The Man He Killed (Criticism)

Criticism

Tyrus Miller

Tyrus Miller teaches comparative literature and English at Yale University, and has written extensively on twentieth-century poetry, fiction, and visual culture. In the following essay, Miller presents the historical background that led to the confrontation depicted in “The Man He Killed” and examines the contradiction between the implications Hardy made about war and the limited narrative of the poem’s protagonist.

Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Man He Killed,” first published in 1902 at the end of the Boer War in South Africa, can be counted as one of the first great antiwar poems of the twentieth century. It sets an ironic, disillusioned tone that would become characteristic in the work of such World War I trench poets as Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Ivor Gurney. Hardy’s protagonist is a plain-speaking countryman, whose concerns lie with the simple, enduring customs of his locale and not with the ambitious aims of imperial power in far-off lands. Nonetheless, the nation has called him to do his duty, which he has done unquestioningly. Now, however, he is left to explain to himself and to his fellows — the ones with whom he is drinking and implicitly the one he shot down — why he has killed another man so like himself, except for the flag under which he marched.

Hardy had very specific details in mind when imagining his speaker, and he succeeded in evoking them so believably that some critics have speculated that the poem may have been occasioned by a story the poet overheard in a tavern. When the poem was originally published in the New York magazine Harper’s Weekly on November 8, 1902, Hardy included a set of accompanying stage directions to help his American readers imagine the scene properly. These read: “Scene: The settle of the Fox Inn, Stagfoot Lane. Characters: The speaker (a returned soldier) and his friends, natives of the hamlet.” Stagfoot Lane was a locale previously depicted by Hardy in his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles; it was a thin disguise for the real hamlet of Hartfoot Lane, a village near Hardy’s home. Hardy’s speaker is thus a native of Dorset, England, sent off to fight in South Africa against the Boers, who had rebelled against the British imposition of rule in their territory.

Writing as he was at the bitter end of the protracted conflict in South Africa, Hardy could assume that his readers would be able to fill in the historical and political subtext that gives his speaker’s spare lines their ironic force. For today’s reader, however, some historical background is necessary. Great Britain had ended up controlling the colony of South Africa following the defeat of Napoleon’s French forces early in the nineteenth century. Most of the white settlers, however, were Dutch: “Boers,” as they were called, was a name derived from the Dutch word for farmer. These settlers moved into the territory across the Orange and Vaal rivers, the Transvaal region, seizing control of the land, enslaving the native inhabitants of the region, and fiercely defending their independence from taxation and centralized rule. England tried to annex the Transvaal in 1877, but was forced to grant the Boers independence in 1881. Then, unexpectedly, gold and eventually diamonds were discovered in the Transvaal. The gold rush brought thousands of foreigners to the region. These newcomers, or Uitlanders as they were called, quickly outnumbered the Boers, who viewed them as interlopers and as agents of British interests. Colonists from neighboring Rhodesia attempted to invade the Transvaal and to provoke an uprising of Uitlanders which would definitively defeat the Boers. With the stage already set for armed conflict, the German Kaiser, who also had imperial designs on southern Africa, encouraged the Boers to do battle with his British rivals. In 1899, open warfare broke out.

The British, numerically and economically superior to the Boers, were confident that their uncouth enemy could be rapidly defeated. The Boers, however, had lived for decades on the rugged terrain of the Transvaal, and they utilized their familiarity with the landscape to sustain a demoralizing guerilla war with the British for three years. Eventually, the British resorted to the dangerous tactics of clearing the land sector-by-sector, during the course of which they gained the dubious honor of introducing one of its most notorious innovations of the twentieth century: the concentration camp. By the end of the war, forty thousand Boers were being detained under the most inhumane conditions. The unexpected length of the conflict; the solidarity of other rebellious and oppressed peoples in the British Empire with the tenacious Boers (above all, the Irish); the humanitarian outrage of liberals and socialists about the treatment of Boer prisoners; and the dispiriting nature of the war goals all contributed to making the Boer War increasingly unpopular and divisive on the domestic front.

Hardy employs this historical situation to evoke several themes in a concentrated, dramatic way. First of all, his speaker’s sympathies are divided: the soldier’s roots lie in a specific, traditional part of Britain, but he is also a subject of the modern British nation that was pursuing its imperial designs in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Hardy makes his readers ponder the question of whether this rural man should feel loyalty to the country that is his dwelling place and native home, the land and people of Dorset, or to the bigger country that has its national interests in southern Africa and its armies to protect them. He also contrasts the civilian role of his speaker as a reflective, feeling, if somewhat inarticulate man of the land, to that same man’s role as soldier and an impersonal part of an infantry lineup — a cog in a military machine. Finally,

the poet also reveals the deep strains placed on the man by the contradictions between his class, which might lead him to identify with his fellow farmer, and his nationhood, which makes that fellow man of the Transvaal countryside his foe. In other words, though Hardy’s soldier must kill the Boer as a national enemy, as a fellow Boer (farmer) he has everything essential in common with his foe.

These tensions are set up by the first two stanzas, which establish the single broad irony of the situation: the man he killed might have easily been included among his present drinking companions. At the same time, these stanzas lend several subtle inflections to that perplexing fact. Hardy hints at how important the question of place and placement is to the life and death of his opposed soldiers. Had the Boer soldier been met in such as place as the inn, in the local place of the British soldier, they would have been fellows and friends. Yet in his place, the Boer’s own local environs, this would-be comrade had to be killed. Hardy thus carefully sets up the symmetry between the two soldiers and the apparently interchangeable nature of their places, only to undermine it in the end. The soldiers stare at one another “face to face,” as if in a mirror. Further reinforcing this implied symmetry with internal rhyme (he / me), Hardy presents the men shooting at each other, as if each one shot at a reflection of himself: “I shot at him as he at me.” But just as the outcome of this shooting is fatally different for the two soldiers, so too the original symmetry between them proves deceptive. For as Hardy subtly reminds us — and as his speaker perhaps never realizes — there is one irreducible difference between his British soldier and his Boer. The Dorset man is an outsider in South Africa, an invader; the Boer settler is at home — already in that very place where, under other circumstances, he might meet his British fellow as a drinking companion. But he had no chance to offer the Dorset man a pint of beer; their meeting in his home means that they are already enemies. There can be no symmetry or equality between invader and invaded.

Hardy’s Dorset soldier is genuinely perplexed by the human dimensions of his story. Yet he also remains profoundly blind to its political truth: that in the end, the places of the British and Boer soldiers are not interchangeable. The unpolitical man, doing his duty without ambition or understanding, experiences this history as a kind of fate that colors invader and invaded alike with its grey strokes. Though Hardy is not unsympathetic with the simple man’s perspective, he is equally rigorous in suggesting its narrow limits.

Several touches help to foster a sense of simple immediacy and authenticity in the speaker’s quoted voice. Hardy takes up the man’s table talk in midstream, creating the illusion that the words begin not, as they actually do, at the top of the page where the poem is printed, but in some unheard speech already in progress before we entered the tavern to overhear them. The poem represents a kind of snapshot of speech, a fragment of an ongoing rotation of a problem, snatched out of time and offered up for view to the reader. Though Hardy does not write in dialect, he does use Dorset slang such as “nipperkin” (a drink) and “traps” (tools, gear), as well as registering the specific oral sounding of’“list” (enlist), which lends the man’s speech its specificity and local flavor.

Above all, however, it is Hardy’s skillful manipulation of the syntax to suggest a psychological rhythm of thought that gives this poem its strikingly dramatic quality. In the latter three stanzas, the pauses and repetitions indicate clearly that the man is anything but convinced of the necessity of killing the man opposite him: because — / Because he was my foe, / Just so: my foe of course he was; / That’s clear enough.“By ending the third stanza on the word although,” Hardy makes his poem pivot around a second thought. The fragmentation of the syntax in the fourth stanza makes crumble before the reader’s eyes any conviction won in the previous stanza. It is impossible to decide if “No other reason why” refers to the Boer, the Dorset man, or both.

The final stanza does not so much resolve the doubts raised in the earlier stanzas as simply shut them down, at least for the meantime. It is hard to believe, given Hardy’s effective beginning in midstream and careful pacing, that this meditation has truly come to a close. We imagine this returned soldier turning his enemy’s death over and over in his mind, being unwilling to face the truth of his act, and being unable to bring it to a conclusion. Hardy’s poem points beyond the narrow confines of its protagonist’s scope of understanding to encompass the historical world. Through the doubts of his Dorset soldier, Hardy suggests the larger worries that were beginning to haunt the British nation about the meaning of its experience in South Africa: the threats to and from the colonies, the danger of widespread revolt, the decay of national unity at home, and the unchecked drift toward new, barbaric forms of war and politics. The lines crossed — at first unwillingly and unwittingly — during the Boer War had, for Thomas Hardy at least, left behind a faint intimation of the horrors that modern war would bring fully to light in only a few short years.

Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale, 1998.

What Do I Read Next?

• After serving in World War I, e.e. cummings wrote some of the most powerful antiwar poetry of all time. Full of irony and bitter humor, it can be found in his Collected Poems. Cummings also wrote a moving, phantasmagorical novel based on his experiences in the war titled The Enormous Room.
• The antiwar literature that came out of the World War I is among the most critical ever written. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque captures the meaninglessness of the war and the horrible human cost as seen by the soldiers in the trenches. Its straightforward style makes the book highly readable.
• In Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, a young victim of the war, who is now deaf, blind, and quadriplegic, recalls his life.
• Thomas Hardy began The Dynasts, his book-length epic poem about the wars against Napoleon around the time he wrote “The Man He Killed.” He did not write about war in his novels, which are by and large social dramas set in the Dorset countryside where he lived most of his life. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the story of a young woman’s conflict with the moral double standard of the village in which she lives, is probably Hardy’s most popular novel.