In a Dark Wood Wandering

by Hella S. Haasse

  Young Richmont was not listening. He walked back and forth in the tent, examining Charles’ armor spread on the camp bed, testing the point of a dagger on his finger.

  ‘Whatever else King Henry may be,” Charles went on, “a coward he is not. He could have entrenched himself within a city when he received our challenge two weeks ago. But no—he came forward and said to us quietly, in a wholly dignified manner, that it did not behoove him to appoint a day or place but that he would meet us in the open at any time…”

  “Yes, yes, I know all that.” Richmont turned with a nervous, jerky movement. “Are you ready now, Orléans?”

  “We are taking two hundred men with us, my lord,” said Boucicaut. During this conversation he had stood silently at the entrance to the tent. He disapproved of Richmont’s familiarity with the King’s nephew; when he was young, vassals of the French crown had had better manners. He watched Charles with some concern. He thought that the young man bore himself with dignity and spoke sensibly, but it seemed to him that Charles d’Orléans was a little too mild, that he lacked the fire to assert authority, to be a leader of men. Louis d’Orléans, when he was twenty years old could, if it came to a crunch, show swift, sharp insight and unflagging persistence. Now it had come to a crunch. Boucicaut was astute enough to know that the size of the French army by no means guaranteed invincibility. The supreme command was shared by too many leaders, the diverse troops were thrown together hastily for the most part and were not dependent upon one another for discipline and order; thus morale was affected by mutual jealousy. In addition, Boucicaut disagreed with the proposed plan of organized attack: horsemen would make up both flanks—that would look pretty, but the terrain was unsuitable for it. They had chosen the valley between Agincourt and the adjacent town of Tramecourt as the battlefield. A brook ran the length of the narrow valley; since it was impossible to deploy the cavalry freely there, the Constable had decided that the battie order would be thirty-two rows deep. Boucicaut could see no advantages in this plan either: it would have to lead immediately to a confused hand-to-hand mêlée. He had made his objections clear, but he had not been able to convince d’Albret to change his mind. The Constable’s plan had been accepted by a majority.

  Charles, Richmont and the Marshal set out to join the men who were to accompany them on the expedition and who were waiting for them behind the farthest row of tents. When the moon, which had been visible through an opening in the clouds, disappeared as gusts of rain began to blow over them, the men hurried into the darkness.

  “My God, what mud!” Richmont murmured irritably to Charles, who was behind him. “That promises something for tomorrow. Up to the ankles …”

  They moved forward through the soft mass of mud. After a while they noticed that the marsh was becoming more solid; pres-endy they began to ascend and found themselves on the sloping terrain before Maisoncelles, the hamlet where the English army was spending the night. Hedges and a series of thickets separated the expedition from the enemy camp. In the air was the unmistakable smell of horses and damp, smouldering wood. The dull glow of an almost extinguished fire was visible here and there through the branches. Richmont remained at the edge of the trees with most of the men while Boucicaut and Charles set out on their scouting expedition accompanied by half a dozen men; they intended to see as much of the enemy camp as they could without being discovered. Charles was much taken with the idea of being the unseen close watcher of the English; he was more interested in doing that than in coming to blows with them.

  The rain abated; the moon broke once more through the clouds. The men ducked hastily into the shadows between the trees. Now the group split up. Charles saw the Marshal move off with a few followers; in a little while he himself chose the road that led straight to the English camp. Two paces from his men, he tripped over a small shrub; he tore his tunic on a branch and banged his foot against a tree trunk. Both times the sound seemed to carry a long way in the silence. But nothing stirred among the sheds and cottages of Maisoncelles; the hamlet seemed completely deserted.

  Charles and his men came within about one hundred meters of the camp; they were close enough to see the English sentries in the darkness. A shadow was visible against the vague glow further away between the houses; something jingled there, straw rustled under moving feet.

  Charles had undertaken the reconnaissance impelled by the desire for adventure which is innate in every man; but he also wanted to perform bravely so that Bonne would hear of his exploits. While he stood in the misty night before Maisoncelles, the image of Bonne flitted through his head: she must be sleeping now inside the green curtains of her bed, with one hand under her cheek and her black hair spread out like a fan over the pillows. He had often seen her like that by the glimmer of the night light. What did she dream oft The old feeling of loneliness had crept over him at those times; there she was, breathing beside him and yet she was not there at all. He could not bear her to turn away from him, not even in her sleep.

  The rain rustled again on the dry leaves under the bushes. Charles heard the English sentry cough. Presently he heard another sound, a muffled chant, a monotonous murmur. He recognized it: thus the murmured prayers of the multitude fill the air in the churches. Charles chose one man from his company, one of his own grooms. Together they crawled through the wet matted grass toward one of the barns. The rain helped them: it poured down heavily and masked the sound of their movements. In the darkness they crept, step by step, past the dank, squalid walls of the hovels of Maisoncelles; abruptly they found themselves in the midst of the enemy camp. A row of sheds and haystacks hid the English, but he who penetrated these barricades could overlook the whole camp.

  Most of the soldiers had found shelter in the cottages and barns the owners of which had fled the day before; thanks to some torchlight Charles was able to see about him. It looked as though no one was sleeping, but everyone was silent. Fires burned in the cottages: the men who were huddled together under the shelter of the roofs were busy with their weapons. They sharpened their swords and axes, cut wooden spears and mended leather clothing. Charles and his companion dropped down and burrowed into a pile of straw. Not far from them in a dilapidated stable, archers sat stretching new strings to their bows: crossbows and footbows, man-sized bows which were far from new and which were braced with ends of rope and straps at damaged places. But their owners handled them carefully as though they were trusted companions. Charles had never seen archers like these before: they were larger and more muscular even than the Picards and Flemings and their sandy hair was worn at an odd length. They worked in intense silence. The same deliberate concentration prevailed everywhere in and around the hovels of Maisoncelles.

  Further off stood many dark canvas tents; there Charles saw the faint gleam of helmets and armor. The murmur seemed to come from somewhere close by; between the dark mass of trees and barns behind the tents, lights were visible, torches and small lamps smoked and flickered in the rain. Now men came running on all sides from stables, sheds and haystacks. They knelt in the mire with uncovered heads and murmured the words entreating forgiveness for sin: “Miserere mei, Domine, miserere meiy quoniam in te confidet anima mea”

  Lanterns and more torches were brought. Amid the kneeling men, Charles saw priests standing; one was an old man in a soggy bishop’s mantle who turned continually from left to right, his hand raised in blessing. The soldiers were ragged and dirty, in old leather jerkins and dented helmets; knives and axes dangled from their girdles, as was usual with peasants. The archers’ arms were bare: they wore leather bonnets buckled under their chins. Charles looked in vain for knights: shields, banners or coats of mail were nowhere to be seen. The horses, captured by the English at Harfleur, stood together in rows under hastily improvised shelters. They were practically all beasts of burden, but the soldiers had covered them carefully with straw and blankets as though they were thoroughbreds.

  The soldiers clustered around the huts moved slightly aside; a rider approached
on a small grey horse. He was young and bare-headed; a dark mantle was thrown around his shoulders. He gave a few commands in a cold clear voice and disappeared as quickly as he had come. The priests walked on, accompanied by torchbearers; they intoned the litany afresh as a bell sounded. The soldiers returned to their work and silence reigned as before.

  Charles was greatly impressed by the behavior of the soldiers in the English camp; the men here prepared for combat in a much more dignified way than the soldiers in the French camp at Agin-court. But although these men had spent the night working and praying, he could not believe that they had much chance of success. On the contrary, now that he had seen their crude equipment, their extremely one-sided army, composed mostly of lightly-armed foot soldiers and bowmen, a French victory seemed to him to be a certainty. He and his men waited for Boucicaut behind the clump of elms below Maisoncelles. The Marshal returned soon enough; he had crept up on the camp from the east and had come to the same conclusion as Charles. Unlike the young man, however, he believed that present weather conditions favored the English: lightly armed troops had more mobility than armed horsemen and spearmen. Boucicaut regretted deeply the decision of the French commanders to refuse, time and time again, the offers of Paris and other cities to send foot soldiers.

  They hurried back through the trees to Richmont and his troop: together they walked back again in the direction of Maisoncelles, this time quite openly. And this time their approach was noticed immediately. The watch blew the alarm and the English rushed forward from all sides, thinking that the camp was being attacked by the enemy. When they realized that it was only a challenge to a skirmish, they wisely chose to save their strength. A few hundred men rode out for a brief and rather aimless scuffle. After a few on each side had fallen, the French, as well as the English, withdrew.

  Charles’ neck was scratched; the warm and sticky feeling of blood under his mail gave him no little satisfaction. Now, he thought, he could take part honorably and jusdy in the battle; now he was no longer a callow youth. At Maisoncelles he had just killed a man in hand-to-hand combat for the first time. It had all happened so quickly that he scarcely realized it himself, but now that it was over he remembered with a shudder of peculiar excitement the soldier’s short scream, and then his fall. Back in his tent he looked at his sword; it bore the traces of his deed. Charles’ squire came up immediately to clean the weapon. When he saw the blood-stained cloth, Charles’ pride and satisfaction vanished, to his surprise, as though by magic. He was ashamed of this reaction and knew he must not mention it to anyone. He thought bitterly that this demonstrated once more that he was not meant to be a soldier. Nay, he did not have the makings of a hero.

  The dawn broke: St Crispin’s day, October twenty-fifth, 1415. The first faint glimmer of light appeared hesitantly on the horizon, but the sky remained darkly clouded. True, the rain had stopped, but a heavy fog drifted low over the land. In the French camp the confusion prevailed which is usually the result of divided commands and too little discipline. Forty thousand men were arming themselves; heralds rode about shouting in the midst of the turmoil and blowing with all their might on clarions and trumpets. The heavily armed knights who hours before had had themselves hoisted into their saddles, rode slowly out of the camp, an almost endless procession of grotesque iron dolls adorned with sodden colored plumes and drenched cloaks. They had closed the visors of their helmets and held their lances menacingly before them. In the field the legs of the heavily burdened battlehorses sank into the yellow-brown mud; the riders dug in their spurs and a rain of mud spurted up from under the hooves of the desperately struggling horses; it sucked and bubbled in the soft earth. The drooping saddlecloths and handsome armorplate were soon soiled beyond recognition. Organizing the troops became an unexpectedly difficult task: the Constable d’Al-bret had competent commanders, but they could not create order in that mass of swarming, entangled horsemen.

  Charles, who felt extremely uncomfortable in his heavy armor—inside the stifling helmet he felt shut off forever from light and air—had, with the greatest effort, assembled his own men. He rode through the dense crowd followed by his heralds and Captain de Braquemont, seeking his vassals and instructing them to go to a chosen place on the field where he had ordered his standard fixed; other captains soon followed his example.

  The knights and their picked men grouped themselves around the standards; an oudine of battie order began at long last to emerge. It looked now as though the valley was indeed too narrow; the warriors stood packed together so closely that they could scarcely move. If a horse took a step forward or backward, a whole row was forced to go along with it. When he saw the ridiculously deep vanguard, Boucicaut lost his self-control. Dukes, counts and barons were crowded together there; their only followers were squires, standard-bearers and trumpeters. It looked impressive, but had the fools learned nothing from what had happened at Nicopolis?

  “That was twenty years ago,” said d’Albret angrily. “Leave me in peace, Boucicaut, take your place; we have no time to listen to your stories.”

  “In God’s name, make the front wider instead of deeper,” the Marshal roared above the noise of the sentries. But d’Albret rode away with a curse, to oversee the progress of the center and rear guard.

  Boucicaut pushed his way in beside Charles in the first row. The young man had closed his visor; he was choking from lack of air; his heart throbbed as though it would burst; sweat broke out under the weight of metal.

  “God be with us, I can’t get my horse out of the mire,” said Boucicaut, extremely irritated. “We cannot conduct a charge like this. Why doesn’t d’Albret listen? This is sheer folly. Look how those horsemen stand on top of each other! I knew perfectly well there would be no room here for the flanks. Spread out, that is the only way, move the battle to a higher terrain and put only foot soldiers to work here. Is it right that a man who has had thirty years of experience fighting at home and abroad should be shoved aside like a peasant when he comes here with advice?”

  Charles moved uneasily. He saw that his horse was sinking ever deeper into the mud; the beast could raise each leg only with great effort. It was light enough now so that the hills could be discerned; among the hedges and groves of Maisoncelles the enemy was visible. Many of them were descending the slopes together in great groups: archers with archers, spearmen with spearmen.

  “There is the man,” Charles said suddenly, “whom I saw giving orders last night. He there—on that small grey horse, not much larger than a colt.”

  Boucicaut shaded his eyes with his hand.

  “That’s the King himself,” he replied. “Didn’t you know, Monseigneur? I’ve heard that the English are exceedingly fond of such small horses. They’re strong and swift.”

  Charles leaned forward in the saddle with a cry of amazement. King Henry wore a bright cuirass and was accompanied by a standard-bearer, but nothing else distinguished him from the horsemen around him. The English took their positions with surprising speed; the mud did not seem to incommode them much. But they had chosen high ground for their last stand, less swampy than the rest of the valley. The archers made up the larger part of the army ranks, which now stood lined up in a very broad front four rows deep. The bowmen in the first row thrust sharply pointed wooden lances into the ground, to give themselves the slight protection of a sort of palisade.

  The armies faced each other in order of battle. On the one side a forest of banners and pennants, plumes and lances, a packed multitude of knights arrayed in jingling gold and silver metal like participants in a tourney. On the other side of the field a dark row without pomp or splendor: men in leather and coarse wool with flat storm caps on their heads, many barefoot, the majority armed with bows, axes, spears and cudgels.

  “By God, they’re nothing but common people and workers,” cried d’Albret, standing up in his stirrups. “We fight against common villagers today, my lords. Does King Henry think his knights are too noble to be led against us in battle?”


  King Henry readied himself for the battle. Someone placed a crowned helmet upon his head; even at a great distance the jewels gleamed on the crown. Alencon swore loudly that he would not rest until he had plucked the gold flowers one by one. Now King Henry rode swiftly along the front of his army; here and there he stopped a moment to speak to the men. Then he dismounted and joined the captains who stood waiting a few paces from the first row of bowmen.

  “It is going to begin, Monseigneur,” said Boucicaut. He turned to Charles and uttered a request for forgiveness, according to the old rules of chivalry. “Before we march into battle, Monseigneur, I beg you to forgive me for whatever crimes I may have committed against you, even as I forgive you.” Charles remembered that this had once been the custom. He bowed to Boucicaut, and in his turn made the same request of the knight on his other side. Everywhere in the vanguard the lords were granting forgiveness to one another. Some even went so far as to embrace each other, insofar as that was possible with mail-covered arms. The English stood astounded by the spectacle.

  It was now about ten o’clock in the morning. The rain had stopped, but the sky was overcast with thick grey clouds. A pene trating chill rose from the marshy ground. King Henry stood for a while staring at the French lines, his hands on his hips. Then he spoke briefly to the knight beside him, who ran down the line, whirled around and threw a staff high in the air, shouting, “Now strike!” The men obeyed the command with a chorus of shouts. To the ears of the French chivalry these sounded barbarous and frightening, as though they issued from the throats of beasts of prey. D’Albret signalled for the charge. Charles closed his visor quickly, gripped his lance more firmly in his fist and prepared to do what the men to the right and left of him were doing: rush down at full gallop upon the enemy. He pressed the spurs into his horse’s flanks, but it could not move forward. It struggled in vain to free itself from the thick mud.