It is important, if we are to understand what follows, to appreciate both the quality and the numbers of those whom the King of France had been able to gather. He had with him, by the still necessary and fatal military weakness of French society, only those loose feudal levies whose lack of cohesion had accounted ten years before for the disaster of Crécy. But John commanded no such host as Philip had nominally led in the Picardy Campaign against Edward III. At the most, and counting all his command, it was little if at all superior in numbers to that of the Black Prince. He hoped, indeed, to increase it somewhat with further levies as his progress southward advanced, and we shall see that his ultimate entry into the town of Poitiers did considerably reinforce him. But at no time before the battle which decided this campaign was John in any important numerical superiority over his enemy, and even in that battle the superiority had nothing of the dramatic disproportion which has rendered the field of Crécy famous. John marched down the Loire straight on Tours. He reached Amboise, twenty miles off, in two days, coming under that town and castle upon Monday the 12th of September, twenty-four hours after the Black Prince had broken up his camp in front of Tours. As it was now useless to go on to Tours, John turned and marched due south, reaching Loches, another twenty miles away, not in two days but in one. It was a fine forced march; and if the Black Prince had appreciated the mobility of the foe, he would not have committed the blunder which will be described in the next section. He himself was marching well, but, encumbered as he was by his heavy baggage train, he covered on the 12th and 13th just less than thirty miles, and reached the town of La Haye des Cartes upon Tuesday the 13th, just as John, with his mixed force of Frenchmen, Germans, and Spaniards, was marching into Loches, twenty miles away. On the next day, Wednesday the 14th, John made yet another of those astonishing marches which merited a better fate than the disaster that was to conclude them, covered the twenty miles between Loches and La Haye, and entered the latter town just as the Black Prince was bringing his men into Châtellerault, only fifteen miles in front of him. Both the commanders, pursuing and pursued, had been getting remarkable work out of their men; for even the Black Prince, though the slower of the two, had covered forty-five miles in three days. But John in that determined advance after him had covered forty miles in two days. With John's entry into La Haye des Cartes and Edward's leaving that town twenty-four hours ahead of him, we enter the curious bit of cross-marching and conflicting purposes which may properly be called "The Preliminaries" of the Battle of Poitiers, and it is under this title that I shall deal with them in the next section. [Illustration: SKETCH MAP OF OPERATIONS PRECEDING THE BATTLE] PART II THE PRELIMINARIES OF THE ACTION