A. C. Swinburne: 'Transvaal'

I'm starting to think about Boer War poetry for my talk at next week's symposium in Bristol on Kipling's 'The Absent-Minded Beggar'. Kipling supported the Boer War, although he retained a great admiration for 'the Burgher of the Transvaal and Orange River Colony'. After the war he admitted that he was 'almost sorry to see them go under'. But Kipling's primary concern throughout was for Empire, believing it to be a civilising power, and he considered the Boer War a timely warning against national complacency: beforehand, we had been 'bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride as we were with material luxury and over much ease.' Kipling's rage against the Establishment --- the politicians and generals who would betray the nation during the Boer War and fail to heed the warnings in the run-up to the Great War --- predicts the ire directed by the war poets of 1914-18 at the enemy behind the lines.

Kipling is often portrayed as a jingoist by those who have never read him. Yet his Boer War poetry makes him seem like a moderate whose work charts a route between extremists like Hardy, who was denounced as a pacifist for being outspokenly against the war, and Swinburne, whose 'Transvaal' is an exercise in hatred.

Transvaal

Patience, long sick to death, is dead. Too long
Have sloth and doubt and treason bidden us be
What Cromwell's England was not, when the sea
To him bore witness given of Blake how strong
She stood, a commonweal that brooked no wrong
From foes less vile than men like wolves set free
Whose war is waged where none may fight or flee---
With women and with weanlings. Speech and song
Lack utterance now for loathing. Scarce we hear
Foul tongues that blacken God's dishonest name
With prayers turned curses and with praise found shame
Defy the truth whose witness now draws near
To scourge these dogs agape with jaws afoam,
Down out of life. Strike, England, and strike home.

It did not take long for the anti-war movement to respond that the only jaws afoam were Swinburne's own. But such poetry was admired, and could expect to be published in leading broadsheets. Kipling, at other times, was the great writer of hatred, and he did not hold back in his assaults against Germans and Russians. 'Mary Postgate' is one of the most brilliantly vicious stories ever written. Even so, for all his populism, Kipling never sacrificed his art as Swinburne does here. So overwhelmed with fury does the sonnet become that its syntax lapses into incoherence, if not incontinence. Never mind his reputation as a 'braggart in matters of vice': it is his Boer War poetry for which Swinburne deserves vilification.

The Absent-Minded Beggar

Rudyard Kipling's Boer War poem, 'The Absent-Minded Beggar', is the subject of a study day at the University of Bristol on 19 June. Speakers include Peter Bailey, John Lee, Simon Potter, Edward M Spiers, Andrew Lycett, and yours truly.

The poem was written to raise money for the families of
soldiers fighting in the Boer War. It proved to be extraordinarily successful, raising more than £250,000 (the equivalent of £14 million today).

The study day will consider the following questions: 'What, though, does it mean when we say that a poem raised £250,000? How does a poem raise money? How did this poem become so immediately famous, nationally and internationally? How long did that fame last, and what were its literary and cultural effects?'

Thomas Hardy: 'A Christmas Ghost-Story'

The Christmas Truce of 1914 brought soldiers together in No-Man's-Land to exchange cigarettes and drinks, play football, sing hymns together, and talk about their families. Christmas is something of an embarrassment for those who wage war: the Tommies and Fritzes who climbed out of their trenches were acknowledging an authority higher than their own military leaders.

Thomas Hardy's 'A Christmas Ghost-Story' is a Boer War poem which sets in opposition the Christian message and the unChristian nature of war. Its publication was enough to outrage the Daily Chronicle, which, with an absence of self-awareness most kindly described as comical, chose Christmas Day, 1899, as the right time to denounce Hardy as a 'pacifist'.

A Christmas Ghost-Story

South of the Line, inland from far Durban,
A mouldering soldier lies---your countryman.
Awry and doubled up are his gray bones,
And on the breeze his puzzled phantom moans
Nightly to clear Canopus: 'I would know
By whom and when the All-Earth-gladdening Law
Of peace, brought in by that Man Crucified,
Was ruled to be inept, and set aside?
And what of logic or of truth appears
In tacking "Anno Domini" to the years?
Near twenty-hundred liveried thus have hied,
But tarries yet the Cause for which He died.'
    Christmas Eve, 1899.

Hardy later allowed the poem to be republished in an anti-war periodical. Quite what the Church made of it, one can only guess, but the poet was not content to leave the matter there. Two months later he reported a conversation with a 'religious man': 'I said, We the civilized world have given Christianity a fair trial for nearly 2000 years, & it has not yet taught countries the rudimentary virtue of keeping peace.'

Yet 'A Christmas Ghost-Story' is a problematic poem. Hardy's prosopopoeia, by which he forces his own political views into the mouth of a dead soldier, is ethically dubious. Compare McCrae's 'In Flanders Fields', from the Great War: McCrae, like Hardy, claims to speak for the dead ('We are the Dead'), yet he burdens them with the argument that the war should be fought to the bitter end lest 'ye break faith with us who die'. Both poems are propaganda, one against war, and one for it, and both enlist the authority of the dead soldier (or soldiers) to protect their own agenda from attack. After all, who would dare argue against those who have made the ultimate sacrifice?

A Short Post About Killing

I have always been fascinated by those very few post-Homeric poems which deal with the subject of killing on the battlefield. They are vastly outnumbered by poems about dying, or watching comrades dying, and it is not hard to guess why. Even though it is the job of soldiers to kill the enemy, both they and their civilian readers have a vested interest in disguising that fact. One of the reasons why Keith Douglas's 'How to Kill' seems to me to be one of the greatest of modern war poems is that Douglas refuses to connive with his audience. 'Look', he insists, obliging the reader to gaze with him through his 'dial of glass' at an enemy 'who is going to die'. What the soldier does, he does for us. If we look, we acknowledge that we are incriminated ('damned'); worse still, if we turn away squeamishly, we are moral hypocrites.

I can think of only two other poems about killing which deserve to be bracketed with 'How to Kill'. The first is Hardy's Boer War poem, 'The Man He Killed', in which the protagonist tries to escape from his own experience ('I shot at him as he at me') into the generalities of the second-person pronoun ('You shoot a fellow down'). The second is Siegfried Sassoon's 'The Kiss':

To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Sassoon wrote some years later that the poem had been inspired by a lecture on the use of the bayonet in which the lecturer, a major, had spoken with 'homicidal eloquence'. Bullet and bayonet, the major reported, were brother and sister. Sassoon was puzzled by 'The Kiss', feeling that he never could have 'stuck a bayonet in anyone', but admitting that the poem 'doesn't show any sign of satire'.

There is, as Sassoon admits, little reason not to take the poem as a strange sadistic fantasy. The bayonet is eroticised --- but eroticised, disturbingly enough, as the soldier's naked 'sister' whose very kiss is fatal. The 'kiss' is itself a curious description, covering up a sexual metaphor which is more obviously thrusting and penetrative. And yet the bayonet's gender resolutely resists the metaphor's logic, so that the poem is at war with itself, at once revealing and withholding, accepting agency and shifting agency from soldier to bayonet. Paradoxically, in its tongue-tied confusions 'The Kiss' comes as close to homicidal eloquence as any poem from the First World War.

Flannelled Fools and Muddied Oafs

The first day of the second test between England and the West Indies seems as good an occasion as any to revisit Rudyard Kipling's 'The Islanders'. The poem dismayed many of its readers when it was first published on 3 January 1902, and its relevance to our current situation ought still to make us uneasy.

'The Islanders' was written towards the end of the Boer War. It amounts to a fierce denunciation of the British public's priorities, and a demand for national service to prepare for the coming European war which Kipling foresaw. Rounding on those who sent an ill-trained army to fight on their behalf, Kipling condemns a nation rendered complacent by bread and circuses:

So? And ye train your horses and the dogs ye feed and prize?

How are the beasts more worthy than the souls, your sacrifice?

But ye said, “Their valour shall show them”; but ye said, “The end is close.”

And ye sent them comfits and pictures to help them harry your foes:

And ye vaunted your fathomless power, and ye flaunted your iron pride,

Ere—ye fawned on the Younger Nations for the men who could shoot and ride!

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls

With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.

At the time, those flannelled fools were touring Australia in the 1901-02 Ashes series. Meanwhile, poorly-equipped British and Australian soldiers were losing their lives in South Africa. Plus ça change: our soldiers still die for the want of basic equipment; and we are all aware of the money and attention invested in flannelled fools and especially muddied oafs. Even those who loathe football have heard of the Kop; far fewer know the battle (see its aftermath, above) after which it was named. Would wars be more urgently resolved, perhaps avoided, if the football and baseball seasons were suspended for as long as those wars continued?

Kipling did more than any poet before or since to raise the status of the British Tommy. He should be living at this hour: stories about soldiers being thrown off trains or refused a hotel room make 'Tommy' essential reading once again. For all its sound and fury, contemporary anti-war poetry ignores the experiences and usually even the existence of our soldiers. We know the reasons why, and it is not the soldiers who are discredited by them.