On a weekend where the England cricket team yet again encountered spectacular and humiliating disaster in Australia, I had the opportunity to visit the scenes of two other spectacular disasters where supposedly superior attacking sides allowed complacency and hubris to let defending sides unpick them with calamitous results. Obviously though, the price to pay at Agincourt and The Somme was far more grave than a loss of pride and the possible concession of a small urn of burnt wood.
When it comes to military disasters, there are few more spectacular than the Somme. Marshall Haig's plan was as audacious as it was flawed. On paper the plan to shell the Germans out of existence and then calmly saunter across No Man's Land and occupy their corpse-ridden trenches was compelling but failed to take account of the fact that the Germans had had months to dig themselves so deeply and safely into the ground that they could have probably survived a nuclear attack. Furthermore, it also failed to appreciate the shoddy production of the shells the British planned to throw at the Germans, meaning that all the barbed wire that would be supposedly obliterated was still there as so many shells failed to explode. Finally, while the attack was postponed by two days because of bad weather, there weren't enough shells to sustain the barrage. But apart from that it was a brilliant plan, and was certain to succeed. Therein lay the problem.So on July the 1st, 1916, as the barrage moved west, the whistles blew and thousands of Allied troops went over the top on a hot summer's day expecting to find empty trenches and spoils. They didn't, they got slaughtered. In the time it took them to stroll across No Man's Land the Germans had time to emerge from their deeply dug-in positions, dust themselves off and load up their machine guns to mow them down. Along the front on that first day alone were 60,000 casualties and some 20,000 dead. July 1 1916 was the single worst day in British Military History.
Among the many dead were, like those in the Ypres Salient (which I visited 3 years ago), were thousands whose bodies were never found or identified and whose names are recorded on the walls of the Thiepval Memorial. Among them were Percy Jeeves, the accomplished Country Cricket Player after whom PG Woodhouse based his famous butler character. Also William Mcfadzean who won the Victoria Cross for throwing himself on a box of explosives that would have blown up his mates, absorbing their fate. Also two of the tragic five Souls Brothers who all died in the war to end all wars.
The map in the Visitor's Centre has two kinds of arrows denoting British activity. Those representing successful attacks and those representing failures. There weren't many of the former, but I'm proud to say that some of the objectives that were achieved were by the Welsh in the centre. The 38th Welsh Division - comprising the South Wales Borderers (of Rorke's Drift fame), Welsh Fusiliers and the Welsh Regiments recruited from the Rhondda Valley (where my family harks from) took Mametz Village on day 1 and by the time they were relieved on the 12th July they had cleared Mametz Wood of the enemy as they were required to do. The triumphant memorial (pictured) is one of the more uplifting sites on the Somme front, although more than 4,000 casualties were sustained in those two weeks. Later we visited the cemetery where contemporaries of my Great Grand Father, a gunner, were buried who had died shelling the Germans in support of their countrymen down in the valley, however Morgan Llewellyn survived the action and lived into the 1960s.
It was Welshmen again who, 500 years earlier and not far from the bloody fields of the Somme, played an important role in the other case of hubris being an army's undoing. When 30,000 French knights and foot soldiers arrived on a muddy field in Agincourt on St Crispin's Day in October 1415, they understood themselves to outnumber their English and Welsh enemy by 4-to-1. They were right, Henry V's army had dwindled from the 12,000 that had landed at Calais to a meagre 8,000. Among the French were the bulk of France's entire nobility including several Royal Princes. This would be the day when this brilliant assembly of France's most impressive knights would avenge the defeats at Crecy and Poitiers by putting their sick and weak English foe to the sword. But their complacency allowed them to be invited into a narrow and muddy field flanked on both sides by dense woodland - as it still is today - and the Welsh bowmen showered 10 arrows a minute each down upon them as they advanced towards the English knights. Packed into this small area no larger than a football field, the French were too cramped to even properly defend themselves. Eye witness accounts talk of heavily armoured French knights having to crawl over piles of their dead countrymen towards their own slaughter by Henry's forces. It is quite a staggering disaster of proportions perhaps only matched by that July day 500 years later.
"And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here, And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks, That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day." Henry V, William Shakespeare
I spent the rest of the weekend in my parent's cottage in Normandy, in the centre of what is known as the Falaise pocket - the scene in August 1944 of a quite different kind of disaster as 150,000 Germans were encircled and decimated by the advancing allies. But that really is a quite different story.
So there's some precedent for the disaster that Alistair Cook and his men face as they head to Perth for the third and possibly deciding Test - but a source of some hope for him perhaps is that ultimately the French won the Hundred Year's War and The British won the First World War!