Read "Red Eve" by H. Rider Haggard online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
It was Saturday, the 26th of August, in the year 1346. The harassed English host -- but a little host, after all, retreating for its life from Paris -- had forced the passage of the Somme by the ford which a forgotten traitor, Gobin Agache by name, revealed to them. Now it stood at bay upon the plain of Crecy, there to conquer or to die.
"Will the French fight to-day, what think you? " asked Hugh of Grey Dick, who had just descended from an apple-tree which grew in the garden of a burnt-out cottage. Here he had been engaged on the twofold business of surveying the disposition of the English army and in gathering a pocketful of fruit which remained upon the tree's topmost boughs.