The Conclusion returns to the need for historians to recognize the topic of cowardice in combat in order to gain a fuller understanding of war. Recovering the complicated histories of the Fire Zouaves and the 2nd Texas further helps to disassemble the glorification of war-making.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Civil war soldiers worried a lot about cowardice in combat, something few historians have been willing to admit. The Introduction explains its importance and sets up how this book will explore the topic by focusing on two civil war regiments accused of cowardice and the lasting effects such allegations had on them. It also discusses what historian Drew Faust calls “war stories” and how constructed celebratory tales of martial glory often hide war’s chaos and horrors.

Contrary to conventional opinion, Hamlet is a major race play in which a white prince dressed in black has a self-serving, improvisational relationship to blackness as a violent, criminal identity. Called upon to avenge his father’s murder, Hamlet designates the fratricidal Claudius a “Moore,” a racial slur for a type that had only recently gained popularity on the stage. Simultaneously, the imperative of the revenge genre requires retributive action, leading the revenger to replicate the original perpetrator’s murderous violence: Hamlet must become a “Moore” like Claudius. Cowardice, Hamlet explains, is the product of contemplation and manifests in bodily paleness, and his affiliation with a black Pyrrhus, drawn from the repertory of the traveling players, compensates for his self-ascribed white cowardice so that blackness in action becomes the revenger’s motivating passion. The theater-aficionado prince is knowledgeable about the traveling company’s repertory of black drama and uses a black Lucianus in the staging of The Murder of Gonzago to truly capture the conscience of the Moor-like king Claudius.

This chapter examines how the authors of the Mahābhārata, India’s great epic, seek strategically to edify real human warriors and kings through a set of martial tropes and expectations. Specifically, nine chapters of the epic’s twelfth book, the Śānti Parvan (MBh.12.96–104), present in religious and ritual terminology a clear set of ideals, which kings can use to convince warriors that fighting and dying in battle is the right thing to do. For example, the paradigmatic model for the courageous behaviour of human warriors is the śūra (‘hero, champion’). In contrast to his heroic exploits, acting like a ‘coward’ (bhīru) is the single most abhorrent thing a warrior could do in social and cosmological terms. What is more, warfare is reconceived in ritual terms and thus dying in battle is elevated to an act of ritual sacrifice which will secure the fallen warrior everlasting heaven with its promise of sexually eager nymphs. Consequently, these chapters provide kings with a coherent masculine ideology to ensure the loyalty of troops, whose willing death in battle will secure martial victory and ultimately protect the kingdom.