The men of Loches were stalwart in defence; a score of knights in full iron mail, supported by crossbows and spearmen, held that breach, cutting down the leather-jacketed routiers who hurled themselves at them with swinging blows of sword and axe. The second wave of mercenaries attacked. And a hundred more of Mercadier’s men were fed into that cauldron of pain, rage and death, into the riot of scything steel and spurting blood.
Yet the breach held.
Now I could see that the mercenaries of the third wave were beginning to hang back a little on the rocky slope, and were milling around beneath the walls, rather than rushing to their deaths in that terrible blood-splashed bottle-neck. They were still dying in great numbers, plucked from this life by a hissing crossbow quarrel, an arrow or a hurled spear. Sergeants were screaming at the men, striking them, urging them onward – but the impetus of the initial attack had been lost. Here and there a brave man, or perhaps a pair of friends, even a small group, would rush up the slope, stumbling on the loose stones, which were now red and slippery, screaming their battle cries and waving weapons – and would die, chopped down by the long blood-slick swords and jabbing spears of the defenders.
Still the breach held.
I heard a trumpet, loud and strong from my left; two long blasts. Turning my head away from the appalling spectacle of bloody heroism and death at the breach, I saw a massive formation of unhorsed but fully armoured men start forward from our lines, thirty or so knights on foot, each clad from head to foot in protective iron links, and a couple of score men-at-arms and squires behind them. A standard fluttered above the foremost rank: it was William, Earl of Striguil, and his knightly followers; the Marshal blatantly disobeying the King’s orders and ramming his men into the battle, just at the moment when they were needed most.
‘The old fool! The disobedient glory-hunting fool,’ I heard the King mutter. And watched in awe as William and his men broke into a heavy run and charged, heedless to all danger, across the open ground before the castle, sweeping Mercadier’s men out of their path, bounding up the gore-greased stairway and into the steel fence of the breach.
William and his knights smashed into the line of defenders and I could hear the crunch of wood, the squeal of metal and clash of blades as the two lines collided. The enemy line sagged, pushed back by the force of fresh men pressing against it; and I saw Mercadier, limping a little, shouting at his men from below the walls, urging them to add their weight to this fresh attack. Sword drawn, he joined his raggedy warriors scrambling up behind the Marshal’s fresh troops. I saw William himself, taller than other men, on the very lip of the breach, laying about him with a long sword, and dropping enemies with every stroke. And beside him his superbly trained household knights, their mail gleaming silver in the sunlight, hacked and carved their way forward, inch by bloody inch.
The resistance began to melt, the Marshal and his men were pushing forward, the defenders’ line was buckling backwards; there was a tremendous howl and a surge forward by Mercadier’s men as they pitched in behind the Marshal’s knights, adding their fury to the mêlée, and suddenly they were all through the breach, like a great dam bursting, our men flooding forward, washing the enemy from my sight.
The slaughter after the taking of Loches was appalling. William the Marshal’s men and Mercadier’s rogues – those who had survived the horror in the breach – killed every living soul they could find inside the castle. The castellan and his wife and baby daughter, and a pair of priests, managed to surrender to the Marshal himself when he and his closest knights had fought their bloody way to the top of the tower – and they were the lucky ones. Everyone else inside the walls of Loches perished. Mercadier’s men, who had shown immense bravery in attacking that hellish gap, showed the other side of the routiers’ reputation when they had broken through the outer wall, and overcome the slight resistance of a few young squires in the smashed north-western corner of the keep. They sank to the level of beasts: a group of routiers discovered the cellars and they drank deeply of the rich yellow wine of the region, and this fuelled their depravity in the captured stronghold. Men, whether armed for war or not, servants, priests, monks – were all put to the sword. Women, old and young, were raped by long queues of routiers, who shouted jests and drained tankards of wine while they waited their turn to defile some unfortunate belledame, whose only crime was to have been married to a French garrison knight.
Loches was ours by mid-afternoon – it had only taken King Richard a matter of hours to reduce this formidable stronghold – but the looting, raping and murders continued until long after midnight.