War showed Count Richard entered into his birthright.  As a strategist he was superb, the best of his time.  What his eye took in his mind snapped up—­like a steel gin.  And his eye was the true soldier’s eye, comprehending by signs, investing with life what was tongueless else.  Over great stretches of barren country—­that limitless land of France—­he could see massed men on the move; creeping forward in snaky columns, spread fanwise from clump to woody clump; here camping snugly under the hill, there lining the river bluffs with winged death; checked here, helped there by a moraine—­as well as you or I may foresee the conduct of a chess-board.  He omitted nothing, judged times and seasons, reckoned defences at their worth, knew all the fordable places by the lie of the land, timed cavalry and infantry to rendezvous, forestalled communications, provided not only for his own base, but against the enemy’s.  All this, of course, without maps, and very much against the systems of his neighbours.  It was thus he had outwitted the heady barons of Aquitaine when little more than a lad, and had turned the hill forts into death-traps against their tenants.  He had the secret of swift marching by night, of delivering assault upon assault, so that while you staggered under one blow you received another full.  He could be as patient as Death, that inchmeal stalker of his prey; he could be as ruthless as the sea, and incredibly generous upon occasion.  To the men he led he was a father, known and beloved as such; it was as a ruler they found him too lonely to be loved.  In war he was the very footboy’s friend.  Personally, when the battles joined, he was rash to a fault; but so blithe, so ready, and so gracefully strong, that to think of wounds upon so bright a surface was an impiety.  No one did think of them:  he seemed to play with danger as a cat with whirling leaves.  ’I have seen him,’ Milo writes somewhere, ’ride into a serry of knights, singing, throwing up and catching again his great sword Gaynpayn; then, all of a sudden, stiffen as with a gush of sap in his veins, dart his head forward, gather his horse together under him, and fling into the midst of them like a tiger into a herd of bulls.  One saw nothing but tossing steel; yet Richard ever emerged, red but scatheless, on the further side.

Upon this man the brunt of war fell naturally:  having begun, he did not hold his hand.  By the beginning of February he had laid his plans, by the end of it he had taken Saumur, cut Angers off from Tours, and turned all the valley of the Loire into a scorched cinder-bed.  In the early days of March he sat down before Tours with his siege-engines, petraries, mangonels, and towers, and daily battered at the walls, with intent to reduce it before the war was really afloat.  The city of Saint Martin was doomed; no help from Anjou could save it, for none could come that way.  Meantime the King his father had landed at Honfleur, assembled his Normans at Rouen, and was