Poitiers has the same loneliness. The Mohammedan had ridden up from the Pyrenees, ricochetted from the walls of Toulouse, but poured on like a flood into the centre of Gaul. Charles the Hammer broke him in the fields beyond Vouneuil. The district is populous and the Valley of the Clain is full of pastures and among the tenderest of European valleys, but as you drift down stream and approach this place the plateau upon the right above you grows bare, and it was there, so far as modern scholarship can be certain, that the last effort of the Arabs was forced back. That other battle of Poitiers among the vineyards, the Black Prince’s battle, one would imagine, could not seem lonely, for it was fought in the midst of tilled land full of vineyards and right above the great high road which leads south-east from the town. But lonely it is, and if you will go up the little gully where the head of the French column advanced against the English archers upon the high land above, you will not find a man to tell you the memories of the place. Creçy was fought close to a county town; but the same trick of landscape or of influence is also played there. The town hides itself in a little hollow upon the farther flank of a hill, and though the right of Edward’s line reposed upon it, and though it was within a bowshot of the houses that the boy his son was pressed so hard, yet Creçy hides away from the battlefield. And as you come in by the eastern road, which takes you all along the crest of the English position, there is nothing before you but a naked and a silent land, falling in a dip to where the first of the French charge failed, and rising in long empty lengths of fallow and of grass to where you can see, a single mark for the eye in so much loneliness, the rude cross standing on the place where the blind King of Bohemia fell.