by Robert Nye
What was to be done?
To Mowbray’s mind, forked as his beard, only one thing could be done in a situation like this: surrender. He ordered the hauling down of our English ensign and the running up of a white flag.
Here a problem presented itself. We didn’t have a white flag handy. Locker after locker was ransacked. Not a white flag. Not a snotrag. A man might wonder how many other battles have been won for lack of the necessary equipment with which to surrender in the first place.
Mowbray was determined not to be put off by a little detail like this. ‘Tear up a shirt!’ he said.
I do not know whether it is true that the English crew of the St George, and our prisoners of war aboard the St Denis, had not a single clean white shirt between them. Certainly when a man sets out to war, white linen is not the best of stuff to take along. Certainly it was a time of appalling fashions, when men went in for shoes that curled at the toes, and the wearing of meaningless little cloaks known outside the tailoring trade as bum-freezers. Again, the night’s hilarity might be mentioned as the reason why whatever clean linen there could ever have been aboard those vessels was now in a state of dirt and disrepair. For this reason, or that, or none, nothing could be found that was really suitable to be used as the white flag with which my lord Thomas, Duke of noble Norfolk, could bring about his wished-for surrender.
‘Well, the Devil take you all!’ his grace proposed, jumping up and down on the poop deck in his cork-heeled shoes. ‘However, he’s not having me – and neither are the Frogs …’
So saying, he fell down a rope-ladder and launched himself in a coracle to the best of what remained of his sobriety. He disappeared into the fog to leeward, watched with some disfavour and bewilderment by his crew. One fellow drank a toast to him, fell overboard (or was pushed), and was eaten by a basking shark.
The French, without hesitation, rammed us amidships. Half a dozen of their soldiers leapt aboard with enthusiastic cries. The rest hung back and waited. This was usually the procedure in naval engagements – the idiots and the valiant went first, the rest tended to postpone things a little, watching to see if the enemy intended to make much of a struggle of it.
Your English soldier, or sailor for that matter, fights best with a gallon of sour sack in his bladder, and a roaring hangover in his head. When they saw these nimble Frenchkins coming, our gallant lads laid hands on a belaying pin or two, and struck out hugely. Few of the blows went home, and one or two English hearts were suddenly filled up with sword thrusts, but our general air of wild resistance was sufficient to prompt the enemy to take a quick sprint through our ranks and round the stern. They assembled then under the rear mast, panting, doubtful. Fog was again descending, or rather seeming to well up thick and grey out of the indifferent silence of the sea.
I decided to take a hand.
Why had I not done so earlier? Couldn’t I have been heaving a cudgel with my companions at the time of the first French attack? Certainly, I could, sir. The reason why I did not was that I was not on board the St George. I was on the St Denis.
So great and glorious a cargo of alcohol had drawn me like a chick to a nest, a hand to a wallet, an iron filing to a mighty magnet. My night had been spent in the hold of the French vessel, in the embrace of Dionysus. I emerged now, at eight and a bit bells, fifteen years old, as brave as a young bull, and very, very drunk.
Madam, I took in the state of battle at a glance.
Our gallant lads were looking round half-wittedly for the French. The French were massing for a second attack.
I swung into action. I seized a hogshead of sack in each hand and launched myself upon the foe. I was standing at the time in the rigging of the St Denis, and from where I was I could see three of every Frenchman on the St George. This, however, I took and take to be no less than fair. Three Frenchmen have ever been about the equivalent of one Englishman.
I fought that morning, in the sweet fog, in the day so foul and fair, like a man inspired. I used my sword, my cudgel, and my belaying pin. But mostly I used the great hogsheads of sack. I swung and clashed them round and round and round. Skulls cracked, blood spilt, men fell, panic reigned. And all the while I fought, I kept up the single roaring two-note chant:
‘Fastolf! Faust off! Faust off! FASTOLF!’
(I made the Fast or Faust sound like a verb, you understand, and the olf or off what the French could do.)
The English, with their backs to the wall, or when their blood is up, are a musical nation. The crew of the St George, drunk as pancakes, still knew a good tune when they heard one. And there is no tune sweeter than the chanting of a warrior’s name, and the cracking of enemy bones to accompany it.
‘Fastolf! Faust off!’ they cried – and falling to the hogsheads they went like all hell at the enemy, swinging and banging and breaking skulls as if skulls were no more than eggshells.
The French, I think, were taken aback by this novel method of warfare, our secret and surprising weapon. There was no coping with anything like this in their manuals of instruction, the etudes of their guerre. Your French soldier is a methodical animal. His courage consists in standing up. Or, at the most, in going slightly forward. He fights well enough when his flag is in the breeze, and the foe comes marching along in a straight line towards him with his flag in the breeze, and all the common courtesies of killing properly observed. But confront him with a drunken young boy fighting like a pocket Hercules, and a boatload of disoriented sailors tossing great hogsheads of sack about, and no one caring to advance in straight lines except occasionally to stop to be sick over the side, and believe me your Frenchman is perplexed.
Those Frenchmen soon found themselves about half perplexed to death, and the other half not at all sure what had hit them and was going on hit-hit-hitting them.
The fog had come up thick as soup again, giving me a useful accomplice. I was able (thanks to my nimbleness of foot and lightness and smallness of person) to hop in and out with my hogsheads, darting to attack when least expected, vanishing as soon as more than a couple of the enemy realised where I was, or what I was about. Those who half saw me must have taken me for an imp or a hobgoblin. For the better to break bones, I strung half-a-dozen of the hogsheads together, and swung them round and round my head as I ran the decks.
And all my bone-breaking I punctuated with the same roaring chant, which the English crew echoed and redoubled as they came to my assistance:
‘Fastolf! Faust off! Faust off! FASTOLF!’
The god of battles tilted things our way. The French blundered about like concussed billygoats, and a confounded Frenchman is only half a creature. They shouted at each other. They cursed. They cried. They referred to witchcraft to account for their failure to cope with one of the rattling, skeleton-smashing sallies of this puckish little ghostly rival – myself. Thus, I heard:
‘Allez, allez!’
‘Le diable!’
‘Mais oui. C’est un petit diable.’
‘Un esprit de vin!’
‘Mais magnifique!’
‘Oh mon Dieu, mon Dieu, mais j’ai peur de le petit diable de vin!’
These remarks provided fresh inspiration for my sorties. I took to climbing into the rigging above the gaggle of the French, and pouring whole hogsheads of sack down on them.
‘Il pleut!’
‘II pleut vin!’
‘C’est un miracle!’
‘Un coup de diable!’
The frightened little Froggies fancied that some great god of grapes was pissing wine down on them, I believe. They sensed a something still and unnatural in the day – what with the sweet fog and the sudden shafts of sun. My appearance, my unheard-of mode of martial behaviour, and the suddenness of my sorties matched with their swift and unpredictable changes of direction – all combined to cause an extraordinary consternation amongst them. Add to this the encouragement which my example gave to our English crew. They fought like heroes now, swigging more sack when not smashing enemy skulls with the hog
sheads, tossing Frenchmen to left and to right, but always overboard.
To Fastolf! To triumph!
The day was ours. Benedicite. Pass the brandy.
Imagining no doubt that some vast host of the English fleet was upon them, so doubly and redoubtably did the cry of ‘Fastolf! A Fastolf!’ ring from English ship to English ship, the whole French fleet turned tail and sailed for Portugal. We were left in possession of the St Denis, the flagship which had rammed us, and two other minor vessels. My personal pleasure in the victory was enhanced when our scouts reported that the minor vessels were as heavy laden with a cargo of wine as the first boat we had captured.
All that long, glorious afternoon we counted the dead and opened the hogsheads. The day was given over to abrupt sea-burial and the invention of toasts:
‘To the squire of sack!’
‘To young Captain Jack!’
‘To the elf and staff that felled the French!’
‘To the pisspot of wine!’
‘To the little Cupid who peed on the French navy from a great height!’
‘To Fastolf!’
‘Faust off!’
‘A Fastolf!’
‘To fast or fall, to olf ’em all!’
‘To Jack!’
‘To Jack!’
‘To Jack!’
‘To crack Jack smack-their-heads and leave-’em-dead FASTOLF!’
It was a merry day. We played on fifes and flutes. We buried French and fished for flounders. I was captain of the flagship until the time came to turn and sail for home. We took our French bounty in tow.
An hour towards Yarmouth we pulled alongside the Duke of Norfolk, shivering in his coracle. It is the mark of a wise soldier to remember in the hour of his triumph the little details and accidents which led up to his victory. My master’s failure to find a white flag and his subsequent desertion of the ship had been prime factors in my need to carry the day. So – I ordered the rescue of the Duke, and had him hauled aboard in a fishing net although the men were all for leaving him to the whims of the English channel.
Once safe aboard, Norfolk suffered the usual change of heart and style. It is true that when a battle is done there is nothing like imagination for assessing the role which you have played in it. By the time we reached the sound off Yarmouth harbour, Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, bestrode history as the man who defeated the French fleet at Slugs and recaptured a quantity of sack in the doing of it. As for the crew – they were all too drunk to care or remember, I daresay, and besides who would have believed them, or me, if anyone should have told the truth, insisting that the victory had been achieved by a young and inexperienced squire, in his first martial engagement, who having slain the Duc de Aquitaine with a single blow of his arse, had gone on to break the skulls of two dozen men by a novel use of hogsheads?
No one would have believed it, is the answer. But I set down the truth of the Battle of Slugs now, so that history eventually will know.
Clio, are you listening? You strumpet! You trull! You puzzell!
I often wonder if some of the battles of former times, pried open, might be found to have similar causes and stories hidden inside them. Remove the official despatches, the Homer Line, and who knows what really happened at Troy, or at Thermopylae, or Marathon? I cannot concern myself with such antiquities. I am a plain soldier, and I tell a plain soldier’s straight, unvarnished tale. Not the affairs of the past, but the actualities of the present age concern me. Be sure, by Clio’s little clack-dish, sir, before this War of my Hundred Days is done, you will be acquainted with the truth of many another skirmish in which John Fastolf aquitted himself well and his country not ill. I have been a man who has left a certain discreet but definite mark on history, and the time has come to disclose it, so that Englishmen, true Englishmen of the time to come, may know why my name struck terror in the enemy, and would still be terrible to him, should he hear it anew in these mincing, nancy days of Harry VI’s poor peace.
I was pissing bloody sack as we sailed into harbour.
As for Norfolk, my master, all he could mutter, as we came, fifes and flutes playing, into Yarmouth water, to a heroes’ welcome, were the same words, over and over:
‘White! White underwear! The boy was wearing white beneath his doublet all the time. That would have made an excellent flag, a noble flag, a sweet, persuasive flag!’
Chapter Sixteen
Sir John Fastolf’s cursing of the cook
15th April
Cook the cook.
The cook’s a crook.
He can go and persuade himself otherwise with a sausage.
He can fig off.
I’ll bet you’ve never seen him licking his own fingers.
Bugger the cook with damsons.
What’s his name again?
Macbeth. I knew it. His father was a thane, some kind of Scotch goat. I heard about it. There was this papal legate hot for the mother. He tucks his bull under his arm and goes up where they hold court and capers on the blasted heath. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘A new rule has come through from Rome! All you thanes are to be buggered, by the Pope’s command.’
‘O holy father,’ wheedles our fellow, ‘can’t you make an exception in my favour?’
‘I regret not. Remove your leggings, please.’
Macbeth goes down on his knees. ‘Excellency, for pity’s sake,’ he begs, ‘I have a wife—’
The legate picks his teeth. ‘Oh, very well. For a small fee in addition. But no one must know.’
Consider this sweet Hibernian scene – Macbeth’s father putting aside the plaid and lying face down across the throne. Lady Macbeth lying on her husband’s back.
The legate mounts and does his duty, so that it looks as though he’s buggering the thane.
Got it Worcester?
Macbeth face down.
Lady M face up.
Lady M’s dress up.
Legate’s papal bull up.
It’s a long, moisty fuck in the misty Scottish morning. A born cuckold, our squashed thane gets excited. His own prick knocks a hole in the bottom of the throne and pokes out red on the other side.
‘Look!’ cries young Macbeth, a lad wise beyond his years. ‘Look what a pizzle that legate’s got on him! It’s gone through my mother and my father and the tip’s still waggling!’
The cook’s a cunt.
Listen: far from owing him five months’ wages, he owes me for five months’ pilfering of supplies. I know the price my partridge fetch in Yarmouth. I know the difference between his books and what we have to eat.
I hope an onion grows out of his belly.
When he drops dead of dysentery in the soup, or of his own soup in the dysentery, I want the undercook to chop off the Macbeth prick and stuff it up the Macbeth arse. That’s the only hole in Norfolk the thing’s not been in.
As for his sack – he says it is very old. I say it is in its second bleeding childhood.
You know why Hal’s sceptre was so long? When he was a boy he was on all the time at his father to let him marry. ‘Wait, wait,’ said old Henry IV, ‘your thing’s not big enough. When it’s long enough for you to sit on it – then I’ll find a wife for you.’ So our prince takes the future of England in his hands and he pulls it as hard as he can, and he sees that what the king says is right enough – it won’t reach his royal arse. He waits a year or two, and every spare minute he’s busy lengthening his member, pulling it and stretching it and schooling it and generally making it fit for any carnal Agincourt. At last, the day dawns when his princely instrument not only reaches his arse, it surpasses it.
‘Jack,’ he tells me, ‘now I can marry without bringing shame on the house of Plantagenet.’
‘Ho hum,’ says I. ‘Why bother? Seeing your prick’s grown so long it reaches your arse – just fuck yourself!’
Macbeth! Macbeth! Macbeth!
Macbeth has murdered sleep, and my digestion.
Macbeth deserves to be cooked slowly on an open fire,
with two crab-apples in his gob and garlic up his bum-gut. Not that such garnishing could make him edible.
The Marshal de Retz had a servant who’d been excommunicated. When he died the local priory refused the body Christian burial.
Bluebeard says: ‘Give me a week. I’ll have him safe in holy ground.’
Then he invites to his castle at Tiffauges all the monks of Poitou, and he has his cook slice up a special dish and season it and pepper it. The rashers come curled on a great silver platter.
The monks eat as monks do.
The monks say how sweet and salt and tender and thank you very much.
‘Sirs,’ says de Retz, ‘it is I who should thank you. That man of mine you refused to have in your graveyard – you have just admitted him to the holier ground of your bellies. Let us give thanks for what we have received.’
The father prior had hiccups for a month.
As for Mr Macbeth’s dice – effects of gravity and gravy – they were loaded.
Chapter Seventeen
How Sir John Fastolf was apprenticed monk
16th April
Back from the wars, I cut quite a figure as a summer boy of fashion. This did not last long. My master Mowbray was jealous as a toad. I think he suspected me also of standing too high in his wife’s favour. He determined to take me down a peg or two. In fact, if it had been his express intention to ruin my pride after the glory that had settled upon me at the Battle of Slugs he could not have chosen his next move better.
I was apprenticed to be a monk!
Pious readers stop here. I have met few Christians in my life whose faith was stout or deep enough to survive many tales of the truth of the monastic life. What goes on behind abbey walls is better left to religious imaginations. I shall have more to say on this subject when I come to tell you of that later period in my story where I had recourse to going as a man into a monastery, and indeed of that other occasion when I was obliged to go as a woman into a nunnery. At the time of which I am now speaking, remember, I was still a boy, solidly ignorant of the ways of the world, fifteen years old and green as grass – although, as I’ve explained, something of a temporary hero on account of that single encounter with the French.