I could see the Constable’s thinking. If he could get his men-at-arms to the English front line then they’d outnumber the enemy at least three to one and it would all be over very quickly.
Except that they couldn’t get to the English front line. They struggled, knee-deep in liquid mud. They had to find their way around piles of dead or wounded men and horses. Their own cavalry were trampling them into the ground. Again, many fell and couldn’t get up again. They struggled feebly, drowning in the mud inside their own helmets.
They were pressed together so tightly that the forces behind them were unable to move forward in support. And their archers, so far back behind the lines, were powerless.
Not so the English, shooting volley after volley into the flailing mass. They never stopped. They were pitiless. Some military leader once said: ‘Always leave your enemy a golden bridge to retreat by.’ The English had no golden bridge. They were fighting for their lives in a foreign country and they showed no mercy. There was no hope for anyone out there in the mud.
It got worse.
When their arrows were expended, and with the entire French army at a virtual standstill, the English archers picked up their mallets and poleaxes, exploded out from behind their stakes, and waded in.
These were powerful men. It takes a lot of strength to pull a bow. Unarmoured and unencumbered, they skipped neatly over the dead and laid about them. French men-at-arms, trapped in the mud, went down like trees.
And then it got even worse.
Not having any clear idea of what was happening, the second line, now eager to get to grips with the foe themselves, advanced, pushing the remains of the first line directly into the arms of the English and their stakes.
I’d been to the Somme in 1917. I’d briefly served there in a French hospital. The sight of men, screaming, impaled on stakes or barbed wire is not something anyone should see once. Let alone twice.
There was nothing anyone could do. Unable even to raise their weapons in the crush, unable to advance, unable to retreat, the first rank were just sitting – or standing – targets.
The second rank of French men-at-arms, eager for their share of what they perceived as the day’s glory, clambered over their fallen comrades and straight into the English, who were fighting like madmen.
Hundreds, possibly thousands, of Frenchmen were passed back down the line as prisoners of war. After all, it was every man for himself. Every man had the right to return home laden with booty and ransomeable prisoners. For them, that was the whole point. Who cared who sat on the French throne so long as they went home rich?
I could hear the cries and pleas of the fallen all around, the screams of injured and terrified horses, and shouted orders as French commanders desperately tried to restore order and organise a controlled retreat. And, rising above everything, the triumphant shouts of the English as they slaughtered very nearly an entire generation of the French nobility.
It was only when I moved to change a disk that I realised how stiff and cramped I had become. Hours had passed and we’d been completely lost in what was happening around us.
‘We should move,’ said Peterson, hoarsely. ‘Look at all these prisoners. Let’s get down to the baggage train. We really need to see what’s happening there.’
I was torn. Half of me wanted to see what was happening at the baggage train. The other half wanted to see the triumphant English archers standing on heaps of dead men and sticking their unamputated fingers up at the French.
But Henry’s order to kill the French prisoners is controversial to this day and needed to be investigated.
We wriggled back to the pod and dumped what we had so far. He handed me a fresh recorder and pulled on a small sword. ‘You record. I’ll keep an eye out.’
He was as good with a sword as a bow. I nodded.
We inched our way through the woods. The baggage-train was at the rear, hidden, to some extent among, the trees.
The English had circled the wagons long before American settlers made that popular and placed their wounded – of whom there were remarkably few – in the middle.
A few women were present. Camp followers, maybe a wife or two, maybe even a French girlfriend. Who knows? At any rate, I wouldn’t be too out of place.
Young boys ran hither and thither, bearing messages and slopping water in buckets too heavy for them. Off to one side, sitting in the mud, the captured French nobility awaited the outcome of the battle. Hundreds of them. Hundreds and hundreds of them. Contemporary estimates put the final number at around seventeen hundred. All guarded, as far as I could see, by two men and a small dog.
‘My God,’ said Peterson, softly. ‘No wonder.’
I knew what he meant. There was a second army sitting here. Defeated and exhausted for the moment but that could change in an instant. If this lot armed themselves and fell on Henry from the rear, it would all be over in minutes. No wonder Henry gave the order.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘This is no place for prudent and sensible historians. Or us.’
I agreed. For once.