Chapter IV: Part 4

What caused the request? Why were these terms accepted and observed? We cannot tell. The request was made, and in that form granted and accepted. Whether it was an outward symbol of the truce with Saladin through this favour to his son, or a permission to ride out and seek forage, by agreement; for whatever reason, the request was made and granted as I have said; and the 1st of May, 1187, was fixed for so singular an adventure. It was the Feast of St. Philip and St. James.

The Count Raymond sent round throughout his wife’s land of Galilee that on this coming day of the Saracens’ Ride no man should appear in the fields, lest by accident there should be provocation. He feared lest, after that hushed, expectant, toppling mood, which the enormous preparations of Saladin had now imposed upon all the East, there should suddenly be heard the roar of an explosion. All his subjects were to be within their farms, or behind the walls of their towns; all cattle were to be driven within their byres and folds. The seven thousand infidel lances were to ride round through an empty land, and so return.

They set out northward after they had crossed Jordan, followed the bank of the lake, challenged, as they passed, the gates of Tiberias; but, true to their compact, they shot no arrow, they threw no javelin. They rode on up to Nazareth, where it slopes to the south on the Galilean hills--Nazareth the chief point of their hatred. They passed under the walls of the little town with insults, but with no act of arms. They rode yet farther, fatiguing their light mounts, until they could look down the hills across the great plain of Esdraelon to the height of Carmel, and even to a glimpse of the sea. They had ridden more than twenty miles deep into Galilee before the leaders turned rein to reach their camp again down in the deep trench of Jordan, to cross the river and to find their tents.

It was already late in the afternoon, but the sun still high in the sky (and their terms therefore strictly kept) when, as they halted their tired beasts near the lake shore under the hills before the crossing of the river, they saw a strange sight.

Less than one hundred mounted men, heavily armoured as was the fashion of the Franks, sitting their larger horses, already deployed as though for battle, came over the last crest and began slowly moving down the slope above them.

They watched the sight curiously. If this unknown band intended battle, it was challenging odds of nearly a hundred to one. But why had they appeared?

The brilliant summer day had been marked throughout by the silence of all that countryside; by the absence not only of soldiery, but even of peasants and their kine. This little line of isolated knights, with nothing in support and no one near, might have seemed a mirage for its futility. But it was real enough against the falling hillside under the westering sun. Since so small, novel, unexpected a force seemed to propose a challenge before the Moslem cavalry could cross the Jordan, that large Saracen force deployed in turn on its small tired horses, and awaited the charge. They took their favourite formation of a shallow crescent--the universal tactic of their time against the weight of a European charge. They drew back the centre from the main blow, and trusted by numbers to develop in the wings. So stood the hundredfold cavalry of the Mahommedans, expecting the shock and their own inevitable victory.

Why had this small Christian force so appeared?

This is what had happened.

The King of Jerusalem had sent two great messengers to Count Raymond of Tripoli. He desired, if it might be, to compose his quarrel. He felt the coming of the storm.

These two messengers were the heads of the great military orders--the Master of the Knights Templar and the Master of the Hospital.

They had come so far upon their journey northward as Nazareth, and lay there upon the night before Afdal’s ride. There, at Nazareth, they had received the message which Raymond had sent round the whole countryside, warning them against provoking Afdal, when that son of Saladin should come outside the walls. Of these two men, one merits a particular attention: the Master of the Temple. I have just written of him.

He was a knight, French in speech, Gerard by name, doubtless from Bideford, in Devon. A man of energy and even of violence, of ambition in government, of great courage, too personal in hatred, and alive with the splendid traditions of his Order in arms. He it was who had most supported the young queen in Jerusalem, most helped to make her husband the king, most thwarted the high claims of the Count of Tripoli. All this must be remembered to understand what follows.

This man, Gerard, then, the Master of the Templars, was there in Nazareth that afternoon of the 30th of April, upon the eve of Afdal’s ride. And when he heard Count Raymond’s order, he took it--quite wrongly--for treason.

_This_ is the note of the tragedy that was to come two months later. _This_ is the evil thread running through all the story of our disaster in the East--the legend of Raymond’s treason had taken root.

Raymond of Tripoli had preferred the political way to the direct. He had parleyed with Saladin. And on that account he, by far the greatest soldier of them all, lost direction, and, in spite of his genius, saw Jerusalem and all Palestine go down.

Later he died of the shame.

The two Masters, I say, he of the Temple and he of the Hospital, had received Raymond’s order--to keep quiet within walls. This is the way they treated it. They sent at once to such knights of their two societies as were within riding distance of the town. They gathered less than one hundred. They harangued them in the market-place of Nazareth, saying it was foul shame to stand unmounted and with the sword sheathed while the Saracens rode unchallenged through the open country, with their high minaret cries of insult and defiance. The little group of knights was moved; for the whole spirit of their foundation was to risk odds and to sacrifice themselves perpetually. They cared nothing for numbers. With their footmen to serve them, perhaps four hundred (and these seem to have straggled and to have been left behind), they rode out before evening from the northern gate of Nazareth, and so eastwards, following the retirement of Afdal. Hence it was that Saladin’s son had seen them, as I have described, suddenly appearing upon the fall of the hill above them, a handful of armed men upon their larger horses, confronting a force more than a hundred times their own.

The Templars and the Hospitallers charged. They were surrounded; nearly all fell; but in the course of the _mêlée_ the execution they did was so great that the day remained legendary with the enemy. One especially, James (who came from Maille, in Touraine, and who was among the last survivors), they thought (did the Saracens) to be St. George himself upon a white horse; for in both armies there was this superstition or vision as old as the battle of Konieh, that St. George was to be seen leading the Christian ranks. His enemies stood round the dead man with lifted hands, the dread of unseen things upon them. They wiped the sweat and blood and dust from his face, and carried him off like a relic, still thinking him something from beyond this world.

When the slaughter was done, and all save, perhaps, some five or six of that little band had fallen (some cut their way out, we know, for we find them in the later battle), Afdal stuck Christian heads on his lances in triumph and rode on, and, with his reduced thousands, crossed Jordan just before the setting of the sun; and such was the end of that day’s foray.

When the news of it came to Tiberias to Count Raymond, he saw at once the enormity of the moment. In numbers insignificant, their action should be forgiven as heroic; but the separate policy, the contempt for his orders, the provocation offered by these few knights, would surely set in movement that great machine, the rumbling of whose wheels all the East was expecting. It was a challenge to Saladin, the very challenge which Saladin thirsted for: and Raymond sweated to delay catastrophe. The challenge had been given prematurely in spite of him, and to the ruin of his plans. It could not now be undone.

Raymond of Tripoli forgot, in the common cause, the past and its angers. He hurried south to Jerusalem. He was reconciled to Guy of Lusignan. All the Christian knights became one body. The bravest and most spirited of them all, the high-born adventurer Reginald, who held the strong outpost, Kerak, on the south of the Dead Sea; who had, in raid after raid, harassed the rich caravans of the desert; who, with an amazing energy, had approached, in the height of summer, the Red Sea itself (sending his ships in sections over the desert on camels), and menaced the holy places of the enemy hundreds of miles away--Reginald, whom Saladin hated with a personal hatred for his fearlessness and his unbroken power, at whose castle only that winter he had impotently shaken his spear: Reginald of Chatillon came riding in. The garrisons were withdrawn from the towers of the sea-coast and from the towns--from Askalon, from Gaza, from Acre, from Tyre. Two thousand knights and barons, fully armed, were gathered together, and such a full levy meant, with all their sergeants and their footmen, a force of fifty thousand. They were more; for the Eurasians, called “Turcopoles,” went with them lightly mounted--of no great service save, perhaps, to observe.

A meeting-place was discussed. It was chosen, I think, by the advice of Raymond (for once accepted by his peers), at a point over against the only road whereby the host of Saladin could come--that is, in the very heart of Galilee.

For Saladin, based on Damascus, must strike just to the north or just to the south of the Lake of Tiberias, and almost certainly by the main road south of it--the road that has seen unnumbered armies pass since the beginning of human life upon those hills.

In the choice of this gathering-place, right in the heart of Galilee, you have one of those curious marriages between the symbolic and the real of which history is full. The place chosen (because even in the height of summer it had ample water) was that of the village, the plain, the wells of Sepphoris: which they call to-day “Seffurieh.”

What an arena for the great issue between the rival forces of the world! Not four miles south over the hill was Nazareth; not four miles east was Cana of Galilee. A day’s march beyond Nazareth, over the valley which Nazareth commands, was Nain. The tradition of the Transfiguration looked at them from Mount Tabor, and the plains below had seen Saul creep by night to find the dead at Endor, and had watched the rush of Barak from the mountain slopes against the heathen, and had heard the song of Deborah. Far below them, in the flat, ran the Kishon. A day’s walk to the east was the town of the Magdalen, and the shores of that little inland sea round which is set half the story of the Gospels.

Here to the Wells of Sepphoris they came, then, from all the points of the Holy Land, riding in; and that great fragment of the True Cross, the standard of the Crusades, was sent to be the heart of the host in this last trial.

So they gathered.

Meanwhile the mighty instrument which threatened them was gathering too. Saladin, who had earlier been south in the desert, in the dark hills beyond the Dead Sea, had come back north. He had summoned all his troops from as far as the Tigris, and the Orontes, and the borders of Egypt. Twelve thousand of the knights alone--that is, of men who held rank by what the Christians would have called “noble tenure”--were in his muster; with, perhaps, six or seven or ten times as many--an unknown multitude--of lesser soldiers eager for “Allah’s road”; the holy business of uprooting the Nazarenes: that is, ourselves; Europe; Christendom.

Saladin also had his gathering-place--Ashtaroth, on the great pilgrims’ road in the Hauran, two days’ march east of Jordan, four days’ from Damascus. Thence going a few miles northward (much to where the station of Tesil now stands on the Damascus railway) he reviewed that vast host of varied men.

It was a Friday, the holy day of the Moslem week, on which day the great fanatic loved to begin an enterprise--Friday, the 26th of June, 1187, the fourteenth day of the month of Rabi-el-Aker, in the five hundred and eighty-third year of the Hegira. On that same day, at the hour of public prayer, he began his march, and, going far, encamped his army that night where his son’s cavalry had stood two months before in the plain to the east of Jordan, just south of the Sea of Galilee.

There for a space he halted. His scouts and spies went cautiously westward over the burnt fields and stubble of the blazing summer for news, and brought back the numbers and names of this gathering of the Christian host at the Wells of Sepphoris.

Saladin took counsel with his captains, and it was determined to provoke immediate action, for the superiority of the Moslems was very great.

Upon Monday, the 29th, the host crossed Jordan and entered Galilee, camping immediately upon the hither bank, and making no true march that day. But upon the 30th they advanced westward some seven miles on to the higher land, and stood at Kefr Sabt, astride the direct way between Nazareth and Tiberias, ten miles or so to the east of the Christian camp at Sepphoris.

The Christian host did not move.

Saladin, by one of those actions in which a soldier compels or provokes something military through something political, detached a force to ruin Tiberias. It was Raymond’s capital of Galilee, and there in the stronghold were Raymond’s wife and her children. Hoping that such a provocation would compel a decision, the Sultan, leaving a considerable force at Kefr Sabt, moved the mass of his troops somewhat northward to cover with their camp the main road between Sepphoris and Tiberias; while the third body, dispatched against Tiberias itself, did their work. This second camp of his in Galilee lay on the broad plateau south of a little village called HATTIN. This plateau was the watershed between the gullies (dry at such a season) which run down to the Mediterranean and the streams and fountains fully supplied which take their short course eastward by a fall of many hundred feet into the trench of the Jordan valley and the Sea of Galilee. From Tiberias itself, and the shores of the lake, Saladin’s camp stood but half an hour’s ride away, and meanwhile the force he had detached (and led) to reduce Tiberias was burning the town.

Raymond’s own wife was close besieged upon the rocky acropolis of it, threatened every moment with disaster. She sent, as Saladin had hoped she would send, entreaties to the Christian host that they would march east at once and succour her and her garrison. It was she (the daughter of the Lord of St. Omer) who had brought Galilee to Raymond for her dower. Her four children were with her, and death was upon them all.

It was upon Thursday, the 2nd of July, that her passionate letter came in to the Christian camp, at vespers, in the late afternoon of the day. In the great red tent of Guy, the King of Jerusalem, the council was held.

It seemed a clear task to march at once to the relief of the capital; a first day’s march and a battle upon the second should decide the issue--and surely time pressed most urgently.

Then it was that Raymond himself rose in the crowded assembly, under the red light that glared through the hangings of the pavilion, and made a speech which all but changed the story of the world.

Those who had heard of him only by name crowded around Raymond to see so famous a figure. What did they see?

A little, very thin man, scanty of hair, and that hair very flat upon his head. He was dark, abstemious, spare, with brilliant, piercing eyes; older than the run of those knights; a light weight on horseback; hardly (to look at) a strong swordsman, but with the just reputation of soldiership beyond any other man there. His French words rose.

The moment he began to speak it was seen that his advice would run counter to the universal counsel of those lords.

“I shall surprise you,” he said. “I shall prefer the interests of the State to my own. My own country is overrun. It is my people who are suffering death and slavery; my town that is in flames; my wife who is besieged and crying for succour. Everything draws me to relieve Tiberias, except my business as a Christian, which is to serve the common cause at the cost of my own disaster.”

He bade them not attack but stand fast where they were, supplied with ample water. Between them and Saladin’s position, south of Hattin, in this brazen height of the summer, not a drop would be found in the baked gullies. The infidel army covered all the springs and the lake behind them. It was but ten miles, but those ten miles would spell disaster. Let Tiberias go. The Sultan would be compelled to attack very soon. _His_ then would be the fatigue, _his_ the thirst. And his retirement, should he be checked, would be through a hostile country. We even find, in the record of what is told of his speech, some hint of stratagem. It may be that Raymond, with his clear eye for war, had ready some force for watching the passages of the Jordan, and threatening to cut off Saladin’s retirement.

So he spoke, as the evening lengthened, after the time of vespers, upon that Thursday, the 2nd of July. No one believed him. Though none said it in his presence, he felt it in the air around him that he was already, in their legend, the traitor. Whatever he advised, their minds conceived as the trick of something too astute for a loyal man-at-arms. And when his advice had been given there was a murmur and a rumour all round.

But as discussion followed and broadened, the older or more poised men weighed fully what the Count of Tripoli had said. For a time, as night approached, their argument was gaining, and the council was perhaps dispersing (or had dispersed) with the determination to stand fast and await the attack of Saladin. But after darkness had fallen, whether in full council or alone, that man who thought himself the counterpoise to Raymond, and who thoroughly believed in Raymond’s treason, Gerard of Bideford, came to King Guy and urged and urged the folly of listening to any plan coming from a man who, to the public shame, had once bargained with Saladin.

The king, Guy of Lusignan, changed again, and perhaps his council with him. At any rate, he was obeyed, Raymond’s advice neglected; and at dawn the great host began its fatal march and fighting of Friday, the 3rd of July, 1187.

At the head of the column rode Raymond himself and his immediate vassals, the men of Galilee, and those from Tyre and the north, as though to prove at once his discipline in what he now thought a lost cause and his readiness to take the sacrifice. After, with the main body trailing along the road of that upland, through the parched fields, came King Guy himself and the guard round the fragment of the True Cross; while the Knights Templar under their passionate Devonshire leader, in part the cause of so much evil, and their brethren, the Hospitallers, covered the train and baggage at the rear.

The sun rose, the heat immediately struck, and with it struck also here and there, harassing the flanks of the column, forbidding the army elbow room, appearing and disappearing through the thick dust, the hornets of Saladin. Those light horsemen darted, skirmishing on their rapid desert mounts, armed with the long light lance, and pricking, as it were, and goading the cumbersome body, whose surface alone as yet they could irritate, and which yet they could so gravely impede.

The sun still rose; the heat increased; men straggled; there were too frequent delays and uncommanded halts; blocks in the column. And all the while the Saracen swarm grew and grew on either side, almost encircling. Still the long column struggled forward. Before noon began the complaint for water. Of all the gullies crossed in the first slow dusty seven miles or so, not one had so much as a stagnant pool between its hot stones. Such gourds as men had with them were long ago consumed, and of other provisions of water for such a host there was none, and could be none in those days.

They had passed by Cana of Galilee, they had come to the bare upland plateau, where the air danced in the heat over the glaring limestone, and the broad rough track of the earthen road was a fog of scorching dust. It was the early afternoon. The still increasing masses of enemy horse striking and turning again, shepherding in their enemy, almost surrounded the Christians. Already some grave disorder was appearing in that three miles or more of exhausted men. In a halt deliberately called Raymond once more gave his last advice--once more to be wasted. He told King Guy that there could be nothing ahead but disaster for a force which had fallen so suddenly into such a condition--a condition inevitable in attempting such a march through such a country at such a season, and with such forces against such a foe. Moreover, they were threatened with envelopment. One way out remained, and only one. It was to wheel round to the right--that is, south-eastward; to cut their way through to water that night in the valley of the Fejjas brook, and with the morning, refreshed, to hold the passages of the Jordan. Then let Saladin, if he will, come down south against them. Short of breaking their defence, his retreat was cut off, and his great host was ruined. Again Guy of Lusignan hesitated. Perhaps Raymond’s plan would have won; but in the midst of this deliberation, the harassing Mahommedan cavalry took on another aspect, more severe than the last. They came on in full force. They rode round the host. They not only cut into the flanks but into the Knights Templar with their baggage to the rear, and the end of that day of torture and thirst was spent up to nightfall in a full battle against a perfect circle of foes. Many of the stragglers had already fallen out in each episode of confusion, and had passed to death or slavery. The now depleted, fainting column camped that night; still an organized body, but terribly shaken and already doomed. It was a night of agony and of alarm. Long before morning that army of the Cross and Europe was already defeated.

All through the short darkness men implored and fought for water, and could not obtain it. Upon so much agony worse came. The Saracens set fire to the dry bushes of that limestone upland, and under a light wind the smoke drove through the Christian camp. Raymond, in the van, knew that the dice had fallen. “He called upon God the Lord, and said that the realm was ruined.” It was so.

The dawn of the Saturday broke. Raymond, with the van, took horse, and saw before him, dark against the sunrise, the strange twin saddle peaks which they call the Horns of Hattin, the watch towers of that land. At their foot stood deployed the main body of Saladin; the rest of his followers were on either side. The envelopment was complete. There, behind the Saracens, was water, food. The enemy fought refreshed against ghosts of men.

Their armament was stronger too. All the Saracen munitionment was carefully distributed for a certain victory. The camels, with their loads of arrows, were ranged behind the archers, and there was a great reserve as well. It is true that, had the Christian army been by some miracle in condition for strong action, the Sultan’s position was very perilous. He was right on the lake, with very steep falling land only a few hundred yards behind him, and his only road of retreat passed just behind the fronts of the two armies. If those fronts shifted in his disfavour, if his light men broke at the shock of the heavier Franks, that road would be cut. Whether the unfavourable position weighed with him or no, whether he had fully gauged the breakdown of what was now before him, we cannot tell. He seems, up to the very end of the fight, to have had some doubt, tugging nervously at his beard and saying, “It was not yet over!” The historian, with both conditions before him, and knowing what exhaustion now weighed upon the Christians, can have none.

It was again, though on a much larger scale, in that same formation of a shallow crescent, that the heart of the Moslem force--that in front of the head of the Christian host under Raymond--was drawn up. It did not at once attack, perhaps depending upon the sun and the heat as allies; and when it did so, it opened with a violent discharge of arrows. The effect of this was clinched by a general advance of the whole Mahommedan line at the charge. It caught and gripped the Christian body, separated its units, reduced the battle to a great mêlée, in which numbers, a better order, and--far more important than everything else--_condition_, were wholly upon the side of the enemy. There is no plan possible of this surging business, for no scheme was necessary or attempted. It was a cutting off of large isolated bodies, a cutting down of smaller ones, and a quantity of hand-to-hand fighting between men refreshed and men maddened by thirst; and for the most part the Christian infantry that followed the Christian knights was already in the mood for surrender, or even for accepting death.

Raymond, Count of Tripoli, with his knights, charged at the king’s command right forward into the press. He found against him the Sultan’s nephew, who opened his ranks and closed them after the small body of knights had crashed through. Raymond found himself with his companions cut off far forward. He hacked his way out through the mass of the Arab horses, and rode with his few companions straight for Tyre. There fell upon him a stupor, and later a frenzy, to see Christendom thus ruined. In a few weeks he was dead.

The footmen, the ill-trained levies from the towns, the half-armed peasantry, had already suffered massacre or surrendered in great groups of thousands. The struggle had not lasted the day long. It was perhaps hardly noon when one small remnant of the Christian host, crowding round the king, still held out. Of the fully armed men there were but one hundred and fifty: with their followers a few score more. The central point which they were guarding was the fragment of the Holy Cross, and what they were defending was a little mound on which there still stood the great red tent of the king. It fell, and the last of the fight was over.

That evening, in the tent of Saladin (which he caused to be pitched right in the heart of the battlefield), there took place an encounter of the two spirits of Europe and of Asia--of Western chivalry and of Oriental hate face to face.

This is what happened. The conqueror caused to be seated upon his right the broken King of Jerusalem, half dead with the thirst and the heat of that day. Saladin gave him the first water he had tasted for many hours. There stood also before him Reginald of Chatillon, whom he had so hated with the violence of a religious hate for his audacity, his splendid courage, and, above all, for his threat to the holy cities of Islam. This man was now in his power, and the Sultan acted as Asia acts in such a pass. He abused him violently, reminded him of the unforgivable crime--that he had dared approach Mecca--dragged in the excuse of the raided caravans, and then fell upon the unarmed man himself to murder him, but not before he had heard the knight tell him that he would not save his life at the cost of faith, and answering with the pride of a man completely indifferent to death. This furious and horrible thing was not sufficient. Reginald of Chatillon, Lord of Kerak, was dragged out, still alive, and hacked to death by the guards. Then the conqueror gave orders that the most gallant and the strongest of his prisoners, those most symbolic of the faith which he hated--I mean the Knights of the Hospital and of the Temple--should be massacred. He knew that they always refused ransom. There were two hundred of these men. They were butchered before the victorious army in a public place.

This was the end of the fight which decided the vast affair between our people and those of the East. Thenceforward, point by point, we lost the mastery of the Mediterranean; we admitted the stranger everywhere. We sowed that harvest of tragedy which is to-day the Balkans, the Dardanelles, the isolation of the Slav. Spain only we recovered. And as for the fragment of the Cross, they carried it away to Damascus. Jerusalem was theirs that autumn. Whose is it to-day?

CHÂTEAU GAILLARD

(_March 6, 1204_)

Philip Augustus, the King of France, sat upon a stone; it was a rough block of stone that lay, not yet used by the builders, on the rampart of his lines before Château Gaillard.

The huge building lay before him like a town--but such a town as no sight we see to-day can recall. Mass upon mass of sheer masonry--worked limestone--carefully jointed, and towering wall within and above wall, angle conflicting with angle in a hundred ways, and the whole an effort of shoulders and of rock. These things were (their ruins are) a sort of sacrament in human strength. What man can do to defend himself against man was there visible and tangible and amenable to common standards: apparent to a child as much as to a mathematician. And it was not only a sacrament of strength and of defence appalling in its dumb solidity and hugeness, but also a sacrament of labour, of energy manifest and achieved. It was also new and white.

Philip Augustus, the king, was an engineer. Every trace of the ditch, of the three circumvallations, of bastion and of angle, meant for him just what it should mean. He understood the co-relation of every part in that vast whole. It was for him what a score of music is to those rare men who can read and take pleasure in music from its mere printed signs though no instrument is sounding. And as he meditated the attack he admired. His creative soul was full of that creation which another such soul had ordered--Richard, the Angevin, the Lion Heart, now dead.

The King of France, thus sitting alone (for he would not be accompanied in such a meditation), watched the big thing with his chin upon his hand. He was a man in his fortieth year; his broad, square, somewhat flat face already definitely marked with the fixed passions of the mind and the habits of his long effort of recovery and of triumph. His eyes were a little cautious for those of a soldier, but very steady, and had in them that sort of secret smile which goes with the certitude of delayed achievement. His thin nose, and the slight sneer about his pressed lips, betrayed the same emotion as he pondered. His great head, rather bald for his age, was bare, and did not move in his contemplation of the mighty problem before him.

The foundations of the work were below him, as were its vast surrounding ditch and its first low containing wall. But the turrets and the battlements, with their wooden, jutting platforms, stood immensely above him, and higher still that enormous central keep which was the stake of the entire concern. It stood inhumanly large up against the keen March air, and the wind blew upon it from down the broad river valley and the distant sea. It had in it all the magnificence of Normandy. Down below, hundreds of feet, where the wide river ran, the Seine, he could see the burnt timber houses of Lesser Andelys, surrounded by its wall which he had stormed months before; the ruins also of the outworks upon the island by which he had approached across the stream. He heard, but did not see, the carts in perpetual rumble and the footmen tramping across his bridge of boats below. He heard the hammering of wood and the sawing of stone in his own lines, and in his mind he recalled, as he so sat, the long business of the siege.

Here was the test! This place, once fallen, he had forced the gate of Normandy, the last province which could defy his arms and his sovereignty. For now three hundred years and more it had been a kingdom almost apart from his own, though in feudal tenure responsible to him and to his house. John the Angevin, last Duke of Normandy, no longer the young man but still the great soldier, had abandoned the Normans--now five months ago. He was back in England. And here, before Philip, Roger of Lascy, with his superb little garrison, was still holding out, and until the castle fell there was no passing north into the Caux country or into the Calvados, no seizing of rich Caen or of Rouen, the mistress of all that land.

Philip, the king, remembered the long adventure. The advance up the wide valley of the Seine until, a march away, he first saw, whiter than the white scars of chalk on which it stood, the splendid new work of Richard gleaming far off like a challenge. He remembered the storming of the outworks on the island, the laborious fighting into Andelys, the rush of the refugees into the castle. He remembered the abominable winter, and his alignment of the strict blockade: the sentries calling to each other round the lines through the long, frozen nights. He remembered, not with pleasure, that awful day in which Roger of Lascy had turned out all the useless mouths, the refugees from the town below--the old men, and the children, and the women; their helpless panic, stumbling to and fro between the outer wall and his own lines; their hideous famine, and the blood, and at last his own clemency, and his permission that they should pass through and be fed.

Now the first breath of spring had come, and still the strict blockade was of no avail. Five months had gone, and nothing had been done save to contain that little band within, which still mounted guard surely in regular fashion, whose taunts could still be heard in the rough jibes shouted by night against his sentinels, and whose arrows, when they went down wind, sometimes just reached his lines, and had cost him men here and there. As he sat there he determined, for all great odds and risks, that an assault must be delivered even against so tremendous a body of resistance. Much lay in that decision; but Philip, the soldier, was a man who would arrive at a plan with increasing swiftness of judgment, and, having arrived at it, would as suddenly execute his desire.

There went through the lines the order for the attack, and the whole aspect of the camps surrounding the castle, one great oval linked by continuous works, was changed. The business was now no longer to starve but to destroy--and the murder of Arthur of Brittany should be avenged in violence.

* * * * *

First they made a great way, very broad and hardened everywhere with stone, along which the engines and the wooden towers could be hauled. Then, at night, they threw into the first outer main ditch earth and faggots from the woods on the hill above and all the refuse of the camp, and they began that week to struggle against the corner bastion of the outer wall. It was undermined in its foundations--the sappers’ work defended by vigorous fire from the causeway against the battlements of the tower, and by the repeated shocks from the catapults and the rams, until, in some few days, the hard chalk rock having been tunnelled thoroughly, down came a whole segment of the outer wall, and the first circuit was in the hands of the king. Next, in the same fashion, was the second circuit attempted; and this, far less extended, concentrating its men more thoroughly, resisted with greater power. The engines did nothing against it. It seemed that the assault must fail.

Now there was in King Philip’s army a soldier called Bogis, an obscure man loving ruse, and he found that in certain wooden outworks of the place there was an entry to be made by those who could cunningly avoid the sentinels, and he, with a small band, went in there. But just as they thought to hold this entry, the besieged caught them, and, as being the quickest way to drive them out, set fire to this little building. It was a ruinous plan. Both had they--the besieged themselves--to retire from the fierceness of the flame, and also they were, by the effect of the fire when it was over and done, left with a gap in their defences, so that though the first intruders had been beaten back, Philip’s men could pour through the charred breach.

They were at the third wall, the high wall round the donjon keep, and this was taken by mere strength and at vast loss and at storm. But of Lascy’s very loyal band not two hundred remained, and all of them defending the wall, so that when they were cut off by the many thousands of Philip Augustus, the king, they could not post even a rearguard to defend the rush into the keep itself, though that was but a few yards behind; and so, upon the Saturday, the 6th of March, 1204, those that had not fallen in the fight were taken each separately between the wall and the tower. And the Saucy Castle, Richard the Lion Heart’s eldest daughter, so young and so strong, had fallen.

* * * * *

It was the greatest feat of arms, almost, of the Middle Ages. It was to the French monarchy and the re-constitution of the land what Wattignies, six hundred years later, was to be for the defence and the survival of the Revolution. It was the opening of Normandy and the advent of all the host into the rich province of the north; the most stalwart, the most lengthily organized of all the feudal things that had proposed to withstand the re-integration of France. Through that breach in Château Gaillard’s wall, as through a break in a dike, the flood of France poured through, armed, into the deep pasturage, the loaded wealth, the granaries, and the orchards of Normandy. And with Normandy so held under, that summer France was made again. And Philip Augustus, the king, became something almost more than a king as kings were accounted in that time. For he became a strict ruler over not one fief or two of his own, but over fief after fief that had formerly been bound only by plea and service, not in subjection, to his fathers. And it almost seemed as though Rome were returning.

This conqueror so conquering had about him, as he entered the Norman towns after his victory, a physical character of conquest, and there was a monk away in Tours, a canon of St. Martin’s there, who saw him and knew him, and tells us well enough what he was:--

“A man high coloured, of a nature driven to good cheer, and to women and to wine, large to his friends, sparing to those who displeased him, an engineer, in faith Catholic, cautious for the future, stubborn in a resolution formed; he judged at once and directly. Fortune loved him, though he was too careful of his life. He was easily both roused and appeased. He loved to be served by the many and to think himself a tamer of the proud. Of the Church he was a good protector, and he nourished the poor.”

THE CONVERSATION OF THE KING

(1245–1250)

St. Louis, the king, loved quiet speech, meeting the speech of others. He loved rallying and conversed with all as though with peers. Pomp wearied him, even where it was necessary for the dignity of so great a state. Those jests which complete a question and leave no more to be said he was amused to hear. Also he himself observed men with very great wisdom, often silently; and his eyes, which were a little weary even in youth from too much questioning of himself and of the world, and from too much business of fighting of every kind within and without, were always luminous and often smiled. His body, which was spare, exercised by continual chivalry and by the weight of arms, but a little wasted by solicitude, by mortification, and by occasional disease, suited his gesture and the holy irony with which he salted life.

All those, or nearly all, who came about the king--men themselves, for the most part, much grosser in temper or much less subtle in observation--felt this play of his intelligence upon theirs, and when he was dead remembered it most vividly. Nor were the words of St. Louis and his manner things very conscious. They surrounded his personality like an air, impossible to define, easy to taste. They were a perfume. Some who thus received his influence wrote down a little clumsily what they remembered, and the things they wrote down, after so many catastrophes and such vast changes in Europe, stand to-day quite neat and clear. So that when you read of St. Louis it is like looking out of a little window, unglazed, in a tower, and seeing through it, framed in the stones of the wall, a well-ordered, sunlit landscape, particular, vivid, and defined; full of small brilliant things, exact in outline.

One day in that good thirteenth century, when all was new, amid the new white buildings, upon the new ordered roads, when even the grass was new (for it was Pentecost), the king, Louis the Saint, was in Corbeil with eighty of his knights and certain others of his train. And when he had eaten the morning meal (which was at nine o’clock, for that was their hour), he went down to the field below the chapel to speak at the door with Count John of Brittany, and with him was the Seneschal of Champagne and others, younger and older men. And as the groups stood there at the door in the spring sunlight, treading the spring grass, mown smooth, Robert of Cerbon (the same that founded the great college of Sorbonne, so that his name stands everywhere to-day for learning) took the young seneschal’s coat and pulled him by it towards the king. And the seneschal said,--

“What would you with me, Master Robert?”

Robert said,--

“I wish to ask you this: If the king were to sit himself down in this field, and you were to sit down without leave on the same bench, and higher than he, would you not be to blame?”

“Yes,” said the seneschal, “I should.”

“Then,” said Robert, “you are to blame now. For even now you are far more nobly clad than the king, for your coat is of many colours, and embroidered nobly with green, and the king does not go so clothed.”

Louis, hearing this dispute, smiled at them but did not speak. And the seneschal answered sharply,--

“Master Robert, saving your grace, I am not to blame at all, though I do dress in ’broidery and in green. For this cloak was left to me by my father and my mother, who were noble. But you are to blame. For you are the son of a serf, and your mother was a serf as well, and you have given up the clothes that were left you by your father and your mother, and you are dressed in rich woollens much grander than the king’s.”

And the seneschal, growing livelier still, took Robert of Cerbon’s coat, and took the hem of the king’s coat, and held them up side by side, and said triumphantly,--

“There! See if I do not speak the truth. Look how much grander is the stuff you wear than the stuff that clothes the king.”

Then King Louis spoke, and first he put his hand upon the sward and sat him down at the gate of the chapel, and said to his sons, who were there, young men,--

“Come, sit down beside me on the grass that we may hear each other the plainer.”

And they answered,--

“Sire, we would not dare.”

Then he said to the seneschal,--

“Seneschal, do you sit so.”

And so did the seneschal. He sat so close that their two cloaks touched.

Then said St. Louis to his sons,--

“You have done very wrong in that you did not obey at once, you, my sons.”

And then he said to the seneschal,--

“You did wrong to speak thus to Master Robert, and when I saw how shamed you made him, I at once knew that it was my business to defend him; and as to dress, this is my counsel: you all of you should dress well and decently, in order that your women may love you more, and that your household may respect you; for the wise man says that we ought to dress ourselves and to arm ourselves in such a manner that neither shall the good men of this world blame us for extravagance nor the young blades for meanness.”

And upon another time, when they were sailing upon the sea, it being night, the ship was struck violently and lay over, and the storm rose so that it was thought she could not live. Then St. Louis, understanding that death was at hand, went as he was, half-clad, to where the Blessed Sacrament was kept, and there expected death.

But when the storm as suddenly abated, and the morning was come, and danger was passed, he asked by what name that wind was called which had nearly wrecked the King of France and all his people. To which the master mariner answered that this wind was no great wind, not one of the major winds of the world, not one of the cardinal winds, but a little side wind that hardly had a name, though some called it the little Gerbin wind.

When St. Louis heard this, he said to one of those about him,--

“See how great is God, and how He shows us His power. Since one of His little unimportant winds, which hardly has a name, all but destroyed the King of France, his children, and his wife, and all his household, in peril of the sea.”

St. Louis, the king, loved also to tell this tale:--

There was a master in divinity, one who had disputed for the Faith, and he came to Bishop William of Paris in great distress, and said that he was full of doubt, and that his heart would not bend to believe in the Sacrament of the Altar, and that this mood, sent by the Enemy, pressed him sore.

To whom Bishop William answered,--

“And does this please you?”

To which the argufier answered vehemently,--

“Not at all! I am tormented thereby!”

“Sir,” said the bishop again, “would you be pleased that these new doubts should conquer?”

“I would rather,” said the poor man, “that my limbs should be torn from my body.”

“Why, then,” said Bishop William, “I will give you a parable. You know that the King of France wars now with the King of England, and that on the front of this war stands the castle of Rochelle, which is in the country of Poitiers. Now, if the king had given you Rochelle to guard, upon the edges of the war where the fighting is, but to me the hill of Laon, peaceably in the heart of his kingdom, which would be honour most--to whom would he give the greater reward?”

“To the man,” said the doubter, “who held Rochelle.”

“Well, then,” said Bishop William, “let me tell you that my heart is not even like the hill of Laon, but rather like the little hill of Montlheri, near Paris, with its tower, for I have never doubted at all. So where God gives me in reward one measure, he will give you four.”

St. Louis said that one should never speak ill of any man, and those who listened closely to his talk never remembered his speaking ill of any man; on which account also he would never so much as mention the name of the Devil.

Also one day, when he was in Cyprus, on Crusade, he said to a companion that put water into his wine,--

“Why do you put water into your wine?”

Then that companion, who was a young man, answered,--

“For two reasons. First, because the physicians have warned me to do so; and secondly, because I do not wish to get drunk.”

To which St. Louis answered,--

“You do well. For if you do not learn this custom in youth you will not practise it in age, and if in age you drink your wine unmixed, you will, without doubt, be drunk every evening of your life; which is a horrible thing to see in a valiant man.”

And thinking of this, he said again,--

“Would you be honoured in this world, and then have Paradise?”

And the young man said “Yes.”

Then the king said,--

“This is the rule: Neither say nor do what you would fear that all men should know.”

And another time the king said to this young man, when they were on Crusade in the East,--

“Tell me which you would rather be--a leper, or in mortal sin.”

And the young man, who was afraid to lie to the king, answered,--

“I would much rather have committed thirty or forty mortal sins than be a leper.”

And the king did not answer him; but the next day he said to the young man,--

“Come here and sit at my feet.” Which the young man did, and then St. Louis said, “You spoke yesterday like a wild man in a hurry, for all ills of the body are cured in a little time, when a man dies; but if your soul is tarnished, and you cannot be certain that God has pardoned you, that evil will last for ever as long as God sits in Paradise.”

And then he asked the young man suddenly whether he ever washed the feet of poor men on Maundy Thursday, and the young man answered,--

“Sire, far be it from me to wash the feet of poor men! No! Never will I do this thing!”

And the king said to him,--

“You are wrong again--thinking yourself too grand to do what God did for our enlightenment. Now I pray you, for the love of God and for the love of me, get yourself into the habit of washing poor men’s feet.”

For this king loved all kinds of men, whatsoever kind God had made and Himself loved.

On which account also he would give castles to guard to men that had no claim on him, if they had renown in good deeds. And he would have at his table men of any birth for the same reason. And so seated once at table he said to a companion,--

“Tell me the reasons that a ‘loyal gentleman’ is so good a thing to be called.”

Then they all began disputing and defining, and at the end the king said, giving no reasons and turning to Robert of Cerbon, the same whom he had defended for dressing well,--

“Master Robert, this is what I think upon the matter: I desire to be called by men a ‘loyal gentleman,’ but much more to know that I am one. And if you would leave me that, you might take all the rest; for that title is so great a thing, and so good a thing, that merely to name it fills my mouth.”

THE DEATH OF ST. LOUIS

(_August 25, 1270_)