and besides, they had as great a desire to be over as the rest of the army; they had committed many faults, but this good action did more than sufficiently atone for all. However, the greatest part of the difficulty was not to get the artillery up; for as soon as our men were at the top, they saw great deep valleys below them, to which there was no way but what nature had prepared; so that our horses and men were forced to draw backward, and the letting the guns down was infinitely more trouble than the hauling them up; and besides, the smiths and the carpenters were forced to be constantly by; for if any of the guns slipped, they had to be mended before they could go on. Many advised the king, for expedition’s sake, to break up his great guns, but he would by no means consent to it. The Marshal de Gié was thirty miles before us, and pressed the king to hasten his march; and yet it was three days before we could reach him, and by that time the enemy was come within sight. Their army was encamped in a large field about half a league from him; and if they had attacked him, he would certainly have been defeated. The marshal afterward took up his quarters at Fornovo, a strong town at the entrance into the plain, and this he did to keep the enemy from assaulting us on the mountains; but we had a better guardian than he to protect us, for God put other thoughts into the heads of our enemies, and so blinded their understandings with avarice that they were resolved to wait for our coming into the plain, that nothing might escape them; for they thought if they should attack us upon the mountains we might retreat to Pisa, or some of the towns we had in the territory of Florence; but they were mistaken, for those places were too remote; and if they had beaten us, they might have pursued as fast as we could have fled, and they would have had the advantage of knowing the country better than we.