Well, when you feel  a theme coming on …

Henry V, eh? Well, I’ve sometimes thought (not recently) that if someone had sent Tony Blair the following bit from Henry V the whole Iraq fiasco could have been avoided. In this scene Bates and Williams are debating in the trenches (well, you know) with the king (they don’t know it’s him) the merits or otherwise of the war. Henry describes his cause as “just and his quarrel honourable”:

“Williams: That’s more than we know.

Bates: Ay, or more than we should seek after. For we know enough if we know we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.

Williams: But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, ‘We died at such a place’ – some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it …”

So do I think that if someone had quoted Williams to Blair (“the king who led them to it”) he would have listened? No, I don’t. But I still wish someone had done it.