fighting talk Was out of work—had sold his traps—
Noother reason why.‘Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.’^103Class solidarity across a national divide is part of what makes war, rather than
the ‘foe’, feel like the enemy here. Despite the speaker’s awareness of division, the
internal and terminal rhymes in the first stanza (‘because/because/he was/he was’,
and ‘foe/so/foe/although’) give voice to a will that strives to locate its identity within
partnerships. The doubled-up grammar echoes this feeling, as the phrase ‘Was out
of work’ looks back to the ‘I’ of the previous line, and forward to the man who sold
‘his’ traps, not fully able to distinguish between the two men even as a distinction is
being formulated. The final stanza is characteristic of Hardy’s eerie end-games: its
release from the broken rhythms of the previous stanzas should come as something
of a relief, yet the acquired ease of the lines is precisely what is disturbing about
them. The speaker could sound chirpy, uttering his conclusion with a shrug of the
shoulders rather than with a belaboured sigh. Indeed, ‘quaint’ and ‘curious’ seem
oddly cosy, as if the speaker is working too hard to suppress other kinds of adjective.
It is as though his killing during the war has desensitized him, rendered him unable
to weigh up the significance of his actions. This is a portrait not of the soldier as
eithervictimorvictor, but of the victor himself as a victim—seeking a numbness
in rhythm and a shelter in euphemism. Hardy’s war poems frequently end with this
kind of blank stare; war has inflicted itself on the fabric of the poem’s attenuated
form, rather than being something that the form describes.
A. E. Housman was another who was intent on shaping poems that were not
straightforwardly pro- or anti-war, but that could muster the poise to count costs
alongside blessings. Even before the Boer War, he was mulling over what it might
mean to fight for Queen and country. ‘1887’, the opening poem ofAShropshire
Lad(1896), plumbs the depths of the phrase ‘God save the Queen’ in order to
consider the need for the soldiers, those other kinds of saviour ‘who shared the
work with God’.^104 Such wry observations do not quite toe the patriotic line,
but nor do they mock it. In Housman’s work, the call of battle is neither wholly
championed nor belittled; ‘XXXV’ inShropshire Ladis representative of the poet’s
divided allegiances, and of those of Victorian war poetry more generally, so I quote
it in full:
On the idle hill of summer,
Sleepy with the flow of streams,(^103) Hardy, ‘The Man He Killed’, inComplete Poems, 287.
(^104) A. E. Housman, ‘1887’, inAShropshireLad,inCollected Poems and Selected Prose,ed.Christopher
Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 23.