Читать книгу The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 90

Table of Contents

The action decided upon the field of Crécy developed wholly within the central space shown in the frontispiece of this volume.

The general frame within which the battle took place must be regarded as a parallelogram corresponding to the exterior limits of that map, not quite four miles in length from east to west, and some 2½ miles in breadth from north to south, having the town of Crécy a little to the north of the medial line, and a good deal on the left or western side of the area. But the emplacement of the troops and the actual fighting, including the partial pursuit by the victors, is wholly contained within a smaller area, which lies aslant, with its major axis pointing north-west, its minor axis pointing north-east, and surrounding the dip called “the Val aux Clercs.”

The aspect of this countryside is that of so many in the north-east of France. The passage of six and a half centuries has not greatly modified it. The limits of the Royal Forest of Crécy are what they have been perhaps from Roman, certainly from early medieval, times. The characteristic hedgeless, rolling, ploughed land, which is the normal landscape of all French provinces and of many others, has been disturbed by no growth of modern industrialism, and its contours remain unmodified by any considerable excavations of the soil. The villages attaching to the battlefield, Estrées, Wadicourt, Fontaine, are in extent, and even in appearance, much what they were when the armies of the fourteenth century occupied them, and the little market-town of Crécy has not appreciably extended its limits.

Even minor features such as the small groups of woodland and the spinnies seem, judged by our remaining descriptions of the battle, to be much the same to-day as they were then.

The terrain of Crécy offers, therefore, an excellent opportunity for the reconstruction of the medieval scene, and I will attempt to bring it before the eyes of my readers.

Ponthieu is a district of low, open, and slightly undulating fertile lands, whose highest ridges touch such contours as 300 feet above the sea, and the depressions in which, very broad and easy, do not commonly fall more than a 100 feet or so below the higher rolls of land. In the particular case of the field of Crécy we shall have to deal with figures even less marked. The crests from which the opposing armies viewed each other before the action average full 200 feet above the sea; the broad, shallow depression between its confronting ridges descends to little more than sixty feet below them.

All this wide expanse of fertile land, affording from one lift of its undulations and another great even views for miles and miles, is cut by streams which run parallel to each other in trenches five to seven miles apart, and make their way by curiously straight courses north-westward to the neighbouring sea. These are the Conche, the Authie (the crossing of whose marshes by the great Roman road formed those pontes which, as we have seen, give the district its name of Ponthieu), and the Maye.

This last little river alone concerns us. We deal in the matter of the Battle of Crécy only with the first rising waters of the Maye. Its source springs just below the village which derives from that river-head its name of Fontaine, and the Church of Crécy stands not two miles down the young stream. These two miles of its course, and a slight depression tributary to this its upper basin, mould the battlefield.

For this shallow depression, called the “Val aux Clercs,” among the least of the many long waves and troughs of land upon which Ponthieu is modelled, was the centre of the engagement, and, though too short and shallow to develop the smaller stream, such water as it collects is tributary to the Maye. This depression runs up from the level exactly north-eastward, gradually rising until it fades, not quite two miles above the river, into the upper levels of the plateau.

On either side of this Val aux Clercs lift the soft and inconspicuous slopes that bound it. The one that bounds it on the north and west, and from which a man faces the south-east and the direction of Amiens, was the eminence occupied by the army of Edward III. At its southern end, where it overlooks the narrow rivulet of the Maye, it descends abruptly to the meadow level of the stream. The fall at this terminal of the bank is one of 100 feet. Its slope varies from one in ten to one in twelve, and on that slope and on the meadow level below it the little town of Crécy stands. There is the mouth of the Val aux Clercs, and the further one walks along the road which marks the position of the English line, and the nearer one approaches Wadicourt, the shallower and less conspicuous and flatter does the Val aux Clercs appear upon one’s right, as its depression rises towards the general level of the plateau. At last, in the neighbourhood of Wadicourt itself (the first houses of which stand 2000 yards from the last houses of Crécy) the depression has almost disappeared.

The bank or fall of land from this crest of the English position down to the lowest point of the trough, steeper towards its southern, or Crécy, easier towards its northern, or Wadicourt, end is, upon the average, a slope of one in thirty; just steep enough to produce its effect upon a charging crowd (especially over soil drenched by rain), and falling just sufficiently to give their maximum value to the arrow-shafts of the long-bow, which was the chief arm of Edward’s command.

The opposing slope, that which lies to the south and east of the vale, and from which the traveller faces the sea-breeze blowing from a shore not fifteen miles away, is much easier and more gentle even than its counterpart. The ridge of it stands above the lowest point of the Val aux Clercs no higher than the corresponding and opposite ridge which the English King occupied with his army, but the fall covers double the distance. It is not 400 yards, but more like a mile, and the average of the decline is one in fifty at the most.

Moreover, this opposing ridge is neither as cleanly marked as the Crécy-Wadicourt line nor parallel to it. It is impossible to fix upon it, with any definition, a true crest. The slope undulates very gradually into the general level of the plateau, and is so formed that the Val aux Clercs is funnel-shaped, much wider at the mouth on the Maye than towards its upper end.

The depression, therefore, which was the theatre of the action, is in the main V-shaped, and its mouth is a full mile in breadth, while its last faint upper portion is not half that width.

Such, in detail, is the field of Crécy.

I have attempted in the cut opposite p. 91 to express graphically its main features as they would appear upon a model carved in wood and plotted to show the actual relief of the soil.

I will conclude by pointing out to the English reader a curious parallel. The field of Crécy has many analogies to the field of Waterloo. In both cases two opposing ridges roughly determine the general plan. In both a depression, double and complex in the modern, single in the medieval, instance, lies between the two lines. That of Crécy, as was suitable for a day in which no missiles of long range were available, is somewhat more marked and affords somewhat more of an obstacle to the offensive than that of Waterloo. In both the French formed the attacking force and in both the defensive position was chosen with singular mastery. Indeed, an eye for a defensive position marks Edward’s plan most strongly, and is, quite apart from the successful result of his action, his best title to repute in military history.

At the close of this section the plainest duty of an historian, as well as the satisfaction of common humour, compels me to allude to a characteristic production of the University of Oxford. There has proceeded from this university a school-book, perhaps the most universally used in the public schools of this country, known as Bright’s History of England. I was myself brought up on it. It is taken, I suppose (like much other Oxford matter), as something hall-marked and official. This text-book has upon page 226 of its first volume a full-page map of the Battle of Crécy. It is fair to say that such a production could not have proceeded, I do not say from any university upon the Continent of Europe, but from the humblest schoolmaster in a French, Swiss, or German village. The features marked upon it are wholly and unreservedly imaginary. There is not even the pretence of a remote similarity between this grotesque thing and the terrain of the famous battle: it is a pure invention. It is almost impossible to express in words the difference between this product of fancy, and even the most inaccurate map sketched from memory, or the merest jottings set down by someone who had no more to guide him than some vague recollection of an account of the battle. There is nothing in it bearing the remotest resemblance to any hill, river, road, wood, village, or point of the compass concerned with the field of Crécy, and to this astonishing abortion is modestly added in the left-hand bottom corner, “From Sprüner.” I have not by me as I write Sprüner’s collection of historical maps which were given us at the University, but if that eminent authority was the model for such a masterpiece, it is a sufficient commentary upon the rest of his work. I have before me as I write the flabbergasting plan in Bright’s History which I have treasured ever since my boyhood, and I trust that this note may be read by many who still believe that the function of our universities is to train the governing class of the nation, not so much in learning as in “character.”

Contrast the excellent and accurate little map in the first-rate manual which Mr. Barnard published twelve years ago from the Clarendon Press. The whole of this book is to be most highly recommended. I believe that this map, the only doubtful features of which are the angular formation of the English Archers and the concentration of the French rear upon the Roman road, is from the pencil of Mr. Oman.