by James Duncan
No sooner had he checked his sword and mumbled a quick prayer than a horn sounded from behind the line. Adolf nodded to the men around him and his own horn was blown, the tuneless sound melding with a dozen others along the line. The formation in front of him set off at a walk.
There was no complex plan for the attack. The first line would advance to the foot of the rise and then assault the ditch line under cover of archery. If the attack faltered or failed, a second line would assault. The third line, which Adolf himself stood with, would be the final resort.
The left wing moved steadily over the open ground and then assaulted the hill, shields up. Adolf watched as the archers stopped to loft their arrows up the gentle rise, then as the first line made their assault in tight groups, bravely cheering and waving banners as they marched up to the enemy force.
Adolf fidgeted with his sword as he watched helplessly from the third line. Initially, the assault appeared to be going well. The defenders’ missiles did not slow the advancing crusaders, and they reached the ditch line. But the assaulting formations had to break up to navigate the ditch, the stakes and obstacles. The Norse unleashed a wave of spears, axes and arrows into the attackers while they were vulnerable. Even from two hundred paces back, Adolf could hear the thunder of the impacts and the screams of the wounded.
Yet enough attackers kept pushing forward, kept their feet, for the assault to push through the obstacles, ragged though it now was. Adolf could see commanders dragging and shoving men back into line, urging them forward through the stakes even as the deadly hail rained down upon them. Men fell. More men kept going forward. The attacking soldiers finally reached the defenders behind the stakes, but not as one surging mass, only in smaller groups. The Norse shield wall held firm as they started trading blows with the Christians. Adolf could see that they would not be able to break through. Too many men were dead, injured or simply not moving forward. The attack had stalled.
He looked to his left and right. The same thing was happening on his left, the first line broken up and not fully engaged. On his right, the situation was worse. The central units had broken against the steel of the best enemy warriors, who were jeering and shouting at the crusaders as they retreated down the slope in disarray, leaving their dead behind them.
Adolf shouted at his signaller; he wasn’t going to wait for orders. The man blew his horn and the second wave started advancing from their position a hundred paces back from the fighting. On his left and right, the line moved to go with his contingent, the other commanders coming to the same conclusion or simply following his example.
The second line marched up the slope almost unmolested and pushed into the ditch. They filtered into the gaps the first line had left and added their numbers to the areas where the fighting was fiercest. Soon, the entire line of defenders was heavily engaged. For a while, the lines were locked together at the line of stakes, the defenders using the advantage of the slope and defences to keep the more heavily armed Christians at bay, long axes flashing in the sun as they hacked at the struggling, desperate crusaders.
Then, just as Adolf was considering leading the third line in, the enemy facing them started to be pushed back past the ditch under the intense pressure as they became tired and their lesser armour started to tell. The Saxon line pushed through the ditch and the stakes behind, and the whole right wing of the Norse army started to sag. In the centre, he could see the second wave had also faltered, although it had not yet broken. They were unable to push through the ditch, and a ditch choked with bodies was evidence of their failure. In the centre, the horns blew again, and the final line moved forward, the Duke of Saxony throwing his last men into the bloody fray in the hope of turning the tide.
Adolf stared at the carnage in the centre and worried. Then he saw that on his flank the advance was also slowing. The combined first and second waves were tiring and grinding into a bloody stalemate further up the slope. Adolf set his face into a grimace and turned to his signaller. Drawing his sword, he set off with the men of Saxony and Francia up the hill into the jaws of the slaughter.
Sir Hans cursed as his horse half stumbled on the rough track. He ducked low under a branch and felt the trailing leaves and twigs run over the back of his hauberk. The meeting with the duke had been brief. He had already been contemplating the same plan Adolf had put forward and approved it quickly. There had been a lot of high concepts and fine words bandied about, but essentially the plan was as simple as it was desperate. Send the cavalry around the flank and hope it could find and force its way through the rough countryside and the locals to reach the rear or flank of the enemy.
Successive scouting parties the previous day had either not found a suitable route, been seen off by heavy bands of Norse or simply not returned, lost or fallen to some ambush. But now, with the way along the road blocked, half a dozen parties of knights were trying to find a way around the flank by brute force. And it was not going well, not where Hans was anyway. He could neither see nor hear the other groups. The road that the Norse army had cut followed the route of the dry land, but marsh, woods and streams covered the flanks. The right was utterly impassable: a broad marsh that could, and did, swallow a horse and rider to the haunches. The left flank, thickly wooded and broken, offered at least some hope. That was the idea, anyway, not that anyone had told the land that, and it resisted them as tenaciously as any Norse warband.
But yet the Norse patrolled it heavily. They must be guarding something. Surely a way through existed for a body of horsemen? The path he and his men were hacking their way through was ancient, unused and overgrown. Hans alternated between scanning the dense undergrowth for ambush and battering his way through the low boughs and trailing branches, hacking at them with his sword in anger and frustration. In his attempts to hack off a stubborn branch, he didn’t hear the first bowstring twang or the first arrow thud home, but he did hear his horse scream and then feel it start to bolt. In a moment of indecision, he tried to decide if he should kick clear of the saddle or try and duck the branch ahead.
He managed neither in time. The stallion bolted, and the branch swept him unceremoniously from the saddle and dumped him in a painful heap on the track. There was chaos around and above him as men reacted to the small fusillade of arrows that sliced into the column. Hans desperately shuffled about on the path, trying to avoid the turning horses and flying hooves, each a much more deadly threat than the desultory ambush. Two knights managed to force their way past the tree and spurred their horses into the undergrowth. There were whoops of joy, and the arrows stopped as fast as they had started. Hans never even saw the enemy.
A short time later, one of the men returned with a bloodied sword and leading Hans’ horse. It was whinnying, eyes wide and afraid. Hans calmed the big stallion and searched for the arrow. It was high, in the top of the rump, snapped off against something during the horse’s panicked flight. He examined the wound while the other man held the horse. The arrow was not deeply embedded, just stuck under the skin at a shallow angle. Hans could feed the tip under the skin, up near the top of the big leg muscle. The horse was not badly hurt, just scared and in pain. He took a firm hold of the arrow and yanked sharply on it. It came free easily, and the horse snorted in anger and twisted away from him, half tugging the man holding him from the ground. The horse stared at him as if in reproach. Hans inspected the arrowhead. It was a simple iron point, not barbed. The horse would be fine. He muttered to it, stroking its mane and trying to calm it down.
As he calmed and then remounted the horse, cursing again the lost time, a man shouted from the front of the column, which continued around the gnarled tree. Hans forced his twitchy horse to the front and found a gaggle of men standing in the open in a large clearing, all looking in the same direction, off to their right. Hans trotted over to them, maille whispering and rustling as he went.
‘What is it – a way through?’ The question died in his throat as he emerged from the trees and looked along the line of their stares. A
gap between the trees revealed, across some boggy, impassable low ground, the battlefield. The two armies were heavily engaged. Even as Hans watched, a distant horn note blew, and he saw a second line of crusaders surge across the open ground, beginning the advance. His heart sank. They were already late.
‘Stop watching – move! We must find a way through to them.’ He spurred his reluctant horse on, the men turning to follow, and they pounded across the clearing and into the woods on the other side.
A short time later, after hacking their way through the forest for another few hundred paces, they came abruptly upon a large force of knights moving across them from the left. Hans stopped in confusion.
‘You there! What lord do you serve?’ a knight stopped to ask.
‘Count Adolf of Schauenburg,’ he replied.
‘The Saxons? Good. Send for your men. We have found a path through the woods, and we are forming up behind their army.
Hans looked to the right in confusion. ‘And the enemy don’t try and stop us?’
The knight shrugged, difficult in full maille. ‘They tried, but it didn’t do them much good.’ He kicked his horse into a trot and continued with the column.
Hans thought for a moment and turned to the man next to him. ‘Follow this path back to our main body. Ignore the way we came – I’m sure this will be quicker. Bring the rest as fast as you can, or we will miss the battle.’ Hans had never been in a large battle, and the thought of missing it because his men were lost in the woods churned his stomach.
The ragged column continued to pass, different units mixed in with each other, some cantering to catch up, commanders shouting for their banners to re-form. It was chaos. Hans chewed his lip impatiently, unwilling to continue without his men, hating being unable to see what was going on. The battle must be well progressed by now. Come on, damn it. Where are you?
Adolf staggered as a spearhead struck his shield and twisted it around with the impact. He hacked ineffectually at the shaft as it was withdrawn by the warrior behind the wall. He saw the man’s wild eyes beneath his thick woollen hat, the battered and splintered round shield still up in the wall of its fellows. Bloodied but unbroken.
The attack had stalled completely. Both sides were exhausted, but no matter how far the Christians pushed the Norse up the slope, step by bloody step, the enemy just retreated over their dead and held the line. The crusaders still had a large number of men, but they were disorganised, tired and not able to mount a decisive attack against the steadfast wall. Instead, tired men fell out of the line, and those who had grabbed a precious few moments of rest replaced them. Adolf knew they were winning. The bodies they stepped over were far more often Norse than crusader, but still he had passed dozens of dead crusaders. The toll the battle of attrition was taking was horrific, and he did not believe the Norse would break before the attackers finally lost heart.
Adolf struggled to put a foot forward, breath rattling out of him in huge shudders. He was not as fit as he once was, and fighting in full armour, even for a short time, was shattering. Someone grabbed his arm and dragged him back out of the fight, and he didn’t resist, grateful for the opportunity.
He bent over double, sticking his sword into the earth and leaning on it. Next to him, a dying Norse warrior mumbled and pawed weakly at his speared guts. Adolf frowned but ignored the man. There would be hundreds more before the day was done. As he turned his eyes away from the dying man, he heard a commotion from the soldiers around him, those waiting for their turn at the front. The ripple of surprise turned into a ragged chorus of cheers and waving weapons.
Behind the Norse line, just visible over the crest of the ridge, a line of banners was flying in the crisp spring sky, a riot of coloured streamers flying behind a forest of spearheads – dozens at first and then hundreds. The Norse saw this too, the line suddenly wavering, men at the back turning to look at the new threat. Large numbers of the Norsemen, those waiting behind the line for their turn to fight and those in the rear ranks of the shield wall, turned around in groups and individually, trying to form a new line facing the rear and failing in their haste and confusion.
Then, as Adolf watched, the spearheads and banners stopped spreading out along the skyline and, for a moment, just hung there like a crown of thorns on the ridge.
Then a muffled horn blew and the spearheads fell and disappeared. The Norse looked around in confusion, the Christian soldiers so transfixed by the sight that they barely took advantage of the distraction. Not many seemed to understand why the spears had disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.
But Adolf understood. He grinned wolfishly to himself and placed his hand on the hilt of the sword, its tip still buried in the earth. He felt it start to tremble, weakly at first, and then so much he could see it and feel the thrumming in his feet. The pounding of thousands of hooves.
The skyline was broken again, this time by a line of helmeted riders, then horses underneath them, stretched out at a gallop, spearheads down and pointed at the rear of the Norse line.
‘Fall back!’ Adolf roared, shouting at the men in front of him, some of whom obeyed, some of whom just stood there dumbstruck. Down the line, other men understood the command and repeated it. Within moments, most of the left wing of the crusader army disengaged from the stunned Norse and pulled back down the slope, leaving their enemy in disarray and confusion.
Some in their lines understood the doom that swept down upon them, but not enough. Men desperately shoved other warriors into line, shouted at them to get their shields up. But it was too little, too late. The tide, the rushing wave of armoured knights going downhill at a full gallop, perhaps a thousand of the finest knights in all Christendom and half the nobility of Saxony, Bavaria and a dozen other smaller states, smashed through the first ragged line of Norse like a bull going through a wicker fence. The Norse warriors on the hill above Adolf were swept away, the knights and their rampaging horses running them down, spearing them, slashing at necks and arms and splitting skulls.
In twenty heartbeats, the defiant enemy’s right flank became a mob of desperately fleeing men, trapped between the waiting crusader foot soldiers and the knights who had so cruelly broken them. The horsemen swept through the fleeing crowd like deer through a field of wheat, cutting them down in swathes. Adolf and the survivors of the three attacking lines cheered themselves hoarse and cut down those fool enough, or panicked enough, to run into their ranks.
Adolf saw that the total victory on his flank had not been mirrored in the centre. There, the prime of the enemy warriors, on a slightly higher piece of ground, had managed to form a solid wall to face the new threat. There, where the men were better armoured, more experienced, the cream of the enemy fighting men, they held firm against the torrent like a rock in a flood. The knights of the crusade and their big horses, for all their power, would not charge into a solid wall of shields and spears.
The charge, its fury spent, died out, and the horsemen and weary foot soldiers of the crusader army were scattered across the flank of the ridge, hunting down survivors or simply resting where they stood, the shock and relief of that earth-shattering charge washing over them.
But not Adolf. He looked at the surrounded and defiant body of warriors on the hill with mounting dismay. There were perhaps a thousand, well-formed and still fighting, occupying the very peak of the ridge. They would take a heavy toll on the tired army to dislodge, and his flank of that army was now scattered and victorious. Nothing saps a man’s strength like believing his fighting is done.
Hans was furious. The main body of his men still had not arrived, and he stood impotently on the path as he waited. All the other contingents had now passed, yet the path remained stubbornly empty of his own men. Just as he considered leaving them and taking the few men he had to the battle, there was a crashing from the woods behind them.
‘Ware! Ware rear!’ a man shouted, and the band lowered their spears and turned their horses to face the unknown threat. They eyed the woods suspi
ciously and waited to see what emerged.
A ragged line of horsemen appeared in the trees, and the trickle became a flood. His missing men. Hans was relieved and angry in equal measure. ‘Why did you come that way?’ he shouted at the first man to emerge. ‘I sent word to follow the main body.’
The man stopped, and his mouth opened in confusion. ‘We never received any orders. I waited for a time and decided to ride to the sound of the battle. I’m sorry, I thought it was the right thing.’
Hans cursed to himself for the man’s disobedience but pushed it to the back of his mind. ‘Never mind. We ride to the battle. It may already be too late. Pray it is not.’ He turned his horse and cantered off down the churned-up path, his men streaming out of the wood to follow him. For several hundred paces they rode, until finally the ground opened up and he saw the ravaged remains of the Norse camp spread out to his left, a few crusader horsemen picking over the wreckage. To the right, over the ridge, the battle could clearly be heard.
Hans spurred his horse towards the crest and pulled up at the top. The scene that spread out below him on the gentle slope took his breath away. To his right, the shattered wing of the Norse army was spread out across a thousand paces of open ground, hundreds of horsemen riding about, hunting down the fleeing enemy. Beyond, he could see Christian foot soldiers in groups, reforming or simply sitting on the ground. The scene repeated itself on his left.
However, in the centre, level with where he stood, a fierce battle was still raging. A crescent of Norse warriors, in a dense shield wall, was still facing downhill, hotly engaged with crusader forces. A thinner line guarded their rear, fending off the few brave knights who dared an attack. As yet, no formed body of soldiers had reached them to surround them and envelop that defiant bubble.