It’s a while since we had some Shakespeare, so here is his masterly evocation of the night before the battle of Agincourt, as spoken by the chorus in ‘Henry V’. It will be remembered that the English army have had a pretty rough time of it, being greatly outnumbered and plagued by disease, and that at the time they were in fact trying to retreat to the English-held port of Calais after the Siege of Harfleur, only to find their path blocked by a much larger French force, so their mood is understandably not too chipper. Later in the act we have the famous exchange between a common soldier called William and the king who has gone about his men in disguise to check up on morale. William accepts that a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, or to be precise, that a man’s gotta do what his king tells him to do, but points out the king consequently faces a heavy reckoning on the Day of Judgment if, as seems likely, things go badly wrong on the morrow. ‘I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle’, says William, a line which neatly undercuts the King’s later bombastic ‘happy few’ speech, and tempts one to believe that here we have a subtly Shakespearean way of resolving a tension between what the playwright found politic to write and what he really thought.

Umber’d: cast into shadow. Cf. Housman’s ‘Wenlock Edge was umbered/And bright was Abdon Burf/And warm between them slumbered/The smooth green miles of turf’.

From Henry V, Act 4: Prologue

Now entertain conjecture of a time
When creeping murmur and the poring dark
Fills the wide vessel of the universe.
From camp to camp, through the foul womb of night
The hum of either army stilly sounds,
That the fixed sentinels almost receive
The secret whispers of each other’s watch.
Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames
Each battle sees the other’s umber’d face;
Steed threatens steed in high and boastful neighs
Piercing the night’s dull ear; and from the tents
The armorers, accomplishing the knights,
With busy hammers closing rivets up,
Give dreadful note of preparation:
The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll,
And the third hour of drowsy morning named,
Proud of their numbers and secure in soul,
The confident and overlusty French
Do the low-rated English play at dice;
And chide the cripple tardy-gaited night,
Who, like a foul and ugly witch, doth limp
So tediously away. The poor condemnèd English,
Like sacrifices, by their watchful fires
Sit patiently and inly ruminate
The morning’s danger; and their gesture sad,
Investing lank-lean cheeks and war-worn coats,
Presenteth them unto the gazing moon
So many horrid ghosts.

William Shakespeare