Close the Wall Up With Our English Dead: Valor and Conquest in the English Imagination From Shakespeare to World War I
Joel Thomas
ERH-205WX
COL Miller
Help Received: Peer review, COL Miller comments
844 Words
Of the many topics we explored throughout the semester, I found myself consistently drawn to the theme of warfare, valor, and conquest in the works of the writers we read. Our literary timeline traced England’s rise as an Imperial power, its peak position of dominance, and finally, with World War I and Orwell, its decline. Throughout it all, war was a driving force and mirror, a source of drama and reflection on what it meant to be English, and what values should be brought to the forefront and either lauded or examined.
War provides both background and substance in Shakespeare’s Henry V, a brooding play about the burdens of kingship. It reflects England’s uneasy status as a European power, removed by geography from the continental centers of power, constantly embroiled in a series of wars with the French, as well as the Scots on the northern border. For Henry, conquest of France means legitimacy, as shown in his prayer before Agincourt, and favor from God. It also serves as an oppoturnity for the expiation of Henry’s ancestral sins, and a victory for Henry is seemingly a victory for all of England, proving that they are ruled by a monarch who has both legitimacy and the strength to enforce it. While Shakespeare makes it clear that the fruits of Henry’s victory are lost on many of the men who fought for him, such as Pistol, then, and while the land gained will be squandered by Henry’s son, it is apparent that conquest and war are an essential part of kingship, and if Henry were to lose, his crown would be forfeit.
If Henry’s drama focuses on conquest as a necessary action in order to claim legitimate rights, conquest becomes a law unto itself in the writings of Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling wrote The Man Who Would Be King, England was at the height of its power as an Empire, owning vast holdings in Africa and Asia. In the story, conquest and war are seen as the right of every Englishman. Daniel Dravot and “Peachy” Carnehan can conquer Kafiristan and subjugate its people because that is precisely what Englishmen can and should do. For Kipling, their daring and competence in conquering and initially running the country are expressions of their natural virtue. It is telling, then, that their downfall only comes when Dravot gets too comfortable, turns his back on the rough, soldiering life, leaving the virtuous, almost Christ-like Peachy in charge of his campaigns, taking a wife and becoming absorbed in fantasies of lavish emperorship. When the two are run off by the Kafiristan “savages”, then, it is Dravot’s valor in the face of certain death, where he reclaims his earlier adventuring spirit, that relegitimizes his kingship and proves him worthy as an Englishman and even a hero in his time, like in spirit to the men who claimed the rest of the empire for England. Absent, however, is a concern for the rank and file who die in their adventures, except for the indefatigable Billy Fish. While Henry may have had to justify himself to his men and explain to them why they must die, the adventurers of The Man Who Would Be King focus solely on the prize: land, power, and riches, trapped in a sort of mania, seemingly forgetting concerns of death and human suffering altogether.
The narrative of British exceptionalism through conquest collapses, however, in World War I. Like Dravot and Carnehan, those in charge of the war effort seemed to forget the human cost of their war. The initial euphoria in British letters that saw the war as a way to restore lost honor, such as the poems of Robert Brooke, soon gave way to an understanding of the grim reality. Poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon documented the nightmare world of the trenches, fighting for the same ground that Henry V fought for, but without the hope of any sort of expiation or resolution at the end. The closest thing the poems have to heroes are the common soldiers in the trenches, fighting for nothing except survival from moment to moment. The poets do not beg for an end to the war, only an explanation, some reason to justify the death all around them, some sliver of honor to redeem the brutality. There is a sense that the young men have been lied to, both about this war and the prospect of honor through combat generally. By the time the war is over, the trenches are filled with English dead, including some of the very people, such as Wilfred Owen, who chronicled life in them, but the eventual fruits of victory are not even enough to be squandered.
The English tradition of valor and conquest, then, falls from its central position during the mid-twentieth century, the dreams of Kipling giving way to the dirty, corrupt world described by Orwell. In post-Great War Burma, everything seems to be falling into a sort of decay, the pointlessness of the whole imperial enterprise seemingly in the mind of everyone, native and conqueror alike. In response to this, the masters become idiotic and brutal and their subjects become spiteful, a poverty of spirit affecting everyone and everything trapped in the dying system. As the empire fades, then, a new problem arises, one that continues to be answered: what now for England? And what new set of values must replace the old?