Victorian Verse - Drummer Hodge - Thomas Hardy

The Battle of Isandlwana (1879) -Charles Fripp  1885

Photograph of Drummer Boy writing home - Boer War

English Drummer Boy - George W Joy (1892)

The poem is set at the time of the Second Boer War (1899- 1902), the culmination of a long-running conflict between Britain, supported by forces from its Empire, and the Boers – descendants of the original Dutch settlers of southern Africa.  British settlement had been advancing for some years into Boer controlled areas, primarily to develop, initially, diamond mining, and then gold.  The incoming settlers or uitlanders, who were by now in a majority, demanded voting rights and representation, threatening the supremacy of the original Boers.  A failure to negotiate led to the declaration of war in October, 1899.

 

The Boer War is notorious for introducing two, tactical policies to modern warfare: scorched earth, whereby farms and fields were burned to prevent local support for the Boers, and the rounding up and internment of civilians, both black and white, in concentration camps.  The latter caused thousands of deaths from starvation and disease.  The war was originally supported by the British public, but as it dragged on, there was criticism both popularly and in Parliament, of the tactics used by the Army, under Lord Kitchener, and the effect on the civilian population.  The outcome of the war was the annexation of the disputed territories into the United Republic of South Africa in 1910, under British rule.

Hardy wrote a number of poems about war, as well as a novel, “The Trumpet Major” which had as its background the threatened invasion of England by the French during the Napoleonic Wars, a war which Hardy returned to in his epic poem “The Dynasts”.  As a child, he was surrounded by people who could remember those wars, and he lived long enough to see the start of the Great War in 1914, a century later, prompting him to write: ‘the world, having like a spider climbed to a certain height, seems slipping back to what it was long ago’.  His attitude was of general dismay at the loss of life, the incompetence of the Generals and the general futility.  There is an excellent website which puts Hardy’s poetry in the context of the War here.  Hardy was much admired by the poets of the Great War, particularly Sassoon, who recognised that he shared similar attitudes to War as they did.  There is a clear reference to “Drummer Hodge”, although the perspective and sentiment is very different, in one of the most famous poems of the early stages of the Great War, Rupert Brooke’s sonnet “The Soldier”, which contains the lines:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England.

A drummer boy was a (usually) non-combatant member of the regiment who played a drum as it advanced into battle, to help soldiers keep time marching and to signal manoeuvres.  He was not always a “boy” – i.e. younger than eighteen, when he could enlist as a soldier.  Some drummer boys were adults.  However, the practice of recruiting young boys into the army as drummers did not cease until after the Great War.  Drummer boys were popular subjects of Victorian paintings, which were often sentimental.  It is possible that in choosing the subject matter, Hardy was remembering an atrocity carried out during the Battle of Isandlwana during the Anglo-Zulu war of 1879 when the British attempted to colonise lands belonging to Zulu tribes in what is modern South Africa.  On returning to camp, part of the regiment discovered that it had been overrun by the Zulus in their absence and everyone killed.  The drummer boys were reportedly hung on hooks and disembowelled.  Research suggests that the youngest was 16.

The vast majority of soldiers killed in combat overseas were buried near to where they fell, and this continued until after the Great War and into the Second World War.  Due to sheer numbers and logistics, there was no way of transporting the bodies back home before they decomposed, particularly during a war.  The images of soldiers returning for burial in coffins draped in flags is a modern one, made possible numbers, changing patterns of warfare and air transport. 

The metre of the poem is regular alternating lines of iambic tetrametre and iambic trimetre, like a drumbeat, the insistent rhythm supported by the regular ababab rhyme scheme.  Thus the pathos of the subject matter is offset by this relentless structure, bringing a sense of irony and heightening the emotion. 

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.

The poem opens in media res – an action has happened before the poem starts, but the focus is on the aftermath.  The callousness of the war in its denial of individual humanity and identity is initially conveyed by the opening “They”.  Who are “They?”  Presumably, those who were his comrades up until the moment of his death.  The casual verb “throw”, used to describe the action of putting the body in the ground, and the lack of specifics as to where they throw him “in” serve to emphasise that “Drummer Hodge” is but one of many.  Even the surname, “Hodge”, which has been interpreted as Hardy giving the dead man the dignity of an identity, was an English equivalent of “John Doe” – the name given in the US to unknown dead males. 

The positioning of the word “rest” at the end of the line suggests an ironic pun – “rest” in the sense of “taking a break” and “rest” as in being “laid to rest”.  The enjambment makes the meaning clear, with its emphasis on “Uncoffined”, an archaic usage, perhaps suggesting that this war is like those that have gone before in its wastage of young lives.  The hyphenated “_just as found;” adds to the sense that this death has gone all but unnoticed – he is “found” dead; his actual dying is unseen and he dies alone.  He is quickly buried without ceremony and they move on.

There is no memorial to him except that provided by the natural landscape, of which he is becoming a part.  The use of the Afrikaans words “kopje” (hill) and “veldt” (open plains) show that he is buried in unfamiliar ground, many miles from his home, whilst unfamiliar stars wheel (“west” means move to the west) around him. 

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.

The young village boy, who left his village in Dorset for the first, and last time, to join the army, knew nothing about the country in which he has come to rest.  The “Karoo” is a semi-desert region in South Africa; the “Bush” the name given by the British colonists to wild, un-farmed country overseas; “loam” means earth.  All these features are a contrast with the English countryside that Hardy knew and loved.  His “Wessex”, in which his novels are set and where he lived, is an area roughly equated to Dorset and parts of Hampshire and Devon.  It is a landscape of rolling hills, heath, farmland and woods, a stark contrast to the hot, open savannah of parts of South Africa.  Hodge, an uneducated village boy, did not know that in the southern hemisphere the constellations are different.  He would have seen that they were “strange”, but not understood why.  “Gloam”, referring to twilight, here seems to be used as synonymous with gloom, meaning dark.

Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.

In spite of the indifference of the stars and the landscape to the body lying beneath them, he is becoming one with them as part of the natural world.  His “Northern”, as in Northern hemisphere, body will provide the nutrients for a tree to grow.  Hardy juxtaposes earth and the heavens, with the boy providing his “breast and brain”, gifts from the earth, to the tree which grows upwards to the heavenly bodies that “reign” above him.  There is also an extraordinary switch in perspective in the last two lines.  Up until now, the perspective has been that of Hodge; he has been looking at the stars and wondering why they are “strange”, it is his body that gives life to the tree.  But the compound adjective “strange-eyed” is from the stars perspective – they are looking down on him as he gazes back at them.  This reciprocation unites the two, bringing a kind of reconciliation and peace to his final resting place.