Authors: Robert Wilton
As before, the strategic framework of events for this account, between 1648 and 1651, is common knowledge. The detail is drawn directly from the archive of the Comptrollerate-General for Scrutiny and Survey, along with other relevant sources currently available (specific documents are referenced with the SS prefix, or equivalent; references are not given here for the many other documents that have contributed colour and background). The exact play of dialogue and emotion is of course my conjecture, consistent with the data and tending I hope to illuminate rather than distort what happened. If my fictionalization of these incidental elements inspires the reader to their own investigation of the facts, so much the better.
R. J. W.
February 2012
The Passing
Dawn on the moor, the cold and wary light silvering the stagnant water, and glistening on the grass and the frosted heaps of dead.
The river slips drowsily through the early morning, wide and flat between the flood plains and unexcited by the promise of the sea just a few miles ahead. It has hurried seventy miles in the darkness, south from the hidden dales of the Pennines, then turning to the west to elude the first forays of the sunlight. By the bridge, tiring, the water slides furtive around the obstacles in its flight, the boulders and the tangled, clutching lattice of reeds, looking for the shadows under the stonework. It creeps past the white face of a man slumped in the shallows, trying not to wake him with its sting against his skin, rummages in the sagging sodden jacket and through the breeches, washes over one bare foot and chuckles away into the gloom under the bridge.
A hand plunges down and grabs the jacket, pulls the body over onto its back, and a dead arm splashes among the reeds.
A musketeer, from the uniform; Scottish presumably.
The face is already puffy after a night in the water, the eyes stare shocked into the morning light, and a black-toothed mouth gapes.
Not a good face: born roughly, lived worse.
A few bruises and rips, but there is no sign of a wound on the body, no bloody sword swipe, no punched hole from a musket ball.
Drowned
.
Mustered in some god-forsaken slum with the promise of excitement and a penny a day, a month or two raping and foraging your way through northern England, and your warrior heritage splutters and chokes to death in a stream as your comrades clamber over you to get to safety.
Still the glazed eyes gape.
You’re not who I’m after, anyway.
Above, dark against the morning light, a weary shake of the head. Then two great splashes as the man pulls away and tramps out of the water. Around him, the corpses sprawl. Tracks through the mud and reeds show where men have dragged themselves to safety or to collapse, and the bank is scattered with hunched brown forms. Some have the wild distortion of violence, thrown by a ball or ripped open by a flailing sword. Others, from wounds or exhaustion, have collapsed peacefully into the grass and never woken. They could be a herd of cows at rest, faces buried in this pasture; so battered and muddied in the dim morning, the brown shapes seem to be slumping back into the earth. Around them the debris of battle: swords and muskets; pikes held by dead men, and broken pikes abandoned by live ones; bandoliers, belts, hats and boots, purses and bags; dropped, flung, forgotten or wrenched off by the early scavengers. Death has come down the river like a tempest, and he has ripped this army out of the ground and whirled and torn and scattered it across the plain.
A too-practised glance around the bank. At least forty men in this immediate stretch – fifty, say. And all King’s men. By this point it had been a rout.
A sigh. The man stiffens. The sigh again, harsh and hoarse, rasping through the grass at his feet. Another musketeer, huddled up like a baby in the mud. The man crouches, an instinctive hand on the body’s woollen cap, then another on the shoulder – he can feel how thin the man is through his sleeve – and he carefully rolls the body onto its back. A stomach wound, and it’s savage. A pike in his gut many hours ago, and nothing will save him now. The face is ghostly, the eyes closed, but still the hissing comes from the throat.
The man stands, checks around him, pulls the jackets off two nearby corpses and lays them both over the faintly shivering body beneath him.
Go quickly, boy. Nothing left for you in this world.
A clean face, untouched by sickness or years. A thin, terribly young face. A face drawn in charcoal on paper: the boy is white, and his stomach, two hands frozen feebly at it, is ghastly red.
Stralsund. Breitenfeld. Lützen.
Memories of three decades of conflict; a continent of death.
I have been here too often.
The man pulls up his gaze. More of them had died on the north side of the river, hesitating to splash into it or trying to get to the bridge, cut down by a final cavalry charge when all their powder had gone. The water’s clean now: the blood has long ceased to flow, and the current has carried it away to the Irish Sea. But the boulders and the grasses around are rusty in the dawn. Above them, the carcases have formed a breakwater on the bank, piled two and three deep, a mess of uniforms stuck with swords and musket barrels and pikes and arms and legs.
Movement beyond them, against the distant shadow of Preston town. The man drops to a crouch, eyes narrow, face gnarled around them, watching for the movement again.
I’ve come on too fast. This battle is not yet over.
Horsemen: a patrol out from the town, perhaps.
This is still contested ground.
The horsemen coming on towards the bridge. Drop among the corpses? But his richer, cleaner clothes will stand out.
The bridge
.
Hawk’s eyes on the distant movement, the man scurries low over the bank again, against the side of the bridge and down into the shallows. This time his boots slide silent through the water; no splashing, no clumsy movement. Under the bridge, crouching against the curve of the arch. Eyes adjust to the gloom: a body in the shallow water, and he heaves the torso up onto his knees.
The horses are nearer now; he can hear voices, echoing weirdly off the water and through the arch. Even if anyone glances under the bridge and sees a shape, they will see the legs and slumped body of a corpse before they see anything else.
I had no choice. I cannot wait. I have to know where he is.
The thump and rattle of horses on the bridge, then over his head. The patrol is heading south – for Wigan, perhaps.
The man spends twenty minutes crouched in the gloom and the chill water, a dead pikeman on his lap.
He was refighting the battle in reverse. From its scattered fringes of debris, men who’d crawled to die under hedges or lay shivering of wounds and fear in peasant kitchens, he was tracking the chaos inward through the channels of panic to the heart of the slaughter, back to the first shock of contact, the first ugly rattle of sword against pike, the first gasp of understanding that death is really loose and hunting you in this place. He knew that gasp.
He’d come through Wigan in the middle of the night, and fugitives had still been staggering into it gibbering of Cromwell’s horsemen behind them. Every bedroom held a wounded Royalist officer, every corner of alley and ditch a soldier. The Roundheads would be on them by now – he’d glimpsed the rearguard as he’d skirted the line of flight, knew it wouldn’t stay to guard anything for more than an hour – and the town would be under military law. That meant door-kick searches, and looting. It meant arrest at best for those wounded officers, and herding and robbing and nasty acts of vindictiveness for the rest. By now the Royalist fugitives would be fleeing south again, with the local villagers starting to pick off the stragglers.
But not the man he was looking for. His man should have been with the command party, but was not. He’d caught up with the command party in a churchyard outside Wigan, wide-eyed and leery of Roundhead ghosts in the darkness, and they had shaken their heads and shrugged and waved thumbs over shoulders and hurried away to the south.
So he had continued north, working his way up parallel to the road, through a witches’ night of moans and cries and half-glimpsed shiftings in the blackness. Shouts of orders and of self-reassurance emerging from the void, then explosions of thunder and vicious metal rasping and the crackle of muskets as the Roundhead pursuit threw itself once again on the dwindling rearguard. He’d moved among riderless bewildered horses, suddenly pale in the gloom, among gasping fugitives, half-man and half-beast and scurrying away into the hedges as he passed, and among the dead.
Nearer the river, the sun’s first tentative advance coming across the plain, he’d come on another devastation: a graveyard of wagons, empty or overturned, smashed boxes thrown around them in the dirt. Hamilton had lost his baggage train as well. Happy pickings for the Roundhead infantry: a Duke’s household on the move, gold plate and silver and rich cloths, and. . . and papers. The first breeze teased a few scattered pages among the boxes, and they fluttered at him. A hissed, vicious expletive into the dawn.
Then there had come a shout from among the wagons – a sentry, two sentries. He’d waved and kept his distance. And so to the bridge, through the dead men.
His legs, his back, feel dangerously cold now. His boots are good – most important part of the uniform:
Stiefel vor Stahl
, like the Brandenburgers used to say – but they can’t keep out this damp cold for ever. No sound from above, so the stiff old back stretches up and the numbed legs slip through the water to the bank.
The bridge itself is a shambles. Shattered soldiers – Scottish musketeers again – are sprawled all over the narrow way, thick in the dust and slumped over the parapets. The northern end of the bridge is choked with bodies, and they’ve been dragged aside to allow the cavalry to pursue the fleeing Royalists, or lie broken by the horses charging over them. Here, as the ground opens out towards Preston, the uniforms change. These are Roundhead dead – pikemen, mostly; the bridge was won hard, by men rushing again and again into barrages of musket shot, until at last their pikes could reach the desperate bodies trying frantically to reload and reprime their weapons.
I’m too exposed here.
The eyes can see the battle in the dead men. He’s come through the flight in the hours before dawn. The struggle for the bridge, the close-quarter wounds and the vengeance of men who’ve paid too heavily for their objective, is easily told. But here? The few bodies leading to the town tell a fast assault against the detachments who’d found themselves cut off by the fall of the bridge, and are now either prisoners or scurrying back to Scotland. The main thrust of battle has come from the right, along the river. A lane nearer the water, no bodies but badly churned: Cromwell’s legendary cavalry, no doubt, his ironsides, and there had been no one to stop them: the troops trying to defend the bridge had been caught in the flank and caught hard. Another shake of the head.
The trail of death leads away from the river’s edge along a muddy road, and he walks it slowly, eyes and ears wide for signs of pursuit.
This is still contested ground
. He reads the battle in the uniforms and in the deaths. A clump of men entangled together – the same clothing, the same symbols tucked in their caps – means a standing fight; musket wounds mean the same. English soldiers among the Royalist dead, now.
Langdale’s men. Have you died with them, Langdale, you old goat, or have you survived again?
Cavalrymen, too, and their horses. This fight took many hours, and every fifty yards of it was a mad screaming assault by pikemen and riders on musketeers and on other pikemen, a hacking swirling orgy of noise and metal, the cold fire of a wound in your side and the screams in your ears, and the mud treacherous beneath your feet. They’re sodden with it, all the dead men: their blues and reds are a uniform stupid brown, so that it’s harder to tell Royalist from Roundhead in their slippery death, and their hands and hair and faces are smeared and clogged and turning brittle grey.
He walks those yards, and he refights those hours, in the faces.
Mannheim. Magdeburg. Vlotho. Too many dead faces.
Pain: screaming cheek-slashed chest-cut pain; groaning gut-shot pain. Exultation: glory; malice; madness. Shock: so surprised; so frightened; so cold; so this is hell.
I have become an accounter of deaths.
A horse slumped in the mud, two pikes buried in its great chest, face stretched out wild. The rider half beneath him, a sword protruding from under the edge of the chest armour.
You saw that coming and you couldn’t do anything about it, could you?
The helmet grille grins up at him. More horses, shot and stabbed and bled, and he knows the screaming that these beasts added to the carnage as they died.
Why did Cromwell stay north of the river?
It’s the smell that’s lifted his head, nose instinctively seeking higher ground. The wounds are more savage here, the putrefaction more advanced, and the sharp syrupy rancid stench of death and shit hangs low over the carnage. His wider gaze brings him the other bank of the river, the fuller scope of the battle. A chase is fun but futile; nothing more than a clumsy violent race, and the man more determined to escape with his life will always outpace the man more determined to loot what he’s left behind. Properly, logically, Cromwell should have come south of the river, to block the Royalist advance.
Cromwell got lucky: with the terrain, with his opponent.
Or perhaps the Godly warrior has the devil in him like they say.
Faces at peace, and faces now in an eternity of disquiet. Faces molten and faces viciously distorted and faces absent, with the indiscriminating violence of war. A slumped man with his throat cut in the aftermath; a body naked from the waist down, white and silly in the morning, fancy boots and breeches long gone and worth nothing to him now. The dead in heaps, grey and glistening in the frost.