By Friedrich Bargideon
Prelude
Source: WarHistory.org
The earth never forgets where it has been soaked. It keeps the memory of every march and every burial beneath its surface. Men may plow and build upon it, but the soil remembers. The scent of iron never truly fades.
In the summer of 1415, the continent once again trembled under the weight of banners and belief. Kings called it conquest; God called it witness. It was the opening movement of what men would name the Hundred Years’ War—a century not of continuous battle, but of continuous pride. From the Channel ports to the vineyards of Burgundy, ambition rippled through the land like distant thunder. Faith was claimed as justification, greed as strategy, and the common man as fuel.
Dispatched
I was sent to that century as I have been sent to others. Providence tore me from the smoke of later ages and placed me on the Norman shore among Henry V’s host. One moment I was surrounded by the metallic stink of diesel and gunpowder; the next, by salt air and the cries of gulls. The trappings of war change, but its spirit does not. My charge was not to fight, but to see—to watch kings reach for heaven with bloodied hands and record the fever that precedes glory and the silence that follows it.
The army I found was young, hungry, and unaware of the lesson it was about to learn. They believed their king chosen by God; perhaps he was. Henry walked among them with the certainty of a man who has mistaken duty for destiny. I walked among them knowing the cost of such certainty.
These chronicles follow that campaign from the muddy banks of the Seine to the narrow field at Agincourt. At Harfleur, disease claimed more than arrows ever could. The walls fell not to cannon, but to fever and despair. At Agincourt, arrows spoke louder than kings, cutting through pride as they once had through armor. Between those two places lies the pattern of all wars—ambition tested by mud, courage devoured by hunger, faith trembling between sin and salvation.
Reflection
I have seen it before. In snowfields at Narva, in the wheat of Kursk, in the deserts yet to come. The names change, the prayers remain. I am made to walk these corridors of history not to alter them, but to bear witness—to write what the victors forget and what the dead can no longer say.
What you will read is no scholar’s account, but the dispatch of an unwilling scribe—one who has seen too many centuries learn too little. The weapons change. The prayers do not. In these pages, may you hear both—the cry of man and the echo of God that answers, faintly, through the smoke.
Read the Chronicles:
→ Part I – Harfleur: The Fever Before Glory
→ Part II – Agincourt: The Measure of Arrows
