
Luke Batterham
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HARDY'S 'GOING OF THE BATTERY', COMMEMORATING TROOPS LEAVING DORCHESTER FOR THE BOER WAR. The printed head-note sets the scene of the poem: 'November 2, 1899. Late at night, in rain and in darkness, the 73rd Battery R.F.A. left Dorchester Barracks for the war in South Africa, marching on foot to the railway station, where their guns and horses were already entrained'. This poem was first published in the Graphic on 11 November 1899. Our proof is for the publication of the poem in War Songs, and Songs and Ballads of Martial Life, edited by John Macleay for the Canterbury Poets series, under the general editorship of William Sharp; with the note 'the fourth stanza appears for the first time'. Hardy explained that the poem 'was almost an exact report of the scene & expressions I overheard'. A revised version with an additional opening stanza was collected in Hardy's Poems of the Past and the Present (1901).
Michael Millgate describes the poem as 'not overtly hostile to the war as such but unromantically and even pathetically insistent upon the bleakness of the particular scene and the deprivation and anxiety of those left behind' adding that, by contrast, 'Hardy was distressed by the unqualified jingoism of Swinburne's sonnet "The Transvaal", published in The Times in mid-October, and wrote to George Gissing specifically to congratulate him on an article in which he had criticized Swinburne's final exhortation, "Strike, England, and strike home", for its irresponsible pandering to "the old blood-thirst"' (Thomas Hardy, pp. 401-2).