matthew bevis
A rider, bound on bound
Full-galloping;nor bridle drew
Until he reached the mound.
Then off there flung in smiling joy,
And held himself erect
By just his horse’s mane, a boy:
You hardly could suspect—
(So tight he kept his lips compressed,
Scarce any blood came through)
Youlookedtwiceereyousawhisbreast
Wasallbutshotintwo.^2The enjambed lines in the first stanza work with the rider to accentuate his pace, but
in the second they shift from stridency to hesitancy. We are asked to glance back even
as we move forward. ‘And held himself erect’ initially sounds proud, but the next
line, in telling us how he did so, comes as a shock (the ‘rider’ also becomes a more
vulnerable ‘boy’). You ‘hardly could suspect’ him, this boy, ‘So tight he kept his lips
compressed’ (a soldierly example to others of tight-lipped trustworthiness)—until,
that is, you come to suspect something else as the sentence makes its inexorable pro-
gress. The penultimate line makes one last grasp at a dignified diction (‘ere’, ‘breast’)
before the close of the stanza brings the incident into clearer focus. The poem ends
when we are told that ‘the boy fell dead’; while Napoleon was dwelling on whether
his plans might fall to earth, the poem was contemplating another kind of falling.
The Victorians are not often credited with an attentiveness to the realities
of warfare. They have frequently been taken to task for keeping their own lips
compressed and for refusing to dwell on the bloodier side of conflict. Their war-
tunes have been heard as cavalier, and critical study has been focused instead on
the rude awakenings of the twentieth century. Never such innocence again. Lytton
Strachey’sEminent Victorians, published in the final year of the Great War, marks
the divide. Strachey’s father had been a general in the army, but the son was a
conscientious objector, and such objections can be heard in the icy briskness of
his book’s final sentence. Recalling how General Gordon’s death in Khartoum was
avenged by Kitchener’s army at Omdurman in 1898, Strachey observes: ‘it had all
ended very happily—in a glorious slaughter of 20,000 Arabs, a vast addition to the
British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Evelyn Baring’.^3 This parody of a happy
ending is meant as the final nail in the coffin of Victorian imperial confidence, and
Strachey’s view has held sway in subsequent literature. As Samuel Hynes observed
more recently, the Great War ‘brought to an end the life and values of Victorian
and Edwardian England’.^4
(^2) Browning, ‘Incident of the French Camp’, ibid. 197.
(^3) Lytton Strachey,Eminent Victorians(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986; 1st pub. 1918), 266.
(^4) Samuel Hynes,A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture(London: Bodley Head,
1990), p. ix.