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Home The Hundred Years' War with France Agincourt; Part 2 |
Agincourt; Part 2It seemed that the Constable could not lose. He had every military advantage on his side. He was vastly superior in numbers; being astride the enemy's line of retreat, he could fight or not as he pleased, and he could choose his ground. He had but to avoid a battle and Henry would be starved into submission; even if it proved too difficult to hold in the feudal array to the ignominy of winning without fighting, he could take up a defensive position, and let the English handful attack. There was indeed only one card in his hand that could lose him the game, and that was to attack the English at once. Of course this was, so to speak, the attractive lead - the French feudal array loved to play a bold game - none the less it was a fatal lead, for it would give Henry the chance of fighting the one kind of battle which an army outnumbered five or six to one could win, namely, a defensive battle with the advantage of a superior missile weapon. Crecy and Poitiers had already showed what was likely to come of such tactics. But feudal leaders were not students of military history.The Battle of Agincourt bears a certain resemblance to Crecy and Poitiers rolled into one. The French fought on ground far too narrow for their numbers. They allowed the enemy to shelter his weak point, his flanks, by woods; Henry had taken the additional precaution of making the archers supply themselves with long, sharp-pointed stakes which were to be stuck in the ground to check the French charges. D'Albret perhaps did not wish to fight at all: had he been anxious for a battle he could have fought before, directly Henry was over the Somme, but he had kept more or less at arm's length, and only converged slowly on his enemy's line of march. In any case the English waited two or three hours in their position at Agincourt and the French did not stir. They were close enough, however, for Henry to be able to compel an attack without losing the advantage of his position. He moved his whole line forward to within range and halted them: the archers fixed their stakes and began to ply the French with their arrows. Thus the French were forced to attack. First came two small bodies of mounted men who were easily checked. The main attack, dismounted knights in armour, toiled painfully over the wet ploughland that lay between them and the English. So heavy were the men and so deep the mud that no real attack was driven home; the mass stuck, a splendid mark for the English archers. When it had been well riddled, the English advanced and flung themselves on it. Being lightly armed, many of them without defensive armour save stout leather coats, they could move freely when the enemy could not. Through the woods on the wing moved bodies of men-at-arms to take the French in flank. Thus the French vanguard and then the main line were overthrown and butchered, the dead lying two or three deep. The third division of the French army, shaken by the fate of its comrades, hardly fought. Though it alone far outnumbered Henry's entire force, it broke and fled at the first onslaught. Agincourt taught no lessons in the art of war that had not been already read at Crecy and Poitiers. The fighting of a defensive battle against odds, and the value of the English bowmen is common to all. The narrow front with guarded flanks, the attack spent before it struck, are Crecy. The sharp stakes stand for the hedge at Poitiers. To Poitiers, too, belong the dismounted attack made by the French, the crushing English counter-attack, the flight of a whole French division without striking a blow. The student may find it amusing to draw other parallels. But the parallel which would have come home most forcibly to a Frenchman fleeing from the field on that fatal 14th of October, was that once more a pitched battle had gone near to ruin France; that there were 8000 of the best blood in France lying dead on the field, among them the Constable, Anthony of Brabant (Burgundy's brother), the Dukes of Bar and Alencon, with the lesser nobility round them in hundreds; and the Dukes of Bourbon and Orleans, together with 1500 other knights, were prisoners. England has in the course of her history dealt France many staggering blows on the battlefield. Sometimes the combatants have been fairly matched in numbers as they were in Maryborough's "Quadrilateral", or in Wellington's sequence of victories in the Peninsula, or again at Waterloo. At other times, David, with the aid of a superior missile weapon, has brought down Goliath: the few have prevailed over the many. Agincourt is perhaps the most striking of all, not only in the disparity of odds, but in the completeness of the wreckage. The blow fell heaviest on the Orleanists. The main share of the dead was theirs, and they took the whole of the dishonour. Burgundy withdrew what lukewarm support he had hitherto given, and Henry was left to pursue his course of conquest. Three years of sieges followed, in which the most notable was that of Rouen, where the women and children turned out by the defenders from the hard-pressed town were callously and cruelly allowed to starve between the walls and Henry's lines. In 1419 Pontoise fell, and there was nothing left to bar Henry's march to Paris. So far Henry had profited by the military skill which had given him an unexpected triumph over one great French army, and the paralysing disunion between Burgundy and Orleans which had prevented the collecting of another; but hitherto neither faction had actively helped him. Burgundy had remained like Achilles sulking in his tent - a malevolent neutral. Now, however, a piece of supreme and wicked folly was to turn that neutrality into enmity. A meeting was arranged at Mon-tereau between the Burgundians and Armagnacs. John of Burgundy rashly crossed the barrier on the bridge that severed the two factions. In the sight of his followers he was set on and stabbed by Tannegui du Chatel, a violent Armagnac and friend of the Dauphin. It was but a retort for 1407. Blood will have blood. But this treacherous murder threw the Burgundians into the arms of the English. By the Treaty of Troyes, Katherine, the daughter of Charles VI, was pledged to Henry in marriage: he was recognized as heir to the French throne to the exclusion of the Dauphin; Philip, the new Duke of Burgundy, engaged to support him. In the autumn of 1420 Henry entered Paris in triumph with his bride. |
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