Mojo, The Bard, & Me

 

 

If I begin the battery once again,

I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur

Till in her ashes she lie buried.

 

-Henry

King Henry the Fifth                      Act III, Scene iii, Line 8

 

King Henry is outside the gates of the French town of Harfleur, talking to the governor of the town (you’d think it would be a mayor, but what do I know). He is telling him that if he surrenders his town, the English will show mercy. He is also telling him that if he makes Henry take the town by force, Henry will not attempt to hold back his men from pillaging. Henry goes into significant detail as to what that pillaging will entail.  

         The gates of mercy shall be all shut up;

        And the flesht soldier, -rough and hard of heart,-

        In liberty of bloody hand shall range

        With conscience wide as hell; mowing like grass

        Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.

 

He goes on, array’d in flames…waste and desolation…heads dasht to walls…infants spitted on spikes for thirty-four more lines, ending of course with a rhyming couplet. By the end of his speech I’m shouting at the governor Surrender the town! Surrender the town! Thankfully, he does. I hope the French were good to their word!

So what do we have here, and how could it possibly be relevant. Well, let me tell you. The relevance is war, and the ravages of war. I think it's safe to say that's a takeaway from today's line. On a similar note, owing to the news of Russians fleeing Putin's new draft (presumably to escape being involved in the ravages of war), I thought it would be interesting to do a little research on the fellow who's name I bear, who supposedly fled Lithuania in the late 1800's, similar to today's Russians, to escape being conscripted into the Russian army (and avoid being involved in the ravages of war). The first thing I needed was a date as to when John Blagys did this fleeing. Luckily my sister has spent the time working on this stuff and I was able to do a screen print from an Ancestry.com page of a 1910 census page. There he is, at the top of the page, and if you zoom in you will see that column 15 is Year of Immigration to the United States. John put in 1891. Now I have to do a little history research and see if the family story makes sense based on what was going on in Lithuania and Russia in that year. 

Wish me luck.