em.

All this wide expanse of fertile land, affording from one lift of its
undulations and another great even views for miles and miles, is cut by
streams which run parallel to each other in trenches five to seven miles
apart, and make their way by curiously straight courses north-westward to
the neighbouring sea. These are the Conche, the Authie (the crossing of
whose marshes by the great Roman road formed those _pontes_ which, as we
have seen, give the district its name of Ponthieu), and the Maye.

This last little river alone concerns us. We deal in the matter of the
Battle of Crecy only with the first rising waters of the Maye. Its source
springs just below the village which derives from that river-head its name
of Fontaine, and the Church of Crecy stands not two miles down the young
stream. These two miles of its course, and a slight depression tributary
to this its upper basin, mould the battlefield.

For this shallow depression, called the "Val aux Clercs," among the least
of the many long waves and troughs of land upon which Ponthieu is
modelled, was the centre of the engagement, and, though too short and
shallow to develop the smaller stream, such water as it collects is
tributary to the Maye. This depression runs up from the level exactly
north-eastward, gradually rising until it fades, not quite two miles above
the river, into the upper levels of the plateau.

On either side of this Val aux Clercs lift the soft and inconspicuous
slopes that bound it. The one that bounds it on the north and west, and
from which a man faces the south-east and the direction of Amiens, was the
eminence occupied by the army of Edward III. At its southern end, where it
overlooks the narrow rivulet of the Maye, it descends abruptly to the
meadow level of the stream. The fall at this terminal of the bank is one
of 100 feet. Its slope varies from one in ten to one in twelve, and on
that slope and on the meadow level below it the little town of Crecy
stands. There is the mouth of the Val aux Clercs, and the further one
walks along the road which marks the position of the English line, and the
nearer one approaches Wadicourt, the shallower and less conspicuous and
flatter does the Val aux Clercs appear upon one's right, as its depression
rises towards the general level of the plateau. At last, in the
neighbourhood of Wadicourt itself (the first houses of which stand 2000
yards from the last houses of Crecy) the depression has almost