7 Canadian Stationary Hospital at
Harfleur on Christmas Eve 1916.
However, the French were starved rather than driven by force out of
Harfleur. And months of siege warfare had brought dysentery to the English camp.
From there, hop over the soaring bridge Pont de Normandie to
Harfleur, where Henry V landed his army and urged them: "Once more into the breach, dear friends..." The walls of the town took so long to breach that the English suffered crippling dysentery - thanks to the defenders opening the town cesspits into the boggy ground.
We laid siege to the great port of
Harfleur, (now a scruffy dismal suburb of dismal Le Havre).
The old Vauban Docks have become stores and leisure areas while Le Havre and the surrounding pretty villages of Honfleur and
Harfleur all hold Christmas markets.
Cafodd ei ladd ar faes y gad ar 20 Gorffennaf 1918, ger
Harfleur, Ffrainc.
It was as if with an uncanny prescience that Shakespeare had written for them the speech of Henry V at the Battle of
Harfleur when he declared to his men that he and they were a "band of brothers; For he to-day that sheds his blood with me Shall be my brother".
Following a siege lasting almost six weeks,
Harfleur capitulated on 22 September 1415, when it became apparent to the townspeople that no French relief force was coming to their aid.
When the dust settles, notwithstanding a welter of political miscues, history might well remember the episode as Obama's
Harfleur, where an announced threat of potentially illegal force catalyzed a better nonviolent result, thereby reinvigorating multilateral diplomacy abroad and much-needed public debate at home.
Maybe that's what brought on the dysentery at
Harfleur. The half achieved
Harfleur ...
1, Never; 2, Yootha Joyce; 3, The Silmarillion; 4,
Harfleur; 5, Henry IV; 6, Austerlitz; 7, Italy; 8, Alfred, Lord Tennyson; 9, Dasani; 10, Three Coins in The Fountain - the title of the film