Blood Divide by John Sadler

Author:John Sadler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lion Hudson
Published: 2014-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Signed, Thomas Howard and the captains of the fleet…

Lord Hume surveys the Scottish encampment

Massive. That was the only word. I’d never seen the like. Our camp was a city, a fortified citadel. It stretched out like some fabled fortress of old. Troy comes to life in Northumbria. It’s not often I’m lost for words. The bowl beneath the rise of Flodden Hill was a sea of silk and canvas surrounded by the crude shelters of the commoners. The King’s seat, as befitted His Majesty, floated in a lake of banners at the highest point, removed from the stink and squalor below. For once it wasn’t raining.

“It would be epic if it was not for the smell.” My companion on that morning was Lord Lindsay of the Byres, a smooth, eloquent man and something of a cynic. Fellow after my own heart, this was code for – it’s a grand show but all smoke and mirrors.

“A fine sight,” I replied carefully. “Our defences seem fully in order.”

“Indeed they do,” Lindsay replied. “Nobody will have seen the like this side of the water.” That was true. The King’s French engineers had constructed a magnificent redoubt, low and wide, built for firepower with angled bastions that meant every inch of the ashlar walls was covered by guns, state of the art by anybody’s standards.

“We will do well enough if we bide here,” Lindsay ventured. “No army in Europe, not even the Turk, could come up that hill. Our flanks are surely secure?”

This was rhetorical. We both knew our breach was sealed in. The Cheviots to our west were impassable to large forces. You’d never get guns anywhere near. East, the slope down to the river was covered by more guns. We’d eliminated the English garrisons, neutralized Norham, and set up a series of outposts. Our patrols ranged freely.

Lindsay looked at me. “We’ve sickness, you know: always happens, of course, and more men slip away each night. No point trying to stop the flood; half the time the provosts defect with ’em.”

“It’s always the way,” I replied. “Our blokes are unwaged. They fight because they’re obliged. Once they’ve got whatever loot they can filch, they’re off. It’s a bad business but nothing you can do about it.”

Any Homeric images were dispelled by the smell. “Largest town in Scotland,” Lindsay observed drily, “and the foulest-smelling – no mean accomplishment!” If our army was still, say, thirty thousand strong we must have had half as many again followers, tradesmen, and the like. Most had no tents; our commissariat didn’t run that far, so they made do with mean bivouacs hacked from branches.

There was no sanitation for the camp, and the latrine trenches created their own pungent miasma. If you think that a large city, such as Edinburgh, might hold ten thousand citizens, King James and his host were at least three times that number. To keep such a population in bread and cheese was a herculean undertaking in itself. Armies are a plague of locusts. They strip the land bare.

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