as I have said, of about
five o'clock. They proceeded down the slight slope into the Val aux
Clercs, followed at a foot's pace by a strong body of the first battalion
of the French mounted knights under Alencon.

Advancing thus deployed, a body of 6000 men had difficulty in keeping its
line, a thing essential to the simultaneous effect of short-range weapons.
Twice they were halted to correct their alignment, and though perhaps at
the second halt they were at the lowest point of the valley and just in
extreme range of the English arrows from the height above, those arrows
did not yet come. The English had been ordered to reserve their fire. They
began to climb the opposing slope, shouting as was their custom, and after
a third halt had been called, and a third strict alignment made so near to
the English front as to be certainly in range for their cross-bows, the
order to shoot was given. With the first flight of the Genoese bolts, the
English Archers took each man his step forward and began pouring in that
terrible fire, sustained, accurate, and rapid, to which they were so
admirably trained, and of which hitherto, save in the fight at the ford,
no example had been given in continental warfare.

Under that murderous and unceasing rain of missiles the Italian
mercenaries, whose weapon compelled them to a complicated process of
winding and ratcheting and laying, very ill-suited to such a strain, fell
into disorder. A sufficient proportion of them broke, and their confusion
at once angered and churned up the great body of mounted French knights,
which awaited impatiently immediately behind their line. They were ridden
down in the eagerness of these armoured horsemen to retrieve this first
check by a charge, and Alencon's men spurred hard (badly hampered by that
obstacle of their own men fallen into confusion before them) upon the
English right and the Prince of Wales's battalion. Some of them got home,
especially those who found themselves opposite the most advanced section
of the Prince of Wales's command, where it stood thrust forward in a
semicircle upon the shoulder and last slopes of the hill. The boy himself
was unhorsed, and for a moment the pressure was severe.[15] But the effect
of the arrow fire upon all the rest of the charging line told heavily. It
never got home. Indeed, it must have been apparent to Edward at that
moment that for all the fixed tradition of chivalry and that overwhelming
atmosphere of milita