Book: Harold, Book 12.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> Harold, Book 12.




Holding up his hand to keep off the press of his men, the generous
King said briefly: "Rise and retreat!--no time on this field for
captor and captive. He whom thou hast called recreant knight, has
been Saxon host. Thou hast fought by his side, thou shalt not die by
his hand!--Go."

Not a word spoke De Graville; but his dark eye dwelt one minute with
mingled pity and reverence on the King; then rising, he turned away;
and slowly, as if he disdained to fly, strode back over the corpses of
his countrymen.

"Stay, all hands!" cried the King to his archers; "yon man hath tasted
our salt, and done us good service of old. He hath paid his
weregeld."

Not a shaft was discharged.

Meanwhile, the Norman infantry, who had been before recoiling, no
sooner saw their Duke (whom they recognised by his steed and
equipment) fall on the ground, than, setting up a shout--"The Duke is
dead!" they fairly turned round, and fled fast in disorder.

The fortune of the day was now well-nigh turned in favour of the
Saxons; and the confusion of the Normans, as the cry of "The Duke is
dead!" reached, and circled round, the host, would have been
irrecoverable, had Harold possessed a cavalry fit to press the
advantage gained, or had not William himself rushed into the midst of
the fugitives, throwing his helmet back on his neck, showing his face,
all animated with fierce valour and disdainful wrath, while he cried
aloud:

"I live, ye varlets! Behold the face of a chief who never yet forgave
coward! Ay, tremble more at me than at yon English, doomed and
accursed as they be! Ye Normans, ye! I blush for you!" and striking
the foremost in the retreat with the flat of his sword, chiding,
stimulating, threatening, promising in a breath, he succeeded in
staying the flight, reforming the lines, and dispelling the general
panic. Then, as he joined his own chosen knights, and surveyed the
field, he beheld an opening which the advanced position of the Saxon
vanguard had left, and by which his knights might gain the
entrenchments. He mused a moment, his face still bare, and
brightening, as he mused. Looking round him, he saw Mallet de
Graville, who had remounted, and said, shortly:

"Pardex, dear knight, we thought you already with St. Michael!--joy,
that you live yet to be an English earl. Look you, ride to
Fitzosborne with the signal-word, 'Li Hardiz passent avant!' Off, and
quick."

De Graville bowed, and darted across the plain.

"Now, my Quens and chevaliers," said William, gaily, as he closed his
helmet, and took from his squire another spear; "now, I shall give ye
the day's great pastime. Pass the word, Sire de Tancarville, to every
horseman--'Charge!--to the Standard!'"

The word passed, the steeds bounded, and the whole force of William's
knighthood, scouring the plain to the rear of the Saxon vanguard, made
for the entrenchments.

At that sight, Harold, divining the object, and seeing this new and
more urgent demand on his presence, halted the battalions over which
he had presided, and, yielding the command to Leofwine, once more
briefly but strenuously enjoined the troops to heed well their
leaders, and on no account to break the wedge, in the form of which
lay their whole strength, both against the cavalry and the greater
number of the foe. Then mounting his horse, and attended only by
Haco, he spurred across the plain, in the opposite direction to that
taken by the Normans. In doing so, he was forced to make a
considerable circuit towards the rear of the entrenchment, and the
farm, with its watchful groups, came in sight. He distinguished the
garbs of the women, and Haco said to him,--

"There wait the wives, to welcome the living victors."

"Or search their lords among the dead!" answered Harold. "Who, Haco,
if we fall, will search for us?"

As the word left his lips, he saw, under a lonely thorn-tree, and
scarce out of bowshot from the entrenchments, a woman seated. The
King looked hard at the bended, hooded form.

"Poor wretch!" he murmured, "her heart is in the battle!" And he
shouted aloud, "Farther off! farther off?--the war rushes hitherward!"

At the sound of that voice the woman rose, stretched her arms, and
sprang forward. But the Saxon chiefs had already turned their faces
towards the neighbouring ingress into the ramparts, and beheld not her
movement, while the tramp of rushing chargers, the shout and the roar
of clashing war, drowned the wail of her feeble cry:

"I have heard him again, again!" murmured the woman, "God be praised!"
and she re-seated herself quietly under the lonely thorn.

As Harold and Haco sprang to their feet within the entrenchments, the
shout of "the King--the King!--Holy Crosse!" came in time to rally the
force at the farther end, now undergoing the full storm of the Norman
chivalry.

The willow ramparts were already rent and hewed beneath the hoofs of
horses and the clash of swords; and the sharp points on the frontals
of the Norman destriers were already gleaming within the
entrenchments, when Harold arrived at the brunt of action. The tide
was then turned; not one of those rash riders left the entrenchments
they had gained; steel and horse alike went down beneath the ponderous
battle-axes; and William, again foiled and baffled, drew off his
cavalry with the reluctant conviction that those breastworks, so
manned, were not to be won by horse. Slowly the knights retreated
down the slope of the hillock, and the English, animated by that
sight, would have left their stronghold to pursue, but for the warning
cry of Harold. The interval in the strife thus gained was promptly
and vigorously employed in repairing the palisades. And this done,
Harold, turning to Haco, and the thegns round him, said joyously:

"By Heaven's help we shall yet win this day. And know you not that it
is my fortunate day--the day on which, hitherto, all hath prospered
with me, in peace and in war--the day of my birth?"

"Of your birth!" echoed Haco in surprise. "Ay--did you not know it?"

"Nay!--strange!--it is also the birthday of Duke William! What would
astrologers say to the meeting of such stars?" [273]

Harold's cheek paled, but his helmet concealed the paleness:--his arm
drooped. The strange dream of his youth again came distinct before
him, as it had come in the hall of the Norman at the sight of the
ghastly relics;--again he saw the shadowy hand from the cloud--again
heard the voice murmuring: "Lo, the star that shone on the birth of
the victor;" again he heard the words of Hilda interpreting the dream
--again the chaunt which the dead or the fiend had poured from the
rigid lips of the Vala. It boomed on his ear; hollow as a death bell
it knelled through the roar of battle--

"Never
Crown and brow shall Force dissever,
Till the dead men, unforgiving,
Loose the war-steeds on the living;
Till a sun whose race is ending
Sees the rival stars contending,
Where the dead men, unforgiving,
Wheel their war-steeds round the living!"

Faded the vision, and died the chaunt, as a breath that dims, and
vanishes from, the mirror of steel. The breath was gone--the firm
steel was bright once more; and suddenly the King was recalled to the
sense of the present hour, by shouts and cries, in which the yell of
Norman triumph predominated, at the further end of the field. The
signal words to Fitzosborne had conveyed to that chief the order for
the mock charge on the Saxon vanguard, to be followed by the feigned
flight; and so artfully had this stratagem been practised, that
despite all the solemn orders of Harold, despite even the warning cry
of Leofwine, who, rash and gay-hearted though he was, had yet a
captain's skill--the bold English, their blood heated by long contest
and seeming victory, could not resist pursuit. They rushed forward
impetuously, breaking the order of their hitherto indomitable phalanx,
and the more eagerly because the Normans had unwittingly taken their
way towards a part of the ground concealing dykes and ditches, into
which the English trusted to precipitate the foe. It was as William's
knights retreated from the breastworks that this fatal error was
committed: and pointing toward the disordered Saxons with a wild laugh
of revengeful joy, William set spurs to his horse, and, followed by
all his chivalry, joined the cavalry of Poitou and Boulogne in their
swoop upon the scattered array. Already the Norman infantry had
turned round--already the horses, that lay in ambush amongst the
brushwood near the dykes, had thundered forth. The whole of the late
impregnable vanguard was broken up, divided corps from corps,--hemmed
in; horse after horse charging to the rear, to the front, to the
flank, to the right, to the left.

Gurth, with the men of Surrey and Sussex, had alone kept their ground,
but they were now compelled to advance to the aid of their scattered
comrades; and coming up in close order, they not only awhile stayed
the slaughter, but again half turned the day. Knowing the country
thoroughly, Gurth lured the foe into the ditches concealed within a
hundred yards of their own ambush, and there the havoc of the
foreigners was so great, that the hollows are said to have been
literally made level with the plain by their corpses. Yet this
combat, however fierce, and however skill might seek to repair the
former error, could not be long maintained against such disparity of
numbers. And meanwhile, the whole of the division under Geoffroi
Martel, and his co-captains, had by a fresh order of William's
occupied the space between the entrenchments and the more distant
engagement; thus when Harold looked up, he saw the foot of the
hillocks so lined with steel, as to render it hopeless that he himself
could win to the aid of his vanguard. He set his teeth firmly, looked
on, and only by gesture and smothered exclamations showed his emotions
of hope and fear. At length he cried:

"Gallant Gurth! brave Leofwine, look to their pennons; right, right;
well fought, sturdy Vebba! Ha! they are moving this way. The wedge
cleaves on--it cuts its path through the heart of the foe." And
indeed, the chiefs now drawing off the shattered remains of their
countrymen, still disunited, but still each section shaping itself
wedge-like,--on came the English, with their shields over their head,
through the tempest of missiles, against the rush of the steeds, here
and there, through the plains, up the slopes, towards the
entrenchment, in the teeth of the formidable array of Martel, and
harassed behind by hosts that seemed numberless. The King could
restrain himself no longer. He selected five hundred of his bravest
and most practised veterans, yet comparatively fresh, and commanding
the rest to stay firm, descended the hills, and charged unexpectedly
into the rear of the mingled Normans and Bretons.

This sortie, well-timed though desperate, served to cover and favour
the retreat of the straggling Saxons. Many, indeed, were cut off, but
Gurth, Leofwine, and Vebba hewed the way for their followers to the
side of Harold, and entered the entrenchments, close followed by the
nearer foe, who were again repulsed amidst the shouts of the English.

But, alas! small indeed the band thus saved, and hopeless the thought
that the small detachments of English still surviving and scattered
over the plain, would ever win to their aid.

Yet in those scattered remnants were, perhaps, almost the only men
who, availing themselves of their acquaintance with the country, and
despairing of victory, escaped by flight from the Field of SANGUELAC.
Nevertheless, within the entrenchments not a man had lost heart; the
day was already far advanced, no impression had been yet made on the
outworks, the position seemed as impregnable as a fortress of stone;
and, truth to say, even the bravest Normans were disheartened, when
they looked to that eminence which had foiled the charge of William
himself. The Duke, in the recent melee, had received more than one
wound, his third horse that day had been slain under him. The
slaughter among the knights and nobles had been immense, for they had
exposed their persons with the most desperate valour. And William,
after surveying the rout of nearly one half of the English army, heard
everywhere, to his wrath and his shame, murmurs of discontent and
dismay at the prospect of scaling the heights, in which the gallant
remnant had found their refuge. At this critical juncture, Odo of
Bayeux, who had hitherto remained in the rear [274], with the crowds
of monks that accompanied the armament, rode into the full field,
where all the hosts were reforming their lines. He was in complete
mail, but a white surplice was drawn over the steel, his head was
bare, and in his right hand he bore the crozier. A formidable club
swung by a leathern noose from his wrist, to be used only for self-
defence: the canons forbade the priest to strike merely in assault.

Behind the milk-white steed of Odo came the whole body of reserve,
fresh and unbreathed, free from the terrors of their comrades, and
stung into proud wrath at the delay of the Norman conquest.

"How now--how now!" cried the prelate; "do ye flag? do ye falter when
the sheaves are down, and ye have but to gather up the harvest? How
now, sons of the Church! warriors of the Cross! avengers of the
Saints! Desert your Count, if ye please; but shrink not back from a
Lord mightier than man. Lo, I come forth, to ride side by side with
my brother, bareheaded, the crozier in my hand. He who fails his
liege is but a coward--he who fails the Church is apostate!"

The fierce shout of the reserve closed this harangue, and the words of
the prelate, as well as the physical aid he brought to back them,
renerved the army. And now the whole of William's mighty host,
covering the field, till its lines seemed to blend with the grey
horizon, came on serried, steadied, orderly--to all sides of the
entrenchment. Aware of the inutility of his horse, till the
breastworks were cleared, William placed in the van all his heavy
armed foot, spearmen, and archers, to open the way through the
palisades, the sorties from which had now been carefully closed.

As they came up the hills, Harold turned to Haco and said: "Where is
thy battle-axe?"

"Harold," answered Haco, with more than his usual tone of sombre
sadness, "I desire now to be thy shield-bearer, for thou must use
thine axe with both hands while the day lasts, and thy shield is
useless. Wherefore thou strike, and I will shield thee."

"Thou lovest me, then, son of Sweyn; I have sometimes doubted it."

"I love thee as the best part of my life, and with thy life ceases
mine: it is my heart that my shield guards when it covers the breast
of Harold."

"I would bid thee live, poor youth," whispered Harold; "but what were
life if this day were lost? Happy, then, will be those who die!"

Scarce had the words left his lips ere he sprang to the breastworks,
and with a sudden sweep of his axe, down dropped a helm that peered
above them. But helm after helm succeeds. Now they come on, swarm
upon swarm, as wolves on a traveller, as bears round a bark.
Countless, amidst their carnage, on they come! The arrows of the
Norman blacken the air: with deadly precision, to each arm, each limb,
each front exposed above the bulwarks whirrs the shaft. They clamber
the palisades, the foremost fall dead under the Saxon axe; new
thousands rush on: vain is the might of Harold, vain had been a
Harold's might in every Saxon there! The first row of breastworks is
forced--it is trampled, hewed, crushed down, cumbered with the dead.
"Ha Rou! Ha Rou! Notre Dame! Notre Dame!" sounds joyous and shrill,
the chargers snort and leap, and charge into the circle. High wheels
in air the great mace of William; bright by the slaughterers flashes
the crozier of the Church.

"On, Normans!--Earldom and land!" cries the Duke.

"On, Sons of the Church! Salvation and heaven!" shouts the voice of
Odo.

The first breastwork down--the Saxons yielding inch by inch, foot by
foot, are pressed, crushed back, into the second enclosure. The same
rush, and swarm, and fight, and cry, and roar:--The second enclosure
gives way. And now in the centre of the third--lo, before the eyes of
the Normans, towers proudly aloft, and shines in the rays of the
westering sun, broidered with gold, and, blazing with mystic gems, the
standard of England's King! And there, are gathered the reserve of
the English host; there, the heroes who had never yet known defeat--
unwearied they by the battle--vigorous, high-hearted still; and round
them the breastworks were thicker, and stronger, and higher, and
fastened by chains to pillars of wood and staves of iron, with the
waggons and carts of the baggage, and piled logs of timber-barricades
at which even William paused aghast, and Odo stifled an exclamation
that became not a priestly lip.

Before that standard, in the front of the men, stood Gurth, and
Leofwine, and Haco, and Harold, the last leaning for rest upon his
axe, for he was sorely wounded in many places, and the blood oozed
through the links of his mail.

Live, Harold; live yet, and Saxon England shall not die!

The English archers had at no time been numerous; most of them had
served with the vanguard, and the shafts of those within the ramparts
were spent; so that the foe had time to pause and to breathe. The
Norman arrows meanwhile flew fast and thick, but William noted to his
grief that they struck against the tall breastworks and barricades,
and so failed in the slaughter they should inflict.

He mused a moment, and sent one of his knights to call to him three of
the chiefs of the archers. They were soon at the side of his
destrier.

"See ye not, maladroits," said the Duke, "that your shafts and bolts
fall harmless on those ozier walls? Shoot in the air; let the arrow
fall perpendicular on those within--fall as the vengeance of the
saints falls--direct from heaven! Give me thy bow, Archer,--thus."
He drew the bow as he sate on his steed, the arrow flashed up, and
descended in the heart of the reserve, within a few feet of the
standard.

"So; that standard be your mark," said the Duke, giving back the bow.

The archers withdrew. The order circulated through their bands, and
in a few moments more down came the iron rain. It took the English
host as by surprise, piercing hide cap, and even iron helm; and in the
very surprise that made them instinctively look up--death came.

A dull groan as from many hearts boomed from the entrenchments on the
Norman ear.

"Now," said William, "they must either use their shields to guard
their heads--and their axes are useless--or while they smite with the
axe they fall by the shaft. On now to the ramparts. I see my crown
already resting on yonder standard!"

Yet despite all, the English bear up; the thickness of the palisades,
the comparative smallness of the last enclosure, more easily therefore
manned and maintained by the small force of the survivors, defy other
weapons than those of the bow. Every Norman who attempts to scale the
breastwork is slain on the instant, and his body cast forth under the
hoofs of the baffled steeds. The sun sinks near and nearer towards
the red horizon.

"Courage!" cries the voice of Harold, "hold but till nightfall, and ye
are saved. Courage and freedom!"

"Harold and Holy Crosse!" is the answer.

Still foiled, William again resolves to hazard his fatal stratagem.
He marked that quarter of the enclosure which was most remote from the
chief point of attack--most remote from the provident watch of Harold,
whose cheering voice, ever and anon, he recognised amidst the hurtling
clamour. In this quarter the palisades were the weakest, and the
ground the least elevated; but it was guarded by men on whose skill
with axe and shield Harold placed the firmest reliance--the Anglo-
Danes of his old East-Anglian earldom. Thither, then, the Duke
advanced a chosen column of his heavy-armed foot, tutored especially
by himself in the rehearsals of his favourite ruse, and accompanied by
a band of archers; while at the same time, he himself, with his
brother Odo, headed a considerable company of knights under the son of
the great Roger de Beaumont, to gain the contiguous level heights on
which now stretches the little town of "Battle;" there to watch and to
aid the manoeuvre. The foot column advanced to the appointed spot,
and after a short, close, and terrible conflict, succeeded in making a
wide breach in the breastworks. But that temporary success only
animates yet more the exertions of the beleaguered defenders, and
swarming round the breach, and pouring through it, line after line of
the foe drop beneath their axes. The column of the heavy-armed
Normans fall back down the slopes--they give way--they turn in
disorder--they retreat--they fly; but the archers stand firm, midway
on the descent--those archers seem an easy prey to the English--the
temptation is irresistible. Long galled, and harassed, and maddened
by the shafts, the Anglo-Danes rushed forth at the heels of the Norman
swordsmen, and sweeping down to exterminate the archers, the breach
that they leave gapes wide.

"Forward," cries William, and he gallops towards the breach.

"Forward," cries Odo, "I see the hands of the holy saints in the air!
Forward! it is the Dead that wheel our war-steeds round the living!"

On rush the Norman knights. But Harold is already in the breach,
rallying around him hearts eager to replace the shattered breastworks.

"Close shields! Hold fast!" shouts his kingly voice. Before him were
the steeds of Bruse and Grantmesnil. At his breast their spears:--
Haco holds over the breast the shield. Swinging aloft with both hands
his axe, the spear of Grantmesnil is shivered in twain by the King's
stroke. Cloven to the skull rolls the steed of Bruse. Knight and
steed roll on the bloody sward.

But a blow from the sword of De Lacy has broken down the guardian
shield of Haco. The son of Sweyn is stricken to his knee. With
lifted blades and whirling maces the Norman knights charge through the
breach.

"Look up, look up, and guard thy head," cries the fatal voice of Haco
to the King.

At that cry the King raises his flashing eyes. Why halts his stride?
Why drops the axe from his hand? As he raised his head, down came the
hissing death-shaft. It smote the lifted face; it crushed into the
dauntless eyeball. He reeled, he staggered, he fell back several
yards, at the foot of his gorgeous standard. With desperate hand he
broke the head of the shaft, and left the barb, quivering in the
anguish. Gurth knelt over him.

"Fight on," gasped the King, "conceal my death! Holy Crosse! England
to the rescue! woe-woe!"

Rallying himself a moment, he sprang to his feet, clenched his right
hand, and fell once more,--a corpse.

At the same moment a simultaneous rush of horsemen towards the
standard bore back a line of Saxons, and covered the body of the King
with heaps of the slain.

His helmet cloven in two, his face all streaming with blood, but still
calm in its ghastly hues, amidst the foremost of those slain, fell the
fated Haco. He fell with his head on the breast of Harold, kissed the
bloody cheek with bloody lips, groaned, and died.

Inspired by despair with superhuman strength, Gurth, striding over the
corpses of his kinsmen, opposed himself singly to the knights; and the
entire strength of the English remnant, coming round him at the
menaced danger to the standard, once more drove off the assailants.

But now all the enclosure was filled with the foe, the whole space
seemed gay, in the darkening air, with banderols and banners. High,
through all, rose the club of the Conqueror; high, through all, shone
the crozier of the Churchman. Not one Englishman fled; all now
centering round the standard, they fell, slaughtering if slaughtered.
Man by man, under the charmed banner, fell the lithsmen of Hilda.
Then died the faithful Sexwolf. Then died the gallant Godrith,
redeeming, by the death of many a Norman, his young fantastic love of
the Norman manners. Then died, last of such of the Kent-men as had
won retreat from their scattered vanguard into the circle of closing
slaughter, the English-hearted Vebba.

Even still in that age, when the Teuton had yet in his veins the blood
of Odin, the demi-god,--even still one man could delay the might of
numbers. Through the crowd, the Normans beheld with admiring awe,--
here, in the front of their horse, a single warrior, before whose axe
spear shivered, helm drooped;--there, close by the standard, standing
breast-high among the slain, one still more formidable, and even
amidst ruin unvanquished. The first fell at length under the mace of
Roger de Montgommeri. So, unknown to the Norman poet (who hath
preserved in his verse the deeds but not the name), fell, laughing in
death, young Leofwine! Still by the enchanted standard towers the
other; still the enchanted standard waves aloft, with its brave ensign
of the solitary "Fighting Man" girded by the gems that had flashed in
the crown of Odin.

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