By Marian Werner

On a recent trip to Jemnice, a former royal fortified dower town, my Czech husband and I witnessed the oldest historical festival in Moravia, called Barchan. We had attended it 13 years earlier, so we knew that we would be stepping back in time to the days of medieval chivalry. Gallantry, graceful gestures and courtliness were the orders of the day.

Barchan is held the weekend following St. Vitus Day in Jemnice, a picturesque place whose wealth came from nearby gold and silver mines so it was important enough for King Wenceslas II to give it to his daughter, Eliška Přemyslovna. The later assassination of Wenceslas III left her and her sisters as the last of a line stretching back five centuries to Libuše and her plowman husband, Přemysl.

Eliška's marriage to Jan Lucemburský — John of Luxembourg as he is known in the English-speaking world — led to his acquiring title in 1310 to the Bohemian crown and its domains. The king was frequently away quelling rebellions or fighting foreign foes, and in 1312 the queen had to take refuge in Jemnice. News of her husband's victories was brought by four messengers, each rewarded by a different present as Eliška was short of ready money. The first was given some stout cloth of cotton and flax, called in English fustian, in Czech barchan.

For centuries, the citizens of Jemnice have celebrated these gracious responses of their much-loved queen. Her role in the pageant is always played by a local schoolgirl chosen not only for her beauty but also for her ability to ride sidesaddle. This year's Eliška was a statuesque 18-year-old brunette who looked every inch a queen, escorted around the historic market by the magnificently robed mayor, Milan Havlíček.

Being a monarchist, I derived a lot of pleasure from observing their walkabout, but surely the most steely-hearted republican felt some stirring of ancestral fealty when later, in a newly devised spectacle, King John himself arrived, riding past with a large retinue of nobles, knights in armor, wimpled ladies, drummers, trumpeters and tin-hatted foot soldiers carrying halberds (halapartny for anyone anxious to extend their Czech vocabulary).

The queen rode after him, attended by her page and ladies. While we and the rest of the crowd waited for the royal pair by the town's ancient gates, we felt the same sense of anticipation as we do in England when our own Queen Eliška, Elizabeth, is about to walk or drive past.

The real life story of John and Eliška was, sadly, not as romantic as the images of Barchan so gorgeously evoke. The king became unjustly suspicious of the queen and took away their children, locking their eldest son Wenceslas in a dark room for two months. He was then sent to Paris to further his education, and was called Charles because the French could not pronounce his Czech name. He went on to become the greatest king the Czechs ever had, Charles IV — later elected holy Roman emperor and celebrated in this year's exhibition at Prague Castle for which tickets were as much sought after as the gold once was in the mines of Jemnice.

Seemingly far from the realms of all the Barchan festivities was the commemoration in July across Europe and elsewhere of the 60th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme, fought with fearful losses. Yet despite the ghastly scenes of death and destruction surrounding him, a young captain in the Grenadier Guards could write to his mother, "The act of death in battle is noble and glorious."

His words haunted me when I remembered how John of Luxembourg had met his death, 660 years earlier, Aug. 26, 1346, fighting with the French against the English at the battle of Crécy, where the longbowmen and cannon in King Edward III's army proved unassailable.

Winston Churchill describes what happened: "In this slaughter fell King Philip's ally, the blind King of Bohemia, who bade his knights fasten their bridles to his in order that he might strike a blow with his own hand. Thus entwined, he charged forward in the press. Man and horse they fell, and the next day their bodies were found still linked." When told that his side was in danger of losing, John had said to his nobles, "God willing, no Bohemian king will ever flee from a battle" (Toho bohdá nebude, aby český král z boje utíkal). He had lost his sight when on a crusade, but had lost nothing of the valor for which he was renowned.

At this point, the jostling of past and present becomes even more poignant. The English monarch was commanding his army, but at the forefront of the battle was his son, Edward the Black Prince, then just 16 and by coincidence born on St. Vitus Day in 1330, the year that Queen Eliška died. Asked after victory had been won and the dead were being counted if he had found it good sport, the prince "said nothing, and was ashamed." The death of the Bohemian king was a matter of particular grief to many on the English side as John was "full of years and valiant at arms" and had shown mercy toward English captives on a previous occasion. To honor him, the Black Prince took his badge of ostrich feathers, and, to this day, three plumes form the heir apparent's badge, popularly called the Prince of Wales Feathers.

They feature on the British two-pence coin, introduced with decimalization in 1971, where also can be seen the motto, Ich dien — "I serve." Scholars dispute the precise origin of those words, but no one can prove that the motto did not belong to the German-speaking John of Luxembourg. A further honor was accorded him by the nation responsible for his death. A requiem mass was held for him by the bishop of Durham, a city in the north of England (where in 1969 my husband was able to resume an academic career after many years of exclusion from teaching under communism).

There is a postscript to my musings about medieval chivalry, the Battle of the Somme, the fate of John of Luxembourg and the badge and motto of Prince Charles and his predecessors. After our return from Barchan, I lunched one day with Patricia Josten, whose Czech husband, Josef, was on Jan Masaryk's staff, escaped to England in 1948 and spent the rest of his life fighting with his pen on behalf of all people oppressed by communism, from Czechoslovakia to Tibet. Josten told me that not long after the war, when Josef was working as a journalist in Luxembourg, the authorities there asked him, as a Czech, to witness the opening of the coffin of King John of Luxembourg, which the Germans had just returned to his native land, some 600 years after his death.

I for one shall silently salute the king's memory Aug. 26, and shall also remember gentle Eliška; whatever tribulations they both went through, they were the parents of an outstandingly wise and beneficent ruler. Who knows, Charles IV may even at some time have visited Jemnice and heard about the barchan.