A Victory Owed to God

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The New York Sun

The Battle of Agincourt is almost 600 years old, but it remains one of the most vivid and stirring chapters in English history. The main reason for its immortality, of course, is Shakespeare, whose art has been as effective in heroizing Henry V as in demonizing Richard III. The transformation of the roguish Prince Hal into the commanding King Henry is consummated at Agincourt, where he rallies his troops with a speech that ranks as one of the most famous never given:

This story shall the good man teach his son:
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers:
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother: be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
And gentlemen in England, now abed,
Shall think themselves accurst they were not here;
And hold their manhoods cheap, while any speaks,
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.

No wonder that, during the World War II, Winston Churchill asked Laurence Olivier to make a film of “Henry V” to boost British morale. Agincourt was, in fact, a perfect precedent for the dark days of the Battle of Britain, for the medieval battle, too, was a victory against tremendous odds.The English invasion force that set sail for France in August 1415 numbered some 12,000 men. But after laying siege to the port town of Harfleur, suffering rampant dysentery, and enduring a forced march along the River Somme, their numbers were halved.

When the English drew up for battle near the village of Azincourt on October 25, their 5,000 archers and 1,000 men-at-arms faced a French force anywhere from six to 10 times their size. As Juliet Barker writes in “Agincourt” (Little Brown, 445 pages, $27.95), her fastpaced and extremely readable new history, anyone who saw the opposing armies that morning would have noticed the stark contrast: the French in “row upon numberless row … clad from head to foot in burnished armour … well fed, well armed, secure in their superior numbers,” facing Englishmen who had been on the march for three weeks, “unable to wash or shave, their armour tarnished and their surcoats and banners grimy and tattered by the constant exposure to the elements.”

In the kind of realistic detail Ms. Barker loves (and Shakespeare gracefully omits), she writes that many of the English archers, suffering from dysentery, hunger, and fear, had cut off their breeches in order “to allow nature to take its course more easily.” No wonder the anonymous English chaplain who wrote an eyewitness account of the battle was terrified: “In fear and trembling, with our eyes raised to heaven we cried out that God would have compassion upon us and upon the crown of England.”

Yet when the day ended, the English had won a victory so staggering that everyone, from King Henry on down, joined in giving the credit to God. The exact numbers of casualties on each side are hard to determine – medieval chroniclers are not noted for their commitment to accuracy, and only the noble dead were worth recording by name – but it seems safe to say that the English lost around 100 men, the French many thousands. The result was a catastrophe not just in military terms, but for French society and government. “Most of the important royal officers of state died or were captured at Agincourt,” Ms. Barker writes, including the Constable, Admiral, and Marshal of France. No wonder rumor had it that Saint George, patron saint of England and of chivalry, had been seen fighting in the English ranks.

In fact, no miracle is required to explain the English victory, which was a result of careful planning and good leadership at every level, from strategy to operations to tactics. Ms.Barker is excellent at guiding the reader through the complexities of raising, provisioning, and leading a medieval army, showing that Henry’s logistical achievement was no less impressive than his military one. With no standing army, the King had to procure not just men but horses, weapons, ships, and huge sums of cash. To pay for it all, he had to put many of his own possessions in hock, including the royal crown. Just supplying the army with arrows was a Herculean task: More than a million were ordered, and a royal edict required every goose-owning Englishman to donate feathers for the fletching. The very fact that, 600 years later, Ms. Barker can trace the names of individual soldiers and how much they were paid testifies to the advanced state of medieval English bureaucracy, without which Henry’s campaign could never have gotten off the ground.

The battle itself does not take place until two-thirds of the way through “Agincourt.” When it comes, Ms. Barker proves an equally expert guide to the conditions of medieval warfare. (In addition to being a literary biographer, she is an authority on chivalry and tournaments.) Ever since the day of the battle, historians have tried to figure out how the numerically superior French could have been so overwhelmingly defeated. King Henry himself was inclined to blame their weak moral fiber: According to one chronicler,he lectured his French prisoners that their loss was “not surprising, for it is said that there was never seen more discord or disorder caused by sensuality, mortal sins and evil vices than reigns in France today.”

Be that as it may,the more immediate reason for the defeat was poor generalship on the French side. The cult of chivalry, whose noble and altruistic elements Ms. Barker often finds occasion to praise, also meant that all the French grandees insisted on fighting in the front rank, leaving no one in charge of the rearguard. Worse, the French were politically divided as well. Henry’s whole campaign was designed to take advantage of a state of near civil war between rival noble factions, which had left France in tatters. Finally, the French placed too much confidence in their superiority of numbers, especially when it came to heavily armored men-at-arms, and had too little respect for the lethal power of the English longbowmen, who could fire more than 10 arrows a minute.

All these factors combined to make the French passive in the face of English tactical maneuvers. By the time the battle was joined, the French found themselves forced to charge the English archers across a field that rain had turned into a sticky swamp. Their infantry, weighed down by armor, presented a narrow front to the English archers, who mowed down rank after rank, leaving the corpses to impede the next wave of attackers. When the archers ran out of ammunition, they used swords and mallets to finish off the French wounded. The next morning, Agincourt was a scene out of a nightmare: The dead had been looted and stripped naked, and one chronicler wrote that their faces,”were so lacerated that no one could recognize them.” All but the most illustrious ended up buried in mass graves.

Even this gruesome scene, however, never shakes Ms. Barker’s certainty that Henry V was a genuine hero: pious, wise, just, brave, and utterly convinced that his French invasion was justified. She concludes with an unironic peroration: “Henry V clearly enjoyed divine approval. And with God on his side, who could stand against him?” Still, reading “Agincourt,” it is hard not to doubt whether the battle, for all its heroism, was worth fighting in the first place. Despite the English victory, the Hundred Years’ War with France ground on. Within 40 years of Agincourt, the English had been driven out of France and were themselves plunged into civil war. For the thousands of ordinary Englishmen who fought, sickened, and died in the Agincourt campaign, and the many more who saw their goods taxed and confiscated to pay for it, there was no profit to be had from Henry V’s ambitions, except the ephemeral one of vicarious glory. In the end, Barker’s fine book brings to mind, not just Shakespeare’s martial rhetoric, but the poem that Robert Southey wrote about a later English triumph, “The Battle of Blenheim”:

They say it was a shocking sight
After the field was won;
For many thousand bodies here
Lay rotting in the sun;
But things like that, you know, must be
After a famous victory.

akirsch@nysun.com


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