Agincourt - Bernard Cornwell [171]
The English were passing skins of water or wine from man to man and Lanferelle suddenly felt parched. “Where’s the wine?” he asked his squire.
“I don’t have any, sire. You didn’t tell me to bring any.”
“Do I have to order you to piss? Jesus, you stink like a midden. Did you shit yourself?”
The squire nodded miserably. He was not the only man whose bowels had loosened in terror, but he quailed under Lanferelle’s scorn. “We’re going left!” Lanferelle called again. He had tried and failed to reach Sir John, so now he planned to lead his men to attack the lightly armored archers instead. He could see the bowmen were carrying maces and poleaxes, but that was better than having them armed with yew bows and ash arrows. He would cut the bastards down and lead Frenchmen through the stakes so they could turn the flank of the English men-at-arms. “This battle isn’t lost,” he told his followers, “it hasn’t even begun! They have no arrows left! So now we can kill the bastards! You hear me? We kill them!”
Trumpets sounded from the northern end of the field. The second French battle, its armor still gleaming and its banners untorn by arrows, was advancing on foot through the morass of plowland churned deep by horses and by the eight thousand Frenchmen of the first attack. That second battle was passing the small group of heralds, English, French, and Burgundian, who watched the battle together from the edge of the Tramecourt woods and the reinforcements, another eight thousand men-at-arms, would reach the killing place in another minute. Lanferelle, not wanting to be caught by the crush of the new arrivals, worked his way toward the flank of the French men-at-arms. He had eleven men with him now, and he reckoned they were enough to cut their way through the archers. And if the twelve led, other men would follow. “Those goddam archers aren’t trained to arms,” he told his men. “They’re tradesmen! They’re nothing but tailors and basket-weavers! They’re just hacking with those axes. So don’t attack them first. Let them hack, then you parry and kill, you understand me?”
Men nodded. They understood, but the field reeked of blood, the oriflamme was gone, and a dozen great lords of France were dead or missing, and Lanferelle knew that victory would only come when men began to believe in victory. So he would give that belief to them. He would fight his way through the English line and he would give France a triumph.
Englishmen saw the second attack closing and they straightened and hoisted weapons. The second French battle had reached the first and the newcomers gave a huge shout. “Saint Denis! Montjoie! Montjoie!”
“Saint George!” the English responded, and the hunting howls started again, the mocking sound of men inviting their quarry to come and die.
But the second battle could not reach the English because the survivors of the first were in their way, and they could only push those survivors forward, and so they churned through the mud, lances leveled, driving tired men onto the heaps of dead and onto the English blades beyond. The noise rose, the clash of steel and the screams of the dying and the desperate blare of trumpets as eight thousand new French men-at-arms went to the killing ground.
And Lanferelle went for the archers.
The women and servants fled from the English baggage, running uphill toward the embattled army while behind them serfs