The Collected Works of Hilaire Belloc. Hilaire Belloc

town twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching and conflicting purposes which may properly be called “The Preliminaries” of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal with them in the next section.

      Sketch Map of operations preceding the Battle

      PART II

       THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION

       Table of Contents

      It was, as we have seen, on the evening of Tuesday, September the 13th, that the Black Prince with his 7000 men and his heavy train of booty had marched into La Haye des Cartes, a small town upon the right bank of the Creuse, somewhat above the place where that river falls into the Vienne.

      His confidence that his well-mounted and light-armed troops could outmarch his pursuers was not yet shaken; he was even prepared to imagine that he had already shaken them off; but anyone who could have taken a general survey of all that countryside would have discovered how ill-founded was his belief. The great forces of the French king, coming down slantways from the north and east, had had nearly four miles to march to his three. Yet they were gaining on him. Edward had given the French king a day’s advance by his hesitation before Tours, and the tardiness with which he had received news of John’s crossing the Loire was another point in favour of the French.

      It was the Black Prince’s business to get down on to the great road which has been the trunk road of Western France for two thousand years, and which leads from Paris through Châtellerault and Poitiers to Angoulême, and so to Bordeaux. If (as he hoped) he could advance so quickly as to get rid of the pursuit, so much the better. If he were still pressed he must continue his rapid marching, but, at any rate, that was the road he must take.

      To the simple plan, however, of reaching Châtellerault and then merely following the great road on through Poitiers, he must make a local exception, for Poitiers itself contained a large population, with plenty of trained men, munitions, and arms; and it was further, from its position as well as from its walls, altogether too strong a place for him to think of taking it.

      The town had been from immemorial time a fortress: first tribal (and the rallying point of the Gaulish Picts under the name of Limon); later, Roman and Frankish. The traveller notes to-day its singular strength, standing on the flat top and sides of its precipitous peninsula, isolated from its plateau on every side save where a narrow neck joins it to the higher land; it is impregnable to mere assault, half surrounded by the Clain to the east, and on the west protected by a deep and formidable ravine.

      It was absolutely necessary for the Prince not only to avoid Poitiers, but not to pass so close to it as to give the alarm. What he proposed to do, therefore, was to strike the great Bordeaux road at a point well south of the city, called Les Roches, and to do this he must engage himself within the broadening triangle which lies between the Clain and the Vienne: these rivers join their waters just above Châtellerault itself.

      The main road from Châtellerault to Poitiers runs on the further side of the Clain from this triangle, and the Black Prince, by engaging himself in the wedge between the rivers, would thus have a stream between his column and the natural marching route of any force which might approach him from the fortified city which he feared.

      Further, he was well provided for part of this march through the triangle between the rivers by the existence of a straight way formed by the old Roman road which runs through it, and may still be followed. He could not pursue this road all the way to Poitiers (which town it ultimately reaches by a bridge over the Clain), but somewhere half-way between Châtellerault and Poitiers he would diverge from it towards the east, and so avoid the latter stronghold and make a straight line for Les Roches. This it would be the easier for him to do because the soil in that countryside is light and firm and traversed by very numerous cross-lanes which serve its equally numerous farms. Only one considerable obstacle interrupts a passage southward through the triangle between the rivers. It is the forest of Moulière. But the Black Prince’s march along the Roman road would skirt this wood to the west, and by the time his approach to Poitiers compelled him to diverge from the Roman road eastward, the boundary of the forest also sloped eastward away from it.

      His first day’s march upon this last lap, as it were, of his escape was a long one. By the road he took it was no less than fifteen miles, and at the end of it he gathered his column into Châtellerault, a couple of miles from the place where the Clain and the Vienne meet, and where the triangle between the two streams through which he proposed to retreat begins. At the same hour that the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, John was leading the head of his column into La Haye. He was just one day’s march behind the Plantagenet.

      There followed an unsoldierly and uncharacteristic blunder on the part of the Black Prince which determined all the strange cross-purposes of that week.

      The Black Prince having made Châtellerault, believed that he had shaken off the pursuit.

      In explanation of this error, it must be remembered that the population so far north as this was universally hostile to the southern cause and to the claim of the Plantagenets. Whether news of the ravaging and burning to the eastward had affected these peasants or no, we are certain that they would give the Anglo-Gascon force nothing but misleading information. The scouting, a perpetual weakness in mediæval warfare, was imperfect; and even had it been better organised, to scout rearwards is not the same thing as scouting on an advance or on the flanks. At any rate, he took it for granted that there was no further need for haste, that he had outmarched the French king, and that the remainder of the retreat might be taken at his own pleasure. It must further be noted that there was a frailty in the Black Prince’s leading which was more than once discovered in his various campaigns, and which he only retrieved by his admirable tactical sense whenever he was compelled to a decision. This frailty consisted, as might be guessed of so headstrong a rider, in trying to get too much out of his troops in a forced march, and paying for it upon the morrow of such efforts by expensive delays which more than counterbalanced its value. He relied too much upon the very large proportion of mounted men which formed the bulk of his small force. He forgot the limitations of his few foot-soldiers and the strain that a too-rapid advance put upon his heavy and cumbersome train of waggons, laden with a heavier and heavier booty as his raid proceeded.

      He stayed in Châtellerault recruiting the strength of his mounts and men for two whole days. He passed the Thursday and the Friday there without moving, and it was not until the Saturday morning that he set out from the town, crossed the Clain, and engaged himself within the triangle between the two rivers.

      The land through which he marched upon that Saturday morning had been the scene of a much more famous and more decisive feat of arms; for it was there, just north of the forest of Moulière, that Charles Martel six hundred years before had overthrown the Mahommedans and saved Europe for ever.

      So he went forward under the morning, making south in a retreat which he believed to be unthreatened.

      Meanwhile, John, at the head of the French army, was pursuing a better-thought-out strategical plan, whose complexity has only puzzled historians because they have not weighed all the factors of the military situation.

      We do not know what numbers the King of France disposed of during this, the first part of the pursuit, but we must presume that he could not yet risk an engagement. The town of Poitiers was everything to him. There he would find provisions and munition, some considerable body of trained men, and the possibility of levying many thousands more. It was a secure rallying point upon which to block the Black Prince’s march to the south, or from which to sally out and intercept his march. But when John found himself in La Haye upon Wednesday the 14th, a day’s march behind Edward’s command, he could not take the direct line for Poitiers because that very command intercepted him. He knew that it had taken the road for Châtellerault. He determined, therefore, by an exceptionally rapid progress, to march round his enemy by the east, to get down to Chauvigny,