may imagine, to no regular order, an occasion seized upon by some
one commander who saw his chance, a charge of horse was led right up to
that end of the English line, the barricade of wagons prevented its
getting home, and, though the struggle was violent, the obstacle was never
pierced or overcome. Well after sunset, and as the light was fading, the
King of France himself led a great body to the centre, and seems to have
come into range of the arrows, but he, no more than any of his lieges,
could force horse against steady infantry and an unremitting fire. The
darkness came, the late moon rose, and still were desultory and sporadic
charges continued, haphazard and blindly. They had not even a hazard of
success. These last efforts of the failing battle were repelled with ease,
but even up to midnight the final pulses of the fight throbbed, with
lesser and lesser pulsations; until after these seven hours of it--most of
it by darkness, and all the while the line of Archers standing unbroken,
and all the while supplied with their unexhausted ammunition, and finding
strength to draw and to discharge--the thing was over.

Throughout that night great bodies of disordered peasantry, half-armed,
the militia of the Communes, fled or wandered aimlessly southward over the
bare, rolling land. The mounted knights had ridden away from a field where
all was utterly lost, and the English line broke up to move forward by the
light of lanterns over the face of the countryside, to despatch or to
capture the wounded, to loot, to search for the faces and the ensigns of
the greater dead. But in that darkness the magnitude of the result was not
seen. The English army seems to have guessed the issue mainly by the dying
down of the noise, and the ceasing of the cries of men rallying to their
lords' banners.

This was the end of the Battle of Crecy, in the night of Saturday the 26th
of August, 1346.

Early upon the Sunday morning, Edward's forces stood to arms again, not
knowing whether even yet a new attack might not be made. Mist covered all
the landscape, through which fog, dimly, bodies of men seemed to be
advancing upon them from the south. They were reinforcements of Philip's
come up in ignorance of what had passed the day before, or at any rate
not appreciating how decisive the day had been. Five hundred knights
riding out easily dispersed them. Further bodies straggling up in similar
fashion were dealt with in detail, and all that mor