Just finished “Agincourt”. I was aware that the French lost badly, but, having forgotten Keegan, I was astonished once again at the casualties. I saw a documentary about the mud of that field. Some scientists and historians decided that it was about the worst mud on the Continent. They mixed it and put boots in it connected to cables and strain gauges and it got really technical. Your description is quite clear and tells us what it meant. The ravaging of Soissons reminded me of a trip my wife and I took to Spain with some students. On the way from the Toledo area to Valencia, it seemed every eighth hill–at least–had some kind of fortification on top. I explained that the immense effort was because of things that went bump in the night and that a soldier’s pay in those days was free play on the civilians of a town, if they took it. The citizenry would put up with a lot for protection. Question for your Sharpe-era stories: My brother said, years ago, that he had read that historians generally took the nominal unit strength and presumed that was the number of guys in the fight. So if the First Loamshires had a ration strength of 1000, then there were 1000 guys on the road to Quatre Bras. No allowance for 100 gone by desertion, 300 sick and half the rest guarding an artillery park someplace. I went around with another author on the battle of Chalons, disputing the sheer possibility that you could get one million men on that field. I used to be able to move a rifle platoon reasonably well and scaling up is not an unfamiliar process. I mean, hell. Half a million guys on a side, each man taking up two feet, eight ranks deep, you have a battle line twenty-three miles long. We agreed to disagree. I expect the data are more accurate going from Chalons to Waterloo, but in your opinion, do historians overestimate the numbers?
Richard Aubrey