William Shakespeare never fought in a war. And yet every soldier knows Shakespeare’s St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, the “band of brothers” speech, the one so many veterans cannot recite without emotion. The speech’s power comes not only from the playwright’s language but, perhaps even more, from the fact that the speaker, Henry, knows the cost, and the honor, that come from having seen slaughter up close.
It is from the Prologue in Henry V that Michael Korda takes the title of his new book, Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets: “O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! / Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, / Assume the port of Mars, and at his heels, / Leashed in like hounds, should famine, sword, and fire / Crouch for employment.”
A story of riveting heartbreaks coupled with deep literary critical knowledge, Muse of Fire looks back to a time that redefined the world and, along with it, English literature. In the work of a small set of British writers, and their shared experience of war, Korda sees echoes of our own time, and perhaps a cautionary tale.
Rupert Brooke, the first of Korda’s soldier-poets, enlisted in August 1914 but died of sepsis the following April, having never experienced the combat he so eloquently wrote about and romanticized. Described by Yeats as “the handsomest young man in England,” Brooke looked uncannily like Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. He had boyfriends in boarding school before studying classics at Cambridge, and he partied with the Bloomsbury group, skinny-dipping with Virginia Woolf. Brooke, whose obituary was written by Winston Churchill, is now considered as much a propagandist as a poet, having lured a generation of young British men with his verse to join in what would be neither glamorous nor poetic.
After Brooke, Korda tracks a tragic group of young officer-poets that includes Alan Seeger (beloved by John F. Kennedy, who, as a young senator in 1953, quoted Seeger’s “I have a rendezvous with Death / At some disputed barricade”), Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and, finally, Wilfred Owen. Though they belonged to the same generation, each experienced war in his own way and according to the larger political context of whether England was “winning.”
As Korda reflects on his subjects’ poetry and their relationships with one another, he takes us into the major battles, from Verdun to the Somme. As casualties mount, romance dims. The early optimism of 1915, the story foretold of a good and just war, evolves into something different, darker, a requiem rather than a sales pitch.
Though they belonged to the same generation, each experienced war in his own way and according to the larger political context of whether England was “winning.”
Korda writes that “if these young men no longer believed that the war had a purpose, or that the generals and the government knew what they were doing, still less cared about the lives of the soldiers, then perhaps the war was a mistake, a grotesque, self-inflicted human catastrophe on a scale so colossal that no purpose could possibly justify it, the modern-day equivalent of Cronus devouring his children”—Cronus, the god about whom Graves would write so powerfully in his The Greek Myths, decades later, after a second “great” war and another generation lost too young.
The critical words in the St. Crispin’s Day speech may, in fact, not be “band” or “brothers,” but rather “happy” and “few.” Shakespeare’s Henry, like Brooke, is speaking on the eve of the battle. On the eve there is hope, courage, commitment, honor. Only later will the warrior look back and, like Owen, think differently: “To children ardent for some desperate glory / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” (It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.)
Owen wrote those lines during his time at Craiglockhart War Hospital, in Edinburgh. He had been diagnosed with shell shock, once called “soldier’s heart,” today known as post-traumatic stress disorder. After leaving Craiglockhart, Owen returned to the war, unable to bear the shame of any other choice, and was later awarded the Military Cross. He was killed in action in November 1918, at age 25. One week later, the armistice was signed.
A former member of the Royal Air Force, Korda is a veteran of literal wars and revolutions, in addition to the coups and countercoups he witnessed up close at the top of the publishing world, as editor of Simon & Schuster. His close friends have included internationally renowned writers and U.S. presidents, and many movie stars too. His uncle Alexander, a celebrated film director, who married Merle Oberon and was knighted by George VI, served in MI6 during World War II alongside Ian Fleming, Graham Greene, and Noël Coward. In his downtime, Korda established himself as a beloved and best-selling writer, historian, biographer, and memoirist. He also foxhunts.
A former member of the Royal Air Force, Korda is a veteran of literal wars and revolutions, in addition to the coups and countercoups he witnessed up close at the top of the publishing world, as editor of Simon & Schuster.
I met Michael Korda for dinner at the Century club in Manhattan, with his wife, Maggie. Korda told me how, as a young man new to New York, he went to parties at the Sutton Place home of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, where the door locks had been removed to lower the risk that she would commit suicide. “I remember if you wanted to use the bathroom you had to keep one foot on the door to hold it closed,” he said.
Korda, who is 90, was born 15 years after World War I ended, with a peace treaty signed at Versailles, later described by the French general Ferdinand Foch as “Une armistice de vingt ans” (a 20-year armistice). That war was experienced, though, by yet another Korda, Michael’s father, Vincent. “When he was a child, my father was woken up and taken down to the railway station at Kecskemet in the middle of the night by his mother, to watch the imperial train go by, with the emperor sitting at a window reading. She hit my father hard on the head with her umbrella and said, ‘Now you will never forget that you saw the Emperor Franz Josef!’ Franz Josef was born in 1830. His father was alive when Napoleon was. Nothing is as far away as it seems when you count history by generations.”
Nothing seems far away for Korda. He chose war and poetry for his latest book to show how one conflict evolved from “an ostensibly noble cause into an apparently insoluble nightmare,” which feels alarmingly relevant today—take your pick of echoes. “Small errors in statecraft, as Henry Kissinger used to observe, can metastasize swiftly into vast tragedies of history,” Korda says. Muse of Fire is, in this way, a never-ending tale, urgently and equally a history and a mirror.
Lea Carpenter is the author of Eleven Days and Red, White, Blue. Her third novel, Ilium, is out now