matthew bevis
howling over the staggering tents—the trenches are turned into dykes...menare
out for twelve hours at a time...not a soul seems to care for their comfort or even
for their lives.’^29
As both these quotations suggest,The Timeswas a forum for many criticisms that
would later be echoed during the Great War (for two criticisms in particular: the
mismanagement of the army by an incompetent aristocracy and the neglect of the
rank-and-filebyacorruptofficerclass).Indeed,thewarcorrespondents—described
by one contemporary as ‘poetic writers of prose’^30 —might be seen as England’s
first soldier-poets. In a note to his poemThe Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade,
Westland Marston observed: ‘the masterly Records of the War which now appear
in our crowded journals—records which are at once histories and poems—leave
to formal poetry only this task—to adopt their descriptions and to develop their
suggestions; to comment, as it were, upon their glorious texts’.^31 These texts were
‘glorious’ because they attended to something more than glory, and poets who
adopted and developed newspaper copy were responding to a form of expression
that questioned heroic conceptions of war even as it acknowledged a regard for their
enduring value. Nowhere is this development more apparent than in the responses
of Russell and Tennyson to one of the most renowned military blunders of the
period, the charge of the Light Brigade.^32
T. S. Eliot once praised Herbert Read’s war poetry as ‘neither Romance nor
Reporting...it has emotion as well as a version of things seen’.^33 The first sentence
of Russell’s report on the charge of the Light Brigade treads a fine line between
romance and reporting: ‘If the exhibitionof the most brilliant valour, of the excess
of courage, and of a daring which would have reflected lustre on the best days of
chivalry can afford full consolation for the disaster to-day, we can have no reason
to regret the melancholy loss which we sustained in a contest with a savage and
barbarian enemy.’^34 The ‘If’ announces that this romantic vocabulary is under
pressure; an ‘excess’ of courage is not only courage, but also foolhardiness, and the
progress of the sentence gives readers reasons to feel unconsoled (one might not
regret a ‘loss’, but it is harder not to regret a ‘melancholyloss’). Tennyson famously
adaptedTimesreports when composing ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, but
he kept their dual depiction of war as both ennobling and horrifying. As Trudi
Tate has recently suggested, although ‘often regarded as a simple-minded piece of
patriotism’, the poem ‘is in fact a subtle and even anguished reflection upon the
(^29) Russell, inThe Times, 25 Nov. 1854, 9.
(^30) ‘War and Poetry’,Edinburgh Review, 196 (July 1902), 53.
(^31) Westland Marston,The Death-Ride: A Tale of the Light Brigade(London: Mitchell, 1855), 8.
(^32) See Geoffrey Regan,Someone Had Blundered: A Historical Survey of Military Incompetence
(London: Batsford, 1987), 192–208.
(^33) T. S. Eliot, quoted in Dominic Hibberd (ed.),Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook(London:
Macmillan, 1981), 52.
(^34) Russell, inThe Times, 14 Nov. 1854, 7.