Jack Whyte: Standard of Honor

He was not aware of having dismounted, but André was pulling at his clothes, ripping off the Arab garments until he stood clad only in the white lamb’s wool loin wrapping of the Temple Knights. He crossed to the mule, moving slowly so as not to frighten the patient animal, and re-dressed himself as a Templar, complete with white, red-crossed surcoat, moving swiftly now that he had decided to die with his peers, and concentrating intently on wasting no time, not even to glance down at the scene below. Thus, engaged with the straps and lacings of his hauberk and cuirass, he missed the first few crucial moments of what next transpired down there, and it was only as he straightened up to slip his sword belt over his head and across his chest that he saw something had changed. Fully alert then, he stuffed his Muslim clothing and weaponry into the leather casings on the pack mule, then moved quickly to his horse and stepped up into the saddle, his eyes fixed on the scene below, to see a transformation that astounded him.

Whatever had occurred, he could clearly see that it had begun with the Hospitallers, for the knights had broken out there, surging through the defensive ranks of their own infantry to attack the Bedouin newcomers, most of whom were now afoot. But the breakout was not confined to the Hospitallers, for as St. Clair watched, rapt, the Frankish cavalry broke through all along their line in an irresistible rolling wave—and watching it occur he could think of no other term for it—that surged all the way to the right of the line and brought the Templars charging out and forward into the teeth of the enemy, who, judging from the way they buckled and recoiled from the assault, were obviously unprepared for anything of the kind. Even from as far away as St. Clair’s viewpoint, it was clear that the tables had been unexpectedly and completely reversed.

The Saracens, so unmistakably jubilant and confident mere minutes earlier, were now reeling and eddying in confusion, unable to assert themselves in the face of what must have appeared to them as an absolute and unstemmable explosion of heavy cavalry. St. Clair had no knowledge of what had happened to the ranks of infantry between the knights and the Saracens, of whether they had been trampled in the charge or had managed to slip between the horsemen, but the Frankish forces rallied with every heartbeat. And then the Bedouin phalanx that had charged the rearguard simply shattered as the men broke and ran in all directions to escape the massive horses of the charging Hospitallers. But the Hospitallers permitted no escape. The fear and frustration they had been forced to undergo for so many hours resulted in an orgy of blood lust and slaughter. They slew men by the thousands in front of their positions as the madness spread southward to the right of the line and Saracens fled in utter panic and fear, leaving their Sultan impotent to stop them or even to try to rally them.

Now St. Clair could hear the difference in the sounds rising from below and he knew, from his eagle’s-eye view, that he was witnessing the greatest rout in the history of the wars of the Latin Kingdom. The masses of cavalry were bunching up, pursuing the fleeing Saracens towards the edge of the forest in the south, but even so, before they could enter the forest proper, the leading ranks were stopped and began milling about, already starting to reform. He would learn later that it was Richard himself who stopped the pursuit, aware even then of past lessons learned through overzealous pursuit of fleeing enemies, and he would hear many accounts of Richard’s personal heroism during the heaviest of the fighting following the breakout, none of which he would doubt for a moment. For the time being, however, he sat his horse alone up on the heights and watched the army reform and regroup along the road until he realized that they were about to march southward in good order to their intended destination of Arsuf. At that point, feeling uncharacteristically jubilant over the victory, he set spurs to his horse and set out down the hill, leading his mule, to rejoin his companions.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, frustrated and increasingly impatient, he was still far above the straggling army, headed in the wrong direction and unable to do anything about it. He had discovered the truth of the oldest adage among climbers—that it is far more difficult to climb down from a high elevation than it is to climb up there in the first place. The way the hillside fell away beneath him simply compelled him to keep moving northward, to his right. The alternative, to strike stubbornly southward and to his left, was simply too dangerous to contemplate. The two animals he was leading left him in no doubt about the folly of that, balking and refusing, stiff legged, to go anywhere near the precipitous southern faces, and although he was unaccustomed to noticing such things, he quickly came to see, quite literally, that everything about this hillside sloped downward, visibly, to the right. And so he gritted his teeth and concentrated on picking his way along with great care, forcing himself to analyze all that he could see going on below him, rather than allow himself to grow more uselessly angry than he already was.

Someone, clearly, had made a decision to keep the main body of the army moving southward along the road to Arsuf, and St. Clair acknowledged to himself that whoever had been responsible—and he presumed it was Richard himself—had made the correct choice, for their current position was clearly untenable, an elongated, cramped, and narrow stretch of hillside between the road itself and the sea. After the pressures they had undergone in that same place, he was unsurprised that they had no wish to remain there for a moment longer than they had to, and so now almost the entire army, regrouped and redisposed in clear formations, was winding steadily along the road to the south, and progressing far more quickly than they had since leaving Acre, secure in the knowledge that the Saracens would not soon be returning to engage them.

The road, until it disappeared beneath the overarching trees at the entrance to the forest, was crammed with marching men, and the largest area of land between it and the sea had been converted into a vast marshaling area where troop commanders and officers were organizing units to join the exodus, falling into place behind the passing ranks as space became available. The exercises were being carried out efficiently, André could see, and the evacuation was proceeding smoothly, but the single most significant and striking thing that he could see as he drew steadily closer to the battlefield was the extent of the casualties, and most particularly among the Saracens.

There appeared to be thousands of dead and wounded Muslim soldiers everywhere he looked, and as he scanned them, seeing how they had been mowed down in swaths, an image grew in his mind from his boyhood, of a cornfield outside his father’s home in Poitou, one remembered afternoon at harvest time, when everyone had stopped working to eat at noonday and the rows of corn, scythed but ungathered, not yet bound and stacked, had formed clear-cut patterns on the stubbled ground. He could see very few Frankish bodies among the casualties, which surprised him, for he was above the far left of the line now, the rearguard position of the Hospitallers, and their black-and-white colors were easy to spot from above, but it seemed to him that for every Hospitaller or other Frankish form he saw on the field, he could count ten or more Muslims.

He reached a stretch of hillside where, unusually, the lie of the land altered and he was able for a brief time to turn his mount and ride southward, back towards the battlefield. And then, quite suddenly, he was within hailing distance of the road below, where the lay brothers of the Hospital were fully occupied in doing what they did best, tending to the wounded. Several of the black-clad fighting monks, riding up and down in full uniform, were supervising the efforts of large, organized groups of infantry who were separating the living from the dead and the Christians from the Muslims, carrying the Frankish wounded to a cleared space by the roadside and the Muslims to a more distant spot, closer to the seashore. Down there, André could see, were more Hospital brothers, tending to the infidels as their brethren were tending to their own.