by Smith, Skye
Haselrig's Lobsters realized their mistake and turned and ran along with the royalists in a desperate action to slow down the royalists and keep them from reaching the town. Lobsters and royalists were riding amongst each other down the slope with much bumping and bashing, slashing and shooting, pushing and shoving. With the Lobsters now out of position to block the road and indeed moving downhill towards the town, another royalist cavalry regiment charged forward to join the fight to push on through to the town. The musketeers got some shot off, but to little effect because most of them were too far from the stretch of road where all the action was.
Daniel, his sergeant, and four lads pulled their horses up on the edge of the plateau above the descending road and looked down on those in the lead of the brutal churn of men moving towards the town. "Which one is Haselrig?" Henry asked.
"Who can say with so much white dust being thrown up onto horse and armour," Daniel replied. "Besides which, I think that Waller's message is now a bit senseless. They are all now behind and below our line." He looked the other way up the road towards the last remaining regiment of royalist horse on the downs. How long before they would realize that the road was open to them all the way to Devizes. "Bloody hell!" Daniel cried out. "There is nothing to stop that last lot from charging right down the road and finishing off our Lobsters."
"Perhaps there is help on the way," Henry said. "Look over at our other wing."
What Henry had seen was that Waller’s entire left side of cavalry under Colonel Hungerford, were picking up speed racing across the front of their own musketeers to attack that last regiment of royalist cavalry. "Waller must be doing his nut," Daniel groaned, "now it is Hungerford who is blocking our guns and muskets."
Sure enough, there was a blast of trumpets sounding the recall, trying to get the racing light cavalry to get out of the way. But it was too late for they were committed and at speed. The royalist regiment wheeled to meet them. "Bloody hell," Daniel moaned. "Who ever is leading them royalists knows what they are doing. They've got our light cavalry boxed in between them and our own line of infantry. Not only does our infantry have no shots, but they stand a good chance of being trampled by their own cavalry. What an effing disaster."
The right end of the infantry line were running to get out of the way of the hundreds of charging horses. If it had just been the enemy horses, they would have planted their pikes, aimed their muskets at the horses, and afterwards they would have eaten well off roasted French for months. But they could not plant their pikes because they would skewer their own cavalry, so pikemen and musketeers were in a crush moving other backwards and sideways to save themselves from being mowed down.
Hungerford's charge to stop that third regiment from racing down the road towards the town had worked, but with unintended consequences, for now they were forced to use all of their horsemanship to wheel around their own infantry without trampling them. The only path open to Hungerford was to turn in a U around the end of the infantry line and around behind the line. That put them on the southern slope of Roundway Hill, the slope that ran along the escarpment.
"Come on," one of the lads thumped Henry on the arm. "Let's get out of here. If that third lot of royalists decide to make for the town then we are right in their way."
"No, look, they are turning to chase after Hungerford," Henry told him. "Now the chase is on. Since Hungerford couldn't cut them off from going down the road, he's using himself as bait to get them to chase him off the battlefield. He used that same tactic at Edgehill. He is getting them the chase him so he can lead them away from the infantry and away from the road to town. Yay, go, go!"
"If that is what he is doing, then he's a fool," Daniel said angrily. When Henry gave him a look, he explained. "At Edgehill both sides had infantry. Our cavalry led Rupert's cavalry off the field so that they wouldn't attack our infantry. Once Rupert was led off the field our infantry rolled over the royalist infantry. Today there is no royalist infantry. If he leads them away from our infantry, then our great advantage of guns and muskets means nothing. That fool Hungerford is fighting the last battle, not this one."
"Shit," Henry said, but not about what Daniel had just told him. He rose up in his saddle and called out at the top of his lungs, "Stay away from the edge! Stay away from the edge!"
Daniel saw the danger too, and he began blowing on his whistle every time that Henry took another deep breath to call out again. It was a tribute to the sergeant's great voice that enough of the racing riders from both armies heard and understood. Unfortunately there was the unintended consequence that some of the lead royalists purposefully tried to crowd Hungerford’s men towards the edge. The two groups of horses were bumping each others, with Hungerford’s men trying to angle away from the edge while the royalists tried to pen them in. The prize for winning this race between cavalries was something that none of the winners expected, for the edge of land crumbled underneath them and they dropped out of sight down the escarpment, down into Roundway Covert.
Daniel and the lads followed Henry, who was ahead of them riding towards the closest place on the escarpment where he could see what had become of those poor men. Call it morbid curiosity. By the time they caught up to Henry, all the cavalryers were beyond the end point of the covert and riding towards Devil's Leap hill fort. Henry was the first to dismount and crawl on hands and knees the last few feet to look over the edge.
The rest of them copied Henry's technique of testing the ground before trusting their weight to it. And for good reason, for the edge of the escarpment for a hundred paces on this side of the covert had collapsed. Down below them they could see a tangle of dozens of horses and men, all horribly injured or dead. A few may have been royalists but mostly they were Hungerford's men.
While Henry quoted scriptures over such a waste of good men, Daniel sent a prayer up to the Valkyries in a plea for them to come and find these unfortunate men. Meanwhile one of the lads was trying to interrupt their prayers. "It must be him," the lad was saying while pulling on their arms insistently. "Why else would so many royalist officers be hammering on him and herding him away from his company? It must be General Haselrig."
Henry kept on with his scriptures, but Daniel interrupted his prayer and allowed himself to be turned by the lad to look down at the lowlands below them. His eye followed the lad's pointing finger. There was one lone Lobster being mauled by six cavalryers, half of them officers. The Lobster was obviously injured and tired and the cavalryers were blocking him from breaking away to join the rest of the great fight going on between the Lobsters and the royalist light cavalry.
"Mount up, fast, move!" Daniel called out as he himself crawled backwards away from the edge and then stood and ran to gain his saddle. His gut was churning. In his mind was the vision of a very similar attack made on John Hampden by the lifeguard of the devil prince. This battle included Maurice, the brother of the devil prince. He would also have a lifeguard of Bohemian knights. Professional killers.
The safe way to get down off this bluff was to ride east back the way they had come, and then down the gentler slope to the road and then down the road to the base of the escarpment, but there wasn't time for that. Instead, as soon as Millie was beyond the covert gully, he turned her towards the edge of the bluff and looked for a sheep track. Millie resisted stepping down and he had to get rough with her to get her to step off the edge. The slope below was not a cliff but it was awfully steep, and he once again longed to be riding Femke, his trick pony, rather than this old mare.
Femke would have danced down this slope taking every advantage of footing and zig zagging as she descended. With Millie, not only did he have to sit back on her rump behind the saddle, but all the time use the reins to guide her from traverse to traverse. Twice she slipped, and only the fact that he was sitting on her rump allowed her to save herself. And then they were down onto the rolling land beneath the escarpment, and he pulled himself forward into the saddle, turned her towards Haselrig, kicked her to a canter a
nd then held on while she ran and he got his weapons ready to use.
He rode in silence, constantly switching his gaze from Millie's choice of path, to the lashings securing his weapons, to the battering that Haselrig was taking. The cavalryers were too busy hacking at Haselrig's armour with their sabres to pay any attention to him. Daniel slipped his dragons lanyard around his left wrist, and his hache's lanyard around his right wrist. It was a good thing that none of the attackers were dragoons, for a dragoon carrying an axe like his hache would have made short work of Haselrig's armour. The cavalryers were obviously frustrated that the sabres were not up to the task, for as he rode and watched, one of them began hacking at the face of Haselrig's huge horse with his sabre.
That huge horse reared in his pain and kicked out at the horse of the man who was attacking him. The smaller horse shied and tried to get out of the way of the infuriated huge horse, who was now all bared teeth and flying hoofs. That was when Haselrig lost his saddle and fell heavily to the ground, to be pinned there by the weight of his own armour. Without Haselrig's weight on his back, his mighty horse made quick work of taking down the light cavalry horse, and that rider leaped out of the saddle to save himself.
That left five cavalryers for Daniel. Two of them had dismounted and had drawn their daggers. Haselrig was helpless on the ground and now those two were going to finish him by shoving their daggers through the eye slits in his massive helmet. At that moment Daniel knew for sure that this was not an attempt to capture a general. No, this was an assassination.
The three remaining mounted cavalryers looked around as he approached and he blew dragon's breath into their faces without slowing Millie. The two assassins looked around at the discharge and stood to meet him, while fumbling to replace daggers with sabres in their right hands. Millie ran one of them down. The other was knocked down when Daniel's hache smashed down on his grand floppy hat. The hache vibrated and rang and bounced off, which meant that the floppy hat was worn overtop of a skull cap helmet.
To her credit, Millie danced around the bulky body of armour lying on the ground. Daniel sawed at her reins to slow her and turn her as quickly as possible. Over his shoulder he could see that two of the riders had not been completely blinded by his dragon's breath, and they were now coming for him. One of the dagger men was struggling to his feet and again had his dagger in his right hand. Haselrig was still in mortal danger, and the two riders meant to block his way through to save him.
But now there was another player in this fight. Henry, old Sergeant Henry Foster, was barreling down on the cavalryers and screaming like a banshee as he rode. He was making for the dagger man, so the two riders changed direction away from blocking Daniel, to block Henry from trampling the daggerman. With all three of the cavalryers now so close to each other, they all got a share of dragon's breath in their faces. And not just a little breath, the small amount that a dragon would blow out - not this time. Henry was still carrying Duett's signal gun, and that hand canon obliterated the three men with foul stinging smoke. Even Daniel, much further away, heard the birdshot bouncing off his chest armour, and Millie bitched loudly at the foulness of the smoke.
The daggerman dropped his dagger so that he could put both hands over his eyes. The man that Haselrig's mount had unhorsed was gathering the loose horses. Five of the cavalryers could still stand, and all of them were mounting up, or being helped to mount up. The last man, the sixth man, was the one who had taken Daniel's hache blow to his hat. He lay very still. Two of the cavalryers still seemed fit to fight, so now it was two against two, and both Daniel and Henry still had loaded pistols. But then Henry's four lads cried out a battle cry as they raced towards them, and all five cavalryers saw the good sense of retreating. They were led away by the two who could still see properly.
"Should we give chase?" one of the lads asked eagerly between his pants for breath.
"Nay, we'll need your backs to help Haselrig into his saddle," Daniel replied. "Let them go." These lads were green compared to the professional soldiers who had been attacking Haselrig. Even if they were injured, those professionals would be well practiced at a few dirty tricks which would kill these lads.
Henry dismounted and bent over Haselrig. Suddenly he began yanking at the helmet trying to pull it off. It was stuck. "Help me, help me," he yelled out without looking up. "He says he can't breathe."
Even with both Henry and Daniel working hard and fast it still took precious moments to get the dented and misshapen helmet off the man. "It must be the dragon's breath. Get me some water to wash out his eyes, nose and mouth!" Henry yelled out to no one in particular.
"There's no ash," Daniel pointed out. "He escaped the smoke. There must be another reason," He was panicking for the man seemed to have stopped breathing. He looked at the chest plate of the armour. It had been stoved in by repeated blows and repeated pistol balls at close range. "It's the chest armour. It's crushing his chest.” He began working at the straps and buckles so as to release the chest plate, but the buckles were twisted and jammed. Henry pushed him out of the way and used his knife to cut through the leathers. Even then it took the two of them to pry the twisted armour apart, and suddenly there was a gush of air as Haselrig let go of the breath he had been holding and gasped for more.
"Oye," one of the lads called. "This ones fakin'. E's not dead," and to prove it he used his boot to stir the cavalryer laying on the ground.
"Get your filthy boot away from me, you cur," the man cursed as he rolled onto his side, "or I will have you flogged. I am Sir John Byron, major of the king's horse, and I demand that you release me and see me safely back to my regiment."
"Kick him again," Henry growled. "He's the bugger what caused all the trouble at the Tower of London last year."
"No, don't hurt him. He's injured," Daniel called out, purposefully a bit too late to stop the next two kicks. "Arthur is gravely injured so we must get him to a barber or a physician. The closest ones are in our siege camp at Rowde. The major will come with us, just in case we need a hostage to see us across these fields."
* * * * *
Even if they hadn't had an injured Haselrig to care for, they would have made for the camp at Rowde. It was the closest, safest port to hide from a storm of royalist cavalryers. Rowde was well manned by the reserve dragoons who were protecting the siege guns. Most of the Lobsters, the ones who hadn't surrendered and could still ride, were also making their way towards Rowde. All of them rode like they were too dog tired to ride any further, never mind ride back up the hill to rejoin the battle. Weight was the main disadvantage to fighting in such heavy armour. Half of your strength was spent fighting the weight of the very armour that so well protected you. Luckily squads of dragoons were riding out to meet individual Lobsters and chase the royalist cavalryers off them so that they could reach the camp.
"What's going on up above? Do you know?" Daniel asked one of the dragoon captains.
"The royalists have split our own cavalry into three groups and are attacking one group at a time. The first attack beat Haselrig's Lobsters out of position. The second attack chased Hungerford’s light cavalry all the way to the main camp at Bagnall hill. Now they are attacking again, this time against Duett's reserve cavalry. They are still with Waller and the infantry, trying to protect the field guns."
"Well they should be safe enough while protected by our musketeers," Daniel replied hopefully, "so long as we keep the Cornish infantry pinned down in the town."
"Don't be so sure."
"But Waller holds the high ground and has ample of powder and shot."
"I didn't mean Waller," the captain said under his breath. "We can't keep the Cornish infantry pinned down much longer. We hold our three positions, yes, but the royalist cavalryers control all of the fields that separate us. If them Cornish were to march out of Devizes right now, it would be suicide for me to try to stop them. It's only a matter of time before Hopton or Wilmot figure that out."
"Who is this Wilmot?"
"Lord Henry Wilmot," the captain replied, "the Earl of Rochester. He's the general that led this army down from Marlborough. I last saw him fight at Edgehill. He knows his stuff."
"I've heard of him. He was at the Siege of Breda. Bugger, another Dutch trained soldier. No wonder he's beating us."
"It didn't take much, did it," the captain said under his breath. "All he did was split us into three parts, and then he dealt with each part, one at a time."
One of Haselrig's Lobster majors came over to them and told them, "Hopton has sent us word from Devizes. He claims that this battle is over for us, because the earliest we could mount a force to climb the hill and help Waller would be tomorrow. I hate to admit it but he is probably right. My men are too buggered to put their armour back on. He suggests that we abandon this camp and the big guns, and if we do so, then he will allow us to retreat to Bath without hindrance."
"You can't agree to that!" the captain hissed. "Our retreat would allow Hopton to march his infantry up Roundway Hill and attack Waller's infantry."
The major looked at him with a steady look and asked, "If Hopton marched out of the town right now, could we stop him?"
The captain shot Daniel a mournful look. "No. I was just saying that we couldn't."
"Then what is the difference if we accept his terms or not?" the major asked. When the captain shrugged, the major answered his own question. "The difference is that we survive as an armed regiment to protect Bath and Bristol and Gloucester. Do you realize what will happen to those cities if we are destroyed or captured here? Those cities will be lost."