Free Henry V as Warlord by Desmond Seward Page A

which he could extract some semblance of a victorious trial by battle.
    As was customary, the English slew and looted as they went, their passage announced by columns of black smoke from burning farmhouses. The abbey of Fécamp also went up in flames, women who had taken refuge in its church being dragged out and raped. Most of the archers were mounted so that the English were able to average nearly twenty miles a day, though such a pace must have been gruelling for those on foot with quivers holding fifty arrows. When fired on by the garrison at the castle of Arques as they were about to cross the River Béthune, Henry threatened to burn the town, extracting supplies of bread and wine for not doing so – it was the same story at Eu when crossing the Bresle. The army looked forward to an easy road over the Somme, which the king expected to reach by midday on 13 October.
    Only six miles from the river a prisoner captured by English scouts reported that the tidal ford at Blanche-Taque was blocked by sharp stakes, and that Marshal Boucicault was waiting on the other side with 6,000 troops. (The force from Calais had been intercepted and driven off.) Henry personally interrogated the prisoner, telling him he would lose his head if he did not tell the truth but the man stuck to his story. In the meantime the tide came in and made the ford impassable. The king marched on eastward along the southern bank of the Somme to look for another ford. An eye-witness, the author of the Gesta , records the dejection of the army:
    Expecting to have no alternative but to go into parts of France higher up and at the head of the river (which was said to be over sixty miles away) … at that time we thought of nothing else but this: that, after the eight days assigned for the march had expired and our provisions had run out, the enemy, craftily hastening on ahead, would impose on us, hungry as we should be, a really dire need of food and at the head of the river if God did not provide otherwise, would with their great and countless host and the engines of war and devices available to them, overwhelm us, so very few we were and made faint by great weariness and weak from lack of food. 1
    Every ford appeared to be held by the French, who kept pace with the English from the other bank. There was a real danger of discipline breaking down. At Boves they drank so much wine, extorted from the castellan by the usual threats, that Henry forbade them to drink any more – when an indulgent commander told the king that they were simply filling their bottles, Henry snapped, ‘Their bottles indeed! They’re making big bottles of their bellies and getting very drunk.’ By now they had eaten their rations apart from a little dried meat, which they supplemented with nuts and what vegetables they could dig up in the fields.
    The king took advantage of a loop in the river to make a short cut and outdistance the enemy who had to go the long way round. He still managed to enforce discipline, hanging in full view of the army a man caught sacrilegiously stealing a cheap copper gilt pyx from a church. (During later campaigns he would not be so particular.) Then on 19 October two unguarded fords were found at Voyennes and Béthencourt near Nesle. They could only be reached through the marshes over causeways which had been destroyed by the French; 200 archers, bows on backs, struggled through a quagmire at Béthencourt to wade waist deep across the river and establish a bridgehead on the far bank; a similar operation at Voyennes was also successful. Henry was not disposed to be merciful to the local peasants who had hung red clothes and blankets out of their windows, as a symbol of the Oriflamme (the sacred battle banner of the kings of France) and of defiance; he ordered every house whose occupants were unhelpful to be burnt to the ground. The causeways were repaired with window-frames, doors, roof-timbers and staircases from their hamlets as well as with hurdles,