f marching.

On the next day, the 17th, he had got his forces more than another
seventeen miles north and had camped them by Auneuil. In two more days, by
the evening of Saturday the 19th, they were yet twenty-five miles further
north as the crow flies (and more like thirty by the roads), at Sommereux.
Edward halted at Troussures (of which the clerk makes "Trusserux") to see
it file by, and on the morrow, Sunday, August the 20th, he was at Camps
in the upland above Moliens Vidame, another push of fifteen miles for mass
of the force, and of more than twenty for himself and his staff.

At this point came the crux of his danger. All during that tremendous feat
of marching (and what it meant anyone who has covered close on fifty miles
in three days under military conditions will know--there are few such) the
great host of Philip was pounding at his heels.

Now, if the reader will glance at the map at the beginning of this
section, he will see that just as Edward had been under a necessity to
cross the Seine in the first part of his raid, he was now under a still
greater necessity of crossing the Somme. A force much larger than his own
was pressing him against that river into a sort of corner, and his only
chance of safety lay in reaching the Straits of Dover through the county
of Ponthieu, which lay beyond the stream. Every effort had been made to
press the march. The force appears to have been divided for this purpose
and to have marched in parallel columns, and the single case of marauding
(the burning of the Abbey of St Lucien outside Beauvais) had been punished
with the death of twenty men.

To turn and meet his pursuers (who were evidently in contact with him
through their scouts) would have meant, so long as he was on this side of
the Somme, no chance of retreat in case of defeat.

Every mile he went to the north the Somme valley, already a broad expanse
of marsh upon his flank, grew broader and more difficult. The decision,
therefore, which Edward took at this critical moment, at once perilous and
masterly, showed that rapid grasp of a situation which, for all his lack
of a general plan during this campaign, this great soldier could boast. In
the first place, he himself rides forward no less than twenty full miles
to the village of Acheux. He has behind him the whole army strung out in
separate bodies parallel to the Somme. Himself, from the head of that long
line of twenty miles, commands all that should be done