Reasonably it might be asked - what is so compelling about a battlefield where men fought and died? Like it or not, warfare is a pursuit thrust upon Man by powers beyond his control, yet he finds fighting and violence to be evocative, stirring the imagination and quickening the blood. Long before the film producer, William Shakespeare knew this and wrote:
- "In peace there's nothing so becomes a man as modest stillness and humility;
But when the blase of war blows in our ears, then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, disguise fair nature with hard favor'd rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostrils wide;
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit to his full height..."
Armed with knowledge of what transpired, even passive people can be significantly stirred by walking over a battlefield where the ground by that quality of which much respected Field Marshal Bill Slim said:
"I do not believe there is any man who, in his heart of hearts, would not rather be called brave than have any other virtue attributed to him. Courage is the basic virtue in man and beast, without it there are no other virtues."
More than anywhere else a battlefield witnesses the entire gamut of human emotions; war brings out the best and worst in man, arousing courage and fear, dignity and abjectness, nobility and brutality, selfishness and selflessness. It may not be entirely comfortable to trespass upon such significant spots, but it is certainly sobering, even stimulating. With knowledge of what took place, battlefields can be walked in awe, fascination and respect - but they should not be ignored.
Even though it is unfashionable to be patriotic, many of us cherish a sneaking feeling of superiority over Continental neighbors, whom we always seemed to defeat ,on their own patch.' Chauvinism rears its head at moments of EEC discord, the French are giving us trouble and we traverse their land muttering of our military forbears who...
- "...like so many Alexanders have in these parts
from morn 'til even fought,
And sheath'd their swords for lack of argument..."
Little changed since fought over so long ago; the battlefields of the Hundred Years War - which actually lasted 116 years from 1337 to 1453 -- are conveniently situated in Northern France, easily reached by cross-channel ferries. Of the war itself, most people know little more than that learned from Olivier's film of Shakespeare's play Henry the Fifth, yet is was a time when England spawned a breed of mighty men, brilliant, larger than life leaders who stand comparison with any other period in our history -- Edward III, the Black Prince, Henry V, Salisbury, Exeter, Bedford, Talbot, Suffolk, Chandos, Fastolf -- men who did not lose a major battle for almost a hundred years - from the beginning of the war until Patay in 1429.
It was an exciting, a glowing era when England was a young nation feeling her feet and a little unsteady, yet with a military power and reputation so high that in 1346 - the year of twin victories over the French at Crecy and the Scots at Neville's Cross -- the Tower of London was too small to accommodate all its royal and noble prisoners of war! These were the days when the incomparable English archer so efficiently handled his crude and simple longbow as to revolutionize all traditions and concepts of war. From him sprang the sturdy infantryman victorious in most battles and gaining the enemy's grudging admiration in the few he lost. Winning a vast empire in all four corners of the world, the archer's descendants fought with Marlborough, with Wellington in the Peninsular and at Waterloo, in the Crimea and on Deli Ridge in the Indian Mutiny; showing rare qualities in the Boer War, he doggedly soldiered on at Mons, Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele; then had to do it all over again in France and Germany, the Western Desert, Italy and Burma, at Alamein, Arnhem and on D-Day. Of late, they showed the Agincourt-spirit in the Falklands.
It requires an almost impossible stretch of imagination to be one with Henry's weary, hungry, dysentery ridden army, trudging along muddy tracks to Agincourt, aware that a huge enemy army was remorselessly marching to trap and destroy them. Kings, princes, earls, and knights were spared for ransom and would eventually return home -- although the Duke of Orleans was a prisoner in the Tower for twenty-five years until his huge ransom could be raised -- but the common soldier could expect only death on the spot, while archers had their right hands struck off.
Perhaps more than on most fields of war, stark courage abounded on medieval and ancient battlefields, where every combatant knew he faced personal hand-to-hand combat, survival depending upon dredging up every single drop of courage and sending it into battle to bolster skill and strength. There is not way for a modern man to know what it was like encased from head to toe I heavy steel armor, to clumsily cavort in a desperate face-to-face confrontation where a slip of the foot resulted in grotesquely sprawling on churned muddy ground, snatching a last look at blue sky above through narrow visor slits, awaiting oblivion by mace or axe battering head and helm into a bloody mess, or the dagger slipped through an armor chink into throat or eye. Perhaps that was more merciful than to be left alive with a gaping wound far beyond the primitive surgery of the day or to helplessly suffer through the chill hours of night until roughly stripped by plundering peasants, then put out of misery by a blunt knife sawing through the throat.
Small Battles
Far removed from today's vast impersonal and horrific conflicts, the Hundred Years War was a series of small battles, now softened by the passing of time to spread a colorful cloak of medieval pageantry over the exploits of legendary heroes, who displayed chivalrous attitudes in their savage combats where personal courage predominated. To walk these fields is to relive those days when England won all her battles and was the most feared nation in Europe.
Each of the fields described have been extensively walked by day and camped upon by night, a Spartan refinement that allows the provocative pall of darkness to lend enchantment to resting where history was made. It is difficult not to feel emotional when laying in a tent pitched where stood the English right-wing at Agincourt, on the edges of the Tramecourt Woods, separated only by a thin groundsheet from that very earth soaked by the blood of Guillaume de Saveuse, Knight of France, brought down and killed when his horse was impaled upon an archer's protective wooden stake.
How tremulously we peer out from the leafy woods of Piseaux at Verneuil on the night of 16/17 August, exactly 550 years to the day when Suffolk's advance patrols lay in that exact spot watching the French and Scots form up on the plain beyond for the following day's battle, said by those who had fought at both to have been even harder than Agincourt. Did we imagine we saw ethereal men-at-arms and common soldiers moving silently in the misty moonlight?
In the Val de Clercs at Crecy on the morning following the battle in 1346, King Edward's clerks tallied the bodies of more than 20,000 kings, princes, lords, knights, sergeants, men-at-arms, and common soldiers - the imagination works overtime in the darkness, laying there gazing up at the star speckled sky.
Even the balm of daylight brings its own mind-boggling surprises as at Patay on a sultry afternoon much like that of the day of the battle in June 1429. Languidly trudging up the old Roman Road towards the crest of St Peravy Ridge, breasted by hard riding French cavalry cascading down upon the unprepared English, the hum of insects was replaced by the swelling cadence of drumming hooves. Staring incredulously at the ridge above we awaited the phantom onslaught as horses and riders, shimmering as in a mirage, came into view. Was it La Hire, Poton de Xaintrailles, Dunois, d'Alencon, the Constable Richemont, Joan of Arc, Giles de Retz (later to achieve notoriety as Bluebeard) and the rest hot in pursuit of the retreating Talbot and Fastolf? They thundered down until close enough to exchange salutation with a dozen children from the local pony club, cantering down the dust track once trod by Romans, to cross the Janville road to the low ridge where Fastolf stood at bay all those years ago, and vanished from sight.
It was but a brief encounter, yet for one irrational moment it aroused the same upsurge of alarm that must have convulsed the small English force retreating from Meaux, who knew the drumming hooves could only be hostile. Reflecting on the apprehension aroused by a dozen ponies, we tried to conjure up the shear terror produced by the ground shaking approach of hundreds of mighty warhorses, bits between their teeth! In truth it was not an entirely new experience; once walking in the dusk over that part of the field of Waterloo where Wellington's infantry squares had all day withstood Ney's cavalry hordes we were startled by approaching horsemen galloping hard up slopes once carpeted by fallen cuirassiers, dragoons, hussars, lancers, and their horses. As at Patay, it was only a handful of youthful riders, but similarly it lifted a curtain to expose us to apprehensions known to no living man.
In fact, that particular holiday was wearing on the nerves. At midnight in a front bedroom of the Hotel Wellington at the La Haye Sainte crossroads in the very middle of Wellington's line, drowsy thoughts dwelt on the forty thousand soldiers killed and wounded in the fields beyond the open window on the fateful day in June 1815. Did they rest in peace, or was it their restless spirits disturbing the curtains so eerily and sending misty tendrils into the room? The mind was dramatically concentrated by an ear splitting shriek, and the pounding heart only stilled by hearing mumbled apologies of a fellow traveler in the adjoining bedroom, suffering from a surfeit of French cooking!
Today and Tomorrow cannot be understood without knowledge of Yesterday, and it can reasonably be claimed that the greatness of England over the past six centuries has been built on the foundations of the immortal trinity of 100 Years War victories -- Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. It is a privilege to have walked these fields, paying homage to the men who fought over them. Perhaps our respect and enthusiasm will stimulate the reader's imagination, breathing life into placid pastures to re-people them with colorful characters who immortalized their green acres and bringing within the reach of everyone a Holiday with a Difference.
Related
100 Years War Campaign by Don Featherstone
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© Copyright 2004 Hal Thinglum
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