1415, 1854 The battles of Agincourt and Balaclava appealed mightily to William Shakespeare and Alfred, Lord Tennyson – but in very different ways. At Agincourt Henry V really did lead his outnumbered forces into battle, unlike Charles VI of France, who had been kept at home because he was mad. Thanks to their highly trained longbow archers, the English won overwhelmingly, killing an average of between six and ten French soldiers each. After the battle Henry wooed and won the hand of the French king’s daughter. How romantic is that?
Balaclava, the second major engagement of the Crimean War, produced romance of another sort. A scramble of badly articulated orders from Lord Raglan through Lord Lucan down to Lord Cardigan resulted in the last of these temperamental toffs first refusing to send the Light Brigade cavalry to attack the left flank of the Russian cavalry, then leading it down a valley bristling with Russian cannon on both sides and at the far end. The outcome was inevitable.
Shakespeare’s Henry starts off with ambiguous motives for going to war, but grows into the responsibility of leading his compatriots into and through the conflict. In Shakespeare the war makes the man, but it also makes the nation. During the Second World War, Laurence Olivier was released from the navy to make the movie of Henry V that came out in 1944, just in time – not so much to stiffen backbones as already to celebrate the impending Allied victory.
So when Henry speaks to his troops before the battle, he lays down rhetorical tracks for the later conflict too. The first line alone provided Churchill’s epithet for heroic Battle of Britain pilots and the title of a TV mini-series of 2001 following a company of parachutists from the Normandy landings to the end of the war in Europe. But more important is Henry’s conceit of social levelling through the shared danger of combat. That may well have fed into the tremendous Labour victory in the ‘Khaki Election’ of 1945.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
The Crimean War was remembered more for its victims than its victors. Florence Nightingale famously looked after the wounded, while Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, written in that same year, dramatised the quandary of those troopers sacrificed in the fatal charge:
‘Forward, the Light Brigade!’
Was there a man dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do & die,
Rode the six hundred.
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley’d & thunder’d;
Storm’d at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
‘Do & die’, so often misremembered as ‘do or die’, is the key: here the dying is in the doing, and the romance is not in the battle won through the fellowship of leaders and led, but in the courageous pursuit of the impossible. As the French Marshal Pierre Bosquet put it, while witnessing the massacre: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre.’ Or to quote a less friendly comment by a contemporary Russian general: ‘Lions led by asses.’