shakespeare and the great war keeps the musketry under control (IP,172). As the line wavers elsewhere and looks
to fall back in disarray, Captain Cadwaladr ‘restores|the Excellent Disciplines of
the Wars’ (IP, 181). ‘The Queen of the Woods’, at the poem’s close, having given
berries and flowers to all the dead, carries to Lewis, killed almost before the attack
had begun, a ‘rowan sprig’, and whispers something over his dead body; what it
is cannot be heard, ‘because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars’ (IP,
186). The Queen of the Woods’s caution recalls that of the Lance-Corporal when
he sang in low voice; Aneirin Lewis, like all the soldiers we see, lives and dies within
the myriad disciplines of the wars, for war is disciplines—the ordering of the lives
and bodies of men in order to achieve the production and regulation of force. To
example war, as Jones conceives that task, is to example its disciplines, for it is those
disciplines, so shockingly new to volunteer and conscript armies, which gave the
war its parenthetical status, as an area or time of life operating under a different
grammar.
Yet ‘the Disciplines of the Wars’ are not new in themselves, either in practice or
description. With his endnote 24, quoted above, Jones takes care to ensure that his
readers recognize the Shakespearean nature of the phrase on its first occurrence.
Captain Fluellen, a Welshman, uses it some six times in Act 3 Scene 2 ofHenry
Vas he questions the competence of the command of Captain Macmorris, an
Irishman. To Fluellen the phrase opens up long perspectives of time, placing the
wars in France in a continuum of wars and war writing. Such a view is in no way
idiosyncraticper se, though perhaps only Fluellen would enjoy the chance to debate
the precise nature of the disciplines in the middle of an attack on a French town.
Niccolo Machiavelli, in his` Art of War, had discussed how Roman techniques and
strategies might best be adapted to the modern realities of European warfare in the
sixteenth century. In doing so, he demonstrated a strategic sophistication which
Carl von Clausewitz would later admire.^2
The phrase also establishes more intimate relationships withHenry V.Lewis’s
singing low is glossed by Fluellen’s later warning to Gower not to speak loudly, lest
the noise give aid to the enemy.^3 The soldiers who discuss strategy, ‘perfect in the
great commanders’ names’ (IP, 78) and mocking each other’s claims to military
learning, seem themselves to be modern-day versions of Fluellen and Macmorris.
Lewis, in fact, almost seems to ventriloquize Fluellen when, in Alice’sestaminet,
he lectures a man from Rotherhithe who distrusts the French: ‘I tell you your
contentions is without reason, it is indeed a normality in the vicissitudes of the
blutty wars—moreover his Intelligences is admirable, the most notorious in all
the world’ (IP, 113). Captain Cadwaladr’s restoration of the disciplines of the
wars replays the scene inHenry Vwhere Fluellen arrives to drive the malingering
(^2) Niccolo Machiavelli,` Art of War, trans. Christopher Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2003). Lynch mentions Clausewitz’s appreciation of Machiavelli in the introduction, p. xxvi. 3
Shakespeare,Henry V,iv.i. 64–82.