When I lay down at night, I hugged myself. I pulled my legs up to my chest to make myself as small as I could beneath the blanket that John laid across me. I felt defeat in every way it’s possible to feel it. My faith was gone and with it everything that I believed in – and in its place a thought that terrified me. Because I knew that as a soldier primed to hate and trained to kill – knew then and know it now – I might myself have waded through the blood of men and women, even children. Because somewhere inside me as I lay there with my knees beneath my chin, there crouched the monster that is man!
Night after night I lay awake, postponing sleep as long as I was able, knowing that there was no refuge, knowing what would come. Bright rings of jagged lines like fangs flashed through my vision; and when sleep came I dreamt that we were back in Acre in a maze of streets and alleys, empty houses, broken walls with doors that would not open and stairways leading nowhere. I dreamt that they were screaming, screaming for me, Khadija and her child – somewhere behind a wall, shut in a house, up on a roof I couldn’t reach – that rocks were falling everywhere to block my passage as I ran to find them, stop them screaming – anything to stop them being killed – to stop them. Stop them… STOP THEM!
And when I willed myself to wake, and lay soaked in sweat with eyes wide open straining in the darkness, the images inside my head refused to go away. I knew I’d helped to take them to that place believing they would be exchanged, and if I was betrayed in my own ignorance, I had betrayed them too. Even with my eyes screwed shut and fingers in both ears I heard their screams and saw the images of slaughter. I was in purgatory and on the road to hell.
How long is it since then? Weeks pass these days without the nightmares. But they haven’t left me, even here amongst the stars. Their spirits haunt me. Perhaps they always will. So much I had to give them still, which now I never can.
But then the time came, as I knew it must, for me to die.
One morning after Prime we’d barely mounted up, with some four leagues to cover still between the woods of Arsuf and the port of Joppa, when the sergeants shouted for us to make ready for engagement.
That I do remember.
Far behind us, we could see the Moslems circling the rearguard of our army, like wolves attacking a migrating flock, their shrill cries muffled by the distance. Horsemen galloped up and down the lines in clouds of dust, with who knows what instructions from the King?
Until at last we heard the clarions, and wheeled about to move into position for a charge.
‘Good fortune, Haddertun,’ Dickon de Waleys called out from somewhere down the line.
Then, as the infantry drew back to let us through, ‘Sir Garry, God protect ye!’ came from John Hideman – who still believed in God and His protection (
’
though just to make sure on the march, had never strayed much further with his pike than a pace from my stirrup). It was the last time, I thought, that I would hear his voice.
We moved off as a squadron in a double-rank formation to the orders of the Bishop’s marechal – first at a trot. Then at a canter when we reached the wooded hills which hid the main part of the Sultan’s army.
A charge uphill, and over broken ground into a soldid mass of Saracens, could only end one way. I knew it was against all reason. Which made it of a pattern with the rest of my unthinking life. The mare I rode was old, untrained for battle. The lance they’d given me was cracked, would shatter almost certainly on impact. The thing was plainly suicidal. So when the order came to charge – when I applied the spurs, I charged no longer with the heroes of my dreams.
I see my own face, pale but calm. My life had lost its meaning. Yet even now I feel a stab of panic, knowing I am riding to my death, as I had always thought I would. That’s how I see it, feel it, looking back and looking down.
Death comes to all of us, I told myself. But only once.
How could I guess how it would be?
So now, the famous ‘Battle of Arsuf’…
In recording his most celebrated victory on the eve of the Nativity of Our Lady, 1191, the writer of King Richard’s
Itinerarium Peregrinoram
allows himself free rein as usual.
‘The heathen pack pressed hard the host, assaulted them and closed with them. Seaward and landward, so close they hemmed the host and with such great fury that they caused grievous loss of horses which they slew…
‘Then charged the Hospital, all in a body, which had suffered so long… Then had ye seen the thick dust fly! And all they who had dismounted and were shooting at us with bows, wherewith they so harassed our folk, these now had their heads cut off; for so soon as the knights overthrew them, the sergeants slew them. And so soon as the King saw that the host had broken its ranks and closed with the Turks he thrust his spurs into his horse, waiting no longer, and came on at full speed to help the foremost lines.
‘Swifter than a crossbow bolt, with all his household brave and eager, he smote so violently a division of the heathen that was crowded together on his right that they were all dumbfounded at the sight of the valiant men, and perforce must void their saddles; stretched out as thick as sheaves of corn had ye seen them lying all along the ground. And the brave King of England pursued after them and charged them; and so well wrought he in that hour that round about him, on either side, before, behind, was a great open highway filled with Saracens that had fallen dead there; and the rest drew back, and the windrow of the dead reached full half a league in length…
‘Such deeds of valour wrought Richard, King of England upon the loathsome enemy, that all men beheld his prowess with amazement. He and his horsemen drave back and held the Turks until our people could regroup around the standard. Thus were our armies able to march on to Arsuf, where they assembled to erect their tents and their pavilions.’
Later in his narrative, which covers several pages, the Christian writer, who desperately needs a victory to record, takes time to summarise what has occurred.
‘These people, devoid of all virtue, were driven back in such wise as I have recounted. Nor were they able to accomplish that whereof they boasted to their Sultan in their arrogance, that without doubt or fail that day the flower of Christendom was to be humbled and defeated. But all was contrary! Had you but viewed it from the mountain-top the way the Turks were fleeing! For we have heard from they who saw it from this vantage that when our armies clashed, we drove them back so violently that as they fled, their camels died, with horses, mules and hinnies by the hundred and the thousand. They lost so many soldiers in the conflict, that had our armies pressed harder and pursued them further, then must the whole of Outremer be occupied by our victorious Christians!’
Now listen to one of King Richard’s latter day biographers, writing in the nineteen thirties, in a chapter titled,
THE VICTORY AT ARSOUF.
‘Richard was about to launch the greatest military enterprise of his life, and there was genius in everything he did,’
this writer blatantly suggests
. ‘Saladin’s determination to force a battle is easily understood. He saw, no doubt, that his former harassing tactics, though very annoying for Richard and exhausting for his men, were having an even worse effect on the morale of his own followers… Some time or other they must stand up to these heavily armed crusaders if victory was to be won. That time, he judged, had come. He chose the ground with his usual skill. Arsouf was the only point on the line of the march where wooded hills came right down to the water’s edge…
‘As soon as the crusaders were fairly entangled amongst the trees, Saladin launched his attack. He seems to have approached in crescent formation, with his centre held back for the final assault, but with the right horn of the crescent considerably in advance of the left, and thrown out so widely as to envelop the Christian rear… The rearguard, composed of the Hospitallers, bore the whole brunt of the battle in its early stage. The crossbowmen on the outer flank and the infantry covering the hindmost of the baggage wagons suffered terribly. They would not halt, but we are told that they marched backwards, always facing the enemy, and that their progress in consequence became alarmingly slow…
‘The Hospitallers sent message after message to Richard begging for permission to charge. Half of their horses were already down they said. Might they not charge out from amongst the infantry before it was too late, and flesh their lances in this mob of insolent paynims? But Richard firmly refused.
“My good Master,” he said to the Master of the Hospital who had galloped up to him, “it must be endured.” He realised the primary importance of getting the whole Saracen army within range of the cavalry charge, which he knew must be his decisive effort…
‘But the Hospitallers could stand it no longer. There were cries from among them of, “Why do we not give rein?” “We shall be held as cowards for evermore!” Suddenly as one man they wheeled their horses and, calling upon St George, dashed out through the broken ranks of the footsoldiers, led by their own Master… Richard’s carefully-thought-out plan was wrecked. But he acted with his usual decision. Ordering the trumpets to be sounded immediately, and calling upon the Normans and English to follow him, he galloped to the rear and hurled himself into the fray behind the Hospitallers, cutting a wide path through the enemy as he went. The Saracens went down on every side, and the Christian infantry, following behind the knights, lopped off the heads of all the infidels on the ground…
‘But the battle was not over. As the knights and men at arms drew slowly back towards their own line, there were several counter-attacks. There was an emir with a great yellow flag who charged almost to the foot of the Standard. But William de Barres drove him off, and Richard, with the reserve, completed his discomfiture. The King of England, being mounted on his peerless Cyprus steed, Fauvel, often got dangerously far ahead of his companions; but his tall figure and his well-known voice inspired such terror in the enemy that their one idea was to get out of his long reach…
‘At last it was finished. Scouts reported 7000 Saracen dead. The Christian losses were comparatively slight… Richard’s magnificent élan, and the irresistible moral effect of his presence in any part of the field, was something different from his legendary feats of physical strength. We are told that his enemies fled before him like sheep…
‘The resounding victory at Arsouf represents the climax of Coeur de Lion’s Crusade.’
Oh yes?
That the battle is considered one of Richard’s finest hours is due to such accounts. It’s quoted everywhere as evidence of his success in Palestine, and to this day contributes to his enduring legend as a military commander. At Arsuf, it seems the best man won.
But is that truth or fiction?
Bismarck is said to have remarked that people never lie so much as during warfare, and I should say that he was right. The truth about Arsuf without the spin is that it’s less of a pitched battle than the most sustained of a series of hit-and-run attacks on Richard’s army, as part of Salahuddin’s strategy to delay and weaken it; to thin out its heavy cavalry especially, and render it incapable of mounting a successful siege upon Jerusalem.
The Sultan’s forces easily outnumber Richard’s. He could have overwhelmed them anywhere along the road to guarantee a victory. But from Hattin four years earlier he’s learned what’s apt to happen when you behead a Christian Hydra; and at the age of fifty-four he cannot face a Fourth Crusade.
So his Plan A. Before they meet in battle, he sends his brother, al-Adil, under a flag of truce, to place again before King Richard the offer of a Frankish Kingdom that will include the ports of Tyre, Acre, Caiffa, Caeserea, with access to the Holy Sepulchre. To offer him a foothold in the Orient and enjoyment of its trade routes, in other words, if he’ll agree to leave in peace.
But Richard needs much more than access to the Sepulchre. Through his interpreter he tells al-Adil that he is pledged to have the City of Jerusalem itself or nothing.
The Sword of
Faith returns empty handed to his brother’s camp above the forest of Arsuf, and together they proceed to their Plan B.
Historians agree that most of the Moslem raids occur in early morning when the crucesignati are least prepared for an attack. On the morning of the seventh of September, the head of the long Christian column is already nearing the seaport of Arsuf whilst its rearguard is still striking camp the best part of a league behind; and it’s no accident that the terrain in which it finds itself, between an ilex forest and the coastal cliffs, is ideal for an ambush.
Battlefield revisionists have drawn neat maps to illustrate the positions of the Christian infantry and cavalry divisions and those of the attacking Moslems, at the onset of the conflict, and later in the day. The reality, as in most military actions, is a good deal more chaotic.
Historians have trawled contemporary first-hand and second-hand accounts for their descriptions of the Hospitallers’ defence; and yet remarkably have failed to highlight why, at this point in his campaign of limited guerrilla warfare, Salahuddin chooses to attack the rear of Richard’s army and with such committed savagery.
When the sun ceases to shine, when the stars fall from the sky and the mountains turn to dust: then shall each soul be made aware of what he hath committed.
How could they miss the point that only nineteen days before Arsuf, the Kurdish brothers
Righteousness of Faith
and
Sword of Faith
bore witness to the slaughter and the desecration of three thousand of their people at the hands of the white-crossed Knights Hospitaller of the Order of Saint John?