Those enemies were already encumbered. The first rank of Frenchmen was mostly on the ground where they were bleeding in a tangle of bodies and discarded lances, and the following ranks had to stumble over those obstacles and as they tried so they were met with ax blades, mace heads, and lance points. It might not have mattered if the French had been able to negotiate the obstacles in their own time, but they were pushed onto them by the press of men behind and so they stumbled haplessly into the English blades. “Kill them!” Sir John bellowed. “Kill them! Kill them! Kill them!” That was when the battle joy came to him, the pure joy of being a warlord, armored and armed, dangerous and invincible. He used the poleax’s hammerhead to beat down armored enemies. The hammer did not need to pierce armor, few weapons could, but the weight alone could stun a man and one blow was usually sufficient to put a man down or cripple him.
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 him, then stepped forward again, hungry for more death. “Kill them!” he screamed. “Kill them!” He felt a burst of energy and used it to crash into the French line, opening it so his men could follow, stabbing and lunging with the speed of Christendom’s most feared tournament fighter. He crippled men with the spike, driving it through the faulds covering their groins, and as they doubled in screaming pain he would crash the hammer or ax onto their helmets and leave it to the men behind to give the fallen enemy the mercy of death. Sir John took blows on his armor, but they were feeble until a Frenchman managed a hard swing with a poleax and Sir John was only saved because the enemy’s shaft broke and Sir John screamed in challenge and swung his own ax at the man’s legs, driving the blade through a roundel to chop into a knee. The man went down and lunged with his weapon’s broken shaft, and Sir John smashed the hammerhead onto the enemy’s helmet with such force that the steel collapsed and bloody ooze spurted from the visor. Sir John and his men-at-arms were hacking a deep hole in the crammed French ranks, killing again to make new corpses to trip the enemy.
To his left, unseen by Sir John, the Duke of York died.
The French attack had struck the English vanguard first. A hundred men were dead in that fight before the oriflamme reached King Henry’s men, and in the front of the foremost men was Ghillebert, Seigneur de Lanferelle, and he was half aware that the English to his left had stepped back as the charge crashed home, but the Duke of York and his men had stayed put, thrusting with lances, and Lanferelle had twisted aside, letting a lance slide off his breastplate’s flank, then ramming his own lance into an unvisored face. “Lanferelle!” he shouted, “Lanferelle!” He wanted the English to know whom they faced, and he fended off a lance with his own then unslung his mace and started to hack. This was no place for the subtle graces of a tournament field, no place to show a swordsman’s skills, this was a place to hack and kill, chop and wound, to fill an enemy with fear, and Lanferelle drove the spiked mace down into a man wearing the duke’s livery and wrenched the bloody spikes out of the split helmet and skull and thumped it forward into another man, hurling him back and he could see the duke clearly now, just to his right, but first he had to kill a man to his left, which he did with the heavy mace in a blow that rang up his arm. “Yield!” he shouted at the duke who had dropped his visor, and the duke’s response was to swing his sword that clanged on Lanferelle’s plate and Lanferelle dropped the mace head over the duke’s shoulder and pulled so that the tall man stumbled forward, lost his footing, and fell full length. “He’s mine!” Lanferelle shouted, “the bastard’s mine,” and that was when the battle joy came to Lanferelle, the exultation of a fighter who dominated his foes.
He stood over the duke, one foot on the fallen man’s spine, and killed any man who tried a rescue. Four of his own men-at-arms flanked him with poleaxes and they shouted insults at the English before killing them. “I want the standard!” Lanferelle shouted. He thought the duke’s great flag would be a welcome decoration in his manor hall where it could hang from the smoke-darkened beams beneath the musicians’ gallery and the duke, a prisoner in Lanferelle’s keeping, would be forced to see that standard every day. “Come and die!” Lanferelle shouted at the standard-bearer, but English men-at-arms pushed the man back out of immediate danger and closed on Lanferelle and he parried their blows, thrusting back hard, depending on the weight of his mace to throw his opponents off balance, and all the while he shouted at his men in the second rank to defend his back. They had to keep the crush of Frenchmen from crowding him, and they did it by threatening their own ranks, giving Lanferelle room to slash the mace at any man who dared oppose him. His four men were using their poleaxes to hack at the English line that was so thin Lanferelle reckoned he could fight through it and lead a mass of Frenchmen to the rear of the English center. Why not capture a king as well as a duke? “Forward!” he bellowed.’ Forward!” but when he tried to go forward he half tripped on the bodies that had fallen across the Duke of York’s legs. Lanferelle tried to kick the dead men out of his path, but a lance thrust from an Englishman hammered his breastplate and threw him back. “Bastard!” Lanferelle shouted, driving the mace’s bloody spikes toward the snarling face, then a shout of warning made him glance to his left and he saw that the English were driving into the French ranks and threatening to fight around to his rear. He reckoned there was still time to break the enemy line and he tried to go forward again and once more was checked by the dead men, and a sudden rush of Englishmen came to oppose him, their lances, poleaxes, and maces battering his armor and he had no choice but to step back. His chance to cleave the line was gone for the moment.