by James Duncan
Chapter 9
The Danevirke
Whatever Ordulf thought being on crusade and being in an army on the march would be like, this wasn’t it. The first shock was being given to the camp master as spare labour for the wagon train.
‘I’m what?’
‘You are on the list as one of my labourers,’ said the agitated Orbert.
‘But I’m a smith!’ protested Ordulf. ‘I’m here at the request of the count himself.’
‘Oh, are you, Your Highness? Let me just check my list of the count’s butt boys. Oh, wait. I don’t have a list of those!’ Orbert screamed up at Ordulf’s face from about a foot below him. ‘Now, if you are a smith, where is your forge, eh?’
Ordulf opened his mouth to explain, but he could see where this was going. ‘I don’t have one.’
‘So what use is a smith without a forge? Hmm, no clever answer, eh? You are a big strong lad with fuck-all to do and no way to earn your keep. So someone smarter than you has put your name on my list of labourers.’ Orbert smiled smugly, waving the parchment up at Ordulf’s face. So, much as I would rather have a fucking box of carrots, I’ve got you. It’s written right there. See?’
Ordulf stared blankly at the hovering parchment and its list of names.
Orbert narrowed his eyes and then rolled them and pulled the list away. ‘You can’t even read your own name, can you, boy? And that, you ham-fisted moron, is why you are now a labourer. And you will continue to be one until someone finds you something to hit with that stupid little hammer.’ With that, Orbert waddled off, shouting at a cart team who were having trouble controlling their horses.
Ordulf’s life for the next week as the army crawled north fell instantly into a dreary and exhausting routine. In the morning, he helped break down the camp and pack it into the carts. He was merely a set of useful arms attached to a set of useful legs, and everything else was superfluous. People pointed at crates and bundles and then at a cart. He picked up the indicated item with the arms and moved said crate to said cart with the legs. Then another item would be indicated, and he would repeat. After a day’s marching, the soldiers would stop in a location the scouts had marked for them with coloured flags and start clearing the ground. Then the baggage train would arrive, and the soldiers would recover their tents – if they had them – cooking equipment, rations and other gear.
Ordulf would help unload and set up the required company gear from the wagon train. Horse lines, officers’ tents, tables, cooking equipment, all of it stuff he had loaded that very morning, came back off and was set up in the same pattern. Soon he didn’t need anyone to point at things, as it was the exact same, day in, day out. It was monotonous and exhausting. He was either marching, working or sleeping, and little of the latter. He slept in one of the empty carts under a tarpaulin. It was one of the only perks of the job working the wagons: staying high and dry if it rained and away from the ants and insects on the ground.
After a week of marching through first rich and then increasingly sparse and overgrown farmland north-east of Hamburg, they entered the lands near the old border with the pagan Wagrians to the east and the Danes to the north. These lands had been too dangerous to settle unprotected and too far from Hamburg for protection. The carefully kept fields and villages near Hamburg had given way to rough wildlands and forest with sparse, walled communities of German settlers. Husks of burnt villages on the trail marked where the conquests had torn through the lands a few years ago.
The army’s progress slowed as the road became winding forest tracks, newly hacked clear by the men preparing the route. The army made barely five miles a day. The column of march was over five miles long on the narrow track, from vanguard to rearguard, so the army didn’t even cover its own length on most days. Proper camps became harder and harder to set up each night until, finally, the order was given to the Saxon baggage train to pull off the road and wait. For a whole day, they and the other wagon trains of the other contingents waited as the majority of the army passed.
‘What is happening?’ Ordulf asked Orbert, who ignored him.
‘We are in enemy lands once we pass this forest,’ said Henry, one of the old soldiers who drove the wagons. ‘The army closes up and we move slower; the baggage train sticks together for protection behind the main body and before the rearguard.’ He leaned over and spat over the side of his cart while his tethered horses rummaged in the undergrowth around the trees. Ordulf went back to staring dumbly at the passing army.
Eventually, no more men were passing them on the road, but the light was waning, so they made a makeshift camp there in the woods. In the morning, the army moved on again on a war footing.
The Saxon company was in the vanguard, too far from the baggage train on that narrow forest path to use their camping equipment. Like most of the army, they carried only their basic cooking gear and bedrolls as they marched in the new order. They slept on the ground, and their tents lay unused in the wagons.
This was a blissful change for Ordulf. Making and breaking camp each evening and morning became a fraction of the work. The wagons were pushed off the road, they cooked and ate, the horses were seen to and then he slept under a wagon. Food for the next day was delivered to the vanguard by wagon each night, but Ordulf wasn’t often needed for that.
The days marching, however, were a different story. There were fifteen thousand men and four thousand horses on the rough and narrow road ahead of Ordulf’s place in the baggage train. He spent his days wading through the detritus of an entire city on the march. The smell was hard to describe, like walking through a tannery mixed with a latrine pit. His good boots were caked in the layer of filth that coated the road, the leavings of horses and mules churned to a dusty paste by thousands of boots and hundreds of wheels. The roadside was littered with broken and discarded equipment and possessions, the odd dead animal and the occasional sick or lame soldier sitting forlornly by the hedges or lying motionless in the undergrowth.
Earlier in the march, in the open fields, soldiers had simply walked out of the line of march to do their business in the fields. Here, in this rough country, there was little opportunity to leave the column and danger in doing so. As a result, many men simply relieved themselves as they marched.
Ordulf turned to Henry, who had seen too many winters to stand in the battle line but who knew no other life and so was retained as a baggage guard. The man was whistling a cheery tune. He was actually happy. Ordulf was horrified.
‘How can you stand this?’ he asked. ‘We are walking through a mix of piss and horse shit. There are men lying on the roadside dying. How can you whistle and ignore this? Is this normal?’
‘Normal?’ The man stopped whistling to himself and looked at Ordulf wide-eyed. ‘Lad, this isn’t normal! This is a nice walk in the country. So what if there is horse shit on the road? This is a healthy army who has fought no battles marching in fine weather.’ He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Lad, you wait until we are walking in high summer where that shit turns to choking dust that fills your mouth. You wait until we are walking in heavy rains where the mud and shit is knee deep or until the army has the stomach sickness and the shit isn’t just from the horses. When we have marched behind fifteen thousand men with stomach fever, then you might hear me complain. Until then?’ The old soldier grunted and looked back to the road. ‘How many men have we passed in the ditch today? Ten? Twenty? Half of those will be picked up by the straggler carts at the back and returned to the line in a few days. The other half will be sent home with the next convoy of empty wagons or be buried by the road like decent men.
You wait until a retreat after a battle where the wounded fall like flies and you have to step through guts that have been trampled by a thousand men and crushed by wagons. Where falling out of the march means death, and injured men beg you from the roadside to help them or just kill them to save them from the scavengers, both human and beast, that will follow us.’ The old man shook his head at the young smith. ‘Lad, this
is the best march I have been on in ten years. So shut up and be grateful in your ignorance.’ The old veteran returned to his whistling. Ordulf returned to his horrified silence. But then he was a very naïve young man.
Later that day, they heard the first sounds of battle: the muffled and distant sound of shouting and clash of steel on steel and wood. Ordulf looked around nervously, hand on his belt knife. Henry sat behind him and laughed at the smith’s nervousness. The train didn’t stop or slow; most men didn’t even look up from their march.
‘Easy, lad. It’s just our scouts playing with their scouts on the flank. Nothing will happen back here.’
Ordulf tried to appear relaxed and carried on. They didn’t see any evidence of the fight, and the skirmishes and distant sounds of battle became closer and more frequent as the day wore on. But the army didn’t slow, and nothing was visibly different other than a stronger guard being set that night. A job Ordulf was blissfully not trained to be allocated.
Then, the next day, and very abruptly, they crossed a low rise and the whole army was laid out in the fields a mile or so in front of them. Beyond them, on a low ridge, was a brown scar along the horizon, topped visibly in some places with palisades and low towers.
The Danevirke. It looked… smaller than Ordulf had expected. Ordulf was almost disappointed. But then, as they got closer, he realised those palisades were made from whole logs and the brown scar was just the lip of a deep and wide ditch before a fifteen-foot wall of grassy earth. It looked a formidable obstacle, and the wall stretched in both directions as far as he could see across the grassy plain.
The army was making camp in the low ground before the wall. Hives of activity were visible everywhere. A mounted man rode along the column wearing the count’s colours, looking for the Saxon baggage train. Spotting Orbert, he slowed and turned his horse, chased white with sweat and splattered with mud. ‘Camp master!’ he called. ‘Our site is down to the right behind the next hedge, one mile. Look for the green flags.’ Orbert waved his assent, and then the man spurred his horse and was gone.
The wagons trundled into the allotted area of rough grass, and a stream of orders were given. Orbert stood in the centre of a storm of activity directing the erection of a more permanent camp, similar to the one at Hamburg. All the rest of the day and through the next morning, they worked until it was complete. Ordulf saw the count and his officers arrive and enter the command tent. The flap was closed behind them.
‘Water carriers!’ cried Orbert. Ordulf sighed. He had no doubt that meant him. He trudged over to the gathering line of wagon attendants and other men. He took a bundle of canteens and followed the directions to the watering site. Two miles there and two miles back. They would do this twice every day until the wagons became properly organised to distribute supplies. Those wagons were still unloading siege equipment in front of the wall, or so the man in front of him said. Ordulf put his head down and re-settled the load on his shoulders. He was filthy, tired, footsore and regretting his life choices. He’d lost a wrap of paper containing ten silver pieces that had been hidden in his boot. Whether it had fallen out on the march or been stolen, he didn’t know.
He cursed inwardly for agreeing to go on this crusade, as if he had been given the choice. It wasn’t likely to get any better any time soon. He was pretty sure it could still get worse. Once the day’s chores ended, he collapsed into his tent to meet with a fitful sleep, the noise of the army dying down around him.
‘Blacksmiths!’
Ordulf cracked his eyes open under his blanket. He rubbed his face. Did he really hear that?
‘Blacksmiths! Over here.’ Yes, that was a real voice. He struggled to get up just as Orbert’s huge face thrust itself through the flap of his makeshift tent.
‘Oi, you, boy. Someone wants blacksmiths. Any chance you are a smith, eh, son?’ he said with a sarcastic grin. ‘Get up and go report to the shouting man so he goes away and stops shouting in my camp. This is my camp, and I’m the one who’s supposed to be shouting here.’
Ordulf groaned and levered himself to a sitting position. ‘Actually, I’m not a blacksmith, I’m a –’
‘I don’t care. You are going over there to report to the man shouting for blacksmiths.’
Ordulf had learned that arguing with Orbert was pointless, so he ruffled himself to full awakeness, grabbed his toolbelt and trudged after the man shouting for smiths. It turned out they wanted help putting together siege engines and making huge ladders.
It was just basic work: heating iron in braziers and hammering it to shape on flat rocks. He was making huge, crude hinges and forcing them into shape around a rounded log, then working plates to hold ladders and crosspieces together, but the simplicity of the work didn’t bother him. It was better than carrying water, and the things they were building were awe-inspiring.
The siege engine being constructed in front of him was like nothing he had seen before. A great wooden frame, like a bed frame for a giant, was laid on rollers on a flattened patch of earth. On each side, near the front part, were two squared tree trunks standing vertically at least thirty feet high. Smaller timbers stretched down from the uprights, holding them strongly in place. Workers were busy at the top of the two vertical pillars installing the giant hinge system and the horizontal rounded log.
As the day progressed, a long arm, short at the front and long and tapering towards the back, at least fifty feet long in total, was mounted securely to a joint in the middle of that rounded log. As the engine was finished, a bundle of thick hemp ropes was hung from the short end at the front. The long end rested on a cradle above a wooden rack at the back of the frame.
One of the siege engineers saw Ordulf staring at it in open-mouthed amazement. He was from the northern shores of old Francia, or so his accent suggested.
‘You are strong. You want to help cast stones?’ he asked, looking up at Ordulf while he cleaned his hands on a rag.
‘Cast stones?’ Ordulf asked, puzzled by the man’s stuttering attempt at the German language.
‘The engine, it throws stone at wall, wall fall over,’ he said, emphasising the actions with his hands. ‘Men, big strong men, they pull down the ropes, stone is cast.’ He motioned with his hands again, pointing at the two ends of the engine and the dangling ropes.
‘Yes, I can do that,’ said Ordulf, with absolutely no idea what he had just let himself in for. But the engine was standing a thousand feet from the wall, well out of range of the defenders. Must be better than carrying water.
Happy in his ignorance, he had not learned lesson one of soldiering: never, ever volunteer for anything.
Two days later, the line of six engines was complete, the ladders were ready and the ground in front of the wall had been flattened and cleared by work parties in the dead of night, scurrying around while defenders and crusader archers exchanged arrows and curses.
The army was starting to take casualties. Ordulf saw them while he was working on the engines: bodies out in the area in front of the wall, arrows sticking out of them like tiny flagpoles, wounded men lying on pallets in the giant area behind the engines that was reserved for treating casualties and where orderlies changed bandages and priests accepted confession and gave last rites.
When he told Orbert that he had agreed to help run the siege engines, Orbert alternated wildly between laughter and anger. ‘You are on my list. Who said you could go on another list, eh? What if they lose you?’
‘Lose me?’ Ordulf was confused. ‘I will come back. I can’t get lost,’ he said, starting to feel the first pangs of worry. Orbert just shrugged and walked off, muttering to himself about stupid boys.
He reported to the engine site at dawn the next day. It would be the first assault. In the mustering area just out of bowshot of the walls, groups of maille-clad soldiers waited in hushed silence with shields, helmets and swords at the ready. Bales of straw, bundles of wood and long ladders lay alongside them. Piles of huge wood-and-hide shields lay in rows in front with th
e archers who were fussing with their fletchings and conducting last checks on their bows.
The engine had moved. It was at least six hundred feet closer to the walls than where it had been constructed, at long bowshot range. It must have been moved overnight. Orbert felt sick; he hadn’t expected to be that close to the wall. He nervously asked one of the siege engineers why it was so close.
‘Close? Lad, the first thing we have to do is move it a lot closer before we can use it.’
Ordulf’s heart sank into his boots. He looked out over the field in front of the walls. He looked back; it was too late to change his mind now. He was being shepherded into a group with eighty other men, all lightly dressed, all looking nervous. God, things were happening fast.
Then, a single horn sounded from behind the line. Without much more than a combined exhale of breath, groups of men surged forward, led by their commanders. The first line was the archers. Each archer had a man to carry his huge shield, and they jogged forward into positions about a hundred and fifty feet in front of the wall, hunched down behind their shields. As soon as they were in range, a mighty cheer sounded from the ramparts above them, flags and banners were raised and a storm of arrows started to fall. One moment, the crusader archers were scanning for targets, and the next, they were sheltering from an iron-tipped hail of death.
‘Amateurs,’ said the man next to him, smiling for the first time.
‘What?’ Ordulf snapped back. His throat was dry, his limbs shaking. He had a desperate urge to piss. He could see other men around him stepping to the side to do so themselves. Should he? No, they would think him weak or afraid. He thought his heart would burst. His head was swimming.
‘They are wasting their arrows on our archers’ shields. Look, the main attackers are going forward, and they aren’t even being shot at. The defenders are amateurs. Everyone who has defended a wall knows the archers are just a distraction – it’s the foot soldiers you have to stop.’ The man grinned at him. ‘Let’s hope they are that stupid when it’s our turn.’