Free The Last Full Measure by Michael Stephenson Page A

slaughter, the peasant-soldiers—about eleven hundred of them—were stripped of their pitiably inadequate weaponry (mainly glaives and bills, the spearlike adaptations of farming implements) and armor (a few had some chain mail) and tossed unceremoniously into grave pits.
    The naked bodies fell like puppets with their strings cut, limbs akimbo, jumbled and tumbled together in a gruesome confraternity, appalling in its mimicry of intimacy. They would lie together, lost, unnamed, and unremembered, until the pits were uncovered in 1905 and each skeleton was examined to determine the likely cause of its death. Those without marks on their bones—the majority—were killed by lethal flesh wounds, mainly spear and sword thrusts to the abdomen. Four hundred fifty-six wounds spoke of being struck by cutting weapons such as swords and axes. Piercing weapons such as arrows, spears, and the macelike “morning star,” a ball studded with metal spikes and attached to a handle, accounted for 126 wounds. One skull shows evidence of multiple hits. In its base it has three bodkin-tipped arrowheads lodged in a neat cluster. Was the man trying to flee? Or had he turned his back in an instinctive response to a hail of arrows? In addition, though, as a testament to the ferocity of a medieval battlefield, he was also struck twice toward the back of his head with devastating blows from a war hammer that left its telltale square imprint in his shattered skull. The destructive power of medieval weaponry is seen everywhere at Visby, but particularly in the cuts to the legs, where in more than one case a single sword or ax blow had severed both legs in one tremendous scything swipe.
    The fate of the anonymous dead of Visby was the lot of most of the slain common soldiers of the time. In many battles the foot soldiers, the archers, the crossbowmen who, through some unlucky turn of battle’s fortune, were left exposed and unprotected, were invariably slaughtered. They had little value, could not be ransomed, and were more profitable dead and stripped of their gear, however meager. In a sense, though, they were condemned to death for the same tactical reasons their social betters, the knights, also perished. If they became isolated, unsupported, separated, they would be shot to death by bowmen, ridden down by cavalrymen, or hacked and stabbed by the exultant infantry.The battle of Falkirk in Scotland (1298) is a good example. The English knights drove off the Scottish cavalry and archers who provided some protection for the pikemen of the infantry massed in dense, circular formations—the
schiltrons
—that were a characteristic of Scottish battle formations of the period. Faced with the bristling hedge of pikes, the English cavalry milled about, unable to break in, but nor could the Scots advance or retreat for fear of being broken. So they stood and died under the devastating hail of Edward I’s longbowmen (a significant proportion of whom were Welsh). Their defensive cohesion shot to pieces, the survivors were hacked down by the English horse followed by the infantry. Of the original ten thousand Scots pikemen, more than half were dispatched. 1
    On occasion the infantry were tricked into breaking their defensive unity and suffered the consequences. At Hastings in 1066, the Norman cavalry, riding up and down the Saxon line, had fruitlessly tried to break down the
shieldburgh
—the formidable shield wall behind which the Saxon
frydmen
, the foot militia, stood fast. It was only by feigning retreat that the Normans induced a large block of the Saxons to break ranks and chase downhill, abandoning their strong defensive position on a ridge, in what seemed like victorious pursuit, only to have the pursuer turn around and cut down to a man the exposed Saxon foot soldiers. By nightfall the flower of the English army lay dead around the fallen dragon standards and its slain king.
    If the fate of the medieval infantry soldier was in many instances brutal