Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
at the close of this section.
2. I pay no attention to the ridiculous suggestion that the delay was due to the contemporary peril in Poland, and to Thugut’s anxiety to have Austrian troops in the east rather than on the western frontier. People who write modern history thus seem to forget that the electric telegraph did not exist in the eighteenth century. The more reasonable pretension that the Austrians hesitated between marching north to effect the plan against Souham, and marching east to relieve the pressure upon Kaunitz, who was hard pressed upon the Sambre, deserves consideration. But Kaunitz’s despatch, telling how he had been forced to fall back, did not reach headquarters until the 12th, and if immediate orders had been given for the northern march, that march would have begun before the news of Kaunitz’s reverse had arrived. The only reasonable explanation in this as in most problems in human history, is the psychological one. You have to explain the delay of George III.’s son, and Joseph II.’s nephew. To anyone not obsessed by the superstition of rank, the mere portraits of these eminent soldiers would be enough to explain it.
3. Fortescue, vol. iv., part i., p. 255.
4. After so many allusions to his youth, I may as well give the date of his birth. Frederick, Duke of York, the second son of King George III. of England, was not yet thirty when he suffered at Tourcoing, having been born in 1765. He had the misfortune to die in 1827.
5. The reader not indifferent to comedy will hear with pleasure that, among various accounts of Kinsky’s communication with the Arch-Duke Charles at this juncture, one describes that Royalty as inaccessible after the fatigue of the day. His colleague is represented as asking in vain for an interview, and receiving from a servant the reply “that his Imperial Highness must not be disturbed, as he was occupied in having a fit.”
6. At a point somewhat below Wervicq: much where the private ferry now plies.
CRÉCY
Table of Contents
I. The Political Circumstances
III. The Preliminaries of the Battle
INTRODUCTION
Between those last precise accounts of military engagements which antiquity has left us in small number, and what may be called the modern history of war, there lies a period of many centuries—quite 1400 years—during which the details of an action and even the main features of a campaign are never given us by contemporary recorders.
Through all that vast stretch of time we are compelled, if we desire to describe with any accuracy, and at any length, the conduct of a battle, to “reconstitute” the same. In other words, we have to argue from known conditions to unknown. We have to establish by a comparison of texts and of traditions, and by other processes which will be dealt with in a moment, a number of elements which, where a modern action is concerned, numerous memoirs and official record often accompanied by elaborate maps can put clearly before us.
We should note that the line of division between what we will call a medieval battle and a modern one, though it cannot, of course, be precisely established, corresponds roughly to the sixteenth century. The battles of the seventeenth are for the most part open in detail to the historian, from copious evidence afforded by contemporary writers and by our considerable knowledge of the tactics and armament of the time. And this, of course, is still truer of the eighteenth and of the nineteenth centuries. Subsequent to the wide employment of printing, and throughout the sixteenth century, the tendency shown by contemporaries to set down detail steadily increases, but the whole of that century is transitional in this matter.
The battles of the fifteenth, of the fourteenth, and earlier centuries, differ entirely as to their evidence. We must gather it from manuscript authorities, often rare, sometimes unique. Those authorities are, again, not always contemporary. They never by any chance give us a map, and rarely a definite topographical indication. They are summary, their motive is ecclesiastical or civil rather than military, they present at the best the picturesque side of an engagement, and at the worst they preserve a bare mention of its date, or the mere fact that it took place.
Even in the elementary point of numbers, without some knowledge of which it is so difficult to judge the nature of a field, we are commonly at a loss. Where a smaller force upon the defensive has discomfited a larger attacking force, the dramatic character of such a success (and Crécy was one of them) has naturally led to an exaggeration of the disproportion. The estimate of loss is very commonly magnified and untrustworthy, for that is an element which, in the absence of exact record, both victors and vanquished inevitably tend to enlarge. We are not as a rule given the hours, sometimes, but not often, the state of the weather, and, especially in the earlier cases, the local or tactical result is of so much greater importance to the chronicler than the strategical plan, that we are left with little more knowledge at first hand than the fact that A won and B lost.
So true is this, that with regard to the majority of the great actions of the Dark Ages no contemporary record even enables us to fix their site within a few miles. That is true, for instance, of the decisive defeat of Attila in 451, of the Mahommedans by Charles Martel in 732, and of the final victory of Alfred over the Danes in 878.
Scholarship has established, with infinite pains and within small limits of doubt, the second and the third. The first is still disputed. So it is with the victory of Clovis over the Visigoths, and with any number of minor actions. Even when we come to the later centuries, and to a more complete knowledge, we are pursued by this difficulty, though it is reduced. Thus we know the square mile within which the Battle of Hastings was fought, but the best authorities have disputed its most important movements and characters. Similarly we can judge the general terrain of most of the Crusading fights, but with no precision, and only at great pains of comparison and collation.
The battle which forms the object of this little monograph, late as was its date, was long the subject of debate during the nineteenth century, upon the elementary point of the English position and its aspect. And, though that and other matters may now be regarded as established, we owe our measure of certitude upon them not to any care upon the part of our earliest informers, but to lengthy and close argument conducted in our time.
There is no space in such a short book as this to discuss all the causes which combined to produce this negligence of military detail in the medieval historian: that he was usually not a soldier, that after the ninth century armies cannot be regarded as professional, and that the interest of the time lay for the mass of readers in the results rather than in the action of a battle, are but a few of these.
But though we have no space for any full discussion,