Part 8
So he spoke, as the evening lengthened, after the time of vespers, upon that Thursday, the 2nd of July. No one believed him. Though none said it in his presence, he felt it in the air around him that he was already, in their legend, the traitor. Whatever he advised, their minds conceived as the trick of something too astute for a loyal man-at-arms. And when his advice had been given there was a murmur and a rumour all round.
But as discussion followed and broadened, the older or more poised men weighed fully what the Count of Tripoli had said. For a time, as night approached, their argument was gaining, and the council was perhaps dispersing (or had dispersed) with the determination to stand fast and await the attack of Saladin. But after darkness had fallen, whether in full council or alone, that man who thought himself the counterpoise to Raymond, and who thoroughly believed in Raymond’s treason, Gerard of Bideford, came to King Guy and urged and urged the folly of listening to any plan coming from a man who, to the public shame, had once bargained with Saladin.
The king, Guy of Lusignan, changed again, and perhaps his council with him. At any rate, he was obeyed, Raymond’s advice neglected; and at dawn the great host began its fatal march and fighting of Friday, the 3rd of July, 1187.
At the head of the column rode Raymond himself and his immediate vassals, the men of Galilee, and those from Tyre and the north, as though to prove at once his discipline in what he now thought a lost cause and his readiness to take the sacrifice. After, with the main body trailing along the road of that upland, through the parched fields, came King Guy himself and the guard round the fragment of the True Cross; while the Knights Templar under their passionate Devonshire leader, in part the cause of so much evil, and their brethren, the Hospitallers, covered the train and baggage at the rear.
The sun rose, the heat immediately struck, and with it struck also here and there, harassing the flanks of the column, forbidding the army elbow room, appearing and disappearing through the thick dust, the hornets of Saladin. Those light horsemen darted, skirmishing on their rapid desert mounts, armed with the long light lance, and pricking, as it were, and goading the cumbersome body, whose surface alone as yet they could irritate, and which yet they could so gravely impede.
The sun still rose; the heat increased; men straggled; there were too frequent delays and uncommanded halts; blocks in the column. And all the while the Saracen swarm grew and grew on either side, almost encircling. Still the long column struggled forward. Before noon began the complaint for water. Of all the gullies crossed in the first slow dusty seven miles or so, not one had so much as a stagnant pool between its hot stones. Such gourds as men had with them were long ago consumed, and of other provisions of water for such a host there was none, and could be none in those days.
They had passed by Cana of Galilee, they had come to the bare upland plateau, where the air danced in the heat over the glaring limestone, and the broad rough track of the earthen road was a fog of scorching dust. It was the early afternoon. The still increasing masses of enemy horse striking and turning again, shepherding in their enemy, almost surrounded the Christians. Already some grave disorder was appearing in that three miles or more of exhausted men. In a halt deliberately called Raymond once more gave his last advice--once more to be wasted. He told King Guy that there could be nothing ahead but disaster for a force which had fallen so suddenly into such a condition--a condition inevitable in attempting such a march through such a country at such a season, and with such forces against such a foe. Moreover, they were threatened with envelopment. One way out remained, and only one. It was to wheel round to the right--that is, south-eastward; to cut their way through to water that night in the valley of the Fejjas brook, and with the morning, refreshed, to hold the passages of the Jordan. Then let Saladin, if he will, come down south against them. Short of breaking their defence, his retreat was cut off, and his great host was ruined. Again Guy of Lusignan hesitated. Perhaps Raymond’s plan would have won; but in the midst of this deliberation, the harassing Mahommedan cavalry took on another aspect, more severe than the last. They came on in full force. They rode round the host. They not only cut into the flanks but into the Knights Templar with their baggage to the rear, and the end of that day of torture and thirst was spent up to nightfall in a full battle against a perfect circle of foes. Many of the stragglers had already fallen out in each episode of confusion, and had passed to death or slavery. The now depleted, fainting column camped that night; still an organized body, but terribly shaken and already doomed. It was a night of agony and of alarm. Long before morning that army of the Cross and Europe was already defeated.
All through the short darkness men implored and fought for water, and could not obtain it. Upon so much agony worse came. The Saracens set fire to the dry bushes of that limestone upland, and under a light wind the smoke drove through the Christian camp. Raymond, in the van, knew that the dice had fallen. “He called upon God the Lord, and said that the realm was ruined.” It was so.
The dawn of the Saturday broke. Raymond, with the van, took horse, and saw before him, dark against the sunrise, the strange twin saddle peaks which they call the Horns of Hattin, the watch towers of that land. At their foot stood deployed the main body of Saladin; the rest of his followers were on either side. The envelopment was complete. There, behind the Saracens, was water, food. The enemy fought refreshed against ghosts of men.
Their armament was stronger too. All the Saracen munitionment was carefully distributed for a certain victory. The camels, with their loads of arrows, were ranged behind the archers, and there was a great reserve as well. It is true that, had the Christian army been by some miracle in condition for strong action, the Sultan’s position was very perilous. He was right on the lake, with very steep falling land only a few hundred yards behind him, and his only road of retreat passed just behind the fronts of the two armies. If those fronts shifted in his disfavour, if his light men broke at the shock of the heavier Franks, that road would be cut. Whether the unfavourable position weighed with him or no, whether he had fully gauged the breakdown of what was now before him, we cannot tell. He seems, up to the very end of the fight, to have had some doubt, tugging nervously at his beard and saying, “It was not yet over!” The historian, with both conditions before him, and knowing what exhaustion now weighed upon the Christians, can have none.
It was again, though on a much larger scale, in that same formation of a shallow crescent, that the heart of the Moslem force--that in front of the head of the Christian host under Raymond--was drawn up. It did not at once attack, perhaps depending upon the sun and the heat as allies; and when it did so, it opened with a violent discharge of arrows. The effect of this was clinched by a general advance of the whole Mahommedan line at the charge. It caught and gripped the Christian body, separated its units, reduced the battle to a great mêlée, in which numbers, a better order, and--far more important than everything else--_condition_, were wholly upon the side of the enemy. There is no plan possible of this surging business, for no scheme was necessary or attempted. It was a cutting off of large isolated bodies, a cutting down of smaller ones, and a quantity of hand-to-hand fighting between men refreshed and men maddened by thirst; and for the most part the Christian infantry that followed the Christian knights was already in the mood for surrender, or even for accepting death.
Raymond, Count of Tripoli, with his knights, charged at the king’s command right forward into the press. He found against him the Sultan’s nephew, who opened his ranks and closed them after the small body of knights had crashed through. Raymond found himself with his companions cut off far forward. He hacked his way out through the mass of the Arab horses, and rode with his few companions straight for Tyre. There fell upon him a stupor, and later a frenzy, to see Christendom thus ruined. In a few weeks he was dead.
The footmen, the ill-trained levies from the towns, the half-armed peasantry, had already suffered massacre or surrendered in great groups of thousands. The struggle had not lasted the day long. It was perhaps hardly noon when one small remnant of the Christian host, crowding round the king, still held out. Of the fully armed men there were but one hundred and fifty: with their followers a few score more. The central point which they were guarding was the fragment of the Holy Cross, and what they were defending was a little mound on which there still stood the great red tent of the king. It fell, and the last of the fight was over.
That evening, in the tent of Saladin (which he caused to be pitched right in the heart of the battlefield), there took place an encounter of the two spirits of Europe and of Asia--of Western chivalry and of Oriental hate face to face.
This is what happened. The conqueror caused to be seated upon his right the broken King of Jerusalem, half dead with the thirst and the heat of that day. Saladin gave him the first water he had tasted for many hours. There stood also before him Reginald of Chatillon, whom he had so hated with the violence of a religious hate for his audacity, his splendid courage, and, above all, for his threat to the holy cities of Islam. This man was now in his power, and the Sultan acted as Asia acts in such a pass. He abused him violently, reminded him of the unforgivable crime--that he had dared approach Mecca--dragged in the excuse of the raided caravans, and then fell upon the unarmed man himself to murder him, but not before he had heard the knight tell him that he would not save his life at the cost of faith, and answering with the pride of a man completely indifferent to death. This furious and horrible thing was not sufficient. Reginald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak, was dragged out, still alive, and hacked to death by the guards. Then the conqueror gave orders that the most gallant and the strongest of his prisoners, those most symbolic of the faith which he hated--I mean the Knights of the Hospital and of the Temple--should be massacred. He knew that they always refused ransom. There were two hundred of these men. They were butchered before the victorious army in a public place.
This was the end of the fight which decided the vast affair between our people and those of the East. Thenceforward, point by point, we lost the mastery of the Mediterranean; we admitted the stranger everywhere. We sowed that harvest of tragedy which is to-day the Balkans, the Dardanelles, the isolation of the Slav. Spain only we recovered. And as for the fragment of the Cross, they carried it away to Damascus. Jerusalem was theirs that autumn. Whose is it to-day?
CHÂTEAU GAILLARD
(_March 6, 1204_)
Philip Augustus, the King of France, sat upon a stone; it was a rough block of stone that lay, not yet used by the builders, on the rampart of his lines before Château Gaillard.
The huge building lay before him like a town--but such a town as no sight we see to-day can recall. Mass upon mass of sheer masonry--worked limestone--carefully jointed, and towering wall within and above wall, angle conflicting with angle in a hundred ways, and the whole an effort of shoulders and of rock. These things were (their ruins are) a sort of sacrament in human strength. What man can do to defend himself against man was there visible and tangible and amenable to common standards: apparent to a child as much as to a mathematician. And it was not only a sacrament of strength and of defence appalling in its dumb solidity and hugeness, but also a sacrament of labour, of energy manifest and achieved. It was also new and white.
Philip Augustus, the king, was an engineer. Every trace of the ditch, of the three circumvallations, of bastion and of angle, meant for him just what it should mean. He understood the co-relation of every part in that vast whole. It was for him what a score of music is to those rare men who can read and take pleasure in music from its mere printed signs though no instrument is sounding. And as he meditated the attack he admired. His creative soul was full of that creation which another such soul had ordered--Richard, the Angevin, the Lion Heart, now dead.
The King of France, thus sitting alone (for he would not be accompanied in such a meditation), watched the big thing with his chin upon his hand. He was a man in his fortieth year; his broad, square, somewhat flat face already definitely marked with the fixed passions of the mind and the habits of his long effort of recovery and of triumph. His eyes were a little cautious for those of a soldier, but very steady, and had in them that sort of secret smile which goes with the certitude of delayed achievement. His thin nose, and the slight sneer about his pressed lips, betrayed the same emotion as he pondered. His great head, rather bald for his age, was bare, and did not move in his contemplation of the mighty problem before him.
The foundations of the work were below him, as were its vast surrounding ditch and its first low containing wall. But the turrets and the battlements, with their wooden, jutting platforms, stood immensely above him, and higher still that enormous central keep which was the stake of the entire concern. It stood inhumanly large up against the keen March air, and the wind blew upon it from down the broad river valley and the distant sea. It had in it all the magnificence of Normandy. Down below, hundreds of feet, where the wide river ran, the Seine, he could see the burnt timber houses of Lesser Andelys, surrounded by its wall which he had stormed months before; the ruins also of the outworks upon the island by which he had approached across the stream. He heard, but did not see, the carts in perpetual rumble and the footmen tramping across his bridge of boats below. He heard the hammering of wood and the sawing of stone in his own lines, and in his mind he recalled, as he so sat, the long business of the siege.
Here was the test! This place, once fallen, he had forced the gate of Normandy, the last province which could defy his arms and his sovereignty. For now three hundred years and more it had been a kingdom almost apart from his own, though in feudal tenure responsible to him and to his house. John the Angevin, last Duke of Normandy, no longer the young man but still the great soldier, had abandoned the Normans--now five months ago. He was back in England. And here, before Philip, Roger of Lascy, with his superb little garrison, was still holding out, and until the castle fell there was no passing north into the Caux country or into the Calvados, no seizing of rich Caen or of Rouen, the mistress of all that land.
Philip, the king, remembered the long adventure. The advance up the wide valley of the Seine until, a march away, he first saw, whiter than the white scars of chalk on which it stood, the splendid new work of Richard gleaming far off like a challenge. He remembered the storming of the outworks on the island, the laborious fighting into Andelys, the rush of the refugees into the castle. He remembered the abominable winter, and his alignment of the strict blockade: the sentries calling to each other round the lines through the long, frozen nights. He remembered, not with pleasure, that awful day in which Roger of Lascy had turned out all the useless mouths, the refugees from the town below--the old men, and the children, and the women; their helpless panic, stumbling to and fro between the outer wall and his own lines; their hideous famine, and the blood, and at last his own clemency, and his permission that they should pass through and be fed.
Now the first breath of spring had come, and still the strict blockade was of no avail. Five months had gone, and nothing had been done save to contain that little band within, which still mounted guard surely in regular fashion, whose taunts could still be heard in the rough jibes shouted by night against his sentinels, and whose arrows, when they went down wind, sometimes just reached his lines, and had cost him men here and there. As he sat there he determined, for all great odds and risks, that an assault must be delivered even against so tremendous a body of resistance. Much lay in that decision; but Philip, the soldier, was a man who would arrive at a plan with increasing swiftness of judgment, and, having arrived at it, would as suddenly execute his desire.
There went through the lines the order for the attack, and the whole aspect of the camps surrounding the castle, one great oval linked by continuous works, was changed. The business was now no longer to starve but to destroy--and the murder of Arthur of Brittany should be avenged in violence.
* * * * *
First they made a great way, very broad and hardened everywhere with stone, along which the engines and the wooden towers could be hauled. Then, at night, they threw into the first outer main ditch earth and faggots from the woods on the hill above and all the refuse of the camp, and they began that week to struggle against the corner bastion of the outer wall. It was undermined in its foundations--the sappers’ work defended by vigorous fire from the causeway against the battlements of the tower, and by the repeated shocks from the catapults and the rams, until, in some few days, the hard chalk rock having been tunnelled thoroughly, down came a whole segment of the outer wall, and the first circuit was in the hands of the king. Next, in the same fashion, was the second circuit attempted; and this, far less extended, concentrating its men more thoroughly, resisted with greater power. The engines did nothing against it. It seemed that the assault must fail.
Now there was in King Philip’s army a soldier called Bogis, an obscure man loving ruse, and he found that in certain wooden outworks of the place there was an entry to be made by those who could cunningly avoid the sentinels, and he, with a small band, went in there. But just as they thought to hold this entry, the besieged caught them, and, as being the quickest way to drive them out, set fire to this little building. It was a ruinous plan. Both had they--the besieged themselves--to retire from the fierceness of the flame, and also they were, by the effect of the fire when it was over and done, left with a gap in their defences, so that though the first intruders had been beaten back, Philip’s men could pour through the charred breach.
They were at the third wall, the high wall round the donjon keep, and this was taken by mere strength and at vast loss and at storm. But of Lascy’s very loyal band not two hundred remained, and all of them defending the wall, so that when they were cut off by the many thousands of Philip Augustus, the king, they could not post even a rearguard to defend the rush into the keep itself, though that was but a few yards behind; and so, upon the Saturday, the 6th of March, 1204, those that had not fallen in the fight were taken each separately between the wall and the tower. And the Saucy Castle, Richard the Lion Heart’s eldest daughter, so young and so strong, had fallen.
* * * * *
It was the greatest feat of arms, almost, of the Middle Ages. It was to the French monarchy and the re-constitution of the land what Wattignies, six hundred years later, was to be for the defence and the survival of the Revolution. It was the opening of Normandy and the advent of all the host into the rich province of the north; the most stalwart, the most lengthily organized of all the feudal things that had proposed to withstand the re-integration of France. Through that breach in Château Gaillard’s wall, as through a break in a dike, the flood of France poured through, armed, into the deep pasturage, the loaded wealth, the granaries, and the orchards of Normandy. And with Normandy so held under, that summer France was made again. And Philip Augustus, the king, became something almost more than a king as kings were accounted in that time. For he became a strict ruler over not one fief or two of his own, but over fief after fief that had formerly been bound only by plea and service, not in subjection, to his fathers. And it almost seemed as though Rome were returning.
This conqueror so conquering had about him, as he entered the Norman towns after his victory, a physical character of conquest, and there was a monk away in Tours, a canon of St. Martin’s there, who saw him and knew him, and tells us well enough what he was:--
“A man high coloured, of a nature driven to good cheer, and to women and to wine, large to his friends, sparing to those who displeased him, an engineer, in faith Catholic, cautious for the future, stubborn in a resolution formed; he judged at once and directly. Fortune loved him, though he was too careful of his life. He was easily both roused and appeased. He loved to be served by the many and to think himself a tamer of the proud. Of the Church he was a good protector, and he nourished the poor.”
THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING
(1245–1250)
St. Louis, the king, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of others. He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with peers. Pomp wearied him, even where it was necessary for the dignity of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave no more to be said he was amused to hear. Also he himself observed men with very great wisdom, often silently; and his eyes, which were a little weary even in youth from too much questioning of himself and of the world, and from too much business of fighting of every kind within and without, were always luminous and often smiled. His body, which was spare, exercised by continual chivalry and by the weight of arms, but a little wasted by solicitude, by mortification, and by occasional disease, suited his gesture and the holy irony with which he salted life.
All those, or nearly all, who came about the king--men themselves, for the most part, much grosser in temper or much less subtle in observation--felt this play of his intelligence upon theirs, and when he was dead remembered it most vividly. Nor were the words of St. Louis and his manner things very conscious. They surrounded his personality like an air, impossible to define, easy to taste. They were a perfume. Some who thus received his influence wrote down a little clumsily what they remembered, and the things they wrote down, after so many catastrophes and such vast changes in Europe, stand to-day quite neat and clear. So that when you read of St. Louis it is like looking out of a little window, unglazed, in a tower, and seeing through it, framed in the stones of the wall, a well-ordered, sunlit landscape, particular, vivid, and defined; full of small brilliant things, exact in outline.