600 years on, haven't the few, the happy few, done well?

It’s a good time for the centuries-old English sport of Frog-bashing, or being nasty about the French.

In fact, it’s a good year for it, since the second centenary of Battle of Waterloo occurred on 18 June. That ’s the battle where the French were so comprehensively beaten by the Prussians.

Apologies, of course I meant the British. After all, one of the commanders arrayed against Napoleon was the Duke of Wellington, who was English. Well, Irish actually, but you know – Anglo-Irish.

He commanded 25,000 Brits, out of the nearly 200,000 men eventually engaged, which really underlines the extent of the purely British victory. A majority of those 25,000 were probably English, so Waterloo certainly provides some kind of basis for Frog-bashing.

This week was another high point within that year. Wednesday was the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar, a much more solidly British triumph. Nelson led a British fleet against a joint French and Spanish force off Cape Trafalgar, providing a name for one of London’s most spectacular squares. I always make a point of taking French visitors there, to remind them of one of those occasions when we came out on top.

John Gilbert's Morning of the Battle of Agincourt

Today, the 25th of October, is an even more significant day. It’s Saint Crispin’s, dedicated to Saints Crispin and Crispianus, or Crispian. That’s as in “this day is called the feast of Crispian: he that outlives this day, and comes safe home, will stand a tip-toe when the day is named, and rouse him at the name of Crispian.”

Yes. 600 years ago today, that fine Englishman, Henry V, led his gallant band into battle against the French on the field of Agincourt. They were hugely outnumbered, of course, some claiming by as much as 10:1, others by just 6:1. This made the English victory not just all the more glorious but also puts it hors concours, as we like to say in English, as the greatest ever case of Frog-bashing recorded.

That huge disparity in numbers also gave rise to another fine moment in the Shakespeare speech, from his play about the King cleverly entitled “Henry V”, which I’ve already quoted above.

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition

Great stuff, isn’t it? It also tells us so much. 

For instance, “gentle” clearly didn’t mean sensitive and delicate or anything that soft. It meant being part of that select brood that called itself “gentlemen”, and as the speech makes clear, you didn’t get access to it by being gentle – on the contrary, you did it by shedding your blood with the King on St Crispin’s day.

Presumably, though, Henry would have preferred it if you shed the blood of the dastardly enemy. He was quite a soldier, so I imagine he’d have shared the view expressed some centuries later by US General George Patton: “no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making some other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

Shakespeare puts into the king’s mouth a smart contrast to “gentle”: the opposite is, it seems, “vile”. Clearly it’s being used here to mean common, base-born, of inferior standing. So if you’re vile, it seems you can raise your standing – gentle your condition – by killing a lot of Frenchmen and showing them (or at least the ones still standing) that, whatever their numbers, they can never be the match for fine upstanding Englishmen.

Funnily enough, it’s worth taking a look at those numbers again. Anne Curry, who did a book about Agincourt ten years ago, argues that the odds were more like 4:3 in favour of the French, and may indeed have been closer still than that to equality. Still, we won’t insist on that point here, since it rather reduces the Frog-bashing quality of the incident, and hence the anniversary.

Instead, let’s focus on the great achievements of the victory. The things we value deeply and which wouldn’t have been possible without that famous English victory. Off-hand, I can’t think what they are, but they have to be there somewhere. Surely.

It is, no doubt, to those gains that we, in the nations that think of themselves as civilised, owe the blessings we enjoy today. Most notable of those blessings is by the rule of gentlemen, made gentle either by birth or by the skilful use of lethal force, caring for the rest of us vile commoners with all the tenderness we’ve come to expect. And never being vile themselves, of course.

In that spirit, let’s take up the suggestion from Shakespeare’s Henry to celebrate this day in “flowing cups”. Then we can help ensure that

Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d

Well, OK, they shall be remembered, not we. But, hey, you know what I mean.

The popular pastime of foot-shooting

If we conjure up a mental image of a target, I suppose most of us think of some kind of disk with rings of alternating colour around a bull’s eye at the centre. Perhaps a more appropriate image would be a human foot, since shooting yourself in the foot is the traditional metaphor for a self-inflicted wound. And it’s extraordinary how often we inflict them on ourselves, with decisions taken without properly considering all the facts, leading to months or years of regret as we struggle to correct them.

Picture a bridge across a river on which the calm of a late afternoon in September is beginning to settle.

On the bridge, there’s anything but calm. In the middle, carpenters have built a square enclosure, with doors facing either bank. Two men with ten companions each are due to meet here to try to overcome their mutual antagonism and unite against a third. The negotiations should have started at 3:00 and it’s a measure of their mutual distrust that they’re already two hours late.

In the event, the meeting takes minutes. One leader makes a gesture which someone who wants to pick a fight could interpret as threatening. There’s a shout and a man moves in and strikes a fatal blow with an axe. Contrary to the agreement, his side has left its door unlocked so more men pour through and the fighting becomes general.

The year was 1419 and the murdered leader was John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy. The man he had come to meet was his cousin the Dauphin or Crown Prince of France, later Charles VII. The third figure was one of England’s more successful soldier kings, Henry V, whose forces were at the gates of Paris.

The Dauphin had stood by while the assassination took place, and he had plenty of time to regret his inaction. The war ended with a French victory, but it took another 34 years. Why so long? He had forfeited the support of Burgundy which instead sided with England against him. Killing John might have seemed an expedient move to rid himself of a dangerous rival, but it cost him decades of struggle against an implacable enemy.

A century after the murder, King Francis I visited Burgundy where a monk showed him the skull of John the Fearless and pointed to the wound made by the axe. ‘Sire,’ he said, ‘this is the hole through which the English entered France.’

Roll forward some centuries. The Saville enquiry recently reported on the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings of 13 civilians by British paratroopers in Northern Ireland. The objective was to arrest troublemakers, which is a police job. Paratroopers are highly trained and fully equipped for one job only, killing people, which they do extremely well. Use paratroops instead of police and you really have no excuse for being surprised that the result is dead bodies.

The outcome of these events is summarised perfectly by the Saville report:

‘What happened on Bloody Sunday strengthened the Provisional IRA, increased nationalist resentment and hostility towards the Army and exacerbated the violent conflict of the years that followed. Bloody Sunday was a tragedy for the bereaved and the wounded, and a catastrophe for the people of Northern Ireland.’

Someone thought that teaching these people a sharp lesson was a good idea at the time. Looking back at the quarter century of violence that followed, we can see that perhaps it wasn’t that bright.

In Britain today, we’re living under a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Now it has to be understood that the Conservative or Tory Party is the natural party of government here. They provided Prime Ministers for nearly two-thirds of the twentieth century, Labour and the Liberals having to share the rest. So the Tories define British politics: you vote for them or you vote against, which generally means either Labour or Liberal Democrat.

But by joining the Conservatives in government, the Liberal Democrats have closed off one of the options for an anti-Tory vote. So it really shouldn’t come as a surprise that their standing in the polls has collapsed and previous Liberal Democrat voters are flocking to Labour.

Joining the government may have seemed a great scheme to get close to power for the first time in ninety years. But right now it’s looking like a suicidal move from which it may take a generation for the party to recover.

It isn’t just the great and the good, or at any rate the historical and incompetent, who engage in this kind of foot-shooting.

Some years ago, while we were still living in Strasbourg, I persuaded my sales colleagues to hold a meeting there. Everyone had a great time. However, we were in a hotel some twenty minutes drive outside town. On one occasion, we drove there in a convoy of three cars that I was leading. It was pouring with rain and pitch black, and I was chatting away to my passengers so I missed my turning.

Now the obvious solution was to do a U-turn and get back onto the right road. What was the worst that could happen? I’d have had to admit that I’d made a mistake. Clearly the sensible option. For reasons that remain obscure to me, I didn’t take it and kept on driving, sure that I’d find another way that would avoid my blushes.

I didn’t. We spent the next two hours driving round Alsace, the region to which Strasbourg belongs. To be strictly honest, we weren’t even in Alsace all the time: at one point I realised that we had driven right into Lorraine, the region next door. By the end, my passengers were gasping to relieve themselves, but I wasn’t prepared to stop for fear of being lynched by the people in the cars behind.

My decision to press on had seemed a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t. I’d hoped to avoid embarrassment, but in fact I only made it worse. Like the Dauphin, like the men who sent in the paras on Bloody Sunday, like the Liberal Democrats propping up the Tories, what looked like a shortcut to success proved absolutely the opposite.

See what I mean? Bang – wow, that’s a couple of toes gone. Just let me take aim again: next time I might be able to take out the whole of the instep.