Well, whatever else you may say about the UK, you cannot say they haven’t given it their all:
Britain’s overstretched Armed Forces are to send as many as 1,000 troops to the Balkans in a move that will see the military’s last remaining reserve unit deployed on operations.
The imminent departure of the 1st Bn Welsh Guards to Kosovo has been ordered in response to fears that the newly formed independent state could slide into “ethnic cleansing”. But last night MPs and former military chiefs described the move as “irresponsible” and “demented”, accusing the Ministry of Defence of being “bankrupt”.
Not for the first time:
O that we now had here
But one ten thousand of those men in England
That do no work to-day!
— Westmoreland, from The Life of King Henry the Fifth, Act IV, scene III, Wm. Shakespeare
Which is followed, of course, by Henry’s most famous smackdown of Westmoreland’s comments:
—————————–
What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin: 24
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more. 28
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires: 32
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour 36
As one man more, methinks, would share from me,
For the best hope I have. O! do not wish one more:
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight, 40
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us. 44
This day is call’d the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian. 48
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say, ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, 52
And say, ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names, 56
Familiar in his mouth as household words,
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d. 60
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remembered; 64
We few, we happy few, we band of brother;
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: 68
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. 72
———————————
The English seem to have lost so very much, and so quickly, these past few decades. More’s the pity, eh?
Damn! Shakespeare left and right. I think I may cry.
AW1Tim;
Been reading “Quartered Safe Out Here” by George Mac Donald Fraser. He would agree that the English have lost so very much. He died just a couple of weeks ago, – maybe a month. Near the end he wondered what they had all fought for as everything he loved and cared about his country was now gone. We are not that far behind them. What-the-hell.
AWTim … I remember, in my freshman year at college, seeing Henry the Fifth, with Laurence Olivier. The movie had just come out. When I read those words I can remember how Olivier sounded. At the end of the speech, [I think it was this one] his horse reared up like some kind of glorious punctuation to those glorious words. It does make me weep, that so much splendor is now contaminated, perhaps forever, by compromise with savages.
Marianne
I am torn between Henry V, or the two parts of Henry IV. I dearly love them both. I was fortunate to work for several years with the American rennaissance Theater, and had the title role in Henry IV, parts I&II, and then played both the Archibishop of Canterbury, as well as the French King in Henry V. Talk about schizophrenia….. That first sceme with the Archbishop has a HUGE pedantic speech that was a bugger to memorise, but fun to perform if you catch the little puns and funny bits it contains. Ah well.
My wife can’t understand how one can memorise so many lines, but to me, the fun part is being able to pull op quotes at parties and clubs. makes folks thinik you are much better educated then you really are
Of all the film, video and theater I have ever done, those years doing Shakespeare were the best of them all. One can never go wrong reading and learning them, as there are lessons on so many things contained in those ancient phrases.
My favorite Olivier anecdote was one he often told. He was performing onstage his role in Henry V, and one night, all through the play, he could hear someone reading along with him, and some other parts as well. This was quite irritating and un-nerving to him. Finally, he could stand it no longer, and took a glance from behind the curtai, and there, in the front row center, sat Churchill, with a loose-leaf copy of the script in his lap, merrily reading along
Respects,
Yes, it is a real shame that the English who sowed the Anglosphere and fought so gallently against Nazi Germany have sunk so low. It is unfortunate that they also hate the US so deeply, for what we are and what they are no longer. And that was long before the current administration.
As for Sir Larrry—my wife and I were on vacation in France in the mid-1980s and had the unhappy experience of having to hear him loudly dissing the US at length at the next table to a young lady whose hairdoo was a Mohawk that was dyed purple. I could never enjoy one of his old movies again after that experience.
I forgot to add that we should offer all the Brit military personnel and their families immediate entrance into the US as full citizens. They are the last survivors of the old England and would find a more supportive populace here.
One of the wishes of UBL was to draw America and the West into a prolonged war to slowly drain our resources and will. Now Britain, where will was already low (as evidenced by such miniscule resources), has reached the point where it is drained by fighting the jihad in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Balkans, and yet is simultaneously tapped by the tremendous fifth column inside its own borders (more than 40,000 visas to Pakistan every year).
Edward suggests offering Tommy immediate entrance to US citizenship. How long, then, till we are the island fortress?
We have been the island fortress since WWII. All of Western Europe has sheltered under our protection to such an extent that they can no longer protect themselves nor wish to make the effort to do so. NATO exists only because the US provides the teeth. Western European democracies have instead withdrawn into a bureaucratic nanny state of which the EU is the logical dead end point. I fear that Mark Steyn has drawn a very clear picture of the future in “America Alone”.
Edward pointed out:
‘All of Western Europe has sheltered under our protection to such an extent that they can no longer protect themselves nor wish to make the effort to do so.’
It was at The Belmont Club (I think) that I read the point that our well-meaning and arguable necessary protection has thus lead to their weakness and downfall. That sure seems logical.
There are indications of similar dynamics in Korea and Japan, I think. Free societies have got to face up to the duty of defending themselves. That’s difficult to do, if the schools and colleges are monolithic in their condemnation of violence (even the noble kind).
This may seem off-topic, but I think we’re on the right track if we place more value in clarity than in unity.
Regards, P-dub.
Victor Davis Hanson wrote a whole book on that theme as well.
Now apply it to European schoolchildren of the past generation, and American schoolchildren of the current generation. They are never left on their own to sort out any of their problems, there is always a teacher, a zero-tolerance policy, an after-school program, a suburban mom as chauffeur, organized sports–whatever, the message is always the same, that some form of government as parent will always be there to solve your problems for you.
Don’t bode well, it don’t.
Britain may not be what it was, but the Welsh Guards ARE on their way to Kosovo.
Let’s not write off the Brits too quickly.
Most of our so-called allies are not sending anybody, because they can’t send anybody, because they don’t have anybody to send.
Their long tradition is to be very guarded about spending money on defense, and to rely on a small core of professionals to do the dirty work overseas.
They ramped up with big manpower commitments during the world wars, but that was extremely unusual.
During the height of their power Kipling tells us that “Tommy” was not welcome in polite company. And there were not a lot of Tommies to go around. And there was some complaining about it, but generally, Tommy got done what needed to be done, on a shoestring most of the time.
Again, the past the prelude to the present. We are very much back in the world of Queen Victoria and the mid- to late-19th Century. Even the battlefields are the same, to some degree. If we could bring back from the grave the soldiers of Welsh Guards from 150 years ago and tell them what is going on now, once they got over the great new weapons we’ve got, there would be no surprise that there is fighting going on in Waziristan. The only surprise would be that the Americans are involved, instead of the British.
I will also predict that the Welsh Guards will be sufficient for whatever needs to be done in Kosovo.