We know for sure that we don’t need the war. Not a Cold War, not a hot war. Not a hybrid one. But if we’ll be attacked by the [enemy] troops, if they try to take our country away from us, our freedom, our lives, the lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. Not attack, but defend ourselves. And when you will be attacking us, you will see our faces, not our backs, but our faces.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, spoke these words to both the Ukrainian and Russian people on February 24, just hours before Russia’s Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. When, a couple of days later, the United States offered to evacuate Zelenskyy, his now-famous response was:
The fight is here. I need ammunition, not a ride. … I am here. We are not putting down arms. We will be defending our country, because our weapon is truth, and our truth is that this is our land, our country, our children, and we will defend all this. That is it. That’s all I wanted to tell you. Glory to Ukraine.
These courageous words affected me, like so many others around the world, in two ways: I was deeply moved by his bravery, and I was also slugged with dread for Ukraine and the world. Searching for some way to understand the seemingly inevitable tragedy ahead, and groping for hope, I recalled scenes in three of Shakespeare’s plays.
The first scene was King Henry’s celebrated St. Crispin’s Day speech in Act 4, Scene 3 of Henry V, which enacts events during the Hundred Years’ War. The scene portrays the moment when the forces of one country are to be attacked by those of another. We witness a brave leader and his people readying to fight to the death for freedom, country, and family. The drama suggests the inspiring possibility that a people might be united by a wise and noble leader and fight valiantly in defense of their freedom.
Here, just prior to the Battle of Agincourt, in which the English will be outnumbered five-to-one by the French, Henry addresses his troops, urging them to fight for their country and for glory—or die. He assures them that he is no different from any ordinary man; he will remain at their side and refuse ransom should he be captured. He specifically addresses, with rousing defiance and valor, the high chance that his troops could be defeated by an enemy that so outnumbers them. He bids them to wish not for “one man more,” but rather to “covet honor,” and look to the day when they are old men and may recall the feats they have accomplished as “a band of brothers.”
KING HENRY V
… 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.
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:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive …
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
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.
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 …
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 remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
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:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
The second scene, from Macbeth, addresses the great human question of how a person caught in the deep middle of a war can possibly persevere in battle once blasted by the grief that inevitably arrives in a war for one’s homeland. Malcolm is the oldest son of Duncan, the good Scottish king whom the tyrant Macbeth has slaughtered in his mad lust for power and domination. Macduff is a Scottish noble whose wife and children have just been murdered and castle destroyed by Macbeth’s men. Ross is a Scottish noble just arrived from the battlefront. In Act 4, Scene 3, Macduff and Malcolm greet him, eager for his report.
ROSS
… I have words
That would be howl’d out in the desert air,
Where hearing should not latch them.MACDUFF
What concern they?
The general cause? or is it a fee-grief
Due to some single breast?ROSS
No mind that’s honest
But in it shares some woe; though the main part
Pertains to you alone.MACDUFF
If it be mine,
Keep it not from me, quickly let me have it.ROSS
Let not your ears despise my tongue for ever,
Which shall possess them with the heaviest sound
That ever yet they heard.MACDUFF
Hum! I guess at it.ROSS
Your castle is surprised; your wife and babes
Savagely slaughter’d: to relate the manner,
Were, on the quarry of these murder’d deer,
To add the death of you.MALCOLM
Merciful heaven!
What, man! ne’er pull your hat upon your brows;
Give sorrow words: the grief that does not speak
Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.MACDUFF
My children too?ROSS
Wife, children, servants, all
That could be found.MACDUFF
And I must be from thence!
My wife kill’d too?ROSS
I have said.MALCOLM
Be comforted:
Let’s make us medicines of our great revenge,
To cure this deadly grief.MACDUFF
He has no children. All my pretty ones?
Did you say all? O hell-kite! All?
What, all my pretty chickens and their dam
At one fell swoop?MALCOLM
Dispute it like a man.MACDUFF
I shall do so;
But I must also feel it as a man:
… Did heaven look on,
And would not take their part? …MALCOLM
Be this the whetstone of your sword: let grief
Convert to anger; blunt not the heart, enrage it.MACDUFF
O, I could play the woman with mine eyes
And braggart with my tongue! But, gentle heavens,
Cut short all intermission; front to front
Bring thou this fiend of Scotland and myself;
Within my sword’s length set him; if he ‘scape,
Heaven forgive him too!
The third scene that the news from Ukraine brought to mind, from Coriolanus, offers a welcome sprig of hope, despite the odds and the dismaying nightly news. It pictures a way to reconcile the impossible, tangled interests of two opposing, unequal sides, offering a scenario in which a force with greater numbers and its disadvantaged opposite might, with sacrifices on both sides, forge a peace together. It presents a method for fashioning such a peace, and also characterizes the frame of mind necessary for such a humane and courageous solution to human conflict.
The war here is for the rule of Rome.
In Act 5, Scene 3, Volumnia, mother of the warrior Coriolanus, puts forth a peace proposal to her son. Coriolanus, in a fit of prideful rage, has turned enemy to his own people and is now set, with Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, to decimate his once-beloved city as well as his beloved mother, wife, and son. Volumnia desperately begs him to recover his reason and forge a pact—a pact requiring compromise and nobility of spirit on the part of the more overwhelming military force and the one to be overwhelmed.
VOLUMNIA
… Whereto we are bound? alack, or we must lose
The country, our dear nurse, or else thy person,
Our comfort in the country. …
… for either thou
Must, as a foreign recreant, be led
With manacles thorough our streets, or else
triumphantly tread on thy country’s ruin,
And bear the palm for having bravely shed
Thy wife and children’s blood. For myself, son,
I purpose not to wait on fortune till
These wars determine: if I cannot persuade thee
Rather to show a noble grace to both parts
Than seek the end of one, thou shalt no sooner
March to assault thy country than to tread—
Trust to’t, thou shalt not—on thy mother’s womb,
That brought thee to this world.
When Coriolanus rises as if to reject her argument, Volumnia persists:
VOLUMNIA
Nay, go not from us thus.
If it were so that our request did tend
To save the Romans, thereby to destroy
The Volsces whom you serve, you might condemn us,
As poisonous of your honour: no; our suit
Is that you reconcile them: while the Volsces
May say ‘This mercy we have show’d;’ the Romans,
‘This we received;’ and each in either side
Give the all-hail to thee and cry ‘Be blest
For making up this peace!’
Peace is not achieved in the play, but Volumnia’s proposal holds out the ringing possibility that the two sides in a conflict might, sooner rather than later, give the “all-hail” to peace and choose noble grace and mercy over slaughter.
