“For the love of God get those ladders up!” Buckingham shouted. All down the line of the castle wall there were soldiers setting the feet of the scaling ladders into the rocks at the foot of the wall.
“Up! Up!” shouted Buckingham “Now! And get those damned gates open!”
Tradescant was flung back by a man falling against him as he took a musket ball. He turned to hold him; but at once a man on the other side went down too.
“Help me!” the man called.
“I’ll come back!” John promised. “I have to…”
He broke off, abandoning both men, and plunged forward, trying to keep close to the duke. Buckingham was at the foot of a scaling ladder, urging men up it. For one dreadful moment Tradescant thought that his lord was going to climb the ladder himself.
“Villiers!” he shouted above the screams and the firing, and saw Buckingham turn his bare head to look for him.
John pushed his way through the crowd at the foot of the scaling ladder to get to his master’s side and cling with all his weight on to his arm to prevent him going upward. Only then did he realize that something was wrong. Tradescant and Buckingham looked upward together. The men were climbing the ladder, head to heels all the way up, the new soldiers at the foot of the ladder pushing up and forcing the ones at the top onward and upward. But then they seemed to stick. No one was moving; the attack had paused. John stepped back a pace and looked up. The scaling ladders were too short. The men could not reach the top of the walls.
The picture of the ladders, crowded by men with nowhere to go, and their faces turned upward to where the musket balls were raining down on them, burned into Tradescant’s vision.
“Retreat!” he yelled. “My lord! The day is lost! The ladders are too short. We have to go back!”
In the noise and the panic Buckingham did not hear him, did not understand him.
“We’re lost!” Tradescant repeated. He fought his way back to Buckingham’s side. “Look up!” he shouted. “Look up!”
Buckingham stepped out from the foot of the ladder and craned his neck to look upward. His face, bright with excitement and courage, suddenly drained of blood and lightness. John thought that his master aged ten years in that one upward glance.
“Retreat,” he said shortly. He turned to his standard bearer. “Sound the retreat,” he ordered. “Sound it loud,” and he turned on his heel.
John ploughed back, still flinching from the musket fire rattling from the citadel walls, to where the man had fallen. He was dead; there was nothing John could do for him except say a swift prayer as he ran, stumbling, like a coward, out of the range of the musket fire, and away from St. Martin’s citadel – the fort where the walls were never measured and the scaling ladders were too short.
“I will fight him myself,” Buckingham said at the council of war the next day. “I shall send a challenge.”
John, weary and bruised, leaned against the doorway of the cabin and saw that his master was in despair, and making the grand gestures of a man in despair.
“He must accept!” Soubise exclaimed. “No gentleman could refuse.”
Buckingham glanced across at John and saw the weary pity in his servant’s face.
“Do you think he will accept, John?” he asked.
“Why should he?”
“Because he is a gentleman! A French gentleman!” Soubise exclaimed. “It is a matter of honor!”
John’s shoulders slumped; he moved to take the weight off his aching knee. “Whatever you say,” he said. “It can’t do any harm. You would beat him with a sword, would you not, my lord?”
Buckingham nodded. “Oh, yes.”
John shrugged.
“The scaling ladders were absurdly short,” the officer burst out. “The wrong size had been loaded. They should have been checked as they were loaded. It was madness to think that they would be any use. You could not reach a thatched cottage roof with ladders that short. You would pick apples with ladders that short!”
There was an awkward silence.
“Send a challenge,” Buckingham said to one of the officers. “He might be fool enough to take it.”
As John had predicted, Commander Torres did not take up the challenge, but the following week the French tried to break out of their siege and capture the English camp. The alarm sounded in the night and the men stood to and fought like savages, pushing the French forces back to the citadel again. It was, in theory, a victory for the English besieging army, but there was little joy at dawn when they did a roll call for the wounded and dead and found that they had fought a long hard battle and were still no further forward.
The siege had held; but the cold weather was coming and it would be a better winter for those inside the fort with food, fuel and shelter than for those camping on marshy ground outside the walls. The duke had been promised that the reinforcing fleet was waiting in Portsmouth harbor under the command of the Earl of Holland, ready to sail any day. But there it stayed, and none of King Charles’s protestations of love and constancy could relieve the English army on the island. The bad weather that kept the earl in harbor also made it impossible to sustain the siege in France. In October, another flotilla of French barges broke the English barricade and fresh French troops were successfully landed inside the fort. Buckingham decided to withdraw.
They had hoped that they might steal away at dawn, and that the citadel might not realize they were gone until it was too late. Following that plan, they did not disembark where they had arrived, on the beaches and dunes on the east of the island, but sent the ships northward to wait off the marshy waters around the Ile de Loix. The Ile de Loix was connected to the island by a tiny causeway, covered at high tide. Buckingham’s plan was that the English army should slip across the causeway as the waters were rising and any French pursuit would be kept back by the swirling currents. Then the English could board the ships in good order and sail away.
Despite their safety behind the thick walls, the French sentries on duty were alert. As the little makeshift English tents were struck and the soldiers quietly formed into ranks, the French sentries watched and raised the alarm. As the ragged English army lined up in companies the gates of St. Martin opened and the French, well-fed, well-clothed, well-commanded, marched out. Buckingham’s troops, nearly seven thousand of them, fell slowly back before the French force. They went in a textbook retreat, staying outside musket range, refusing to engage with the sporadic fire that the French troops offered.
“How does the tide?” Buckingham asked John quickly as he tried to keep the men maintaining a steady pace toward the causeway. The ground underfoot was marshy and wet and the men could not keep to a quick march. They floundered about and had to be ordered into single file on the narrow path. The sniping from the rear increased as the French soldiers gained on them.
“The tide’s turning,” John warned. “Let them run to the ships, my lord, or we’ll not get them off the island before the tide rises.”
“Run!” Buckingham shouted. “As fast as you can!” He sent his standard bearer ahead to show the men the way. One man stepped carelessly off the causeway and immediately sank to his waist in thick mud. He shouted to his friends for help and they, glancing anxiously toward the rear of the army where the French were coming closer, laid their pikes on the ground toward him and pulled him out.
“Go on! Go on!” John urged them. “Hurry!”
It was a race against three forces. One, the English, breaking ranks and running for their ships; two, the French coming behind them, as confident as poachers in a field of rabbits, pausing to fire and reload and then marching briskly on; three, the tide swirling in either side of the island, threatening to cut the narrow causeway in two, pushed on by the rising winds.