matthew bevis
This emphasis on the ‘I’ lurking inside the ‘We’, and on a man who insists on
beingrepresentative only of feelings of isolation,can be heard in different ways.
Steve Attridge suggests that this speaker gave audiences a chance to laugh at the
unwilling recruit, thereby offering ‘tangential support for the strident imperial
tone of Macdermott’s act’;^82 but he might also be heard as a spokesman for the
disaffected, a man who has the courage to say what others are thinking, and
who questions a military ethos even as he feels compelled to submit to it.^83 Late
Victorian war songs often manage to combine a sense of the ‘we’ and the ‘I’;
they have something of the swagger of military marches, but the burdens of their
refrains start to feel like solitary whistlings in the dark as the century nears its close.
The soldier’s pluck was no longer to be condescended to as a reason to avoid his
disconsolate pleadings. J. B. Booth acknowledged the significance of these voices
when he observed: ‘Tommy moaned all through his sing-songs.’^84
The most accomplished translation of Tommy’s moaning into metre was effected
by Kipling, and for more than thirty years after its publication hisBarrack-Room
Ballads, and Other Verses(1892) was the most popular book of verse in the English-
speaking world. Not against war, but against complacency about what war entails,
his dramatic monologues took their lead from the music-hall to breathe new life into
Atkins. Situating himself between wholly dignified and derogatory vocabularies,
his ‘Tommy’ insisted: ‘We aren’t no thin red ’eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards
too|But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you.’^85 One contemporary
anthologist summed up the remarkable Tommy as ‘humanly full of discontent and
grievance, with no more love than stay-at-home folk for blistering marches and an
empty belly, fonder of life than most, he is a great and honourable fighter, gay in the
face of a soldier’s death, and a broad humorist in time of peril’, before noting that
‘Kipling handles honour and glory with no hint of awe’.^86 Kipling was responsibly
wary of awe, of the way it can act as a refusal to dwell on what honour and glory
can cost its recipient, but he was also cognizant of how the ‘broad humorist’ might
offer a certain kind of disingenuous consolation, whereby the soldier becomes a
mere clown, somebody whose joking might deflect attention from his suffering or
lead some to reflect that he exists solely for their entertainment. Accordingly, his
Tommies have a rueful wit, a trench humour that is burdened by an awareness
of what war can inflict even as it refuses to bow under the strain of that burden.
(^82) Steve Attridge,Nationalism, Imperialism and Identity in Late Victorian Culture(Basingstoke:
Palgrave, 2003), 30.
(^83) The working-class inflection of this voice is also important, as Attridge explains: ‘A growing
recognition of Tommy Atkins’s background grew contemporaneously with an awareness of the effects
of material deprivation among the working class....The soldier figure is both accommodated and
distanced, supported and derided, an expression of unity and of class antagonism’ (ibid. 69 and 43).
(^84) J. B. Booth,A Pink ’Un Remembers(London: Laurie, 1937), 123.
(^85) Kipling, ‘Tommy’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 399.
(^86) John Macleay, inidem(ed.),War Songs and Ballads of Martial Life(London: Scott, 1900), pp.
xxvi–xxvii.