matthew bevis
untaught,|Bewildered,and alone’.^72 Like Smiles’s ‘rough gallant’, this ‘low-born’
but ‘untaught’ hero came to stand as a kind of synecdoche for war itself: savage yet
chivalric, uncivilized yet the defender of civilization.
These developments intersected with the proselytizing tenor of British imperial
rhetoric as Christian militarism captured the public imagination and helped to
produce a new kind of soldier-hero.^73 Embracing the purpose of God and the
doom assigned became a recurring feature of the poetry of soldiering. Military
adventure was fused with religious narratives, and prominent figures like Havelock
and Gordon came to embody a cluster of virtues with roots in nineteenth-century
evangelical imperialism.^74 This diverse range of vocabularies (soldier as degenerate
malcontent, as stoic victim, as Christian hero) permeates Gerard Manley Hopkins’s
sonnet ‘The Soldier’ (1885). It begins by asking, ‘Yes. Why do we all, seeing of
a soldier, bless him? Bless|Our redcoats, our tars? Both these being, the greater
part,|But frail clay, nay but foul clay.’^75 The move from ‘frail’ to ‘foul’ is a gesture
to earlier conceptions of the soldier, but the answering voice is swift:
Mark Christ our King. He knows war, served this soldiering through;
He of all can reave a rope best. There he bides in bliss
Now, and seeing somewhere some man do all that man can do,
For love he leans forth, needs his neck must fall on, kiss,
And cry ‘O Christ-done deed! So God-made-flesh does too:
Were I come o’er again’ cries Christ ‘it should be this.’To envisage life as a form of ‘war’ and ‘soldiering’, and the job as a representation of
‘all that man can do’, is to see the soldier as both Everyman and Christ-like martyr.
The act of soldiering on is accorded a transcendental dignity, for the soldier’s death
(hinted at in talk of a ‘rope’ and ‘his neck’) now intimates resurrection. The journey
of ‘foul clay’ in this sonnet is the rite of passage of the soldier in Victoria’s reign:
from dens of prostitution to stages of pilgrimage, from inebriation to incarnation.
II
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••The century’s closing decades witnessed a different kind of soldierly apotheosis, one
of the most enduring bequests fromVictorian poets to twentieth-century writers.
(^72) Francis Hastings Doyle, ‘The Private of the Buffs’, in Edmund Clarence Stedman (ed.),A
Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895).
(^73) See Olive Anderson, ‘The Growth of Christian Militarism in Mid-Victorian Britain’,English
Historical Review 74 , 86 (Jan. 1971), 46–72.
See Graham Dawson,Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities
(London: Routledge, 1994), 79–155.
(^75) Gerard Manley Hopkins, in ‘The Soldier’, inPoems and Prose, ed. W. H. Gardner (Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 60.