‘graver things...braver things’ scepticism from innocence that was brought about by the Great War. According
tothis model, Hardy’s war poetry fails; and Silkin, in his widely read studyOut
of Battle, condemns Hardy for responding ‘so inertly to the First World War’. His
poems were, Silkin says ‘neither indictments of war nor...tentative gropings for
a position in which the demands of war and the compunctions of killing may
be, if not reconciled, at least held in tolerable equilibrium’.^8 UnlikeThe Dynasts
and Hardy’s Boer War poems, Hardy’s First World War poetry typically becomes,
according to Silkin, ‘declamatory propaganda in thepejorative sense of the word’.^9
These judgements are not accurate about or attentive to the poems Hardy wrote
during the Great War, and Silkin condemns Hardy’s work simply because it does
not voice the required, disillusioned attitude. Moreover, the complexity of Hardy’s
various poetries of war reveals the narrowness of Silkin’s critical focus and its
historical blindspots.
When Hardy was growing up, Dorchester was an army town ‘made colourful by
the constant presence of the red-coated and splendidly accoutred soldiery of those
days’,^10 and the county was filled with stories of the war fever of forty years before.
The English fleet had been at anchor just off Weymouth in 1804 amid widespread
fears of a French invasion; these culminated on 1 May in a general panic and
mobilization. Hardy returned again and again to this incident, in his poem ‘The
Alarm’, inThe Trumpet-Major,andinPart1ofThe Dynasts(ii. iv–v); he alluded to
it again inThe Return of the Native(1878), in his short story ‘A Tradition of Eighteen
Hundred and Four’ (1882), and in his poem ‘One We Knew’. It is a peculiarly
compulsive preoccupation. ‘The Alarm’ was written ‘In Memory of one of the
Writer’s Family who was a Volunteer during the War with Napoleon’, Hardy’s
paternal grandfather, who had been one of the ‘Bang-up Locals’ and marched on
Weymouth to repel the invader.^11 Similarly, Hardy always pointed out to visitors
Captain Hardy’s monument on Blackdown Hill, visible through the windows of
Max Gate. This Hardy, not directly related to Thomas Hardy, had been Nelson’s
flag captain at Trafalgar and is portrayed admiringly in the Trafalgar scenes ofThe
Dynasts(Part 1,v.iiandiv).
Hardy himself was condemned to remain a non-combatant—not born during
the Napoleonic Wars, too young for the Crimean War, and far too old for the
wars at the end of the century. This exclusion from glory bred a fear that he fell
short because his qualities, as Ruskin might put it, had never been wholly tested.
In addition, Hardy was particularly alert to the pitfalls of non-combatant status
(^8) Jon Silkin,Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 37.
(^9) Ibid. 44.
(^10) Michael Millgate,Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2004), 51. 11
Hardy, ‘The Alarm’, inThe Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy,ed.JamesGibson(London:
Macmillan, 1976), 35. For further details about the Dorset Volunteers, see George Lanning, ‘Thomas
Hardy and the Bang-up Locals’,Thomas Hardy Journal, 16/2 (May 2000), 54–8.