SOURCE: “What Happens in ‘Lepanto,”’ in The Chesterton Review, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, February, 1992, pp. 25-29.

In the following essay, LeVay describes the historical events that Chesterton left out of his poem about the sixteenth-century battle between a Turkish and a Christian fleet in the Gulf of Lepanto.

“What doesn't happen in ‘Lepanto’.” The point is, there's no way on God's green earth that one is going to find out what happened at the battle of Lepanto by reading Chesterton's pep-rally tub-thumper. That's the kind of poem it is, and it's very good of its kind. It's also a phantasmagoric slide-show with martial allegro (Beethoven) music. But some of the mundane details which Chesterton treated with such cavalier nonchalance must be considered.

The battle of Lepanto, in which Ali Pasha was crushingly defeated by Don John of Austria, took place, October 7, 1571, just south of the town of Lepanto (now...