Victorian poetry and patriotismVaster battalions press for further strands,
To argue in the selfsame bloody mode
Which this late age of thought, and pact, and code,
Still fails to mend. (THi-8)England's own shore thus stands as a reminder not only of Roman and
Saxon invasions but also of "Convincing triumphs" that led England to
ultimate defeat (in this case, the 1415 Battle of Agincourt). To embark on a
war is merely to "argue in the selfsame bloody mode" that has betrayed
centuries of Britons and their opponents alike; and as succeeding poems
emphasize, patriotic song is part of that mode. In "The Colonel's Soli-
loquy," an aging soldier embarks to the tune of "The Girl I've Left behind
Me" (21), painfully aware that the no longer resilient "girl" he leaves
behind is "a grandmother" (35). In "The Going of the Battery," which is
subtitled "Wives' Lament," Hardy offers a bleak counterpoint to "The
Charge of the Light Brigade": "Rain came down drenchingly; but we
unblenchingly / Trudged on beside them through mirk and through mire"
(TH 5-6). At first grimly echoing both the heroic progress and the meter of
Tennyson's poem, Hardy's patriotic heroines falter on the words "All we
loved" (19); and though they resume Tennyson's martial cadences only a
few lines later, the lapse underscores the vulnerability of these women's
courage.
As the sequence progresses, patriotic domestication of graves, too, takes
on newly somber meanings. "A Christmas Ghost-Story," whose title
conjures up visions of cozy holiday hearths, presents a "mouldering
soldier" (TH 2), his "gray bones" "Awry and doubled up" (3) in a South
African grave, while his exiled and "puzzled phantom" (4) moans nightly
to "clear Canopus": "I would know / By whom and when the All-Earth-
Gladdening Law / Of Peace, brought in by that Man Crucified, / Was ruled
to be inept, and set aside?" (5-8). The next poem, "Drummer Hodge,"
begins: "They throw in Drummer Hodge to rest, / Uncoffined - just as
found" (TH 1-2). Who are "they"? We do not know; and indeed, of the
dead soldier himself, we know only his position as a drummer and his
origins as a rural laborer - a generic "Hodge." What we can be sure,
however, is that no reverent patriot will seek out this nameless man's
unmarked grave on a "kopje-crest" (3). Far from his "Wessex home" (8), he
must sink under "Strange stars" (12) into an alien landscape whose
"meaning" (9) he "never knew" (7). Early in the First World War, Rupert
Brooke's "The Soldier" (1914) would still be able to call upon Hemans's
and Kipling's consolations: "If I should die, think only this of me, / That
there's some corner of a foreign field, / That is for ever England." 57 With
"Drummer Hodge," however, Hardy sounded the knell of a poetic tradi-
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