Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [134]
They would, of course, fight to the death for their honour. But the Duke would no doubt see that if Guînes were lost, Calais could hardly be retaken. Whereas (Lady Grey was word perfect on this point) if a strong force were to relieve Guînes and repulse the French army, the occupiers of Calais might be besieged in turn and starved into submission.
It was all perfectly true. It was not Lord Grey’s fault that the Duke of Savoy had no army, and that those troops he had, he was saving to protect the Low Countries, not to lose lives and prestige in pulling English chestnuts out of a peculiarly horrendous French fire. Two small bands of Spanish soldiers were sent to help Lord Grey at Guînes, of whom thirty-five men got into the citadel and five only lived to get out of it.
By Sunday night, the cuttings had reached the ditches and started to drain them. At dawn on Monday, the bombardment began which was to subject the Mary bulwark between the fortress gate and the town to nine thousand cannon shot in forty-eight hours, dislodge the English counter-battery and breach the bastion.
At two o’clock on Monday afternoon the French sent several parties to wade the moat, now only waist-high, and examine the damage. Later, two bands of Gascons attempted to scale the bulwark and inspect it more closely, and retired, pursued by culvers and hackbuts and pots of wild fire: shortly after, the French resumed firing. The eight deafening salvoes they delivered that evening tore open a breach which exposed all the Mary’s defenders.
Night, falling, saved them, but an English captain had lost his life, and a Spanish, and forty or fifty common soldiers. They had then been under siege for five sleepless days before the entire French armed forces. With Lord Grey were his twenty-year-old son Arthur, his cousin Lewis Davie, his nephew Austin Grey, his colleague Henry Palmer, an English captain called Bracknell and an experienced Spanish leader of Alva’s called Montdragon. The quality of the leadership was undoubted; and in Grey of Wilton’s case, supreme.
He knew the Pale, and its strengths, and its weaknesses. Marsh lay all around him: a wilderness of short, sour grass showing everywhere the white eyes of water, upon which floated the small hill of Guînes.
Marsh protected two sides of the fort’s moated ramparts. On the other two, the French were encamped. Lansquenetz straddled the highway to Ardres, which led south from the barbican entrance. And across the west ditch, Frenchmen held the burnt-out husk of the town and by daylight, if they were shrewd, would have ranged their batteries on its maundes, or on the commanding flat stage of the market place. One had only to count the ensigns, streaming from each moving body of troops, and scan the flagged pavilions which spread their skirts from bush to bush to recognize what one was opposing.
There was a particular pleasure, now and then in one’s life, in matching one’s skill with the best. He had expected to find it when he led the English troops at Saint-Quentin, but that had been a rogue victory, won through an old man’s mistakes. Arthur, he remembered had been elated, but he had seen again in his nephew’s manner that air of withdrawal which meant he would never make a first-class general, for all his brains.
God knew, one didn’t go into this business with any illusions. Over and over again, he had impressed the facts of life on these two boys. One battle in twelve might be won by a brilliant military stratagem. The rest stood