Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [164]
The French, it seemed to Sir John, moved with a painful slowness, while he was endowed with a godlike speed. He was grinning and he was watching three or four enemies at once, picking which one to attack first and already knowing how the second and third would be destroyed. They came to him and he sensed their panic. The rearward ranks of the French carried short weapons, maces or swords or axes, but they had no time to use them as they were forced onto the bodies of the fallen. They tripped into the blows of Sir John and his men, and so many were put down that Sir John had to negotiate the dead himself. Now the English were carrying the fight to the French. Nine hundred men were attacking eight thousand, but the nine hundred could take care where they stepped without fear of being pushed from behind.
A Frenchman in mud-spattered armor that had been scoured until it shone like silver, lunged a sword at Sir John who let the weapon waste its force against the cuisse protecting his left thigh. The man to Sir John’s left battered the polished helmet with a poleax hammer, and the Frenchman collapsed like a felled ox as Sir John rammed his pole’s spike into the face of a man wearing the livery of a wheatsheaf. The spike mangled visor, teeth, and palate, jerking the man’s head back as his body was pushed forward. Sir John let his neighbor crack a hammer against the fallen man’s helmet as he back-swung his poleax into a pot-helm surmounted by a plume of feathers. “Come on, you bastards! I want you!” Sir John shouted. He was laughing. At that moment it never once occurred to him that some Frenchmen were eager for the renown that would follow the death or capture of Sir John Cornewaille. They came and they fell, victims of the wet ground and of the obstacles they could not see through their closed visors, and they came to the short, hard blows of a poleax that made more obstacles.
“Stay tight, stay tight!” Sir John bellowed, making sure there was a man to his left and Sir William to his right. You fought shoulder to shoulder to give the enemy no room to pierce the line, and Sir John’s men-at-arms were fighting as he had trained them to fight. They had stepped over the first fallen Frenchmen and the second line of English were lifting enemy visors and sliding knives into the eyes or mouths of the wounded to stop them from striking up from the ground. Frenchmen screamed when they saw the blade coming, they twisted in the mud to escape the quick stabs, they died in spasms, and still more came to be hammered or chopped or crushed. Some Frenchmen, reckoning themselves safe from arrows, had lifted their visors and Sir John slammed the poleax’s spike into a man’s face, twisting it as it pierced the eye socket, dragging it back jellied and bloodied, watching as the man, in frantic dying pain, flailed and impeded more Frenchmen. Sir William Porter was stabbing his lance at men’s faces. One blow was usually enough to unbalance an enemy and Sir William’s other neighbor would finish the job with a hammer blow. Sir William, usually a quiet and studious man, was growling and snarling as he picked his victims. “God’s blood, William,” Sir John shouted, “but this is joy!”
The noise was unending. Steel on steel, screams, war-shouts. Enough Frenchmen had fallen to stop the ponderous charge, and the men behind could not negotiate the piled bodies without stumbling into the English blades. There was blood in the furrows. Sir John stepped on a wounded Frenchman’s helmet, unaware that he did so, but conscious that his right foot had found firm standing, and his weight drove the man’s visor into the mud that seeped through the visor holes and slowly stifled him. He drowned in mud, choking for breath as Sir John taunted the French, begged them to come to