I did not sleep that third day of the siege. For one thing I was in the grip of hunger-pains, the first cramps that come while a starving man is still active, before his whole inside feels dead. It reminded me of my youth, when I had led the Regnians through the Forest after the defeat of Count Ambrosius. The recollection cheered me up, for then I had brought them back safely in the end, and I told the story to Cynric as an antidote to despair. I found that I was more comfortable moving about than sitting still thinking about food, and I spent most of the day walking round the rampart; I was troubled to find that the men were beginning to lose heart, and some of them reproached me for leading them into a trap. But not one of the discontented had spirit enough to murder his chief and assume command, though little parties tried to desert; it was interesting to watch the efficient way in which the enemy dealt with them. The scouts raised the alarm, but did not try to hinder them; then when they reached the plain the Roman cavalry rode them down and butchered them to the last man. Otherwise the enemy contented themselves with sending forward archers to worry the sentries on the rampart. No one in Britain normally uses the bow as a weapon of war; these short, stiff hunting-bows, meant to cripple a stag at very close quarters, would not penetrate our shields, and they were afraid to come close.
The enemy withdrew to their camp for dinner, and lit a large cooking-fire where the smell would drift over our fort, to remind us how hungry we were. It only annoyed my Saxons, instead of making them despair; they are people of sudden moods, and if you can only get them boasting about the toughness in adversity for which they think they are famous, they will endure anything with surprising good temper.
Shortly before sunset we had a stroke of good luck, which I think we had deserved by our steadfast conduct. A terrific summer thunderstorm blew up, with sheets of rain. The water drained into the ditch of the fort, and we baled it out with helmets so that everyone had a good drink. My men perked up at once, saying that Seaxneat, their great ancestor, had persuaded Thor to come to the rescue.
On the morning of the fourth day of the siege I felt lightheaded from hunger; as I walked round the rampart, leaning on a strong young man, I realized that this was the last day on which my army would be an effective force. The men were lying about half asleep, and admitted that their swords felt much heavier than usual. We had passed the stage of craving for food, and stuffing grass or rubbish into the mouth to go through the motions of eating; now we were growing weaker every hour, but peacefully, without any pain or discomfort.
I had a look at the Romans. Their foot were drawn up on the plateau, listening to orders at the morning stand-to. The cavalry were down in the valley, encamped by the stream where we had snatched our drink on the second day of the siege; it was a sensible move to put them on the low ground, for it would take them some time to descend the steep slope of the plateau. They were not parading, as Roman troops usually do in the early morning, but fussing over their horses in the dilatory manner of troopers. We had drunk well last night, and our clothes were still wet from the storm and the dew; so we were not in the least thirsty, but food we must have before nightfall.
Cynric was all for a sudden attack downhill, which might have killed a few horses before the cavalry got mounted. At first sight it seemed a promising move, but on consideration I realized that the Roman foot would be on our tails before we could begin eating. But I saw something new in the camp on the plateau; previously the Romans had been sleeping round fires in the open; now their encampment was dotted with large pavilions, such as Kings and rich comrades bring into the field when the army is to sit still for several days. It was an allied army that faced us, and evidently they had not appointed a supreme commander; for these big tents of leather and canvas were pitched without order, straggling at all angles to one another. They were guyed with a tangled web of ropes, since the servants feared the high winds of that exposed ground. I have noticed repeatedly that in the last forty years the lower classes among the Romans have become extraordinarily clumsy and awkward in any task that needs mechanical skill; movements of population have broken down the traditions of apprenticeship. Nothing is ever properly fastened to anything else, since the design is too ambitious for the workmanship; in fact, in some things they are worse than barbarians, who stick to the methods of their ancestors. A Saxon ship is small and dangerous, but its tackle is fitted to its purpose and kept in good order; a Roman ship is bigger and more imposing, but it always leaks, and the ropes are tangled. So in this case the Roman camp was a mass of cordage and flapping cloth, and they were busily laying out more ropes as the wind rose.
It occurred to me that all this mess ought to form a very good barrier to a cavalry charge, if only we could get inside the camp of the besiegers. When I had explained my plan the men were eager to attack. I made them rest all morning, for the enemy waited for hunger to do its work and showed no sign of advancing; I also inspected every man, and made them leave behind any bulky plunder that they had hung on to after our first defeat. I had to let them keep their gold and jewels, otherwise there would have been a mutiny; for most of them thought they would die before to-morrow’s sunrise, and they wanted to take a little wealth with them into the next world.
We waited till dinner-time, when we could smell the food cooking in the Roman camp. The enemy knew that we would not be thirsty after the storm of the previous night, and they expected us to go on quietly starving behind our fortifications. We crept on our bellies to the eastern side of the hill-fort, so that the scouts would not see that we were massing for an assault, and poured out silently in a body just as the main force of the Romans was sitting down to dinner.
Nobody could expect me to charge in the front rank at my age, and I was well embedded in the centre of the column. I suppose we were still about four hundred strong, out of the thousand who had taken refuge in the hill-fort; a certain number had been found dead every morning, of exposure and starvation, and others had attempted unsuccessful escapes. A few were too weak to join in the charge, and Cynric arranged that they should have their throats cut with as little pain as possible. Every living man joined in the attack, for I had no intention of returning to that ill-omened hill-fort. Our formation was more or less a solid square of men, and my darling Cynric was in the front rank, with the best and strongest of the remaining warriors. Men vary a good deal in their endurance of hardship, and while some were dying every day others were still fit for battle. It did not take us long to reach the edge of the hostile camp; the main body of the Romans were unable to get into line of battle before we arrived.
I have often arranged for the feeding of troops in the field, in the close presence of the enemy. You can make what rules you like about every man remaining armed and fully equipped, but they always will insist on undoing their swordbelts, and unless you watch them closely they leave their swords by their bedding. These Romans carried more spoons than swords; also they were composed of two different contingents, presumably Demetians and Dumnonians, and the two commanders did not agree on where to offer battle. Half of them ran back to form up in the open, while the other half ran towards us to bar the way to the tents. Just as we reached them Cynric raised the howling wolf-like war cry of the raiders and my men leapt into the camp, all teeth and claws.
In less than five minutes we had swept through the tents, and there was the magnificent Roman stew waiting for us, bubbling in great copper cauldrons; Cynric, with a few chosen companions, made a front among the tangled guy-ropes of the tents while we speared out the meat on the points of our seax-knives; then other warriors, with their mouths full of scalding beef, relieved him while he took his turn round the fires. It was the sort of well-drilled co-operation that I had thought would be impossible for a barbarian army, but I had explained it to them beforehand, they knew each other, and every man regarded himself as a hero, who had survived unimaginable hardships.
The Roman foot rallied to the east of their camp, and arrayed themselves in very good order before they dared to adv
ance. I was not particularly frightened of them, for Germans ought always to beat Romans in fair fight on level ground; the Demetians evidently thought the same, or they would not have allowed us to wander all over the most fertile part of their land during the previous winter. But I dared not order my men to come out from the shelter of the tents when the cavalry of Artorius were climbing the hill and preparing to charge us.
We all gulped down some hot beef, and it made me feel twice the man I had been in the morning. I walked among the comrades by myself, no longer leaning on a borrowed shoulder, and did my best to push them into a close formation. But no matter how close we stood, or how well we prepared to meet the attack, it was certain that our short scramaseaxes would be no use in keeping off a charge of horse. At the last minute, but just in time, I broke up our solid array into little clumps, each covered by the guy-ropes of one large tent. I calculated that when the horsemen charged they would divide into different squadrons; about the only way we could hope to do them any damage was to hamstring the horses from behind when they were brought to a halt.
Soon Artorius led his cavalry to the attack, while the Roman infantry looked on from a distance; evidently there was friction among the allied commanders, which was what I had expected when I laid my plans. It must be a difficult situation when the leader of the best troops is nothing more than a mercenary general, while the foot are under the orders of two co-equal Kings who have frequently fought one another in the past. We must hold this attack or face extermination, and we just managed to do it; one group of about fifty men was broken up and cut down in detail, but the rest stood firm. A single rope stretched low above the ground was enough to bring the horses to a halt, and then the riders could only poke with their long lances at the foot opposed to them. Our little clumps were dotted about in such a manner that as soon as the Romans came to a standstill they found Saxons in their rear, and the tail end of a horse is very easy to deal with; a good cut with a sharp sword just above the hock, and that horse has finished with warfare for ever. After less than an hour’s fighting Artorius drew off his men, with the loss of many of his irreplaceable foreign horses.
It was now quite late in the afternoon, and the Romans showed signs of settling down to besiege us in our new position. Apart from the excellent dinner we had found ready cooked for us, there was a store of biscuit in the captured camp; but although we now had food for several days, in other respects we were worse off than we had been in the old hill-fort. When the enemy had recovered from the shock of our sudden change of position they could send forward their archers to shoot us down one by one. I summoned a council of captains.
I always made a point of consulting the captains before every fresh move, for my men were not bound to me by any tie of blood or allegiance; they were my partners in a scheme for the plunder of Roman Britain, and if I issued orders that they thought silly they would just appoint another leader. But I had been trained to marshal my arguments convincingly, which is the most important branch of a Roman education, and I got my way merely by arguing them down. In this case I told them that we could not stay where we were, for we could not repel another attack; we must be in the woods by daylight. Some of the captains were rather too exhilarated by our unexpected victory, and wanted to offer battle again in the morning; they thought it a marvel that foot had been able to beat off a charge of horsemen; but in the end I persuaded them. It is very odd that cavalry have now acquired so much prestige that it is accounted almost a miracle if foot can withstand them; the ancients regarded them as nothing better than scouts and skirmishers. Perhaps the introduction of stirrups has made them more formidable.
That night was overcast, with driving rain; certainly whichever god controls the weather was on the side of the barbarians, which ought to be an argument in favour of Woden; but the Christians always find a way out by saying that Jehovah is punishing them for their sins, so that a careful man cannot make up his mind. About midnight we crept down the steepest part of the hill-side; of course, the Roman sentinels saw at once what we were doing, and we heard their main body standing to arms in the old hill-fort. But the cavalry had to saddle up, and the foot were in no mood to hinder us when we were headed away from their territory. By dawn we were encamped in the middle of a marshy and extensive wood to the north of Mount Badon. I led my men eastward through the thickets of the Thames valley to the borders of the Cantwara, and then southwest to my own land, without ever venturing into the open country. Artorius sent mounted scouts who kept in touch with our column, but the Dumnonians and Demetians went back to repair their burnt-out villages. By the end of July 516 I was back in Venta.
I have related the story of this campaign at some length, for it was of great importance for the future of Britain. When I set out with the largest army of Germans that had ever been assembled since the original landing of Hengist, we had all expected to conquer the island right up to the Irish Sea. It would have been a good thing for the country as a whole if we had been completely successful, and Britain had become a land of German rulers, instead of remaining torn by unceasing warfare between the two races as it is at present. The intervention of Artorius prevented that, and perhaps the next best thing would have been for him to chase us right out of the land. But Artorius was not a King, and I suppose the Kings would not back him with their full force; he was just strong enough to perpetuate the condition of affairs as he found them, with Germans in the east, Romans in the west, and all the fertile midlands the theatre of incessant war.
I reached Venta with about two hundred men, out of the seven thousand who had marched out in the previous year. But, of course, all the others were not necessarily dead; some had gone home before we fought our battle, and after the cavalry charge in the plain the woods had been full of little parties of routed men, many of whom escaped alive. The Roman coalition was breaking up under the strain of victory, so much more trying to good relations with one’s allies than defeat; the horsemen did no more than ride over the open country where we had been used to keep our sheep. We retired south to the woodlands; we had to eat more bread and less meat, but otherwise we were not much worse off than we had been before we attempted the conquest of Britain. The horsemen of Artorius went away in the autumn, and they have never come back.
Artorius does not come into this story again, but he was a very interesting figure, and I will set down the little that I know about his end. At first his war-band had been composed of noblemen who thought it a sacred duty to defend Britain against the pagans in return for just enough pay to buy their food; but, of course, when his army won famous victories it attracted a very different class of warrior. His followers grew discontented, and at last one of his captains raised a sedition against him; I have heard that the rebel was also the lover of the leader’s wife, and that may have been the case; but I always doubt that sort of story. Poets often pretend that the chief motive of a striking action is a love-affair, but in my experience greed causes more trouble than adultery. Anyway, for whatever reason, there was a civil war inside this band of heavy cavalry, and eventually it split up. Artorius himself was not slain in the fighting, but went into hiding after a defeat; he is believed to be living as a hermit in the west, and the poorer Romans hope that he will one day raise another war-band and rescue them from their oppressors. Of course, all the big foreign horses are dead by now.
I made up my mind to be content with what I had salvaged from the wreck, and to see that my little state prospered from its own resources, without relying on the uncertain plunder of hazardous raids. I was too old for serious fighting, anyway. It may have been a blessing in disguise that we had lost the open chalk-land of the north, for those deserted hill-forts encouraged a wandering uncivilized way of life; now our farmers live very much as they did in Germany, make iron weapons and tools from the ore of the Forest, tell their children the traditional tales, and go regularly to the annual law courts. If we are not getting any more civilized, at least we are not slipping back.
It see
med strange at first that I had gained renown from my defeat; but that is part of the peculiar Saxon way of looking at things. In their hearts, the Saxons believe that life in general is hostile to mankind, and that all true stories have an unhappy ending; they reserve most of their admiration for the hero who can face disaster without losing his head. Their poets spend more time composing songs about disasters than they do on such banal subjects as victories, and the Siege of Mount Badon quickly became the most celebrated occurrence of the century. I was much admired for the courage and resource I had shown in escaping with a remnant of my army when things looked black, and no one ever reproached me for being surprised by a charge of heavy cavalry; no man in southern Britain had any reason to suppose there were heavy cavalry in the island until Artorius appeared.
My state, though smaller, was now more compact and easier to govern. I had as much power as the King of the South Saxons, and Cynric pressed me to declare myself a King. But I had too much of the Roman respect for success to celebrate a great defeat in this way, whatever the Saxons may think about the superiority of heroic failure. I compromised in the end by promising my very dear and patient son that I would ascend the throne immediately I won a victory; I thought it very likely I would never fight again, and I certainly was not looking for any more campaigning, but it satisfied him for the moment.
Conscience of the King Page 25