Classic English A Magnificent Lie

A magnificent lie

Before a battle in France, an old soldier gives a young king some advice. The men are tired, hungry and badly outnumbered. Tomorrow many of them will die. To make them fight, the old soldier says, a king can give them one of two things. The men deserve his confidence: the truth about why they are fighting. If he cannot give them that, he must at least tell them “a magnificent lie.”

The king gives a magnificent speech. It works. And the old soldier smiles.

Poets have written that speech again and again: in Shakespeare’s England, in the Serbian epic songs of Kosovo, to fill the trenches of 1914, and to start a rebellion in Ireland. This lesson follows the speech, and asks each time what reason, if any, stood behind it.

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers”
Shakespeare, Henry V (1599), Act 4, Scene 3

The lesson in five parts

  1. The king’s speechFalstaff’s advice and Henry’s choice in the film The King, then three pieces of Shakespeare’s St Crispin’s Day speech.
  2. The recruiters, 1914–1915Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and Jessie Pope’s “Who’s for the Game?”: the same speech, printed in newspapers.
  3. The mother and the queenYeats and Lady Gregory’s Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902) and Patrick Pearse’s “The Mother” (1916). What if the cause is real?
  4. The dead answer backAbel Gance’s film J’accuse (1919) and Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est.”
  5. The Kosovo songTsar Lazar’s choice between an earthly and a heavenly kingdom, from the Serbian epic, and a poet who sang it: Radovan Karadžić. Then your own answer to the big question.

The question

A reason answers the questions why? and for what? It can be checked. A speech answers a different question: how should I feel? It gives you glory, brotherhood, love of home, fear of shame. Good leaders often give both. But a speech can work without any reason at all, and a person who is ready to die rarely stops to ask which one he was given.

In every part of this lesson, sort what you read into those two boxes. At the end you will answer the hardest question: when men die because of a beautiful speech, how much of the blame belongs to the poet who wrote it?