Hilaire Belloc - Premium Collection: Historical Works, Writings on Economy, Essays & Fiction. Hilaire Belloc
by experience what unshaken infantry could do against horse, it would already have been apparent that the action was decided. But there was no such experience and no such knowledge. Over the long slopes of open field which fronted the English ridge, line after line of knights were coming forward in successive waves, as though mere weight of horses and men could win home in spite of the increasing welter of flying, dead, and maddened mounts, and of fallen men and iron that now lined all the front with a belt of obstacle more formidable than earth or wall. And of those, such few as could struggle through to within range might hope to escape the deadly and now converging fire which struck horse after horse as the foot of the ridge was reached. By gaps in the deadly confusion of the stampede and the corpses, round to their right further and further up the valley (upon their left the marshes of the Maye forbade a turning movement), the French charges followed and spread. A dozen or more were counted, and each as it came met the missile defence and was broken, with no counter missile offensive to tame that fire.
The sun was setting, but one effort was made which should have been made far earlier in the short crisis. It was an effort of the French right to turn the English left by Wadicourt.
Due, we may imagine, to no regular order, an occasion seized upon by some one commander who saw his chance, a charge of horse was led right up to that end of the English line, the barricade of wagons prevented its getting home, and, though the struggle was violent, the obstacle was never pierced or overcome. Well after sunset, and as the light was fading, the King of France himself led a great body to the centre, and seems to have come into range of the arrows, but he, no more than any of his lieges, could force horse against steady infantry and an unremitting fire. The darkness came, the late moon rose, and still were desultory and sporadic charges continued, haphazard and blindly. They had not even a hazard of success. These last efforts of the failing battle were repelled with ease, but even up to midnight the final pulses of the fight throbbed, with lesser and lesser pulsations; until after these seven hours of it—most of it by darkness, and all the while the line of Archers standing unbroken, and all the while supplied with their unexhausted ammunition, and finding strength to draw and to discharge—the thing was over.
Throughout that night great bodies of disordered peasantry, half-armed, the militia of the Communes, fled or wandered aimlessly southward over the bare, rolling land. The mounted knights had ridden away from a field where all was utterly lost, and the English line broke up to move forward by the light of lanterns over the face of the countryside, to despatch or to capture the wounded, to loot, to search for the faces and the ensigns of the greater dead. But in that darkness the magnitude of the result was not seen. The English army seems to have guessed the issue mainly by the dying down of the noise, and the ceasing of the cries of men rallying to their lords’ banners.
This was the end of the Battle of Crécy, in the night of Saturday the 26th of August, 1346.
Early upon the Sunday morning, Edward’s forces stood to arms again, not knowing whether even yet a new attack might not be made. Mist covered all the landscape, through which fog, dimly, bodies of men seemed to be advancing upon them from the south. They were reinforcements of Philip’s come up in ignorance of what had passed the day before, or at any rate not appreciating how decisive the day had been. Five hundred knights riding out easily dispersed them. Further bodies straggling up in similar fashion were dealt with in detail, and all that morning the English soldiers going at large over the fields found and put to the sword lost fragments of militia, came, as they tracked the flight, upon dead and wounded lords, and cut off bewildered remnants, making they knew not whither over the land.
The total French losses will never be known. The legend of disaster calls them now ten, now twenty thousand. Of the mounted and armoured men of rank the heralds made a precise account, and returned a list to King Edward of 1542 fallen and dead upon the front of the battle and in the first fields of the retreat. To these due sepulchre was given. The mass of the fallen were buried in common trenches, marks of which may be seen to this day; and it is said that fires were lit to rid the ground of the dead.
The English loss was wholly insignificant. Its exact amount, like that of its enemy, we cannot tell, because a list of but two knights, one squire, and forty of the rest, not counting a few Welsh, is all that we are given. But, even if this total (which hardly corresponds to the fierce mêlée at the beginning of the action on the right) be below the true number, we may be certain that that number was very small indeed. The line was never pierced; the English fight was wholly defensive, and a defensive maintained at range against troops which disposed, after the first rout of the Genoese, of no missiles upon their side.
Upon the Monday morning, the 28th of August, the host set forth upon its northern march, quite free now from any danger of pursuit. By the first days of September it had sat down before Calais. All winter and all the succeeding summer the blockade continued, and upon the 4th of August 1347, nearly a year after Crécy, the town was taken and the lasting fruit of that engagement was garnered. Calais remained an English bastion upon the Continent for more than two hundred years.
Footnotes:
1. We have this upon the evidence of a contemporary, Villani. It has, of course, been denied by our modern academic authorities, but without evidence.
2. The theatrical character which attaches to warfare through the fourteenth century appears at this very outset of the campaign. Edward knighted the Black Prince and sundry other commanders on a hill overlooking the fleet and the harbour just before the main body disembarked. The Black Prince had already been knighted, and the ceremony was mere parade.
3. He did not go to Rouen, or near it, as the map in Mr. Fortescue’s work (vol. i. p. 37) presumes. Rouen was, he found, too strongly held. There is no time for the big loop of twenty miles which Mr. Fortescue introduces, and no evidence for it.
4. This is not N. D. de Vaudreuil, as Professor Thompson suggests, but St. Cyr just beyond where the bridge is.
5. This point has also proved puzzling. Thus Professor Thompson calls it “difficult to find.” What the clerk heard and set down was the peasants’ term “L’Angreville.”
6. This, as Professor Thompson rightly says, is not on the modern maps. It stood just above Nezel near the modern Chateau between that village and Falaise or “The Cliff.”
7. So I read the meaningless rigmarole of the Clerk of the Kitchen. But I may be wrong. Professor Thompson inclines to Ecquevilly, a mile or two further on.
8. Or six, if we read Ecquevilly. The main army halted at Flins.
9. The low tide after the full moon occurred on that 24th of August at about half past-six o’clock in the open sea and nearer eight o’clock in the estuary, or even later; for we must allow quite seven hours’ ebb to five hours’ flow in that funnel in its old unreclaimed state.
10. Antiq. de Pic., vol. iii. pp. 131, etc.
11. The parish boundaries are not absolutely straight, as, after the fashion of modern French communal boundaries, they follow the corners of the oblong strips of peasant cultivation, but the aggregate of straight lines, all in one continuous direction, marks a quite unmistakable trajectory.