top of them, unable to check their speed, or to
swerve aside from the terrible wall of their shattered comrades which
had so suddenly sprung up before them. Fifteen feet high was that
blood-spurting mound of screaming, kicking horses and writhing,
struggling men. Here and there on the flanks a horseman cleared himself
and dashed for the hedge, only to have his steed slain under him and to
be hurled from his saddle. Of all the three hundred gallant riders, not
one ever reached that fatal hedge.

But now in a long rolling wave of steel the German battalion roared
swiftly onward. They opened in the center to pass that terrible mound
of death, and then spurred swiftly in upon the archers. They were brave
men, well led, and in their open lines they could avoid the clubbing
together which had been the ruin of the vanguard; yet they perished
singly even as the others had perished together. A few were slain by the
arrows. The greater number had their horses killed under them, and were
so shaken and shattered by the fall that they could not raise their
limbs, over-weighted with iron, from the spot where they lay.

Three men riding together broke through the bushes which sheltered the
leaders of the archers, cut down Widdington the Dalesman, spurred onward
through the hedge, dashed over the bowmen behind it, and made for the
Prince. One fell with an arrow through his head, a second was beaten
from his saddle by Chandos, and the third was slain by the Prince's own
hand. A second band broke through near the river, but were cut off by
Lord Audley and his squires, so that all were slain. A single horseman
whose steed was mad with pain, an arrow in its eye and a second in its
nostril, sprang over the hedge and clattered through the whole army,
disappearing amid whoops and laughter into the woods behind. But none
others won as far as the hedge. The whole front of the position was
fringed with a litter of German wounded or dead, while one great heap in
the center marked the downfall of the gallant French three hundred.

Whilst these two waves of the attack had broken in front of the English
position, leaving this blood-stained wreckage behind them, the main
divisions had halted and made their last preparations for their own
assault. They had not yet begun their advance, and the nearest was still
half a mile distant, when the few survivors from the forlorn hope, their
maddened horses bristling with arrows, flew past them on either flan