Читать книгу The Collected Works - Hilaire Belloc - Страница 119

Table of Contents

It was, as we have seen, on the evening of Tuesday, September the 13th, that the Black Prince with his 7000 men and his heavy train of booty had marched into La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the right bank of the Creuse, somewhat above the place where that river falls into the Vienne.

His confidence that his well-mounted and light-armed troops could outmarch his pursuers was not yet shaken; he was even prepared to imagine that he had already shaken them off; but anyone who could have taken a general survey of all that countryside would have discovered how ill-founded was his belief. The great forces of the French king, coming down slantways from the north and east, had had nearly four miles to march to his three. Yet they were gaining on him. Edward had given the French king a day’s advance by his hesitation before Tours, and the tardiness with which he had received news of John’s crossing the Loire was another point in favour of the French.

It was the Black Prince’s business to get down on to the great road which has been the trunk road of Western France for two thousand years, and which leads from Paris through Châtellerault and Poitiers to Angoulême, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped) he could advance so quickly as to get rid of the pursuit, so much the better. If he were still pressed he must continue his rapid marching, but, at any rate, that was the road he must take.

To the simple plan, however, of reaching Châtellerault and then merely following the great road on through Poitiers, he must make a local exception, for Poitiers itself contained a large population, with plenty of trained men, munitions, and arms; and it was further, from its position as well as from its walls, altogether too strong a place for him to think of taking it.

The town had been from immemorial time a fortress: first tribal (and the rallying point of the Gaulish Picts under the name of Limon); later, Roman and Frankish. The traveller notes to-day its singular strength, standing on the flat top and sides of its precipitous peninsula, isolated from its plateau on every side save where a narrow neck joins it to the higher land; it is impregnable to mere assault, half surrounded by the Clain to the east, and on the west protected by a deep and formidable ravine.

It was absolutely necessary for the Prince not only to avoid Poitiers, but not to pass so close to it as to give the alarm. What he proposed to do, therefore, was to strike the great Bordeaux road at a point well south of the city, called Les Roches, and to do this he must engage himself within the broadening triangle which lies between the Clain and the Vienne: these rivers join their waters just above Châtellerault itself.

The main road from Châtellerault to Poitiers runs on the further side of the Clain from this triangle, and the Black Prince, by engaging himself in the wedge between the rivers, would thus have a stream between his column and the natural marching route of any force which might approach him from the fortified city which he feared.

Further, he was well provided for part of this march through the triangle between the rivers by the existence of a straight way formed by the old Roman road which runs through it, and may still be followed. He could not pursue this road all the way to Poitiers (which town it ultimately reaches by a bridge over the Clain), but somewhere half-way between Châtellerault and Poitiers he would diverge from it towards the east, and so avoid the latter stronghold and make a straight line for Les Roches. This it would be the easier for him to do because the soil in that countryside is light and firm and traversed by very numerous cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous farms. Only one considerable obstacle interrupts a passage southward through the triangle between the rivers. It is the forest of Moulière. But the Black Prince’s march along the Roman road would skirt this wood to the west, and by the time his approach to Poitiers compelled him to diverge from the Roman road eastward, the boundary of the forest also sloped eastward away from it.

His first day’s march upon this last lap, as it were, of his escape was a long one. By the road he took it was no less than fifteen miles, and at the end of it he gathered his column into Châtellerault, a couple of miles from the place where the Clain and the Vienne meet, and where the triangle between the two streams through which he proposed to retreat begins. At the same hour that the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, John was leading the head of his column into La Haye. He was just one day’s march behind the Plantagenet.

There followed an unsoldierly and uncharacteristic blunder on the part of the Black Prince which determined all the strange cross-purposes of that week.

The Black Prince having made Châtellerault, believed that he had shaken off the pursuit.

In explanation of this error, it must be remembered that the population so far north as this was universally hostile to the southern cause and to the claim of the Plantagenets. Whether news of the ravaging and burning to the eastward had affected these peasants or no, we are certain that they would give the Anglo-Gascon force nothing but misleading information. The scouting, a perpetual weakness in mediæval warfare, was imperfect; and even had it been better organised, to scout rearwards is not the same thing as scouting on an advance or on the flanks. At any rate, he took it for granted that there was no further need for haste, that he had outmarched the French king, and that the remainder of the retreat might be taken at his own pleasure. It must further be noted that there was a frailty in the Black Prince’s leading which was more than once discovered in his various campaigns, and which he only retrieved by his admirable tactical sense whenever he was compelled to a decision. This frailty consisted, as might be guessed of so headstrong a rider, in trying to get too much out of his troops in a forced march, and paying for it upon the morrow of such efforts by expensive delays which more than counterbalanced its value. He relied too much upon the very large proportion of mounted men which formed the bulk of his small force. He forgot the limitations of his few foot-soldiers and the strain that a too-rapid advance put upon his heavy and cumbersome train of waggons, laden with a heavier and heavier booty as his raid proceeded.

He stayed in Châtellerault recruiting the strength of his mounts and men for two whole days. He passed the Thursday and the Friday there without moving, and it was not until the Saturday morning that he set out from the town, crossed the Clain, and engaged himself within the triangle between the two rivers.

The land through which he marched upon that Saturday morning had been the scene of a much more famous and more decisive feat of arms; for it was there, just north of the forest of Moulière, that Charles Martel six hundred years before had overthrown the Mahommedans and saved Europe for ever.

So he went forward under the morning, making south in a retreat which he believed to be unthreatened.

Meanwhile, John, at the head of the French army, was pursuing a better-thought-out strategical plan, whose complexity has only puzzled historians because they have not weighed all the factors of the military situation.

We do not know what numbers the King of France disposed of during this, the first part of the pursuit, but we must presume that he could not yet risk an engagement. The town of Poitiers was everything to him. There he would find provisions and munition, some considerable body of trained men, and the possibility of levying many thousands more. It was a secure rallying point upon which to block the Black Prince’s march to the south, or from which to sally out and intercept his march. But when John found himself in La Haye upon Wednesday the 14th, a day’s march behind Edward’s command, he could not take the direct line for Poitiers because that very command intercepted him. He knew that it had taken the road for Châtellerault. He determined, therefore, by an exceptionally rapid progress, to march round his enemy by the east, to get down to Chauvigny, and from that point to turn westward and reach Poitiers. It was a risk, but it was the only course open to him. Had the Black Prince pursued his march instead of waiting at Châtellerault, John’s plan would have failed, prompt as its execution was; but the Black Prince’s delay gave him his opportunity.

From La Haye to Chauvigny by the crossroads that lead directly southward is a matter of thirty miles. John covered this in two days. Leaving La Haye upon the morning of Thursday the 15th, he brought his force into Chauvigny upon the 16th, Friday. He left, no doubt, a certain proportion delayed upon the road, but he himself, with the bulk of the army, completed the distance.

While, therefore, the Black Prince was delaying all that Thursday and Friday in Châtellerault, John was passing right in front and beyond him some eight miles to the eastward; and on the Saturday, the 17th, while the Black Prince was leading his column through the triangle between the rivers, John was marching due west from Chauvigny to Poitiers by the great road through St. Julien, yet another fifteen miles and more, in the third day of his great effort. The head of the column, with the king himself, we must presume to have ridden through the gate of Poitiers before or about noon, but the last contingents were spread out along the road behind him when, in that same morning or early afternoon of Saturday, the outriders of the Anglo-Gascon force appeared upon the fields to the north.

It was an encounter as sudden as it was dramatic. The countryside at this point consists in wide, open fields, the plough-lands of a plateau which rises about one hundred feet above the level of the rivers. To the east of this open country a line of wood marks the outlying fragments of the forest of Moulière; to the west, five miles away, and out of sight of these farms, stands upon its slope above the Clain the town of Poitiers. The lane by which the Black Prince was advancing was that which passes through the hamlet of Le Breuil.1 It is possible that he intended to camp there; he had covered sixteen miles. But if that was his intention, the accident which followed changed it altogether. A mile beyond the village there is a roll of rising land, itself a mile short of the great road which joins Poitiers and Chauvigny. It was from this slight eminence that scouts riding out in front of Edward’s army saw, massed upon that road and advancing westward across their view, a considerable body of vehicles escorted by armed men. It was the rearguard and the train of King John.

A man following to-day that great road between Poitiers and Chauvigny eastward, notes a spinney and a farm lying respectively to the right and to the left of his way, some four kilometres from the gate of Poitiers, and not quite three from the famous megalith of the “Lifted Stone,” which is a matter of immemorial reverence for the townsfolk. That farm is known as La Chaboterie, and it marks the spot upon the high road where John’s rearguard first caught sight of Edward’s scouts upon the sky-line to the north.

The mounted men of this force turned northward off the high road, and pursued the scouts to the main body near Le Breuil; then a sharp skirmish ensued, and the French were driven off. This mêlée was the first news the Black Prince had that the French army, so far from having abandoned the pursuit, had marched right round him, and that his column was actually in the gravest peril. It warned him that though he had already covered those sixteen miles, he must press on further before he could dare to camp for the night. His column was already weary, but there was no alternative.

The army reached the high road, and crossed it long after the French rearguard had disappeared to the west. Exhausted as it was, it pushed on another mile or two southward by the lanes that lead across the fields to the neighbourhood of Mignaloux, and there it camped. The men had covered that day close on twenty miles! But before settling for the evening, the Black Prince sent out the Captal de Buch north-westward over the rolling plateau in reconnaissance. When this commander and his body reached the heights which overlook the Clain, and faced the houses of Poitiers upon the hill beyond, they saw in the valley beneath them, and on the slopes of the river bank, the encampment of the French army; and reported, upon their return, “that all the plain was covered with men-at-arms.”

Upon the next morning, that of Sunday the 18th of September, broken as the force was with fatigue, it was marshalled again for the march—but no more than a mile or two was asked of it.

Edward had scouted forward upon the morning, and discovered, just in front of the little town of Nouaillé and to the northward of the wood that covers that little town, a position which, if it were necessary to stand, would give him the opportunity for a defensive action.

That he intended any such action we may doubt in the light of what followed. It was certainly not to his advantage to do so. The French by occupying Poitiers had left his way to the south free, but the extreme weariness of his force and the possibility that the French might strike suddenly were both present in his mind. He wisely prepared for either alternative of action or retreat, and carefully prepared the position he had chosen. For its exact nature, I must refer my reader to the next section, but the general conditions of the place are proper to the interest of our present matter.

The main business, it must be remembered, upon which the Prince’s mind was concentrated was still his escape to the south. He must expect the French advance upon him to come down by the shortest road to any position he had prepared, even if he did not intend, or only half intended, to stand there: and that position was therefore fixed astraddle of the road which leads from Poitiers to Nouaillé.

Now, just behind—that is, to the south of—this position runs in a tortuous course through a fairly sharp2 little valley a stream called the Miosson. It formed a sufficient obstacle to check pursuit for some appreciable time. There was only one bridge across it, at Nouaillé itself, which he could destroy when his army had passed; and the line of it was strengthened by woods upon either side of the stream.

The Black Prince, therefore, must be judged (if we collate all the evidence) to have looked forward to a general plan offering him two alternatives.

Either the French would advance at once and press him. In which case he would be compelled to take his chance of an action against what were by this time far superior numbers; and in that case he had a good prepared position, which will shortly be described, upon which to meet them.

Or they would give him time to file away southward, in which case the neighbouring Miosson, with its ravine and its woods, would immediately, at the very beginning of the march, put an obstacle between him and his pursuer; especially as he had two crossings, a ford, and a bridge some way above it, and he could cut the bridge the moment he had crossed it.

Finally, if (as was possible) a combination of these two alternatives should present itself, he had but to depend upon his prepared position for its rearguard to hold during just the time that would permit the main force to make the passage of the Miosson, not two miles away.

With this plan clearly developed he advanced upon the Sunday morning no more than a mile or two to the position in question, fortified it after the fashion which I shall later describe, and camped immediately behind it to see what that Sunday might bring. He could not make off at once, because his horses and his marching men were worn out with the fatigue of the previous day’s great march.