Then they came down the hill, and shouts of dismay and astonishment rose from the Saxon army. For they were charging on horseback! Line after line of mounted men galloped towards us. I suppose there were really only a few hundred of them, certainly less than a thousand, but horsemen take up a great deal of room when they are in line, and they seemed to overlap our right wing and extend right down to our centre. They carried long lances and big shields, and from the way they were riding I could see that they must be using stirrups. Of course, both Romans and Germans ride on the march, if they can afford to keep a pony; Cynric and I had both been riding before we dismounted for our meal. But when the alarm came not a man of ours made a move to where the ponies were tethered, for none of us dreamt of fighting on horseback.
It is probable this was the first cavalry charge that had ever taken place in the south of Britain. At school I read Caesar’s Commentaries, and he makes it clear that the barbarians of his day used chariots drawn by little ponies, while a hundred years ago the Romans depended entirely on their heavy foot. Artorius and his band were equipped as cataphractarii, the famous mailed horsemen who defended New Rome. No wonder they had won great victories against the German swordsmen of the north. I have read that drilled pikemen are safe against cavalry, but even that was written before stirrups were invented.
I suppose I had half a minute to make up my mind, while they were thundering down upon us. I could see that we would lose this battle, for the line was already becoming unsteady, and a thin spray of shirkers ran towards the woods in our rear. My first impulse was to order a general retreat, but there was no time; I could not get the order round the whole army before the clash, and once we started retiring our formation would break up in a mad dash for safety. If we stayed where we were the battle would follow a pattern that was very familiar in the songs of the poets; first the cowards would flee, then the ordinary sensible men, including the poets themselves; but the heroes would refuse to give ground until the last of them was slain. A very good poem can be made about such a battle, but the trouble is that the leader of the host is expected to die on the field; I knew that Cynric would fight it out, even if I told him to escape, and of course, since I was nearly sixty-five years old, I should not get away myself. This was the end of all my planning.
I was just bracing myself for the oblivion that wise men hope for, or the unpleasantness that the outraged gods will have in store for me if they really do exist, when I had an inspiration. No leader can get undrilled barbarians to manoeuvre, especially when they see the enemy charging, but there are two commands they always understand; one is to retreat, and that was useless for lack of time; but the other is to attack. Naturally the best warriors in the army had been sharing my dinner, and they were still clustered round me. I yelled as loudly as I could, and began trotting up the hill-side at a steady double.
Just before the collision I stole a glance over my shoulder; not a blow had yet been struck, but already my army was dissolving; some comrades were trying to form the shieldring for a defensive fight, a great many had already taken to their heels, and those who looked to their leader in a crisis were climbing the hill.
When the charge met us it was not as bad as I had expected. I know nothing about cavalry and how they ought to behave in battle and I have never ridden a horse in a charge; but I imagine that it is difficult to stop the silly creatures once you have started. Anyway, for a moment I saw a horseman rushing towards me, the head of his lance growing larger and larger; then the point had glanced off the smooth surface of my little red shield, the sky seemed to be full of flying hoofs, and I picked myself up to find that they were all galloping away. Artorius had a second line, and I suppose their duty was to spear those of us who were lying on the ground, but in the excitement they had got too close to the front, and their horses seemed to jump over us as we lay flat. In short, that first charge scattered the army as a fighting force, but did not kill many men.
When the only hoofs I could hear were in the distance, I stood up very cautiously, and continued straight up the hill. Cynric was also unhurt, and so were many of my companions; by the time I reached the top I was at the head of quite a considerable body of shaken and frightened troops. It is a very sound rule, when you are caught in an ambush, to go straight for the attackers; they have usually made elaborate arrangements to cut off your retreat, but never expect you to push farther into the trap.
On the crest of the hill, as I had fully expected, I found the earthen rampart of one of the old hill-forts that are dotted all over that part of the country. We bustled inside it, and I set every man to scarping the grass-grown banks with sword and bare hands. I could see on the plain below the Roman cavalry chasing our fugitives towards the distant woods. It was these fugitives, who turned their backs on the enemy, that were killed in great numbers; the Roman poets sang afterwards that Artorius had accounted for nine hundred and sixty men, and I believe that is a reasonable figure. If the Demetian infantry had been with him he would have destroyed our whole army; but he had attacked with only his own war-band, and the story goes that the King of Demetia, seeing us marching eastward, was quite glad to let us continue in that direction; he kept his men a mile away, and Artorius attacked against his advice. If this story is true, and it is the best explanation of the very incoherent series of actions, the Demetians missed a great opportunity of settling the Saxon menace for good.
My army did not use ensigns or standards, though they are not unknown among the Germans. I have never been in favour of anything of the sort for barbarians, since the usual difficulty is to persuade them to retreat from a lost fight, rather than to rally them for another charge. On this occasion, I should have been glad of some mark to show the scattered survivors where to assemble; as things were, the best I could do was to send down swift runners into the plain, to round up any fit men they found wandering about.
For a full hour we were unmolested on our hill-top. I had time for a consultation with the leading warriors, and we made up our minds to stay where we were for at least the rest of the day. With spears we might have formed up in close order for a fighting retreat to the shelter of the woods; but the peasant spearmen had naturally been the first to fly, and the better warriors, who preferred death to dishonourable flight, carried only swords. That meant we could not hope to repel cavalry in the open plain, and must hold out behind our ramparts until something turned up. Holding out until something turns up is an important branch of the military art.
I had begun my march that morning with rather more than four thousand men; about a thousand had been killed in the charge, and others had found shelter in the woods. I tried to count with my eyes how many I had left, for to number them would have been thought very unlucky. As far as I could make out we were nearly a thousand strong. The fort in which we found ourselves was on the edge of a plateau; it was not a Roman work, but an old town of the barbarians before the Romans came to Britain, and the ramparts curved to take advantage of the ground. Roughly two sides were protected by the slope, which a man on foot could barely climb without using his hands; on another side the ground fell, but more gently, and the fourth, the shortest, faced the level plateau and was protected only by the bank and ditch. The whole circumference was rather too long for my force to man, but the attack would obviously come along the level ground, and the other faces needed no more than a few sentries to guard against surprise.
My comrades had recovered from the shock of meeting such an unheard-of thing as a charge of heavy cavalry; they were more angry with the enemy for having scattered them unprepared than disheartened by their defeat. I was confident they would beat off an assault on our rampart, especially as they were working really hard to scarp the bank. Saxon warriors of the upper class are usually reluctant to dig, but they will do it if the enemy are very near and the work can be counted as part of the fighting. What I dreaded most was that the enemy would settle down to blockade us. Of course, we had no food at all, for our baggage was still lying on the
plain below; however, Saxons pride themselves on their endurance of hardship, and I knew that they would fast without grumbling for two or three days. Worse than the lack of food was the absence of water; it is unusual to find a spring inside these old ramparts, which is one of the reasons why the Romans built other forts down in the plain. In consequence, we had not a drop of anything to drink, and the nearest water-supply seemed to be at the bottom of the valley to the north.
This was our weakest point, and it worried all of us; but I cheered up the men by telling them that after we had beaten off the first attack the Romans would probably wait for reinforcements and we could escape when it grew dark. I myself did not think this very likely, since Artorius was a skilled general; but it put them in the right frame of mind for hard fighting, which is to have something to look forward to at sunset.
In mid-afternoon the Roman cavalry came back from the pursuit; they were trained and disciplined soldiers, and their general had collected them into a well-ordered formation. I saw no point in trying to hide, and they soon spotted our sentries on the sky-line. They wheeled in excellent order and climbed the plateau to the eastward, before they sent out scouts to have a look at our position. Just at the same time the Demetian foot came out of the woods that lay between us and the Thames. Then they held a council of war, for there was a lot of milling about before they finally drew up in close order on the level ground, and advanced towards us. The well-drilled cavalry marched forward at a walk, with the whole levy of the Demetians cheering and yelling in a disorderly mass behind them.
I was now able to have a good look at these horsemen who had so completely upset the balance of power in southern Britain. I don’t know why I had taken it for granted from their first appearance that they were the war-band of Artorius; but our whole army thought the same, and of course it was perfectly true. Every man was mounted on an enormous charger, much bigger and stronger than the ponies that run wild on all the moorlands of ravaged Britain. The riders were completely covered with metal armour, not only the metal and leather cuirass worn by the wealthy members of the Roman comitatus, but leggings also of the same materials; they carried long lances and big round shields, with heavy broadswords like the Gothic spatha hanging from their belts; and they sat on deep saddles that rose into peaks before and behind to protect the rider’s bowels. The big iron stirrups were unusual; these troopers sat up straight and rigid, and seemed to be much more firmly attached to their horses than a Roman nobleman, lounging on his pony’s back to save his feet on a long march.
I turned to Cynric, who was standing beside me. ‘We can’t face these men in the open,’ I said. ‘You know that when a horseman rides into you the right thing is to strike at his thigh, just above the knee; but they have thick armour on their legs, and your scramaseax would bounce off. They must dismount to get over this rampart, and on foot we can go for their throats with our seaxknives, but I don’t see how we are to get away. It looks like the end of the conquest of Britain.’
The dear boy was always cheerful, and he thought it his duty to see that his leader did not give way to despair. ‘Never mind, Father,’ he answered. ‘We shall find some way of dealing with them, if only we can find water. I want to get out of this battle alive, if I can without dishonour, for I think I know the way to defeat them if we meet again. I shall make my men carry axes; no horse in the world could bear the weight of armour thick enough to withstand axe-blows. Those chargers must have been brought in from overseas, for none like them are bred in Britain. Artorius will not be able to keep up the breed, and when they go back to their ponies they will have to take off their armour.’
I had trained my son always to take long views, and to think of the welfare of the Cerdingas after we were dead.
The Roman cavalry realized that our rampart was impassable to horsemen, and they remained in the background while the Demetians advanced. I suppose they thought we might be so demoralized by our recent defeat that our line would give way if briskly attacked; otherwise it was a ridiculous manoeuvre, for I had enough men to hold the one face that the lie of the ground made it easy to attack, and I doubt whether their numbers were much greater than ours. Certainly the well-armed comitatus of a petty Roman Kingdom would not contain more than a thousand men, and the rear ranks must have been filled up with untrained and half-hearted peasants. A few minutes’fighting showed that our position on top of the steep rampart was impregnable as long as my men did their duty, and the Romans retired in good order, with hardly any loss on either side.
Shortly afterwards darkness fell on the first day of the Siege of Mount Badon.
We were all ready for sleep, but first I held a council of the leaders; more to find how my men were feeling, and what fight they had left in them, than because I thought any of these barbarians would suggest anything useful. They did not. Most German legends have sad endings, and a great many of them finish with the hero trapped in his hall, and an account of the gallant end he made. This was such a good parallel to our present position that all my best warriors were resigned to death, and their chief worry was the fear that there would not be a single survivor to tell the poets exactly what had happened. I am bound to admit that they were not as depressed as I should have been if I had given up all hope of escape, and they would fight bravely until thirst or the sword made an end of them; but they could not be bothered to think out plans for the future. Even Cynric was exalted and full of noble sentiments, so that his brain was not working clearly.
I sent them off to get what sleep they could, and sat on alone. I had now been living among barbarians for forty years, and the daily beastliness of their behaviour no longer jarred upon my nerves, but on these occasions, when what was needed was a cool brain rather than the courage of a bull, I realized how solitary I was. I was the only man inside the rampart of this obsolete hill-fort who could use his head for anything better than ramming it into an opponent’s belly.
I tried to put myself in the place of the Roman commander. That at once gave me grounds for hope, for I saw that the enemy were undergoing all the disadvantages of a divided command. Artorius was a skilled soldier, and a man of new ideas with the drive and determination to carry them out; but he was no more than a captain of mercenaries, and Kings would not take his orders. If he was disregarded, or better still, insulted, after the great victory he had won with his band alone, he might get in a huff and march his cavalry away. The second point in our favour was that the whole valley of the Thames was a devastated march. We were not in the territory of any Roman King, there was no population of industrious peasants from whom the besiegers might get food, and it was no one ruler’s indisputable business to drive us away. We had no food, and no water, but if we could hold out time was on our side.
I spent the night going round the sentries, since it was too cold for a man of sixty-five to sleep without a fire. Most of my men got a little rest, and perhaps the chill of the night was really a good thing, since it made it easier for us to bear our thirst. The enemy stayed quiet on the other end of the plateau; they had no reason to risk a night attack, when the drill and discipline their troops possessed would be wasted in the darkness. I remembered that the day always began in a Roman camp with a stand-to at dawn, and I thought that Artorius would keep up the custom; but they would not assault our ramparts until the sun was fully risen.
There was a stream in the plain to the north, and the slope was too steep for cavalry to charge uphill. If we all ran suddenly down there we might get a drink before the enemy changed their formation to attack downhill, and that would be another day gained. Unfortunately we had no water-jars, to fill with a reserve supply, but then we were merely living from day to day. Shortly before dawn I roused Cynric and told him to get the men under arms.
A ring of hostile sentinels stood round, as I had expected; but on three sides the slope of the ground prevented them from seeing into the camp. Just before dawn they were nearly at the end of their watch, and as we had kept quiet during the night they
were bored and no longer alert. In absolute silence we crept over the rampart and shuffled down the hill-side; no war cries were shouted, and the men kept their swords in the scabbards. The little party of scouts made no attempt to dispute the passage of nearly a thousand men, and soon we were filling our empty bellies with cold spring water; we were already climbing the slope when the cavalry thundered down to the stream, but they did not pursue us up the hill-side. Of course, the infantry should have rushed the camp while we were drinking; but these Romans do not react quickly to the unexpected, and perhaps they feared a trap. We were inside before they marched forward in good order to the assault.
Then I lay down in the sun and went to sleep.
In the evening I awoke refreshed, and Cynric reported that the fighting had ended about midday. Nowhere had the enemy looked like getting over the rampart, and very few of our men had been killed with the sword; but in the afternoon the Romans had brought up huntsmen with bows, and their arrows made things very awkward for our sentries. It was a day and a half since any of us had tasted food, and soon we would be too weak to fight.
I took over for the night, while Cynric had a sleep. This really did seem like the end at last. We might fight our way down to water once again, although now the enemy would be expecting it; but we could not get anything to eat, and death in battle was better than starvation. I did think once or twice that there must be dead bodies in plenty on the plain where we had first been surprised, but I doubted whether my men would eat them even if I ordered it; also we had no firewood, and I don’t think even I could nibble at a human corpse raw and undisguised.
All that night I brooded over our very unpleasant position. What was so maddening was that I knew the various Roman commanders would be on bad terms with one another after the failure of the assault; in these cases an allied army always thinks the other contingents have not done their fair share. If we could hold out for a week they would quarrel among themselves. There was only one thing to do; we must attack their camp, and win food from our enemies; we should probably be killed in the attempt, but that was as good a death as any, and I should take great care that I myself was not made prisoner. But first of all I would try the effect of doing absolutely nothing for a whole day; my men would not be too much weakened if they merely sat behind the rampart, and it might make the enemy careless.
Conscience of the King Page 24