the horsemen would turn back to the French lines, dismount and take off their spurs, and then join the great attack that would fight on foot to hammer at the centre of the English army.
That was the plan of battle: to use the heavily armoured horse to destroy the English archers, then slaughter the men-at-arms, but as d’Audrehem and Douglas had led their men over the brow of the western hill they saw the tips of English banners beyond the hedge, and those banners were moving southwards.
‘What are the bastards doing?’ D’Audrehem asked the question of no one.
‘Escaping,’ Douglas answered anyway.
The eastern horizon was brightly lit by the rising sun and the forest was dark against that brightness, but the banners could be seen against the trees. There were a dozen flags, all of them moving southwards, and d’Audrehem looked that way and saw the glint of water in the depth of the valley. ‘Bastards are crossing the river!’ he said.
‘They’re running away,’ Douglas said.
Marshal d’Audrehem hesitated. He was fifty years old and had spent almost all his adult years as a soldier. He had fought in Scotland, where he had learned to kill Englishmen, and then in Brittany, Normandy, and at Calais. He knew war. He was not hesitating because he feared what was happening, but because he knew the plan of battle must change. If they charged the far hill, aiming for where they believed the English left wing lay, they would find men-at-arms, not archers, and his mounted knights had been ordered to destroy the hated enemy bowmen. So where were the archers?
‘There’s a ford down there,’ a man said, pointing to the glint of water.
‘You know that?’
‘I grew up not three miles from here, sire.’
‘We’ll go to the ford,’ d’Audrehem decided. He turned his horse, which was caparisoned in a great cloth that bore the broad blue and white diagonal stripes of his livery. He carried a shield with the same bright colours, and his visored helmet had one white plume and one blue. ‘This way!’ he called and led the horsemen southwards.
And this was easier than crossing the valley. Now, instead of pushing the heavy horses up the long slope of the English-held hill, they were riding downhill. They trotted. The horse armour clinked and jangled; the hooves thumped the dry turf. Some men carried lances, but most had swords. They were riding on open grassland, but ahead of them, where the valley dropped and widened into the larger valley of the Miosson, were trees, and beyond those trees d’Audrehem expected to find archers protecting the ford.
The Lord of Douglas was on the right where a dozen of his own Scotsmen joined him. ‘Drop your visors when you see an arrow,’ he reminded them, ‘and enjoy the killing!’ He would enjoy it. The sport of the Douglas clan was killing Englishmen, and Douglas felt a fierce joy at the prospect of battle. He had dreaded that the interfering churchmen would arrange an escape for this English army, but instead the negotiations had failed and he was released to cry havoc. ‘And remember! If you see my cursed nephew then he’s to live!’ He doubted that he would find Robbie in the chaos of battle, but he still wanted the boy taken alive. Taken alive and then made to suffer. ‘I want the little bastard alive and weeping! Remember that!’
‘I’ll make him weep,’ Sculley answered, ‘weep like a baby!’
Then the heavy horses were in the trees and the riders slowed as they ducked beneath heavy branches. Still no arrows. Still no enemy. Pray Christ d’Audrehem is right, Douglas thought. Were they riding into empty space? Were the English really retreating? Or were the horsemen pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp? The sound of his destrier’s hooves had changed and he realised that they were riding into a marsh. There were willows and alders instead of oak, tussocks of earth and stretches of green liquid soil instead of leaf mould. The horses were sinking their heavy feet into the bog, but they were still moving, and then he saw the river ahead, a sliver of brightness in the green gloom, and he saw men there too, men and wagons, and there were archers!
Marshal D’Audrehem saw them too, and he saw that a wagon had overturned and that the English were in chaos, and an arrow flickered in the sky. He did not see where it went, but it told him he had made the right decision and he had found the archers. He slammed down his visor to turn his world dark, rowelled back his spurs, and charged.
The Earl of Warwick’s archers were still streaming down from the hill. Thomas’s men faced the horsemen and, because the archers were trained and experienced, they chose flesh arrows. These were the arrows made to kill horses because horses were vulnerable and every archer knew that to defeat a charge of mounted knights a man must aim at the horses. That was how Crecy had been won, and so they instinctively picked flesh arrows that had triangular heads, barbed heads, and the two edges of each head were razor sharp, edges to tear through flesh and cut blood vessels and rip apart muscles. They drew the bows back to their ears, picked their targets, and loosed.
The war bow was taller than a man. It was cut from the trunk of a yew grown in the sunny lands close to the Mediterranean, and it was cut where the golden sapwood met the dark-coloured heartwood, and the dark heart of the yew was stiff, it resisted bending, while the outer sapwood was springy so that it would snap back to its shape if it was bent, and the push of the compressed heartwood and the pull of the golden sapwood worked together to give the great war bow a terrible strength. Yet to release that strength the bow must be drawn to the ear, not the eye, so an archer must learn to aim by instinct, just as he had to train his muscles to pull the cord until it seemed that the stress in the yew must surely snap and break. It took ten years to make an archer, but give a trained man a war bow made of yew and he could kill at more than two hundred paces and be feared through all Christendom.
The bows sounded. The strings slapped on the bracers that protected the archers’ wrists; the arrows leaped away. The archers aimed at the horses’ chests, aiming to drive the flesh arrows deep into labouring lungs. Thomas knew what must happen. The horses would stumble and fall. Blood would froth at their nostrils and mouths. Men would scream as dying horses rolled on them. Other men would be tripped by the fallen beasts, and still the arrows would come, relentless, savage, searing white-tipped death driven by wood and hemp, except it did not happen.
The arrows struck. The horses kept coming.
Men were shouting. Wagon drivers were leaping from their seats and fleeing across the river. The horseman who had tried to hurry the retreat was gaping at the approaching French in disbelief. The first of the Earl of Warwick’s archers were reaching the river and their ventenars were bellowing at them to start shooting.
And the French were still coming. They were coming slowly, relentlessly, apparently unaffected by the arrows. The closest horsemen were a hundred and fifty paces away now.
Thomas loosed a second shaft, watched the arrow fly, saw it arc low in the air to plunge dead centre into a bright trapper decorated with diagonal blue and white stripes and the horse did not miss a step, and Thomas saw other arrows were caught in the striped trapper. His arrow had gone just where he wanted, right into the horse’s chest, and it had done nothing. ‘They’ve got armour under the trappers!’ he shouted at his men. ‘Bodkins! Bodkins!’ He plucked a bodkin from the ground where he had thrust a handful of arrows into the soft turf. He drew, looked for a target, saw the red heart of Douglas on a shield, loosed.
The horse kept coming.
Yet the horses were coming slowly. This was not a gallop, not even a canter. The big destriers were hung with mail and plate, restricted by thick skirts of boiled leather, carrying men in full armour, and ploughing through the marsh that bordered the river. That marsh slowed them, their weight slowed them, and Thomas saw an arrow slide by a horse’s head, streak past the rider’s knee and strike the destrier’s rump and the horse sheered away from
