Forgotten deeds of grace in wartime

Thomas Hardy by Jacques-Emile Blanche
1906 Tate N03580 10

In 1917, the English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy published a poetry collection titled Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verse. Sixteen of the final poems in that collection appear under the subtitle “Poems of War and Patriotism.” Hardy was seventy-four when the First World War broke out, and his poetry expresses his ambivalence about the conflict. He celebrated the “faith and fire” of the “Men Who March Away,” mourned for the Belgium refugees fleeing “ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end,” but wrote bitterly of national and political interests that had plunged the world into total war. 

Often When Warring

Often when warring for he wist not what,
An enemy-soldier, passing by one weak,
Has tendered water, wiped the burning cheek,
And cooled the lips so black and clammed and hot;

Then gone his way, and maybe quite forgot
The deed of grace amid the roar and reek;
Yet larger vision than the tongue can speak
He there has reached, although he has known it not.

For natural mindsight, triumphing in the act
Over the throes of artificial rage,
Has thereby muffled victory’s peal of pride,
Rended to ribands policy’s specious page
That deals but with evasion, code, and pact,
And war's apology wholly stultified.

1915.
—Thomas Hardy (from Moments of Vision)

Hardy’s poem contrasts one soldier’s simple act of mercy with the “artificial rage” that governments stir up as they send men to kill one another.  The poem argues that care for a suffering enemy is the “natural mindset,” which exposes the insincere concern for others that is used to justify power-hungry leaders’ codes, pacts, and dissembling policies. 

In Hardy’s vision of the battlefield, soldiers may not understand why they have been tasked to kill, yet often they instinctively feel compassion for others caught up in the same maelstrom. The selfless “deed of grace amid the roar and reek” demonstrates a “larger vision than the tongue can speak.” The act of offering water to a wounded enemy speaks louder than the shrill language of propaganda that calls men to arms.  

In the fall of 1916, Hardy visited “the large camp of some 5000 German prisoners in Dorchester” and the nearby “the English wounded in hospital.” Following the visit, he commented, 

At the German prisoners’ camp, including the hospital, operating room, etc., were many sufferers. One Prussian, in much pain, died whilst I was with him—to my great relief, and his own. Men lie helpless here from wounds: in the hospital a hundred yards off other men, English, lie helpless from wounds—each scene of suffering caused by the other!*

In February of 1917, Hardy wrote to the Secretary of the Royal Society of Literature, 

...nothing effectual will be accomplished in the cause of Peace till the sentiment of Patriotism be freed from the narrow meaning attached to it in the past (still upheld by Junkers and Jingoists) and be extended to the whole globe. On the other hand, that the sentiment of Foreignness—if the sense of a contrast be really rhetorically necessary—attach only to other planets and their inhabitants, if any. I may add that I have been writing in advocacy of those views for the last twenty years.**

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* Florence Emily Hardy, Later Years of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1930, p. 173.
** Florence Emily Hardy, Later Years of Thomas Hardy, Macmillan, 1930, p. 174.