ineyards to the summit of the little rise.
This sharp and unlooked for flank fire turned the scale. The whole French
vanguard was thrown into confusion, and broke down the side of the
depression and up its opposing slope. As it so broke it interfered with
and in part confused the first of the great French "battles," that under
the Dauphin, whose ordered task it was to follow up the vanguard and
reinforce its pressure upon the English line. Though the vanguard had been
broken, the Dauphin's big, unwieldy body of dismounted armoured men
managed to go forward through the shaken and flying infantry, and in their
turn to attack the hedge and the vineyard before it. Against them, the
flank fire from Warwick could do less than it had done against the
unarmoured cross-bowmen and sergeants of the vanguard which it had just
routed. The Dauphin's cumbered and mailed knights did manage to reach the
main English position of the hedge, but they were not numerous enough for
the effort then demanded of them. The half mile of advance under such a
weight of iron had terribly exhausted them, and meanwhile Edward had come
back, the full weight of his command--every man of it except a reserve of
four hundred--was massed to meet the Dauphin's attack. Warwick's men
hurried up from the left to help in the sword play, and by the time the
melee was engaged that line of hedge saw the unusual struggle of a
defensive superior in numbers against an inferior offensive which should,
by all military rule, have refused to attempt the assault.

Nevertheless, that assault was pressed with astonishing vigour, and it was
that passage in the action, before and after the hour of ten o'clock,
which was the hottest of all. Regarded as an isolated episode in the
fight, the Dauphin's unequal struggle was one of the finest feats of arms
in all the Hundred Years' War. Nothing but a miracle could have made it
succeed, nor did it succeed; after a slaughter in which the English
defending line had itself suffered heavily and the Dauphin's attack had
been virtually cut to pieces, there followed a third phase in the battle
which quite cancelled not only the advantage (for that was slight) but
also the glory gained by the Dauphin's great effort.

Next behind the Dauphin's line, the second "battle," that of the Duke of
Orleans, should have proceeded to press on in reinforcement and to have
launched yet another wave of men against the hedge which had been with
such difficul