always in debt, and always utterly careless of
it. His courage was of the sort that takes a sharp delight in danger, and
particularly in danger accompanied by strong action; he was an intense and
a variable lover of women, an unwearied rider, of some (but no
conspicuous) ability in the planning of an action or the grasp of a field,
not cruel as yet (but already violent to an excess which later years,
alas! refined into cruelty), splendidly adventurous, and strung every way
for command. He could and did inspire a force, especially a small force,
in the fashion which it was his chief desire to achieve. He was a great
soldier; but his sins doomed him to an unhappy failure and to the wasting
of his life at last.

PART I

THE CAMPAIGN

As the first of the great raids, that of Crecy, had been designed to draw
off the pressure from Edward III.'s troops in the South of France, and to
bring the French levies northward away from them, so the second great raid
ten years later, which may be called by courtesy the "Campaign" of
Poitiers, was designed to call pressure off the English troops in the
north and to bring the French levies down southward away from them. As
Edward's march through Normandy had been a daring ride for booty, so was
the Black Prince's ride northward from Aquitaine; and as Edward from the
neighbourhood of Paris turned and retreated at top speed from before the
French host, so did the Black Prince turn from the neighbourhood of the
Loire and retreat at speed from before the pursuit of the bodies which the
King of France had gathered. And as the one great raid ended in the
signal victory of Crecy, so did the other end in the signal victory of
Poitiers.

But these parallel and typical actions, lying ten years apart, have, of
course, one main point of resemblance more important than all the rest:
each includes the complete overthrow of a large body of feudal cavalry by
the trained forces of the Plantagenets; Crecy wholly, Poitiers partly, by
the excellence of a missile weapon--the long-bow. Each shows also a
striking disproportion of numbers: the little force on the defensive
completely defeating the much larger body of the attack.

Those of my readers, therefore, who have made themselves acquainted with
the details of Crecy must expect a repetition of much the same sort of
incidents in the details of Poitiers. The two battles are twin, and stand
out conspicuously in their sharpness of result from the