It was clear that the crusaders would have to regroup. Modern scholarship has emphasised the skill with which Richard organised and upheld the Frankish marching formation upon leaving Acre. But this ignores the fact that, to a significant degree, the Lionheart and his men actually had to learn by their mistakes. One crusader wrote that, after the experiences of 25 August, the Franks ‘made great efforts and conducted themselves more wisely’. While continuing to wait for the army to muster fully–for troops were still arriving from Acre, now mostly by ship–the king set about reordering his forces. Equipment was pared down; the poor especially had begun the march overburdened ‘with food and arms’, so that ‘a number of them had to be left behind to die of heat and thirst’. At the same time, a far more structured marching order was established and this seems to have been followed for the remainder of the journey south.

The crusaders continued wherever possible to cling to the coastline, maintaining even closer contact with the fleet. Elite, battle-hardened Templars and Hospitallers were given the crucial job of holding the van and rearguard, while the king and a central mass of mounted knights were screened on the exposed left flank by dense ranks of well-armoured infantry. A Muslim eyewitness who beheld the army a few days later described this latter unit as an impenetrable ‘wall’. Protected by ‘full-length, well-made chain mail’, all but invulnerable to light missile fire, ‘arrows were falling on them with no effect’, such that he saw ‘Franks with ten arrows fixed in their backs, pressing on in this fashion quite unconcerned’. These infantrymen might use bow and crossbow fire to deter skirmishers, but in the main they focused upon sustaining their inexorable advance unabated. Recognising that this shielding role would take an enormous physical and psychological toll, Richard split the infantry into two divisions, rotating them in and out of service, leaving the rested group to recuperate as they marched on the protected right, seaward, flank alongside the army’s lightened baggage train.⁶⁹

Adopting this formation, the Christians left Haifa on 28 August, clear in the knowledge that they would, from this point on, face intense and unceasing harassment from Saladin’s troops. Richard now took great care to conserve his army’s energy, following each stage of the march with one or even two rest days. Muslim forces certainly trailed their every step, even picketing the Latins’ camps at night, all the while looking for any opportunity to crack their marching order. What remained unclear, however, was whether the sultan would attempt to challenge them in a full-scale pitched battle. Historians have consistently misjudged Saladin’s intentions in this regard, suggesting that he had from the start settled upon suitable ground to the south, near Arsuf. The richly detailed eyewitness testimony of Baha al-Din, who was with the sultan throughout this period, presents a very different picture. Saladin, it seems, was rather bewildered by Richard’s tactics. Taken aback by the king’s unexpected decision to take repeated rest days, the sultan misjudged the speed of the Frankish advance and therefore the length of time his own troops would have to stay in the field, prompting food shortages. For the moment, Saladin seemed to have been outplayed by the Lionheart, forced to adopt a reactive strategy shot through with desperation. Troops were indeed dispatched to stalk the Christians, but the sultan also began a rather frantic search for a suitable battlefield, personally reconnoitring the coastal route south, even assessing the vulnerability of the crusaders’ likely campsites. Throughout this period he was actively looking to stop the Latins in their tracks.

For eight days the crusaders made slow, gruelling progress. Advancing from the ruined fortification at Destroit to Caesarea on Friday 30 August, they began to falter under the beating summer sun. A Latin marching in the army described how:

The heat was so intolerable that some died of it; these were buried at once. Those who could not go on, the worn-out and exhausted, of whom there were often many, the sick and infirm, the king, acting wisely, had carried in the galleys and the small boats to the next stage.

The next day, en route to the grimly named Dead River, the Franks scored a notable success in the midst of a prolonged skirmish. Among the enemy on that day was Ayas the Tall, one of Saladin’s most celebrated and ferocious mamluks, laying waste to all before him with a massive lance. When a lucky blow brought down his horse, Ayas, weighed down by his armour, was overrun and butchered. Baha al-Din admitted that ‘the Muslims grieved for him greatly’, but, perhaps more importantly, the victory helped to buoy Christian morale. So too did the crusaders’ ritual each night of chanting en masse ‘Holy Sepulchre, help us’ before they settled down to snatch a few restless hours of sleep. But the undoubted key to their continued composure in the face of such unrelenting pressure was the presence of the Lionheart, unbending, ever ready to step into the fray, to bolster the line. Richard seems to have taken great care to monitor the mood of his men, seeking to ensure that he did not overstretch their endurance. By the start of September, with food shortages beginning to bite, arguments started breaking out. Infantrymen would swarm round the carcasses of ‘the fattest of the dead horses’ to have fallen during each day’s march, brawling over their flesh, to the disgust of the steeds’ knightly owners. The king interceded, proclaiming that he would replace any lost mount so long as the meat of the deceased animal was offered up to ‘worthy men-at-arms’. Grateful Franks ‘ate [the] horsemeat as if it were game. Flavoured with hunger rather than sauce, they thought it was delicious.’⁷⁰

Of course, the benefits of Richard’s visible presence came at considerable risk. Marching on from the Dead River on 3 September, a ‘wild’ stretch of coastline forced the crusaders to turn inland for a time. Saladin had chosen this moment to seek battle, personally leading three divisions of troops against the crusaders’ massed ranks. Time and again the Muslims bombarded the Christians with arrows and then charged their lines. Baha al-Din watched the repeated attacks unfold:

I saw [Saladin] actually riding among the skirmishers as the enemy’s arrows flew past him. He was attended by two pages with two spare mounts and that was all, riding from division to division and urging them forward, ordering them to press hard upon the enemy and bring them to battle.

The sultan emerged unscathed, but Richard was less fortunate. There, as always, in the thick of the fighting, the king was suddenly struck in the side by a crossbow bolt. Fortunately, he managed to stay in the saddle as combat raged on around him. This time he had been lucky: his armour had absorbed most of the impact and ‘he was not seriously hurt’. But the episode highlighted the immense, but necessary, risks he took as a medieval warrior-king par excellence. Had he fallen that day, the whole crusade might soon have collapsed. Equally, however, without his tangible, seemingly indestructible, presence in the front line, Frankish resistance would probably have buckled. As it was, both he and Saladin survived this first confrontation. By the end of the day a rather shell-shocked Christian army had reached the River of Reeds. As they made camp on its banks they seem to have been unaware that, just a mile or so upstream, the Muslims too were pitching their tents. Baha al-Din reflected with some irony that ‘we were drinking from the higher reaches while the enemy were drinking from the lower’.⁷¹