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 matthew bevis

And sick of such a life, fell down, with groans

Myhead went weakly nodding to my feet.^53

The journey from the spear-head to the weakly nodding head is one which has taken
account of the publicized horrors of the Crimean War. Similarly, in Morris’s ‘The
Wind’, his old knight’s romantic reminiscences are interrupted when ‘in march’d
the ghosts of those that had gone to the war’:

I knew them by the arms that I was used to paint

Upon their long thin shields; but the colours were all grown faint,

And faint upon their banner was Olaf, king and saint.^54

To recognize the soldiers by the emblems on their shields might imply that their
physical injuries render them unrecognizable, as the men carry the scars of battle
with them into the world beyond. These dead do not rest easy with their sacrifice,
and their march heralds not a glorious remembrance, but a kind of beleaguered
trooping of the colours. George Meredith’s ‘Grandfather Bridgeman’, which he
deemed important enough to stand at the head of his collectionModern Love
(1862), contains a similar sense of fading splendour. A grandfather reads a letter
from his soldier-grandson in the Crimea, lauding his victories and turning to the
assembled family to note, ‘You’ll own war isn’t such humbug: and Glory means
something, you see’.^55 What they eventually see, though, is another ghost; the letter
turns out to be several weeks old, and Tom has been severely wounded during the
interim. At the end of the poem he makes his entrance: ‘Wheeled, pale, in a chair,
and shattered, the wreck of their hero was seen;|The ghost of Tom drawn slow
o’er the orchard’s shadowy green.’ This shattering, at once physical and emotional,
frequently makes itself felt in post-Crimean War poetry, as touchable ghosts hover
in the margins of the verse to remind readers of how war might re-figure and
disfigure the body.
Beyond the Crimean War lay the Indian Mutiny, an event that further tested
Victorian confidence in its imperial project and the violence that accompanied it.
As Gautam Chakravarty has noted, the poetry of the Mutiny (unlike novelistic
or historical explorations) tended to excise the sequence of causes that led to the
popular insurgency and to focus instead on the sufferings of the British.^56 This focus
again took its bearings from the press. The Cawnpore massacre was covered byThe
Timesin leaders which dwelt on war-torn bodies with unprecedented directness:

The women having been stripped naked, beheaded and thrown into a well; the children
having been hurled down alive upon the butchered mothers, whose blood yet reeked on

(^53) William Morris, ‘Concerning Geffray Teste Noir’, inThe Collected Works of William Morris,ed.
May Morris, i (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), 76 and 78.
(^54) Morris, ‘The Wind’, ibid. 110.
(^55) George Meredith, ‘Grandfather Bridgeman’, inThe Poetical Works of George Meredith(London:
Constable, 1912), 125.
(^56) Gautam Chakravarty,The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 107.