fighting talk When Rudyard Kipling’s soldier in ‘The Instructor’ notes that ‘There’sone above
is greater than us all’,^76 he is referring not to God, but to the bullet that flies just
above his crouching body. This war poetry breathes a different air; the soldier is no
longer, technically speaking, a redcoat (Hopkins’s poem was written in the last year
that red coats were worn in battle),^77 but wears khaki for protective colouration.
The soldier comes of age in Victorian poetry and culture as the methods of warfare
themselves reach a terrifying maturity, and the figure now enjoys a new kind of
privilege as he completes the metamorphosis from scapegoat to underdog. This
focus on the soldier was due again, in part, to the progress of the newspapers and
to the public’s hunger for news of war in particular (between 1880 and 1900 the
number of newspapers doubled, and during the Franco-Prussian War alone the
circulation of theDaily Newstrebled). As one correspondent recalled, the demand
for war reports was also a demand for news of the ‘sweating, swearing, grimy, dirty,
fearless and generous Tommy’.^78
Tommy Atkins was heard as well as seen. The Victorian music-halls were, as
J. A. Hobson argued inThe Psychology of Jingoism, ‘a very serviceable engine
for generating military passion’;^79 but they were also a space in which imperial
jingoism and the official line on war might be questioned. The term ‘jingoism’
was the outgrowth of a popular music-hall song by G. W. Hunt (sung by G. H.
Macdermott) from 1878, the chorus of which ran:
We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, and got the money too.
We’ve fought the bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.^80Voices like this were common, but recent work on the music-hall has pointed
to other tones that need to be heard alongside them in order to appreciate
the complexity of late Victorian imaginings ofwar. Macdermott’s rival, Herbert
Campbell, often performed another song on the same bill, this one written by
Henry Pettit, with the chorus:
I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do!
I’ll change my togs and sell my kit and pop my rifle too!
I don’t like the war, I ain’t no Briton true
And I’d let the Russians have Constantinople.^81(^76) Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Instructor’, inThe Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse(London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1989; 1st pub. 1940), 472.
(^77) See Philip Warner,Dervish: The Rise and Fall of an African Empire(London: Macdonald, 1973),
134.
(^78) Melton Prior,Campaigns of a War Correspondent(London: Arnold, 1912), 287.
(^79) J. A. Hobson,The Psychology of Jingoism(London: Grant Richards, 1901), 2.
(^80) G. W. Hunt, ‘Macdermott’s War Song’, repr. inThe Music Hall Songster(London: Fortney, 1893),
n. p.
(^81) Henry Pettit, quoted in Peter Davison, ‘A Briton True: A Short Account of Patriotic Songs and
Verse and Popular Entertainment’,Alta(Spring 1970), 216.