The White Cross

by Richard Masefield

  Blown flowers and rotting fruit, viscous and congealing. Destroyed for what exactly? Revenge? Strategic gain? Or for something worse? Were they destroyed to satisfy a basic human need? A flaw within the beast that regularly, and in every age, drives it to slaughter its own kind?

  Flies rise in clouds. The stench is so appalling that all within a hundred paces hold their noses.

  ‘So are avenged the blows and arrow shots of infidels,’ King Richard’s annalist is later to record. ‘Great thanks be given to the Creator!’

  A spoiled child of a Creator who smashes His own toys? Is that the God he has in mind?

  From Tel al-Ayadiyeh, the Sultan Salahuddin sees his brother’s archers sweep down from al-Kharruba. He hears their battle cry. Time and time again he sees them harrying the larger Christian army.

  As daylight fades he sees their frantic sallies fail, and fail again to save their dying people.

  It is the time for evening prayer.

  ‘Oh God Most High – I attest to thee there is no other God but Allah. I declare that Muhammad is the Prophet of God. Come to prayer! Come to the temple of Salvation! God is great; there is no other.’

  The Sultan genuflects, looks west and east towards the angels who record men’s deeds, begs Allah to receive with honour the souls of those who have been, will be martyred, beseeches Him to help His servant to countenance and to accept.

  ‘When the sun ceases to shine, when the stars fall from the sky and the mountains turn to dust: then shall each soul be made aware of what he hath committed.

  ‘Ya-Allah kam minal-jaraaim turtakab bismik; Allah, what evils are committed in Thy name. Behold the soul of man in the mystery of its nakedness.’

  The first to be found wanting on that Day of Judgement, God’s Shadow on the Earth believes, and takes what comfort he can find from his belief, is he who hath shed blood without due cause.’

  It is already dark before the last Christian soldiers leave the monstrous scene. The Knights Hospitaller slump on their horses, slack-mouthed and glassy-eyed, flushed, foetid and polluted; men who have reached and then exceeded their own capacity for violence. Every now and then one leaves the ranks to vomit, or to sit his mount and stare into the darkness.

  The King’s composure has deserted him. His face is hidden by a scented scarf. His body trembles as he rides.

  Back in his palace, he ungloves himself, demands to be admitted to the Queen. But news of what he’s done has reached her, and it seems there is less steel bred into Bérengère than old Queen Eléonore supposed. The pregnant Spanish woman screeches through her chamber door for him to leave her be.

  So Richard has them find the captive child, the thirteen-year-old princess he’s brought with him from Cyprus. Takes her to bed instead, and muffles her screams with a pillow.

  In the early hours of the next morning, Queen Bérengère miscarries. Her maids are sworn to secrecy. But King Richard’s oaths are all it needs to spread the news from palace court to city street and through the gate into the Christian camp.

  Two days later, the Queen appears in public, pale and silent, with wads of bloodstained linen rammed between her thighs. No one can read her face or tell what she is thinking. But Bérengère knows, and in due time her husband will discover, that in all but name their four-month marriage has already ended.

  Later the same afternoon, with their hostage problem solved, the Christian armies leave the Plain of Acre, to march south for Joppa and Jerusalem.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It’s said that when God seeks to punish you, He grants you what you’ve prayed for. I prayed in the port of Tyre for victory and death to infidels, and was punished. How I was punished!

  But not by God. Because it was as if a curtain had been wrenched aside to reveal an empty void. I realised that there was no God in heaven. No Allah or Jehovah. I saw the sky as empty of anything but clouds – saw the whole thing as a lie. There is no Day of Judgement. Payment for our sins is made in this world not the next. The Evil One is not in Hell, but here on earth in mortal form. The human masks we wear whilst prattling of love and of forgiveness are made in our own selfish image, not in God’s – the faces underneath them, those of snarling devils who kill for pleasure and delight in pain.

  It’s said that man’s above the beasts. But I say he’s beneath them.

  I saw their faces in my nightmares, endlessly repeated.

  The mare’s fall and my concussion spared me the sight, but not the knowledge of the butchery – and night after night, I woke from shrieking, blood-filled dreams to see it happening again – and heard Alia’s screams – and shared her mother’s anguish. I saw the sword-blades fall. I felt them bite into their flesh, and mine, because I died with them in every dream.

  And when I woke to recall where I was and what had really happened – to live again, dry-mouthed and desperate. That was even worse.

  It was a march of more than twenty leagues from Acre to Arsuf. It took our Christian armies more than two weeks, with halts to rest along the way. We moved, as my Jos would have said, at a slow snail’s gallop – or so they told me afterwards, for I had lost all sense of time or reason. And but for John, I would have stayed behind, refused to move a further pace for their croisade – and likely had my throat cut for desertion.

  So when I woke to the familiar sight of my old tent in Bishop Walter’s camp, and heard from John how he had led me back unconscious from al-Ayadiyeh tied across the saddle of my mare – and asked him what had happened to Khadija and the child – and saw the wordless truth of it in his contorted face. Well then I must have lost my senses!

  I shouted, shouted anything to drown his words and block the truth in them. I felt the pressure of a wall of tears behind my eyes, a dam about to break – and something tightening around my head, and something in my throat I could not swallow. And then darkness pressing in, so close and stifling I could not breathe – and John’s voice in the tone he used for frightened beasts, soothing words devoid of sense – and John’s hands gripping both my wrists as I fought through the flood.

  That night, the night before we marched, I woke again to griping pain and crouched between the tents to squirt out a stinking flux that splashed my braies and burned my arse and emptied me of thought and energy and all emotion.

  I stank! I thought I never would be clean again. But next day, John washed me, dressed me in my helm and armour, sat me like a sandbag dummy on my horse.

  ‘Trust to me, Sir Garry.’ Was what he said, or something of the sort. ‘Now then, trust to me an’ jus’ do as I say.’

  That journey is as unclear now to me as it was then. When I think back, few details of that time remain. My memories are all in fragments. I know we only travelled in the morning, from dawn until the summer heat made it impossible to march– and in the afternoons we camped beside the track or in the dunes or on the beach, while fresh supplies were landed from King Richard’s ships which kept pace with us down the coast.

  Through the slit visor of my helm I see the sun, a fiery red ball veiled in dust. I see the smudge of distant hills, the salt lagoons, the sails of Richard’s ships against the blue-green of the sea – long winding lines of men and horses, floating and distorted by the heat. I feel the flies bite, hear the grunting of the camels, the clanking cooking pots beneath the carts – the tok, tok-tocking of the kettledrums, the disembodied calls to prayer to tell us we were not alone – that Sarsen horsemen matched us pace for pace and camp for camp.

  We never knew when they’d appear, and when I saw them taking substance out of haze and dust – screaming out of nowhere, to shoot and hack and batter at our lines – I couldn’t tell if they were men of flesh and blood, or demons from my nightmares. Well no, that isn’t true. I could tell, but I had no interest, was indifferent to my fate. I couldn’t summon energy to care if I should live or die.

  When I lay down at night, I hugged myself. I pulled my legs up to my chest to make myself as small as I could beneath the blanket that John laid across me.
I felt defeat in every way it’s possible to feel it. My faith was gone and with it everything that I believed in – and in its place a thought that terrified me. Because I knew that as a soldier primed to hate and trained to kill – knew then and know it now – I might myself have waded through the blood of men and women, even children. Because somewhere inside me as I lay there with my knees beneath my chin, there crouched the monster that is man!

  Night after night I lay awake, postponing sleep as long as I was able, knowing that there was no refuge, knowing what would come. Bright rings of jagged lines like fangs flashed through my vision; and when sleep came I dreamt that we were back in Acre in a maze of streets and alleys, empty houses, broken walls with doors that would not open and stairways leading nowhere. I dreamt that they were screaming, screaming for me, Khadija and her child – somewhere behind a wall, shut in a house, up on a roof I couldn’t reach – that rocks were falling everywhere to block my passage as I ran to find them, stop them screaming – anything to stop them being killed – to stop them. Stop them… STOP THEM!

  And when I willed myself to wake, and lay soaked in sweat with eyes wide open straining in the darkness, the images inside my head refused to go away. I knew I’d helped to take them to that place believing they would be exchanged, and if I was betrayed in my own ignorance, I had betrayed them too. Even with my eyes screwed shut and fingers in both ears I heard their screams and saw the images of slaughter. I was in purgatory and on the road to hell.

  How long is it since then? Weeks pass these days without the nightmares. But they haven’t left me, even here amongst the stars. Their spirits haunt me. Perhaps they always will. So much I had to give them still, which now I never can.

  But then the time came, as I knew it must, for me to die.

  One morning after Prime we’d barely mounted up, with some four leagues to cover still between the woods of Arsuf and the port of Joppa, when the sergeants shouted for us to make ready for engagement.

  That I do remember.

  Far behind us, we could see the Moslems circling the rearguard of our army, like wolves attacking a migrating flock, their shrill cries muffled by the distance. Horsemen galloped up and down the lines in clouds of dust, with who knows what instructions from the King?

  Until at last we heard the clarions, and wheeled about to move into position for a charge.

  ‘Good fortune, Haddertun,’ Dickon de Waleys called out from somewhere down the line.

  Then, as the infantry drew back to let us through, ‘Sir Garry, God protect ye!’ came from John Hideman – who still believed in God and His protection (’though just to make sure on the march, had never strayed much further with his pike than a pace from my stirrup). It was the last time, I thought, that I would hear his voice.

  We moved off as a squadron in a double-rank formation to the orders of the Bishop’s marechal – first at a trot. Then at a canter when we reached the wooded hills which hid the main part of the Sultan’s army.

  A charge uphill, and over broken ground into a soldid mass of Saracens, could only end one way. I knew it was against all reason. Which made it of a pattern with the rest of my unthinking life. The mare I rode was old, untrained for battle. The lance they’d given me was cracked, would shatter almost certainly on impact. The thing was plainly suicidal. So when the order came to charge – when I applied the spurs, I charged no longer with the heroes of my dreams.

  I see my own face, pale but calm. My life had lost its meaning. Yet even now I feel a stab of panic, knowing I am riding to my death, as I had always thought I would. That’s how I see it, feel it, looking back and looking down.

  Death comes to all of us, I told myself. But only once.

  How could I guess how it would be?

  So now, the famous ‘Battle of Arsuf’…

  In recording his most celebrated victory on the eve of the Nativity of Our Lady, 1191, the writer of King Richard’s Itinerarium Peregrinoram allows himself free rein as usual.

  ‘The heathen pack pressed hard the host, assaulted them and closed with them. Seaward and landward, so close they hemmed the host and with such great fury that they caused grievous loss of horses which they slew…

  ‘Then charged the Hospital, all in a body, which had suffered so long… Then had ye seen the thick dust fly! And all they who had dismounted and were shooting at us with bows, wherewith they so harassed our folk, these now had their heads cut off; for so soon as the knights overthrew them, the sergeants slew them. And so soon as the King saw that the host had broken its ranks and closed with the Turks he thrust his spurs into his horse, waiting no longer, and came on at full speed to help the foremost lines.

  ‘Swifter than a crossbow bolt, with all his household brave and eager, he smote so violently a division of the heathen that was crowded together on his right that they were all dumbfounded at the sight of the valiant men, and perforce must void their saddles; stretched out as thick as sheaves of corn had ye seen them lying all along the ground. And the brave King of England pursued after them and charged them; and so well wrought he in that hour that round about him, on either side, before, behind, was a great open highway filled with Saracens that had fallen dead there; and the rest drew back, and the windrow of the dead reached full half a league in length…

  ‘Such deeds of valour wrought Richard, King of England upon the loathsome enemy, that all men beheld his prowess with amazement. He and his horsemen drave back and held the Turks until our people could regroup around the standard. Thus were our armies able to march on to Arsuf, where they assembled to erect their tents and their pavilions.’

  Later in his narrative, which covers several pages, the Christian writer, who desperately needs a victory to record, takes time to summarise what has occurred.

  ‘These people, devoid of all virtue, were driven back in such wise as I have recounted. Nor were they able to accomplish that whereof they boasted to their Sultan in their arrogance, that without doubt or fail that day the flower of Christendom was to be humbled and defeated. But all was contrary! Had you but viewed it from the mountain-top the way the Turks were fleeing! For we have heard from they who saw it from this vantage that when our armies clashed, we drove them back so violently that as they fled, their camels died, with horses, mules and hinnies by the hundred and the thousand. They lost so many soldiers in the conflict, that had our armies pressed harder and pursued them further, then must the whole of Outremer be occupied by our victorious Christians!’

  Now listen to one of King Richard’s latter day biographers, writing in the nineteen thirties, in a chapter titled, THE VICTORY AT ARSOUF.

  ‘Richard was about to launch the greatest military enterprise of his life, and there was genius in everything he did,’ this writer blatantly suggests. ‘Saladin’s determination to force a battle is easily understood. He saw, no doubt, that his former harassing tactics, though very annoying for Richard and exhausting for his men, were having an even worse effect on the morale of his own followers… Some time or other they must stand up to these heavily armed crusaders if victory was to be won. That time, he judged, had come. He chose the ground with his usual skill. Arsouf was the only point on the line of the march where wooded hills came right down to the water’s edge…

  ‘As soon as the crusaders were fairly entangled amongst the trees, Saladin launched his attack. He seems to have approached in crescent formation, with his centre held back for the final assault, but with the right horn of the crescent considerably in advance of the left, and thrown out so widely as to envelop the Christian rear… The rearguard, composed of the Hospitallers, bore the whole brunt of the battle in its early stage. The crossbowmen on the outer flank and the infantry covering the hindmost of the baggage wagons suffered terribly. They would not halt, but we are told that they marched backwards, always facing the enemy, and that their progress in consequence became alarmingly slow…

  ‘The Hospitallers sent message after message to Richard begging for permission to charge. Half of thei
r horses were already down they said. Might they not charge out from amongst the infantry before it was too late, and flesh their lances in this mob of insolent paynims? But Richard firmly refused.

  “My good Master,” he said to the Master of the Hospital who had galloped up to him, “it must be endured.” He realised the primary importance of getting the whole Saracen army within range of the cavalry charge, which he knew must be his decisive effort…

  ‘But the Hospitallers could stand it no longer. There were cries from among them of, “Why do we not give rein?” “We shall be held as cowards for evermore!” Suddenly as one man they wheeled their horses and, calling upon St George, dashed out through the broken ranks of the footsoldiers, led by their own Master… Richard’s carefully-thought-out plan was wrecked. But he acted with his usual decision. Ordering the trumpets to be sounded immediately, and calling upon the Normans and English to follow him, he galloped to the rear and hurled himself into the fray behind the Hospitallers, cutting a wide path through the enemy as he went. The Saracens went down on every side, and the Christian infantry, following behind the knights, lopped off the heads of all the infidels on the ground…

  ‘But the battle was not over. As the knights and men at arms drew slowly back towards their own line, there were several counter-attacks. There was an emir with a great yellow flag who charged almost to the foot of the Standard. But William de Barres drove him off, and Richard, with the reserve, completed his discomfiture. The King of England, being mounted on his peerless Cyprus steed, Fauvel, often got dangerously far ahead of his companions; but his tall figure and his well-known voice inspired such terror in the enemy that their one idea was to get out of his long reach…

  ‘At last it was finished. Scouts reported 7000 Saracen dead. The Christian losses were comparatively slight… Richard’s magnificent élan, and the irresistible moral effect of his presence in any part of the field, was something different from his legendary feats of physical strength. We are told that his enemies fled before him like sheep…