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. Hardy objected to the war for three reasons: 1) at 8,000 miles away, southern Africa represented no credible threat to the British people or to its land; 2) the British, confronting aggressive defenses of the proud and determined Afrikaner people, resorted to tactics that involved weapons of indiscriminate mass destruction and the incarceration of thousands of civilians; and 3) the entire war drama was little more than a land grab to secure access to gold and diamond mines.

In creating the soldier/speaker, Hardy distanced himself from his own discontent with what was a popular (and ultimately successful) war to focus not so much on the ideals for which a country goes to war but rather on how war itself can affect the minds of those who enlist to fight for their country. The first two stanzas make clear that the soldier has done his duty—squaring off against an enemy soldier, he shot him dead—and yet cannot rationalize the act nor shake the sense that, under any other circumstance, the man he killed might have been a friend. In all but words, the confused soldier asks, why did the two of them shoot at each other? What makes another person a “foe” (Line 10)? Wars can only be fought, Hardy’s poem suggests, by soldiers who shut down their conscience, interdict their hearts, and become automatons serving their government’s ends.

The third stanza reveals the soldier’s own internal debate over what he has done: “I shot him dead because— / Because he was my foe, / Just so” (Lines 9-11). The repetition and the hesitancy of these lines reveal how his heart tells him one thing and his intellect another. Is he best as a man, full of generous sympathies and genial empathy, or as a soldier, arbitrarily defining people he does not even know as his enemy?

The fourth stanza underscores the speaker’s natural inclination toward sympathy. He sorts through the unsettling reality that, had he bothered to get to know a man he just shot dead, they might have much common ground despite being on opposing sides of a battlefield. Like the speaker, the man he killed was most likely from the working class and possibly “out of work” (Line 15), and he enlisted only because of the scarcity of jobs available back home. Desperate to make ends meet, the speaker speculates that the other man had sold most of his possessions—his “traps” (Line 15)—before deciding military service was really the only viable alternative available that would pay a steady wage. In fact, the speaker himself can think of “no other reason why” (Line 16) anyone would join the military. Imagine Homer’s Achilles, the quintessential Classical warrior, conceding such decidedly un-glorious motivation.

In the closing stanza, Hardy offers a conclusion in which nothing is concluded. Nothing can be concluded, as the speaker is most likely still involved in the ongoing conditions of a brutal and pointless war, which he now sees clearly in its starkest basics: one person shooting dead another person with impunity and without accountability, violating every code of Christian decency and healthy human behavior. If, alternatively, the speaker has returned home, he appears to have symptoms now recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder, or the inability to shake free of the nightmare of his battlefield experience. The man is left with the too-casual conclusion that this whole war business is “quaint and curious” (Line 17). However, his glib assessment of the war cannot entirely offset his nagging conscience, his persistent heart, or his vestigial decency. As he closes the poem, he considers again how easily he and the man he killed might have been friends.