The Man He Killed

Since Antiquity, poets have sung the glories of war, finding in the titanic showdown between cultures a litmus test for defining the heroic essence of the warriors. In turn, the warriors are glorified and adulated, even (or especially) through death, the ultimate sacrifice. Homer’s Iliad (c. 8th century BCE), an iconic foundational text in Western culture, offers a graphic account of the brutal battlefield realities of the long and costly Trojan War but also makes clear that battlefield heroics elevate those who fight wars. In turn, cowardice under fire shames a man, and heroism under fire elevates war itself into a grand drama that reveals the truest bravery of the human spirit under the most trying circumstances.

As long as poets were unchallenged as historians, war flourished as a celebration of courage and cunning. With the emergence in Hardy’s era of photojournalism and war correspondents came records of the grim realities of combat. The growing global market encouraged nations with powerful armies to pursue colonial conquest driven by mercenary interests rather than ideals, and war revealed itself as a bloody and ultimately pointless exercise in force and domination.

For Hardy, the British expeditionary force dispatched to distant southern Africa in the name of British imperial pride smacked of inelegant greed and hypocritical propaganda typical of a government using its vast military advantage to secure economic capital.