When one thinks of war memorials erected in honour of those who gave their lives in the Great War it is salutary sometimes to recall a different perspective on the machinery of conflict. The following two passages are separated by over three hundred years but what attitude do they share in common?
Falstaff is preparing to save himself just before the Battle of Shrewsbury, 1403. The passage comes from Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part I, 1598 and the Prince of Wales tells Falstaff that he owes God a death (i.e. his own!). Falstaff replies:
’Tis not due yet. I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, ’tis no matter; honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honour set to a leg? No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honour? A word. What is in that word ‘honour’? What is that ‘honour’? Air. A trim reckoning. Who hath it? He that died o’Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ’Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon. And so ends my catechism.
(Act V, scene 1)
The second passage comes from the First World War novel The Good Soldier Švejk by the Czech novelist Jaroslav Hašek. Švejk is in the train on the way to the Eastern Front:
Before the arrival of the passenger train the third-class restaurant filled up with soldiers and civilians. They were predominantly soldiers of various regiments and formations and the most diverse nationalities whom the whirlwinds of war had swept into the Tabor hospitals. They were now going back to the front to get new wounds, mutilations and pains and to earn the reward of a simple wooden cross over their graves. Years after on the mournful plains of East Galicia a faded Austrian soldier’s cap with a rusty Imperial badge would flutter over it in wind and rain. From time to time a miserable old carrion crow would perch on it, recalling fat feasts of bygone days when there used to be spread for him an unending table of human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under the cap on which he perched there lay the daintiest morsels of all—human eyes.
(Penguin edition translated by Cecil Parrott 1973, page 230)
Ian Brinton, October 22 2014