Part 3 (1/2)
Boismont satisfies every part of the evidence. An hour's riding from it permits the attack on St Valery. Mons, where the traitor comes from, is only two miles off; the march from Boismont to the Ford is just such an advance as would take the dawn and sunrise of a day--whereas the advance from Oisemont, impossible for all those other reasons, would involve fourteen to fifteen miles of marching, and is utterly incompatible with the idea of two or possibly three heavy fights, and the long march succeeding it.
One last piece of evidence would be conclusive even if we had not all the rest. There is contemporary record of the Mayor of Abbeville watching from the heights of Caubert Hill the English army streaming northward to concentrate round the advanced position of the King.
From that height such an advance could be discerned crossing the plateau which leads to Acheux, to Mons, and to Boismont. You could no more see a concentration on Oisemont from it than you could see a concentration on Greenwich from Camden Hill.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Sketch showing Estuary of the Somme at BLANCHETAQUE in 1346]
III
THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE BATTLE
The manoeuvres of the French and English armies preliminary to the Battle of Crecy are so instructive upon many points, involved movements so hazardous and so complex, gave rise to so sharp a series of engagements, and form in general so large a part of our subject, that they merit a far larger study than do the approaches to most battles.
They ill.u.s.trate the comparative lack of thought-out plan which characterised medieval warfare; they afford a contrast between the compact and fairly well organised command of Edward III., and the chaotic host of the King of France. They show the effect upon the military profession of a time without maps and without any properly managed system of intelligence; and, above all, they show the overwhelming part which chance plays in all armed conflict between forces of the same civilisation and approximately the same apt.i.tudes.
The situation upon Wednesday the 23rd of August (at which point we concluded the survey of Edward III.'s great raid through Normandy, and of his retreat down the line of the Somme) is already known to the reader, and will be the clearer if he will look at the map upon page 28.
Edward had made a very fine march indeed, not only averaging something like twelve miles a day, or more, but arranging for expeditions to leave the main host during the latter part of this rapid retreat, and attempt to force, at various points, the pa.s.sages of the River Somme. We have seen that he was compelled, if possible, to force a pa.s.sage because he would otherwise find himself shut up between the Somme and the sea, with a much superior force cutting him off to the south. In case of defeat he would have no line of retreat, and even in case of success, unless that success were overwhelming, he would find himself strategically stalemated, still caught in a trap, and still doomed to await the next onslaught of the enemy. We have further seen that with every mile that he proceeded towards the sea his ability to cross the Somme decreased. The river runs through a marshy valley which, even to-day, is a ma.s.s of ponds and water meadows, and which then was a belt of marsh. It is bounded on either side by fairly steep banks, rising to heights of 60, 70, and 100 feet, and inland to 150, between which the flat swamped land grows broader and broader as one approaches the sea. At Picquigny this level belt of swamp through which the Somme twines is quite 500 yards across. At Long Pre it is nearer 800, below Abbeville it is 1000, and at the point whence Edward overlooked it when he was halted at bay on the evening of that 23rd of August, it is well over 2000 yards in width and nearer 2500.
Boismont, a village climbing the southern bank of the estuary, was the spot on which the King had gathered the army upon the evening of that Wednesday, and, not a day's march behind him, the most advanced mounted men of his pursuers, with the King of France among them, were camping. The peril was extreme, and an issue from that peril as extremely doubtful.
It was hopeless for the army to attempt to retrace its steps to the upper river. To have done so would have been to march with the flank of its march exposed to an immediate advance of French forces, and almost certainly to be caught in column; and Edward had already suffered such repulses before Long Pre, Pont Remy, and Picquigny as left him no hope for success should he attempt these bridges again. His only chance was to find, if it were possible, some practicable ford across the broad estuary itself that lay before him.
The moon was within a few hours of the full that night, the highest of the spring-tides was making--in the open sea they were at their full height of 25 feet, an hour before midnight,--and though where he would strike the estuary he might hope for a tide more tardy, Edward had before him as he watched, his only avenue of escape, a great flood that appeared to deny him all access to the further sh.o.r.e.
Every effort was made to discover from local knowledge whether any pa.s.sage existed. The highest rewards were offered, in vain, for in all that countryside a feeling which if not national was at least strongly opposed to the invader, forbade treason, and the near presence of the French King's great force was an active reminder of the punishment that would attend it. Late in this period of suspense a guide was found.
A man of the name of Gobin Agache, who had been taken prisoner by the army, was that guide. His was that ”invaluable” capture which I mentioned in the last section. He was a peasant of those parts, and a native of Mons-en-Vimieux, through which the army had marched from Acheux to Boismont. He yielded to temptation when all others had refused. He was promised a hundred pieces of gold (say 500 of our money), his own liberty, and that of twenty of his companions. For that price he sold himself, and promised to discover to the King and to his army the only practicable ford across the estuary.
Just at the end of the night the host set out and marched during the first hours of the moonlit Wednesday morning along the old road which still leads over the hills that separate Boismont from Saigneville and marked the southern bank of the valley. The marshalling was long; the full ordering of the force, now that it was all gathered together and marching along one narrow way, inexpeditious; and the two miles that separated the head of its column from the neighbouring village were not traversed by its last units, nor was the whole body drawn up at the foot of the hills against the water until the sun of that late August day was beginning to rise, and to show more clearly the great sheet of flood-water and the steep distant bank beyond it.
The place to which their guide had led them was the entry to the ford of Blanchetaque, a name famous in the military history of this country.
Hidden beneath the waters which, though now ebbing strongly, were still far too deep for any attempt at a crossing, ran the causeway. By it, upon the faith of the traitor, they could trust to gaining the opposite sh.o.r.e.
As the racing ebb lowered more and more, the landward approaches of that causeway appeared in a lengthening white belt pointing right across towards the further bank, and a.s.sured them that they had not been betrayed. It was built of firm marl in the midst of that gra.s.sy slime which marks the edges of the Somme valley, and they had but to wait for low water to be certain that they could make the pa.s.sage. Beyond, upon the northern sh.o.r.e which showed in a high, black band (for it was steep) against the broadening day, they could distinguish a force that had been gathered to oppose them.
It was mid-morning before the ebb was at its lowest,[9] and they could begin to march ”twelve abreast, and with the water no more than knee-high,” across the dwindled stream now at its lowermost of slack water, and running near the further bank with a breadth not a fifth of what it had been at the flood. But before proceeding further and describing the a.s.sault sh.o.r.e, I would lay before my readers the process by which I have established the exact locality of this famous ford. It has been a matter of considerable historical debate. It is and will always remain a matter of high historical interest, and this must be my excuse for digressing upon the evidence which, I think it will be admitted, finally establishes the exact trajectory of Blanchetaque.
The site of Blanchetaque is one which nature and art have combined to render obscure: nature, because a ford when its purpose disappears and it is no longer kept up, that is, an artificial ford, tends to disappear more rapidly than any other monument; art, because the old estuary of the Somme has of recent years been further and further reclaimed. It was, when I first began studying this district, already banked across below Boismont, and, if I am not mistaken, the great railway bridge right across the very mouth of the river has, in the last few months, been made the boundary of the reclaimed land.
Now, Blanchetaque was an artificial ford. We know this because there is no marl formation near by, and could be none forming a narrow rib across the deep alluvial mud of the estuary; the marl, then, can only have been brought from some little distance. It is not only an artificial hardening which we have to deal with, but one in the midst of a tidal estuary where a violent current swept the work for centuries. Finally, the cause for keeping the ford in some sort of repair early disappeared in modern times before the process of reclaiming the land of the estuary began. Numerous modern bridges, coupled with the great development of modern roads, permitted the crossing of the Somme at and below Abbeville: notably the Bridge of Cambron. The railway, the growth of the tonnage of steamers, and other causes, led to the decline of the little riverside town of Port--formerly the secure head of marine navigation upon the river and largely the cause that Blanchetaque was kept in repair.
Again, the reclamation of the land has been carried out with a French thoroughness only too successful in destroying the contours of the old river bed. In the sketch map on p. 60 I have indicated to the best of my ability the channel of the river at low tide as it appears to have been before reclamation began, but even this can barely be traced upon the levelled, heightened, and now fruitful pastures.
It is all this which has made the exact emplacement of Blanchetaque so difficult to ascertain, and has led to the controversies upon its site.
Now, if we will proceed to gather all forms of evidence, we shall find that they converge upon one particular line of trajectory which in the end we can regard as completely established.
We have in the first place (and most valuable of all, of course) tradition. Local traditions luckily carefully gathered as late as 1840,[10] but the indications of the peasants pointing out the traditional site of the then ruined way were, unfortunately, not marked on a map. What _was_ done was to give an indication unfortunately not too precise, and to leave it on record that the northern end of the ford was ”from 1200 to 1500 metres below Port.” This gives us a margin of possible error, not of 300 yards as might be supposed, but of more than double that distance, for Port itself is 500 yards in length from east to west. We can be certain, however, that so far as tradition goes we need not look more than a mile below Port for the ford, nor less than say half a mile from its last houses.
Fortunately, we have other convergent indications which can guide us with greater precision.