Page 1696 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

May make a peaceful and a sweet retire
From off these fields, where, wretches, their poor bodies
Must lie and fester.

KING HENRY
Who hath sent thee now?

MONTJOY
The Constable of France.

KING HENRY
I pray thee, bear my former answer back: [90]

Bid them achieve me and then sell my bones.
Good God, why should they mock poor fellows thus?
The man that once did sell the lion’s skin

While the beast liv’d, was kill’d with hunting him.
A many of our bodies shall no doubt [95]
Find native graves; upon the which, I trust,
Shall witness live in brass of this day’s work
And those that leave their valiant bones in France,

Dying like men, though buried in your dunghills,
They shall be fam’d; for there the sun shall greet them, [100]
And draw their honours reeking up to heaven,

Leaving their earthly parts to choke your clime,
The smell whereof shall breed a plague in France.
Mark then abounding valour in our English,
That being dead, like to the bullet’s crasing, [105]
Break out into a second course of mischief,

Killing in relapse of mortality.
Let me speak proudly: tell the Constable
We are but warrions for the working-day;

Our gayness and our gilt are all besmirch’d [110]
With rainy marching in the painful field;
There’s not a piece of feather in our host −
Good argument, I hope, we will not fly −
And time bath worn us into slovenry:

But, by the mass, our hearts are in the trim; [115]
And my poor soldiers tell me, yet ere night