The Battle for France (Struggle For a Crown Book 7) by Hosker Griff

Author:Hosker, Griff [Hosker, Griff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sword Books Ltd.
Published: 2021-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 11

King Henry was never idle, and his riders were sent to Paris and to Picardy to find out where his army was needed. Meaux was just twenty-five miles from Paris and was a formidable castle. It was held by a warlord called Bastard of Vaurus. The garrison, apart from the rebels, was made up of Scottish and Irish. King Henry’s treatment of the Scottish prisoners at Melun meant that they would fight to the very end. It was seen by the King as a key target for it protected Paris from the east and was the most formidable of the northern French fortresses. King Henry was in a positive mood as he began, at the start of October, yet another siege. The rains began and after an already wet autumn, the River Marne flooded. My heart sank when we arrived for I knew that this was Honfleur all over again; we would have a flooded siege which would only become worse as more rain fell. The difference this time was that the King had already planned his camps and his strategy. The fortress lay in a loop of the river. The town walls followed the river and were punctuated with towers upon which they had their guns. The castle lay in the heart of the town. Once we had taken the walls then we would have to take the castle. Our main efforts were at the barbican which guarded the main entrance to the town. It was there that the French had placed their bombards and we lost two of our valuable and irreplaceable guns while they were being brought into position.

The army surrounded the town and castle with camps. As the vanguard my men had chosen one which was slightly higher than many but, even so, we were wet from dawn until dusk. We used logs and, when we could find it, turf, to make log houses but we had to make them in what was soon to become a sea of mud. We were never clean! The French had artillery and they used it well. The stones they fired caused death to our men as we prepared the siege lines. Until the wooden defences were in place then we were vulnerable. There was damage to our defences before we could even put them up. Firing from an elevated position, they were able to outrange our guns. It was like Caen in reverse. There we had held the high ground and now, in this swampy part of France, the French and Scottish did. It was once we had finally built our defences and started to pound their walls that disease began to hurt us. Men died, as they had at Honfleur but in even greater numbers. One in five of the army was ill and soon they succumbed to the cold and dysentery and died. We seemed to make little progress and each day was a repetition of the previous one. The air was filled with the stink of gunpowder.

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