On October 25, 1415, the cream of the French aristocracy stood waiting in their armor. They were arranged in three lines. Behind them: thousands of reinforcements. Before them: an exhausted English army, starving, diseased, and outnumbered at least three to one. This was going to be a slaughter.
It was. But not the one the French expected.
The Battle of Agincourt is one of the most-studied military engagements in history. It wasn't particularly large, or pivotal (not in the long run), but it makes for an elegant case study in the fragility of structured power and how perfect order, under the wrong conditions, becomes the perfect target. Rituals of command are not the same thing as strategy. And hierarchy, when ossified, becomes less a way of organizing action and more a way of distributing delay.
You can still visit the muddy fields in northern France where thousands of French knights drowned in their own armor, stuck in the churned earth, too disciplined to break formation, too proud to yield.
And it doesn't seem like much has changed.
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