History of the British Army (Vol.1&2). J. W. Fortescue
a history of the British Army. The company which he commanded, English almost to a man, was the terror of Italy, and not only the most formidable in the field but the smartest to the eye, for its arms were burnished till they shone like silver. Hawkwood, though a mercenary, was celebrated as the only one who never broke faith, and as a general his reputation was European. The action which he fought at Castagnaro, when, in spite of great inferiority in numbers, he deliberately laid his plans for a sudden counterstroke, after the manner of Poitiers, extorts the admiration even of modern generals. Still more remarkable is his once famous retreat in the face of an overwhelming force from the Adda to the Adige, and perhaps greatest of all was the closing scene of that retreat. For, as he lay encamped in the plains by the Adige, the enemy broke the dykes of the river and turned the whole flood of its waters upon his army. It was night, and the men were encamping, weary after a hard day's march, when the deluge came upon them. Everything conspired to create a panic, but Hawkwood's coolness and confidence were equal to the danger. He bade every horseman take up one of the foot-men behind his saddle, and then placing himself at their head he led them through ten miles of the trackless waste of water, never less than girth-deep, and brought them out by sheer sagacity, not indeed without loss but without heavy loss, to the dry bed of the river. This was in his last campaign, when he was past seventy years of age; and Florence, the state which he had long faithfully served, voted him a pension for life and a monument even during his lifetime. He was making arrangements to return to England when he died; and King Richard the Second begged the city of Florence that the bones of so famous a warrior might be returned to his native land. The request was gracefully granted by the citizens, but the last resting-place of Hawkwood is now unknown. His monument in the Cathedral at Florence records that he was the most skilful general of his age, a height of military fame that has been reached by one other Englishman only, John, Duke of Marlborough.
1385,
August 14.
Yet another action must be briefly noticed to show the value set on English military skill. During the invasion of Portugal by the King of Castile, in 1385, the Portuguese were joined by a party of about five hundred English adventurers, whose leaders appear to have directed most of the operations. It was under their guidance that the decisive battle of Aljubarotta, of which the Portuguese are still proud, was finally fought; and it is worthy of remark that, finding no advantageous position to hand, they deliberately constructed by means of abattis an imitation of the position of Poitiers, making it unassailable from the front except through a narrow strait, which was purposely left open and lined with archers. Marvellous to relate, the Spaniards and the French, who were fighting with them, rushed straight into the trap, and were of course utterly overthrown; whereupon, in due accordance with precedent, the Portuguese made their counter-attack and won a complete victory.[27] All this was due, as Froissart says, to the counsel of the English; and indeed, little though we may be conscious of it, it is doubtful whether even after Waterloo the prestige of English soldiers was greater than at the end of the fourteenth century.
But while the English military doctrines were thus spreading themselves over Europe, fresh innovations, which were destined to render them obsolete, were already making rapid progress. Artillery in the hands of the Germans was tending more and more to lose its cumbrous character and to take new form in mobile and practicable weapons. The heavy bombards, which could be neither elevated nor traversed, had before the close of the fourteenth century given place to lighter guns of smaller bore fixed on to the end of a shaft of wood and supported on a fork or hook, whence they derived their name of Hakenbüchse, a word soon corrupted by the English into hackbut, hagbush, and finally harquebus. A later improvement had fitted guns with a stock like that of the cross-bow, which could be brought up to the shoulder, thus more readily aligning the barrel to the eye. The step from this to the hand-gun, which could be served out as the individual weapon of a single man, was but a short one and was soon to be taken. But as the traditions of Wellington and the Peninsula were to be tried once more at Alma and Inkerman before they finally perished, so the system of the two great Edwards was to be revived forty years after Navarrete at Agincourt.
1415.
It is unnecessary to dwell on the pretensions which were put forward to excuse the wanton aggression of Henry the Fifth against France. Ambitious, like Frederick the Great, of military glory he made his will the true ground for his action, counting on the spirit of a people that was never strongly averse from a French war. The military devices introduced by the Edwards, the commissions of array,[28] and the system of indentures, were still in good working order, while the discipline of the Black Prince, like his order of battle, was stereotyped in a written code of Ordinances of War. All the old machinery was therefore to hand; and perhaps the most noteworthy change that had come over the English military world was the doubling of the archers' wages from threepence to sixpence a day. Parliament voted the King a large sum of money, which however proved to be insufficient, for, significantly enough, not a contractor would furnish his contingent of men without security for the repayment of his expenses. The crown jewels were pledged in all directions, ships were hired in Holland and in England, seamen were impressed, artisans of every trade, from the miner to the farrier, were engaged, and on the 7th of August 1415 the army embarked at Southampton and the adjacent ports, and sailed for the Seine. The whole fleet numbered some fourteen hundred vessels, and the army is reckoned at thirty thousand men, men-at-arms with their attendants, and archers both mounted and afoot, all distinguished by the red cross of St. George. Further, there was a great train of the newest and best artillery, great guns called by pet names such as the London and the King's Daughter, the whole under the charge of four German gunmasters.
On the second day out the fleet anchored before Harfleur. A day was taken up by the disembarkation, which was unhindered by the French; and by the 19th of August the town was fully invested. Then came a month of siege, wherein the art that was dying blended strangely with that which was just coming to birth; wooden towers and quaint engines that might have been employed by the Romans plying side by side with sap and mine and countermine and the latest patterns of German artillery. The French made a most gallant defence, and dysentery breaking out in the English camp swept off thousands of the besiegers; but at length the heavy guns prevailed. The garrison begged for terms, praying that the King would make his gunners to cease, "for the fire was to them intolerable." On the 22nd of September the capitulation was agreed on, and Harfleur received an English garrison. It was the first town that the English had reduced by the fire of cannon.
But Henry was not yet satisfied. Two-thirds of his force had melted away, dead or invalided, but he had no intention of re-embarking at Harfleur. He devoted a fortnight to the repair of the defences of the captured town, and then collecting provisions for eight days he marched northward for Calais with an army, or, as we should now call it, a flying column, of nine thousand men.
Meanwhile the French, disorganised though they were by the insanity of their king, Charles the Sixth, began to bestir themselves, and collecting an army of sixty thousand men, fourteen thousand of them men-at-arms and several thousand archers and cross-bowmen, determined to hold the line of the Somme and bar Henry's passage of the river. Henry's idea, dictated like the whole of his campaign by the precedent of Edward the Third, had been to cross the Somme by the ford of Blanche Tache. He now learned that the passage was defended by the French in force. He wheeled at once to the right, and following the left bank of the river upward, tried in vain to find a crossing-place. Every bridge was broken down and every ford beset. It was plain that he was more effectually entrapped even than his predecessor Edward.
October.
The eight days' supply of provisions was now consumed, and the position of the English became most critical. Retreat Henry would not, force the passage of the Somme he could not. He decided to follow the river upward to its head-waters, and on reaching Nesle learned from a countryman of a ford, the access to which lay across a morass. Two causeways that provided a footing over it had been broken down by the French, but these were quickly repaired with wood and faggots and straw till they were broad enough to admit three horsemen abreast. Henry himself was indefatigable in the work. He took personal charge of one end of the passages, and appointed special officers to attend to the other. The baggage was carried over along one causeway, and the men by the second. Thus the passage both of morass and river was accomplished between eight in the morning and an hour before dusk of an October day.