Poetry and the pity of war

'Blood for our blood', they said

and the final verse:

'O glorious Life, who dwellest in earth and sun, I have lived, I praise and adore thee'. A sword swept. Over the pass the voices one by one Faded, and the hill slept.

After the long Victorian summer, came its twilight and a rather more prolonged and serious conflict, that in South Africa, known as the Boer Wars (1880-81 and, more seriously 1899-1902), the old Queen having died in 1901. 20,000 Boer women and children, it was reckoned, died in concentration camps, British troops having devastated the countryside in a terrible process.

Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley were all besieged and Banjo Paterson (1864-1941), the Australian poet, famous as the author of Waltzing Matilda, wrote a celebratory ballad, The Relief of Kimberley:

And French rode into Kimberley: the people cheered amain; The women came with tear-stained eyes to kiss his bridle-rein; The starving children lined the streets to raise a feeble cheer; The bells rang out a joyous peal to say, Relief is here!

The Boer war brought home to people in Britain something of the strain of governing the Empire - gunboats were not always successful in quelling the natives and South Africa seemed very far away, further even than Khartoum where General Gordon had died in 1885 at the hands of an Islamic messianic leader. But the blind patriotism generated by the distant South African war can be instanced by this music-hall song of the time:

We'll take the lion's muzzle off And let him have a go! Whisper to him Majuba Hill, And at his chain he'll pull! There's only room for one out there, And - that's - John Bull!

(In 1881 the Boers had won a victory at Majuba Hill).

Another song declared with utter abandon:

We don't know if the quarrel's right or wrong And hang it, we don't care!!

One cannot help wondering whether, in spite of the support given by the rest of the Empire to the cause, the Boer War was the beginning of the end of Imperial Power. Had it outlived its usefulness.9 The rest of Europe, jealous of British acquisitions in Africa, watched with interest. Germany, France, Holland and Portugal all had ambitions to annexe the lands of Africa. Meanwhile, disease seemed to cause more deaths than bullets and (as in 1914-1918) the people at home became sick of the war which from 1900 dragged on, guerrilla style.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), who turned to publishing his poems after the critics had rejected his novels, wrote one of the simplest and most moving of all war poems in Drummer Hodge, which tells us much of the intrinsic tragedy and futility of war, pictured in the helplessness of a drummer boy killed in the Boer War.

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined - just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around; And foreign constellations West Each night above his mound.

Young Hodge the Drummer never knew - Fresh from his Wessex home - The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.