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fighting words: A wartime lexicon.

Prince ValiantBritain's Prince Harry should've stayed in Afghanistan.

By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 1:18 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

It might still be mentioned, though, as a word of encouragement, that young Harry himself said that he was "disappointed" in being hauled back so quickly, while members of his regiment told reporters that they were "gutted" to see him go. But silence there in the ranks! Do you want to become a bullet magnet? (Of course, if you don't, you do always have the even more prudent option of not volunteering in the first place.) If this capitulation had involved his older brother, Prince William, the headline word might have been abdication.

Perhaps it's wrong or trite for me to play for a little on the overlap between Prince Harry and Prince Hal/King Harry, England's most celebrated martial monarch, but there's more to it than just the banal coincidence of name. Until very recently, if you saw Harry's name in a headline, it was because he'd been found facedown in yet another nightclub. His decision to transcend all that and to submit himself to the training and put on the uniform was, as the earlier Harry puts it so bluntly to Falstaff at the close of Henry IV, Part II, proof positive "that I have turned away my former self" and that his former riotous companions should "[p]resume not that I am the thing I was." Having taken a fresh resolution and exchanged frivolity for the sterner forms of ardor, "Harry the King" is most often credited with the speech that Shakespeare awards him on the eve of Agincourt. Here, and speaking to those "which hath no stomach to this fight," he warmly urges all faint-hearts to quit at once because "[w]e would not die in that man's company/ That fears his fellowship to die with us." He famously ends by speaking of the "few" and "the band of brothers." This much-overdone scene of bombast is nothing, I find, to the understated words in which Henry has already replied to Montjoy, arrogant herald of the French monarch, in Act III, Scene VI:

The sum of all our answer is but this:
We would not seek a battle as we are;
Nor, as we are, we say, we will not shun it.

I am not a monarchist (and I have a soft spot for Falstaff and no liking for imperial expeditions in search of enlarged Plantagenet kingdoms), but Shakespearean virtues can also be republican and democratic ones in the face of theocracy and tyranny. Anyway, they make for much better reading than the media-conscious calculations of British officials and politicians who seem determined to cry before they have even been hurt.

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Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair.
Photograph of Prince Harry by John Stillwell/AFP/Getty Images.
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