The Man He Killed

Because Hardy elected not to specify the conflict that serves as the occasion for his poem, the poem stands as an indictment not of a specific war or battle but of war in general. It’s notable that the speaker is not a man of power, like a general or politician, but a commoner who has joined the war for lack of employment. In having a simple infantry soldier as the speaker, the poem captures the ground-level confusion of a man who was compelled to kill and is struggling to process why he was required to do something so heinous. Unlike the powerful, who have something to gain from war, the speaker and his victim are engaged in an unnecessary battle for survival, highlighting the theme of war’s pointlessness.

The poem offers no grand picture nor great crusade feeling to the battlefield encounter—just the close proximity of two ordinary men on a patch of the battlefield. The speaker is left with the nagging feeling that in killing that man, that “foe” (and Hardy’s argument compels putting the word in quotes), he has secured no great sense of heroics nor any sense that the killing served any purpose. The foe shot at him, so he shot back; his foe missed, but he did not—it all seems so random, so much short of the grandiose tactics and sweeping battle plans that glorify war. And tomorrow, when this unsettling reality hangs about the infantry soldier’s attempts to understand the implications of the killing, he will be back in the same harrowing consequence-free battle-scape—shooting and being shot at—on and on and on. Nothing is achieved by killing the enemy; nothing is gained by saving the speaker. In this, Hardy anticipates the provocative and always ironic search for some kind of cosmic meaning conducted a generation later by the self-styled existential Modernists. This sentence is a good one to demonstrate how his writing needs to be simplified and better structured away from run-on sentences and confusing syntax.