The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 6, Issue 1, Winter 2017 | Page 10

French historian save for the fact that he panders the same excuse for Crecy. 6 Under
the biography of Henry V, The Harpers Encyclopedia of Military Biography comes
up with a figure of six thousand English to as many as thirty-five thousand French. 7
The battle figures remind one of the Battle of Kursk, where the number of tanks has
been massaged by both sides. What is hard to understand is why the French did not
allow Henry to simply limp to the coast, dogging his retreat every step of the way.
Sumption’s opinion probably reflects the prevailing French sentiment that,
“Politically it was probably unthinkable, after Henry V’s capture of Harfleur and his
ostentatious challenges, to let him escape with impunity.” 8
Joan of Arc is harder to assess in the military sense. Nevertheless, in the
political and psychological sense, she revitalized the French fighting spirit, acting as
a morale force multiplier. It is hard to understand how this peasant girl, albeit from
prosperous peasants, was given such an opportunity except to consider that the
fortunes of France were at their lowest nadir. Even with Henry V’s death in 1422,
the French forces were demoralized, and their leadership decimated to the point of
conceding defeat to the invading English forces and their allies from Burgundy. If
the English took the city of Orleans, it seemed as if French resistance would simply
crumble. The French loss at the Battle of the Herrings—where they failed to capture
a English resupply train (of herring no less!)—meant the impending loss of Orleans
was seemingly the last psychological straw. Instead, Joan led the French to victory
at Orleans. More importantly, Joan of Arc changed the rules of the game. No longer
was this to be the gentlemanly and leisurely style of warfare. If anything, Joan
ushered in an early era of something akin to a predecessor to Total Warfare. In a
sense, Machiavelli had been the theorist for what seems to us a period of
unregulated warfare, whose influence now began to wane. 9 Joan seemed to have
fought with the Augustinian concept of a Just War, an alien concept. Here was now
a war not just for some prince or king but a war for the general welfare of the
French people, an ideal of all equal before God, and by inference a war on
feudalism itself, where the ancient order produced the evil of man subjugating man.
Joan changed the French Army’s thought to one where it mattered how “it [felt]
about the soil and about the people from which it springs.” 10 It is small wonder that
once Joan had recovered the political and military situation, the French were
perhaps not unhappy to abandon her to her fate, as her ideas were revolutionary and
a threat to the existing order.
But the French were learning. Like the English, they began setting the
foundation for a more professional army, for imitation is the highest form of
flattery. There would be no more of the emotional charges like at Poiters or
Agincourt that decimated the French forces. The return of the Province of Maine to
10