penning the following piece (although half of it concerns pacifist political correctness regarding the House of Windsor):
It has been tempting this past week to recall the Battle of Agincourt
between the French and English armies, not because of any looming
anniversary — the 600th is not due until 2015 — but because some things
never seem to change.
Once more, England has a royal warrior called Harry, although he is a
prince of the realm and a helicopter pilot, not the equestrian king
immortalized by Shakespeare in “Henry V.”
And, as Prime Minister
David Cameron’s effort to redefine his land’s relationship with the
European Union
seemed to show, the nation still harbors old ambitions to mold events
in the vast Continent separated from it by a narrow band of sometimes
fog-bound water and by large dollops of mutual incomprehension.
“In all history,” the columnist Simon Jenkins observed in The Guardian, “the conundrum of
Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe has never been resolved.”
But one function of that tangled past is to hold up what the historian
Barbara W. Tuchman called a distant mirror to the present, and so it was
last week when Prince Harry returned from a tour of duty in
Afghanistan.
Almost immediately, he was ensnared by a public dispute that a medieval monarch would have found quite baffling.
When Prince Harry acknowledged in interviews that he had opened fire on
the Taliban insurgents — what else would the gunner of an Apache attack
helicopter in Afghanistan be expected to do? — he inspired a media
frenzy that seemed to reflect a degree of doubt about whether the nation
wanted its royal warrior to be quite so warlike, or, at least, to talk
about the realities of war in a way that other royals on military duty,
like his brother, uncle, father and grandfather, have not.
“We fire when we have to, take a life to save a life,” Prince Harry
said, stirring Taliban ire by ascribing his aptitude as a gunner to his
prowess as a player of video games.
As the younger son of Diana, Princess of Wales, who had her own fraught
relationship with the paparazzi and the press, the 28-year-old prince
should perhaps have understood that discretion is sometimes the better
part of valor.
“Never in her 86 years has the queen been a fraction as indiscreet as
Prince Harry was in his interview,” the author Harry Mount wrote in The
Daily Telegraph.
“Royal service is not a pick-and-mix game. You can’t just pull out the
plums — the money, the girls, the servants, the palaces, the private
jets.” The prince, he said, would do well “to button his lip.”
The furor raised the same questions of privacy and privilege as have
clung to Harry through a catalog of missteps and nurtured his ever
greater acrimony toward the media.
The episodes include being photographed naked playing strip snooker in a
Las Vegas hotel room last year — “probably a classic example of me
probably being too much army, not enough prince,” he said in his
post-Afghanistan musings on the struggle to compartmentalize life
between private, military and public moments — in other words, between
the normal and the extraordinary.
War in Afghanistan, Harry lamented, is “as normal as it’s going to get.”
Arguably, though, the response to his remarks showed a broader ambiguity
in a post-imperial Britain wrestling with diminished status on the
global stage that it cannot quite accept or seem to reverse.
Before an audience in London, Mr. Cameron projected his land as doughty
and resilient. “We have the character of an island nation — independent,
forthright, passionate in defense of our sovereignty,” he said as he
promised a referendum within five years on membership in the European
Union if he is re-elected in 2015.
(The qualities resembled those listed by President
Charles de Gaulle
of France in vetoing Britain’s entry into the forerunner of the
European Union 50 years ago this month, concluding that by its very
nature Britain differed “profoundly” from the Continental Europeans.) A
day later, speaking to business leaders in Davos, Mr. Cameron expanded
the definition. “We are a global nation, with global interests and
global reach.”
That seemed to echo his calls for a robust response to a newly perceived
threat in what he has called the “ungoverned space” of North Africa
after the Algerian hostage crisis. But it also came as Britain announced
new military cuts.
“It looks a little odd to be thinking about a developing situation in a
very difficult part of the world when you’re making your defense
capability smaller,” said Gen. Richard Dannatt, the former head of the
British Army.
Compared with such uncertainties, the English triumph at Agincourt was a
model of decisiveness, but it was not the only marker.
In the Bordeaux-based Sud-Ouest newspaper, the columnist Bruno Dive
preferred to cite the Battle of Fontenoy in 1745 as an example of Gallic
guile trumping British maneuvers. “Every day that passes,” he went on
to say, “shows that General de Gaulle was right” in 1963 to block
British ambitions at Calais.
Plus ça change....
