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Close observers of the _Spare_ saga will have observed Prince Harry’s claim to have terminated twenty-five Taliban fighters during his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Furthermore, his

controversial justification that he saw his victims as hostile chess pieces to be swept from the board, rather than genuine human beings. The reaction to the Princely assertion has not been

overwhelmingly favourable. Security spooks have pointed out the potential of this provocation for attracting Talibanic reprisals, not only against Harry himself, but also against the entire

royal family. Military types have huffed that this is not the sort of thing that real soldiers boast about, killing with humility being far more the order of the day. The reaction of the

Taliban itself has, surprisingly, been somewhat restrained, emphasising that they too are human beings with feelings and families. Hurt, rather than vengeful, seems to be their message. It

reminds me of a song from Gilbert and Sullivan: _When a felon’s not engaged in his employment_ _ _ _Or maturing his felonious little plans ,_ _ _ _His capacity for innocent enjoyment_ _ _

_Is just as great as any honest man’s._ _When the enterprising burglar’s not a’burgling_ _ _ _When the cut throat isn’t occupied in crime_ _ _ _He loves to hear the little brook a’gurgling_

_ _ _And listen to the merry village chime._ _ _ _When the coster’s finished jumping on his mother_ _ _ _He loves to lie a’basking in the sun_ _ _ _Ah, take one consideration with another_ _

_ _A policeman’s lot is not a happy one._ (“Burglar’s song”, _The Pirates of Penzance_) The implication, of course, being that the Taliban are a sweetly benign group of inter-faith

activists who — after a hard day’s work flogging apostates, closing down female educational institutions, firing all women from any professional posts and issuing the regulation number of

bloodcurdling fatwas — enjoy nothing more than sitting down with their families for a meal of roast camel flesh garnished with sautéed sheep’s eyes, followed by the singing of some

appropriately peaceful Suras. No, the real problem with Harry’s claim is his arithmetic. In chess, as we know it, there simply aren’t twenty-five enemy units to terminate, each army being

composed of 16 pieces. You can only get to 25 by scoring a few own-goals, which I am sure is discouraged by the British army, and illegal in the royal game. Here is a modest reminder that in

chess, each side has _sixteen_ units: eight pawns, two rooks, two knights, two bishops, one king and one queen. The elephant, apart from being the world’s largest land-dwelling mammal), is

also a chess piece. In the course of its long history it has undergone an interesting transformation from pachyderm to prelate. Alexander the Great and his troops encountered Indian war

elephants on their campaigns, and the Greeks, seeing elephants for the first time, and observing their key role, in both oriental warfare and agriculture, named them “aleph-hind”, the

“Indian ox”. (The Spanish Conquistadores of the 16th century committed a similar error with llamas, calling them “native sheep”.) The elephant, in due course, appeared as a unit on the

primitive Indian chessboard, the symbol of warfare in miniature. Only in Russia and in some Slav countries now, does the word “elephant” (“slon”) persist in chess. Elsewhere, as chess

progressed westward it was the “l” and “f” sounds of “aleph-hind” which survived. One sees traces of this in the Arabic term, _fil; _in the Middle English, _aufin;__ _in the Spanish, _alfil;

 _in the Italian, _alfiere; _in the German, _lä__ufer;_ Dutch, _loper;__ _the Serbo-Croatian, _lovac;_ and perhaps even in the French, _le fou._ It is evident that the various incarnations

of the bishop in the European culture have laid greater stress on preserving the ancient and original sound than the meaning. The Dutch and Germans see this diagonal piece as a “runner”; the

Yugoslavs as a “hunter”; the French as a “jester”; while the Spanish and Italian words, closest of all to the “aleph-hind”, mean only the chess piece and nothing more. The English bishop is

furthest, indeed, quite remote from its elephantine original. Nevertheless, when one construes a medieval court and its most powerful figures as the respective sides of a chessboard battle,

then inclusion of the clergy makes perfect sense. More so, indeed, than jesters, runners, hunters and so on. English also has an exception in its word “rook”, where most European languages

go for “tower” or “castle” (tour, Turm, torre). Doubtless, a key derivation here is from the alternative Italian word for tower, “rocco”. In other European languages one sees the roots of

“rook” in the word for castling (roque, arrocco, enroque). Returning to Harry’s infelicitous metaphor, in a piece for _TheMailOnline,__ _Andrew Neil opines, “_It’s not just that there’s

something unsavoury about being proud of kills made from the world’s most advanced and sophisticated attack helicopter against an enemy, however barbaric, armed largely with Soviet-era AK47

rifles. It’s the way he compounded this folly, as only Harry could, by_ _saying he regarded the targets as pieces on a chessboard._ _All of that would be bad enough. But he’s also breached

the_ _ _ _long-standing convention among British military veterans of all ranks that they don’t talk much about the wars they waged, and never about ‘_ _kills_ _’._ _”_ Perhaps Harry was

thinking of the Great chess of the Uzbek world conqueror, Tamburlaine, or the Grant chess of the Iberian monarch Alfonso el Sabio (the Wise). In both of these variants there is a

superabundance of imaginative extra pieces to reach the desired tally of twenty five. Far more likely, though, is it that we are once again entering the topsy-turvy universe of Gilbert and

Sullivan, specifically the song by Don Alhambra, the Grand Inquisitor of Barataria. If Harry returns for the coronation of King Charles III (my old landing mate from Trinity College, 

Cambridge), he is liable to find, with again, Gilbert and Sullivan providing an apt background: _“_ _Prime Ministers and such as they,_ _ _ _Grew like asparagus in May,_ _ _ _And Dukes were

three a penny.And Party Leaders you might meet in _ _ _ _twos and threes in every street_ _ _ _Maintaining, with no little heat,Their various opinions._ _”  _ (Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss,

Sunak, Corbyn, Starmer, Miliband, Davey, Lucas, Sturgeon, Drakeford….to name but a few). (‘There lived a King’, _The Gondoliers_) Of course, the punchline for Harry and his insatiable 

craving for celebrity status and wealth comes with Don Alhambra’s conclusion: _“__When every__ __one is somebodee, then no__ one__’__s anybody!__” _ Our game of the week features a famous

victory from the tournament at St Petersburg in 1896 by a real chessplaying Harry against the reigning World Champion of the day: Pillsbury vs. Lasker. _Raymond Keene_ _’_ _s latest book _

_“_ _Fifty Shades of Ray: Chess in the year of the Coronavirus_ _”_ _, containing some of his best pieces from TheArticle, is now available from_ _ _ _Blackwell_ _’_ _s_ _. _ _His 206th

book, Chess in the Year of the King, with a foreword_ _ _ _by The Article contributor Patrick Heren, and written in collaboration with former Reuters chess correspondent, Adam Black, is in

preparation._ _ _ _It will be published_ _ _ _later this_ _ _ _year._ _ _ A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an

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