At Agincourt King Henry said, "First bastard who runs get his jewels on a plate," or words to that effect. His sidekick the Duke of Gloucester remarked some movement of the birds in a spinney of winter birches off to the left. Several men farted into the pre-combat silence. Archers on the flanks were cracking wise about the Queen's fey scribe sent along to write the whole thing up. There was more farting because some of the horses had died and the men had eaten them to the very great distressing of their bowels. All night it had rained as the archers drove a bristling breastwork of sharpened stakes that fuzzily chivalric Frenchmenv would later try to charge through on their blindered and caparisoned war steeds. The horse meat was raw and muddy; though some of it, men swore, was served by fluffy angels in blue hats. In the soup of rain and dung and plowed ground, those who could sleep had thrown down in full armour against inclines of the cold ditches. Some whores from the village came round but the priests ran them off - both facts left out of the scribe's sensible and fervid battle piece scrawled on bleached mule hide and holed up, now, in a vault at the British Museum. Anyway, it was the moment before the first French charge, after the giggling archers had drawn back their ashwood bows and rained a six-thousand-shaft volley onto the noble armoured heads of the French cavalry, deafening hail of ball bearings on a tin roof. Things were quiet as could be thenv for everyone, after the ringing stopped, when out of nowhere flew a clutch of white doves, which circled three times between the two poised belligerents in array and, in the scribe's telling, "a-cryd out as one voyse fore to taken each mann merci on hys anymys. And ther was much astonyshment before the charage." Later, after the wildly retreating French horse had collided with their own infantry tottering headlong the other way, after the English archers had laid down their bows and with giant mallets set to the beturtled knights in all their shit-stained iron, someone remarked the birds again, turned mute, crowlike and aimless as programs fluttering from the darkened galleries of the next six hundred years. Back to Table of Contents -- Kriegspieler #6 To Kriegspieler List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Kriegspieler Publications. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com