TY - JOUR
AU - Hunt,, Aeron
AB - Abstract Thomas Hardy’s 1880 text The Trumpet-Major, a historical novel set during the period of the Napoleonic invasion scares, is notable for its generic inconsistency and the strangeness of its plot and characters. This essay analyses the novel’s array of soldiers, sailors, members of the yeomanry focused on civil defence, and military veterans, arguing that Hardy’s novel’s formal strangeness grows in part out of its preoccupation with these examples of military figures at home – roles that, I suggest, focused a contemporary anxiety about social connectedness and the continuities and consistencies of life stories and identities. In highlighting the disquiet that these military figures register in the novel as well as outside it, in wider discussions of army reform and policies toward veterans and members of the military, I suggest that in Victorian accounts and in the ruptures registered in Hardy’s text we may find new insights into the languages of social connection – and their failures – that continue to vex us today. In the preface to the 1895–96 edition of his 1880 novel The Trumpet-Major, Thomas Hardy elaborates a vision of history that emphasizes, first and foremost, a personal and intimate sense of connection. ‘Lingering remains’ and ‘casual relics’ from the everyday encounters of Hardy’s ‘early childhood’ shape the novel’s portrait of life in the Wessex village of Overcombe, near the southern coast, during the invasion scares of the early years of the nineteenth century: ‘an outhouse door riddled with bullet-holes’ which had served for target practice; ‘worm-eaten shafts and iron heads of pikes’ to be used as weapons should Napoleon’s army make landfall; ‘fragments of volunteer uniform’.1 His imagination fired by this material evidence of the militarization of the landscape and community, Hardy incorporates multiple layers of personal memory to build his tale. ‘Testimony – oral and written’ formed its backbone, the preface claims, especially the ‘recollections of old persons well known to the author in childhood, but now long dead, who were eye-witnesses of those scenes’ (3). This interest in testimony ranged beyond the immediate, personal world of his childhood and its associated memories: on the sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, Hardy visited Chelsea Hospital, the home for aged veterans established by Charles II, to collect reminiscences from its inhabitants, thereby transforming the official calendrical event into an occasion for expansive, shared, personal memory. The experience was powerful enough for Hardy to repeat the visit around another Waterloo Day.2 The veterans who talked with Hardy on these commemorative occasions register the kind of intersubjective connection to national history that Lara Kriegel has argued typifies Victorian representations of veterans, distinguishing them from the focus on trauma – and the psychic ruptures it implies – which has come to dominate our post-First World War, post-Vietnam, post-Iraq and -Afghanistan perspective.3 Kriegel’s suggestion that scholars not allow the conceptual lens of trauma – crucial though it is to our full understanding of veterans’ concerns – to limit our interpretations is both historically astute and, I suggest, a corrective that may allow us to find new relevance in Victorian representations of veterans. The analysis of Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major that I offer in this essay takes Kriegel’s insight as a starting point. But rather than following her turn from trauma to connection, I suggest that Hardy’s novel offers an occasion to linger on the notion of rupture with the conceptual openness that Kriegel has urged: if we do not take psychic trauma as the necessary interpretive companion to rupture in accounts of military experience, what other kinds of social, political, historical, and narrative problems come into view? In fact, even as they articulate points of connection the novel’s framing devices emphasize ruptures of narrative and history. The very focus on testimony – the at-once ‘fragmentary’ and expansive information produced by garrulous ‘survivors’ and chatty ‘old persons’ (3) – necessitates narrative incompleteness: as the preface acknowledges, the novel must exclude and limit, since ‘if wholly transcribed’ the recollections of Hardy’s interlocutors ‘would have filled a volume thrice the length of “The Trumpet-Major”’ (3). And as Hardy’s preface gestures toward the newspaper stories, documents transcribed from museum visits, accounts of military practice and protocol, and drawings of historical costuming that fill the pages of his Trumpet-Major research notebook, it posits as supplement the ‘true sequence of events’ (3) that these forms are meant to ascertain, running alongside but not identical to the testimonial and material history unearthed by his personal connection.4 Hardy’s drawing for the front cover of the novel similarly highlights disruption as much as connection as it sketches the relation of military life to the ordinary life of the novel’s Wessex community (Figure 1). A group of tents occupies the top right corner of the image – the same army encampment whose arrival in the opening chapter sparks excitement in the village. A mill occupies the bottom left, owned and occupied, as we come to learn, by Miller Loveday, father to the eponymous trumpet-major, John, and to another son, Bob, who serves as a sailor in the merchant service and later in the navy. A road zigzags from one site to the other, but is cut through by a banner announcing the title. The whole scene is depopulated, save for the suggestion of a figure in the doorway of the mill, looking away from the camp, and for a figure on a post that stretches up into the title banner. This figure, we find out, is a weathervane, recognizable by its colour as a sailor, although ‘the paint [had] washed from his body so far as to reveal that he had been a soldier in red before he became a sailor in blue’ (19). Critics have highlighted the resonance of the weathervane for the novel’s romance plot; shifting with the winds, unstably referencing both soldier and sailor, it seems an apt symbol to preside over the text’s narrative juxtapositions of constancy, inconstancy, and impulsive desire.5 Contained within the frame of the title, apart from both camp and mill, the vane’s separation from the active, useful life of the village is underscored by its inutility: the winds do not catch it, and it does not display their direction. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hardy’s illustration for front cover of The Trumpet-Major (Smith, Elder, 1880). The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hardy’s illustration for front cover of The Trumpet-Major (Smith, Elder, 1880). The Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. From the layer-cake design of the front cover through the preface’s undermining of its own offer of connection to historical experience and narrative, a sense of rupture is foregrounded in The Trumpet-Major – and this sense of rupture, I argue, is an important element of Victorian thinking about the relationship of military experience to national life, one that complements the vision of connection that Kriegel has articulated, opening distinct historical, theoretical and formal concerns. In this essay I suggest that these elements of disconnection and rupture were coming into particular focus at the time the novel was being written, as a decade-long series of army reforms took gradual hold and preoccupied policymakers and commentators in the 1870s and early 1880s. The Cardwell reforms, as these were known, sought to reconcile the tensions between the needs of an imperial military and those of a liberal, capitalist economy. Reading Hardy’s representations of soldiers in and around Overcombe – returned veterans, militia members, and regular army camps – alongside contemporary discussions of the relation of the military to everyday life at home, we can see the literary work registering the limitations in the plots, identities, and forms that could be imagined to serve the negotiation of these tensions. The questions the novel engages – about social belonging and responsibility, dependence and independence, and continuity and change over the course of a life – are not easily resolved, and the novel’s unsettling of genre, plot, and character suggest a discomfort that persists. The meaning of the soldier at home, and the story he generates, remains difficult to tell. 1. SOLDIERS OLD AND YOUNG: THE BOUNDS OF SERVICE Following the ignominious 1881 defeat of the British at Majuba Hill, during the Anglo-Transvaal War, the Saturday Review fretted that the proper causes of the debacle were being lost by a failure to take a hard, painful measure of the state of the army. The paper diagnosed a significant problem, a full-scale deterioration in the discipline and character of the British fighting forces: ‘The British soldier of the past was not in the habit of being pushed by his officers into action . . . he was not in the habit of turning tail and running back from the comrades he had just come to reinforce’. ‘Throughout the whole of that miserable affair’, the paper continued, referring to the battle, ‘the sole redeeming feature was afforded by the old soldiers, who stood and behaved as old soldiers who know and trust each other always do’. True, the article allows, there were ‘young soldiers’ present when the British defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, still the principal scene for illustrating British military glory – and things worked out just fine there. But, the article asserts, ‘the discipline of those days was very different from what it is now’. And besides, it continues, in that earlier war there were ‘many old men in the ranks’ as well.6 What was to blame for the change – both for the prevalence of young soldiers and for their failures of discipline? The title of the article that I have been quoting – ‘Wrong-Headed Reform’ – gives the Saturday Review’s succinct answer. It was the ongoing series of reforms, begun about a decade earlier by Edward Cardwell, the Secretary of State for War, which aimed to navigate tensions among the demands of the homeland – for national defence, imperial rule, and cost effectiveness – and also the demands of home life – in particular, those of family and the labour market. The Cardwell reforms had a modernizing, professionalizing impulse: for instance, the sale of officers’ commissions was ended, and the tradition of flogging as a punishment was stopped. Most significant for my purposes, however, were changes to the terms of enlistment, the immediate inspiration for the categories of ‘young’ and ‘old’ soldiers to which the Saturday Review refers. These ‘young soldiers’ were not only deemed so because of their age, but also because they were less experienced, having signed up under new terms of service. The reforms shortened the enlistment period, which had formerly stretched on for many years, a length of service that had deterred potential recruits and left soldiers without skills and connections to home and employers upon finishing their terms. Under the new system, the first half of the enlistment period was to be spent in active service, with limits to how many years a soldier might expect to serve. After that, the reforms created a system of reserves, which the soldier entered for the second half of his service; these were intended to establish a force that was trained and ready in case of urgent national need, but that could be sustained without exorbitant cost, without hurting the bonds of family, without rendering soldiers forever unfit for other work, and without depriving the labour market of the workers it required. Those ‘old soldiers’ of the Saturday Review’s nostalgic fantasy were figures of total commitment, absolute service, like Tennyson’s emblematic soldier-heroes who followed orders to their doom. In fact, these old soldiers do not need to be ‘pushed’ into action by an officer; their wills and their actions are so completely in tune with comrades and nation that in this account we do not even need to hear of the blunder by Major General Colley, the British commander at Majuba Hill. There is no ‘“Charge for the guns!”’ moment to shine a spotlight on the fact that it might have been reasonable to hesitate, to ‘reason why’, to require an extra push.7 In the Majuba Hill old soldier fantasy, what has been left out of the scene of the battle, in effect, is the commander – or, imagined another way, the boss. And in both Tennyson’s poem and the Saturday Review, removed also are elements such as terms of enlistment, prohibitions on deserting, and punishments for doing so, or for disobeying. The fantasy of pure service obscures elements of contract but also compulsion: the elements that connected military service to the capitalist labour market (you get paid for your work, you have a supervisor who directs your labour), and the elements that made it utterly different. You cannot easily quit before your term of enlistment is up, or leave the workplace (the battle). For the deserting soldiers of Hardy’s story ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’, published almost a decade later, the punishment is the firing squad, their bodies displayed ‘“as an example to the men”’ (209). This vision of military service – almost unfathomable service, in Tennyson’s case – aligns with other Victorian accounts that took the soldier as a model of masculine identity that exceeds rationality, and in particular, economic rationality. In Thomas Carlyle’s Past and Present, for instance, a military analogy sketches a transformed principle of social connection – the Captains of Industry, leading a ‘noble Chivalry of Work’ that transcended ‘mere Supply-and-demand’ and the payment of ‘sixpence-a-day’. ‘How would mere redcoated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for you’, Carlyle asks, ‘if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on payment of the stipulated shillings, – and they discharge you on the morning of it!’8 But, strikingly, the shillings and sixpences and the calculations of obligation that hamper relations at this moment in Carlyle’s example are not really avoided in the end. In fact, they return in the very next sentence with an acknowledgement of responsibility that must be fulfilled – partly through an enduring and nearly religious promise, but also through more mundane means: the construction of a career track, for example, as well as institutions that embody a collective spirit while also require financing and administration. Carlyle goes on: ‘Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions, rigorous lasting covenant on the one side and on the other, are indispensable even for a hired fighter’.9 Carlyle’s invocation of the Chelsea Pensioners as emblems of mutual obligation and ‘covenant’ help to place the veterans with whom Hardy spoke within a long tradition of discussions over the ways soldiers were connected to society they served, and vice versa. It is a tradition that continues to this day in representations of the hospital and its inhabitants, who feature as both revered symbols and tourist kitsch, purchasable in teddy-bear form at the hospital gift shop. Occupying a building designed by Christopher Wren, the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, was authorized by Royal Warrant in 1682 to house veterans ‘broken by age or war’; about 300 pensioners live there today, representing, as the hospital website asserts, the ‘iconic faces of the UK’s veteran community’, having sought out the ‘excellent accommodation, comradeship and the highest standards of care for veterans, in recognition of their loyal service to the Nation’. The institution proclaims openness: ‘Any former soldier of the British Army over the age of 65, who is facing spending their advanced years alone, can apply for residence as an In-Pensioner’.10 In practice, of course, both today and over the course of its history the number of in-pensioners has been limited compared to the number of potential residents, and the community (both among veterans and between veterans and their nation) that this website highlights in its vision of mitigating loneliness and supplying care would have been circumscribed. Still, the hospital administered the out-pensions of veteran soldiers as well and thus had a broader practical and symbolic reach, while other veterans experienced community care and connection through support from local institutions. But as the historian Caroline Louise Nielsen has noted, up to 1807, at least, pensions were a recruiting promise more than an achieved benefit; both out- and in-pensions through the Chelsea administration were neither guaranteed nor stable (veterans had to keep appearing to prove and re-prove their eligibility); and admission requirements that were far less welcoming than those on today’s website discouraged many soldiers from applying for residence at all. In 1807 military pensions became guaranteed based on a calculation of number of years of service; but fears that the army was being softened and demoralized by the guarantee led to a repeal of this provision in 1826, at which point pensions became once again more personalistic, subject to favouritism, a ‘gift of the state and not a legal entitlement’, to use Nielsen’s terms.11 In other words, the extravagant claims of comradeship and care that Carlyle invoked through the military example were, institutionally speaking, far more contingent than his usage implied – and in any case, there was no escaping the financial terms that they were meant to transcend in serving as models for reimagining social connection: pensions and hospitals and promotions require money. Two decades later, the relationship between the military and the market came into focus again in John Ruskin’s Unto This Last, which looked at the relationship between soldier and commander (along with domestic servants and masters) to exemplify the principle of ‘affection’ that he suggested was missing from political economists’ restrictive focus on self-interest. Ruskin begins by emphasizing the difference between military work and the capitalist labour market: a soldier, like a domestic servant ‘is engaged at a definite rate of wages, for a definite period’ but a workman’s wages are ‘variable according to the demand for labour, and with the risk of being at any time thrown out of his situation by chances of trade’.12 At the same time, however, Ruskin also takes seriously the fact that the soldier’s work is work – a ‘trade,’ even – a trade whose violent terms make it hard to form a ‘reasonable’ comparison with other, ordinary kinds of employment, ‘for the soldier’s trade, verily and essentially, is not slaying but being slain’.13 Ruskin crystallizes the ideal of the ‘old soldiers’ at Majuba Hill and the remarkable fighters at Waterloo when he highlights self-sacrifice as the soldier’s’ ‘trade’ – his ultimate service to the State. But the term presents difficulties as it turns that self-sacrificial ideal into a version of everyday labour. In The Trumpet-Major, as in many actual military experiences, the reasons for enlisting in military service are varied: a desire for more adventure than a career managing a family mill can provide; impressment – or the wish to avoid impressment and to exercise more control over the terms of one’s service; the appeal of military costumes; pay, purely and simply, as witnessed by the presence of foreign mercenary soldiers. ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’ further underscores the inadequacy of reading soldiers’ motivations through a singular lens. Far from motivated by patriotic zeal, Matthäus Tina, the Hussar of the title, was pressed into service; he is not Hanoverian and, as a native of a town that is not at war with France, his service in the ‘King’s German Legion’ is thoroughly disconnected from personal, nationalist commitment (195; and see 201). If the spirit of self-sacrifice in a greater cause is not uppermost in the decision to enlist, should these less exalted reasons for serving colour the way one reads the soldier and the obligations his community has to him? Is self-sacrifice nullified if he comes home unscathed by injury or illness, still a young man? Can heroic sacrifice be measured on an ordinary scale of labour and reward? These were questions that lurked in discussions of soldiers as army reformers set about remaking the army according to a more professionalized model, and with an effort to more formally account for the flow between military and civilian life. Was military experience to be understood simply as a stage in employment, or did it fundamentally transform the person’s relationship to his employer – which was, after all, a state and a nation? Was the connection of soldier to his home community – national or local – an ordinary economic one? Or was there a new way to imagine that connection, and thus the players within it? 2. ‘ALL RANKS AND DESCRIPTIONS OF ENGLISHMEN’: AT HOME IN THE TRUMPET-MAJOR The soldierly ideals of Ruskin and Carlyle, and the ‘old soldiers’, of Majuba Hill might be imagined as part of the appeal to the audience for the recruiting poster, ‘Address to All Ranks and Descriptions of Englishmen,’ that Hardy claims to have ‘transcribed from an original copy in a local museum’ for inclusion in his novel (5). ‘No man’s service is compelled’, the poster insists as it urges local men to volunteer for different defence forces and tasks. ‘If the Love of true Liberty and honest Fame has not ceased to animate the Hearts of Englishmen, Pay, though necessary, will be the least Part of your Reward’ (166). The Trumpet-Major’s tale of a range of ranks and descriptions of Englishmen and women at the height of invasion panic explores the risks and the possibilities of liberty as well as the dynamics of service and reward, broadly conceived, mixing characters, plots, and situations that blend, often maddeningly, commedia dell’arte and romance traditions with historical – and Hardyesque – realism.14 The story focuses on the romantic triangle formed by Anne Garland, a painter’s daughter, and the two sons of the Wessex miller, Miller Loveday, with whom she and her widowed mother lodge, and whom her mother marries early in the book. Bob Loveday, the sailor in the merchant service with whom Anne had contrived an early, secret, relationship, returns home unexpectedly and considers taking over the mill from his father. His brother John – who loves Anne and courts her, successfully for a while – is the trumpet-major, a regular soldier in a company of dragoons who set up camp at the edge of town. Anne must also fend off another suitor, Festus Derriman, the awful nephew of the local landowner, who schemes to gain control of his uncle’s property, threatens Anne with sexual violence, betrays Bob to a press-gang, and finally winds up in romantic, scheming league with an actress (and implied prostitute), who had formerly tempted Bob away from Anne on his return to England from his naval adventures. Festus is decidedly villainous, with a violent edge that tends to overshadow the comic aspects of his boorishness. He is also a member of the yeomanry, a volunteer cavalry force that was meant to protect the local community. Bob escapes the press gang but, after a period of vacillation between ‘the influence of Anne’s eyes’ (237) and patriotic guilt, he finally decides (in a conversation with Captain Hardy, Admiral Nelson’s captain and the novelist’s relative) to volunteer for the navy. Bob serves heroically with Nelson and Captain Hardy on the Victory, is promoted to lieutenant, throws Anne over a second time for a new dubious woman, and finally asks his much more worthy brother, John, to watch over Anne and ‘guide her mind back’ to him when he realizes his mistake (274). John does, sacrificing his own desires, and Anne agrees to marry Bob, who in the meantime has briefly befriended and de-friended Festus, testifying to his poor moral judgment and his fickleness alike. John, the trumpet-major, who has loved Anne constantly, remains true even until he falls, with minimal fanfare in the novel’s last line, ‘upon one of the bloody battle-fields of Spain’ (301). This plot sketch gives a glimpse of the novel’s refusal of narrative conventions and of morally, generically, and sentimentally satisfying resolutions. As Linda Shires has noted, it offers neither a heroic war story nor a satisfying marriage plot; it mixes comic figures out of stage pantomime with occasional pathos, but never a fully realized individual tragedy.15 But in evoking the painful ironies of history and human character and the failures of standard or singular forms to represent them, the novel registers a more widely ranging contemporary unease that comes into focus in discussions of the military’s relationship to home, both in the novel and outside it. Imagining connection – connection through work or service to a sustaining community, or connection to a continuous personal history and identity – is a fraught endeavour, captured in the novel’s representative military figures. As The Trumpet-Major highlights different positions along a spectrum that measures degrees of connection to the home community – volunteers, yeomanry, potential recruits, regular army dragoons, foreign soldiers, and press gangs, as well as veterans, to whom I will return – its abrupt and even disorienting shifts in plot, characterization, genre, and tone highlight the gaps and incongruities that condition the lives of characters and their community. Following the discontinuities of the front cover, the novel opens with a scene in which the separation of the military camp from the ordinary life of the town is emphasized. Seeing the soldiers laying down marks where their tents are to be placed, Anne’s mother goes so far as to wonder if the activity indicates, not the establishment of national defences, but rather the long-expected invasion: ‘Can it be the French?’ she asks (15). The excitement, the novelty, and the sexual energy that are activated with the arrival of the camp of soldiers – and the implied potential for danger that accompanies them – will not be particularly surprising to anyone familiar with, to take perhaps the most famous example, the antics of Austen’s Lydia Bennet, not to mention the longings the camp inspires in Phyllis Grove, heroine of ‘The Melancholy Hussar’, whose romantic vacillations replay Anne’s inconstancy. But Hardy’s novel takes this common trope in an unusual direction; in fact, far from representing a menace on par with Napoleon, the camp itself turns out to be a relatively unthreatening presence, largely outside the main action of the novel and remarkably tame in general. Instead, the strongest possibility of threat – sexual and otherwise – is displaced onto characters who are both at home and in the military, or connected to it in some way. For instance, when Miller Loveday holds a party, inviting the soldiers from the camp, the old veterans in the village, and Anne and her mother, it is the regular soldiers who are the best guests: a soldier from the Foreign Hussars performs his national dance, to satisfy a comrade’s request, while Sargent Stanner, one of the dragoons, sings a cleaned-up version of a satirical song, omitting an offending verse ‘out of respect to the ladies’ (37). It is the arrival of Festus that introduces the risqué lyrics into the scene, causing everyone discomfort. In other words, while foreign soldiers are good, sociable partygoers, the character who belongs to the yeomanry – associated with an old English tradition of defensive service to the local lord and community – exemplifies the hyper-sexualized, competitive, and aggressive masculinity that is often associated with soldiers; the defying of the standard xenophobic Victorian expectations in this detail underscores how strongly the danger is linked to this close association – this near collapse – of the military and the at-home. Perceiving an insult when the miller does not immediately recognize him because he is wearing ‘soldier’s clothes’, as if in disguise, Festus blusters about the offence this gives to his ‘“soldier’s honour”’, before becoming disconcerted by the presence of the regulars, whose claim to military honour and costume is beyond dispute. While the miller tries to calm him with the comment, ‘“everybody’s a soldier nowadays”’, the rivalry Festus feels toward the dragoons lingers. And when that rivalry gets mapped onto his erotic interest, Festus seeks to boost himself by turning to his ordinary, at-home economic identity, as the presumptive heir to the property of his Uncle Benjy, the owner of Overcombe Hall: when he hears that John, the trumpet-major dragoon, is favoured by Anne, he grinds his teeth and asserts ‘“Then ’tis my enemy. . . . But I am a rich man, and he’s poor, and rides the King’s horse while I ride my own!”’ (72). The aura of sexual menace that Festus initiates at the party continues, tempered but by no means dissipated by the slapstick that accompanies it. Over the course of the novel Festus stalks Anne, attempts to kiss her against her will, and finally tries to break into a cottage in which she has barricaded herself. She escapes only by frightening his horse, clinging to its back and risking serious injury as it gallops, uncontrolled, to what she hopes will be safety. I do not suggest here that the novel attributes Festus’s wickedness to his status as a yeoman, non-regular soldier; he is repellent enough in many attributes that his villainy seems overdetermined. But other figures in the text build up a pattern of which Festus is merely the foremost example: the sense that the places where soldiering touches home generate troubles for the novel’s masculine subjects. Think, for instance, of Bob’s repeated ill-advised and short-lived engagements: returning home from a triumphant national naval victory, the sailor-hero is as unsteady as when he returns from merchant seafaring, with a new fiancée at each disembarkation. Even Bob’s voluntary enlistment, the moment at which he chooses to move from home to naval service – which could be an occasion for the character to fully inhabit a heroic narrative and a connection to the nation – is hedged and qualified with uncomfortable, home-bound psychological and characterological motivation. Taking leave of his family and Anne, his supposed love, Bob’s brave speech finally announces his distance from the patriotic call-to-service that his decision might imply, and underscores instead that his choice stems from a desire to surprise his doubting community with an assertion of independent will and capacity for responsibility: ‘The press-gang has been here, and though I showed them that I was a free man, I am going to show everybody that I can do my duty’ (245). Even as the novel moves to culminate the love plot, after Bob’s second return, his second quick engagement, and yet another jilting of Anne, Bob mimics Festus’s sexual coercions as he attempts to win Anne’s affections once more, ‘imprison[ing]’ and ‘enslav[ing]’ her waist and hands as she uncomfortably watches a fireworks display with her family, resisting and trying to keep Bob’s actions unnoticed (290, 291). As plot expectations unfold and unravel, and as characters abruptly shift gear, in other words, the figures who represent the greatest enmeshment of military and ordinary home life take on an outsized burden of narrative, cultural, and moral baggage. In this, Hardy’s novel registers a common preoccupation with those who debated army reform, as they grappled with the question of how and whether different experiences of service, commitment, and labour, over time and in the life course of a single individual or character, could articulate with each other and with everyday life. In the novel’s final scene, as the characters gather at the mill the night before John’s departure with the dragoons on the way to the Peninsula, Hardy gestures toward the contemporary debates: it was a period when romance had not so greatly faded out of military life as it has done in these days of short service, heterogeneous mixing, and transient campaigns; when the esprit de corps was strong, and long experience stamped noteworthy professional characteristics even on rank and file. (300) But the novel that has led up to this point has not given much reason to broaden that celebration of the military spirit of earlier days, to see it as animating a professionalizing, elevating, communitarian potential in English communities, at home. Instead it has highlighted friction and rupture. Army reformers hoped to create a system in which military life and civilian life could be more smoothly integrated, with the demands of each fulfilled as men passed between roles. An 1884 article by Frederick Roberts in The Nineteenth Century, entitled ‘Free Trade in the Army’, complained that reform had managed to achieve nothing of the sort for the classes from which most recruits came. At the post-reform length of service, Roberts complains, artisans were ‘set adrift’ after seven years, with a £21 lump sum, the chance of being called up away from work for five- or sixpence a day, and rusty skills and foregone training and wages.16 The labourer, Roberts suggests, has become accustomed to new scenes and new sorts of people and is liable to be discontented forever. The ‘Street Arab’, after seven years of ‘decent living, decent clothes, decent companionship, and enforced education’ does not want to return to his former life, but he is not likely to have other options. ‘No respectable civil employment is offered to him by the State; he has no home, he knows no trade; dig he cannot, to beg he is ashamed, but there is nothing left for him to do’.17 And on top of this he may he may face prejudice from employers because of his reserve status. Roberts argues that the ‘public obligation’ toward soldiers ‘cannot cease with a dole in the shape of reserve pay’, and he recommends offering government jobs, in part to set an example for private employers so that service may not be entirely cut off from the masculine endeavour of market employment.18 Service to the nation incurs an ‘obligation’, in Roberts’s view, and that obligation justifies turning to the state to step in as the ‘heroic actor’, to use Zarena Aslami’s term, that can re-create a subject in his social matrix and even modify the economic context in which he must take part.19 As The Trumpet Major traces the relationship of military and home life, though, no such possibility arises. John is the character who comes closes to Carlyle’s and Ruskin’s ideals of committed, self-sacrificing soldier-labourers: he rides the King’s horse; offers his death to the State; and it is his job, his trade, as a regular soldier. But he does so as a character whose service in many ways is marked by its separation from community life – in the front cover drawing, in the conditions of his enlistment, and even in the poignant circumstances of his death abroad. John is alone in the novel in managing to extend a principle of ‘service’ into his community, as he sacrifices his own love for Anne to smooth the way for his brother. But this service is thoroughly ironized, as Bob and Anne, changeable and flawed, seem unworthy of it. The possibility that John represents for integrating that service-labour at home – and for realizing its transcendent value through connection to others – falls short. If the novel starts to imagine a category of masculine service-labour, however circumscribed, it also shows how this new imagining is foreclosed. It is the novel’s veterans who demonstrate this foreclosure. Had John’s fate been other than it was, he might have ended up like the resonantly named Simon Burden, described as a ‘pensioner’ and a ‘dazed veteran who had fought at Minden’ during the Seven Years’ War, or like Simon’s somewhat younger companion Corporal Tullidge (32, 183). And these veterans insistently remind the reader that the effort of army reformers to imagine a smooth connection between army service and an ordinary course of masculine life and labour would be troubled. At the miller’s party the veterans introduce unease even before Festus enters singing. The ‘spectacle’ of Corporal Tullidge’s maimed head – solicited for Anne’s entertainment by one of the party guests – generates extreme discomfort (33). His wounded arm is offered as another party trick, and the offer to feel the bones, ‘loose as a bag of ninepins’, drives Anne to flee (34). If the broken bodies of the veterans insist on pain that the village both wants and does not want to see – the corporal’s head is the subject of ‘strange stories’ in town (33), a thing with which to frighten children – their experience bears no fruit at home. Simon Burden, who spends his days drinking at the Duke of York pub, is introduced as a ‘military relic,’ stammering and hesitating as Anne asks for information about what the soldiers are doing as they build their camp, unable to provide even that service (15). The two veterans drink ‘patriotically’ and reminisce as they watch over the beacon that is to signal the anticipated invasion, but they fail at their task, misreading instructions and activity on the coast, hearing guns that are not sounding, and causing a panic. Though represented in a comic vein, this false alarm poses the most serious threat to the community in the novel: the fears and the weapons that the characters gather to protect themselves are real, and the veterans have been transformed from protectors to menace. In fact they cannot even get jobs within the narrative economy of the novel: the testimonial, memorializing service that older veterans were (and are) often called on to supply is refused. The ‘casual relics’ of the preface – the physical objects and marks in the landscape and stories from unnamed past acquaintances that set Hardy on a path of inquiry and eventually storytelling – are more resonant than the ‘military relic’ Simon Burden, who a short chapter later is unable to provide any kind of memory, any kind of useful account, to Anne and her mother. Far from providing narrative help, as this new use of the term ‘relic’ recalls the preface, Simon’s inadequacy winds up making things even worse, undermining the earlier testimony that seemed to offer an access to historical truth: what kind of connection do relics really offer? In Hardy’s later epic, poetic, Napoleonic drama The Dynasts, a similar dynamic is at work in the reference to the veteran of Waterloo, known to Hardy in his youth (and perhaps one of his Chelsea Hospital interviewees), who appears in a footnote to a particularly hazy moment in that notably dizzying text: the image of a ‘night-mist’ curtaining the scene after the battle of Waterloo, as the Spirit of the Years describes the non-advance of grand geopolitical narratives as ‘Europe’s wormy dynasties rerobe / Themselves in their old gilt, to daze anew the globe’.20 In this and other footnotes mentioning conversations with veterans, memories of picturesque uniforms, and so forth we may be tempted to read a point of true historical contact and satisfying concreteness. But these are footnotes, first of all, not part of the main text – and they may not even seem terribly connected to the main text’s language. Here is the footnote to the Spirit of the Years and the night-mist: One of the many Waterloo men known to the writer in his youth, John Bentley of the Fusileer Guards, used to declare that he lay down on the ground in such weariness that when food was brought him he could not eat it, and slept till next morning on an empty stomach. He died at Chelsea Hospital, 187-, aged eighty-six.21 The veteran’s footnote mixes fact (dates), personal reminiscence, and recounted bodily memories – a sharp divergence from the metaphorical, poetic spirit’s-eye perspective where the footnote callout falls. It is too strong, perhaps, to say that the text offers no link between the veteran’s experience and the grand historical and fantastic narrative; the need to hold both scales of experience simultaneously, as Anna Henchman has argued, to distrust the privileging of the purely personal, or of the global scan may be part of Hardy’s epistemological point.22 But even so, the effect of the contrasting aestheticized and reportorial registers is to highlight continued rupture in the veteran’s experience of war, more than well-knit befores, durings, and afters. Carlyle and Ruskin and army reformers, all in their own ways, were trying to imagine smoothing out those ruptures between the intensities of military experience and the mundanities of ordinary experience – whether by re-envisioning work and social connection as infused with the transcendent spirit of service that could be thought to characterize the military ideal, or, conversely, re-envisioning military service to align it with the normal rationalities of the working world. In Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major, the representation of soldiers and sailors at home suggests how heavy an imaginative lift this is. The novel’s representation of John, who ‘rides the King’s horse’ – emphatically serving and supported and paid by the State – could provide a new vision. But instead, to invoke terms used by Bruce Robbins, no new narrative of upward mobility and the common good coalesces around the ideas of service and the state.23 Where soldiers and sailors were military workers – engaged in service conceived simultaneously as labour – once their wars are over, those who survive are merely unemployed, and in the terms the novel presents, there remains no scope to incorporate them as whole, effective economic and social agents. For Simon Burden and Corporal Tullidge, to ride the King’s horse now, owning nothing themselves, would merely signal the dependence that Festus scorned in the dragoons – minus the fight, the work. Veterans’ bodies register violence and vulnerability; they age. They shift categories, moving from bearers of strength, to burdens that must be borne. Pensions for older veterans were at least imaginable and mentionable for Hardy and in the wider conversation; the ‘old soldier’ could stand as a paradigmatic veteran (if still a Burden) needing support at the end of his life’s narrative. Harder to realize was the younger veteran, the man who returned from service having lost skills and employment. Local volunteers, the yeomanry, and even the patriotic regular recruit – all of them contain the seeds of a rupture, actual or potential, that is not easily rewoven into the fabric of everyday home life. If the army reformers of the period – some of them at least – come to envision the state as an actor that can address the pains of veterans with pensions, with civil service jobs, with training and education, seeing their service as a mode of action and engagement that needed to be worked back into home life, Hardy’s novel, highlighting the distance that will need to be travelled, the new plots, genres, narratives, and frameworks of identity that will need to be imagined as the old ones falter, is much more dubious. The lived experiences of soldiers vary widely across history and across space according to the specific social, technological, economic, and professional contexts of their work; the geopolitical contexts of the wars they fight; and their relation to the nations that they serve. Nonetheless, a 2013 NBC News article about a veteran of the US’s recent wars caught my eye for its Victorian echoes. It told the story of one ex-Marine, an Iraq veteran named Eric Swinney, whose history traces what have come to be familiar veterans’ narratives: traumatic events and actions during war; alcohol abuse at home; panic attacks and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder; job loss. Living in a Howard Johnson hotel that had been converted to housing for homeless veterans with the support of a non-profit group that receives federal funding, Swinney voiced an ambivalent perspective on his years in the military and out. Soldiering provided opportunity, both positive and negative: ‘“I had seen some stuff that I probably would have never seen before in life had I not been in Marine Corps, some good stuff and some stuff I just don’t care to think about anymore”’.24 But in the article’s closing words, Swinney resists being cast in a narrative of dependence, defining himself instead through an identity that, he insists, he shares with his fellow citizens: the identity of a worker. ‘“I hate it when people feel entitled to stuff. Being a Marine helped me in a lot of ways. Yes, it had its drawbacks. But what it all boils down to is we’re average Americans, like everybody else. We just had more dangerous jobs. . . . Nobody owes me anything”’.25 While I would not want to minimize the significance of trauma in his own account – panic, alcoholism, the things he saw that he wishes he had not – it is the last part of Swinney’s comment that I want to highlight. Swinney rejects entitlement and dependence, insisting that his military activity be viewed as a ‘job’ – albeit a more risky one than most – rather than a service for which the nation still owes him a debt. Implicit in the suggestion that his identity as a worker connects him to ‘average Americans’ is the suggestion that to think of himself otherwise – as one who served, whose actions made him a different kind of economic subject than an ordinary paid labourer, one who is now both entitled and dependent – would cast him out of the national norm. What Swinney’s comments suggest is required is a model that can incorporate military experience as part of a broader life story and identity, without seeing the soldier at home as an anomaly, or a danger, or a burden in a social context in which connection is principally viewed through the economic lens of the marketplace. This was not yet imaginable in Hardy’s text; the bipartisan applause for President Obama in his 2015 State of the Union Address when he urged ‘every CEO in America’ to ‘hire a veteran’ – in other words, calling on the private sector, without the government example that Roberts proposed – suggests that we, perhaps even more than Hardy and his contemporaries, still struggle to imagine it.26 DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1 Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major: A Tale, ed. by Linda M. Shires (1880; London: Penguin, 1997), p. 3. Subsequent references will be noted in parentheses. 2 See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 170, for a discussion of Hardy’s visits to Chelsea Hospital. 3 See Lara Kriegel, ‘Living Links to History, or, Victorian Veterans in the Twentieth-Century World’, Victorian Studies, 58 (2016), 289–301. The place of trauma in Victorian representations of war and its veterans is complex. Jill L. Matus’s study Shock, Memory, and the Unconscious in Victorian Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), for instance, working with the retrospective knowledge that ‘the effects of war were critical to the Freudian development of trauma as a concept’, looks to ‘Victorian responses to war’ to see if they ‘yield a particularly Victorian discourse about the nature of overwhelming shock on the psyche’ (47). Fascinatingly, the picture that emerges from her survey is that war plays a relatively unimportant role in the development of Victorian discourses of shock or trauma avant-la-lettre. In accounts of the Crimean War and the Sepoy Rebellion, she notes, there is ‘relatively little overt discussion of psychological or emotional injury’ (51); and though there is more discussion of emotional and psychological disturbance in contemporary accounts of the experience of French soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War, Matus’s study suggests that while trauma might be read back into some soldiers’ stories by historians to whom the concepts of trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, and so forth are available, they do not tend to emerge within the Victorian accounts themselves. Of course, this is not to say that Victorian soldiers and veterans did not experience emotional or psychic injuries; without a symptom language for trauma, Matus suggests, it is possible that these experiences either did not present the same way or were not recognized. Christopher Herbert’s readings of the Indian Mutiny as a trauma within Victorian fiction stands as a counterexample, in which the concept of trauma is powerfully employed in analysing the literature of Victorian war; see War of No Pity: The Indian Mutiny and Victorian Trauma (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 4 See Hardy, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. by Richard H. Taylor (Columbia, NY: Columbia University Press, 1979). For a useful discussion of the novel’s representation of ‘striated and multidimensional’ historical time, see Ruth M. McAdams, ‘Clothing Napoleonic History in Vanity Fair and The Trumpet-Major’, Victorian Studies, 60 (2017), 9–28. The militarized landscape and the testimonial framework continued to serve Hardy as devices for probing the discontinuities of historical truth, returning in the next decade in the short story ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’, whose narrator walks across turf that displays ‘traces’ of the ‘midden-heaps’ of the cavalry camp, while he catches ‘echoes of many characteristic tales’, which ‘still linger about . . . in more or less fragmentary form’ (Hardy, ‘The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion, ‘The Distracted Preacher’ and other Tales, ed. by Susan Hill (London: Penguin, 1979), 192, 193). Here, the value of testimony as truth is called into question: the story of a homesick soldier in the German Legion who falls in love with a lonely young woman, who lives with her father near camp and who has apparently been abandoned by her betrothed, comes from the lips of the now aged woman herself, explicitly as a rebuttal to the ‘fragments of her story’ that had got abroad and that were ‘most unfavourable to her character’ (193). The landscape, too, proves recalcitrant as a connection to historical truth: though the narrator hears, as he walks, ‘the old trumpet and bugle calls, the rattle of the halters’, the voices that he imagines, speak in ‘foreign tongues’ that he cannot understand (192). 5 See for instance, Linda M. Shires, introduction to The Trumpet-Major, xxix. 6 ‘Wrong-Headed Reform’, Saturday Review, 7 May 1881, 589. 7 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Tennyson’s Poetry, ed. by Robert W. Hill, Jr., 2nd edn (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 307. 8 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present, ed. by Richard D. Altick (1843; New York, NY: New York University Press, 1965), p. 270. 9 Carlyle, Past and Present, p. 270. 10 ‘About Us’, <http://www.chelsea-pensioners.co.uk/about-the-rhc> [accessed 20 May 2018]. 11 Caroline Louise Nielsen, ‘Disability, Fraud, and Medical Experience at the Royal Hospital of Chelsea in the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815, ed. by Kevin Linch and Matthew McCormack (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), p. 183–201. 12 John Ruskin, ‘Unto This Last’ and Other Writings, ed. by Clive Wilmer (London: Penguin, 1985), p. 172. 13 Ruskin, ‘Unto This Last’, p. 175. 14 For discussions of the generic mixing of The Trumpet-Major, see Shires’s introduction, as well as Richard Nemesvari, ‘The Anti-Comedy of The Trumpet-Major’, Victorian Newsletter, 77 (1990), 8–13. 15 See Shires, introduction to The Trumpet-Major. 16 Frederick Roberts, ‘Free Trade in the Army’, The Nineteenth Century, 15 (June 1884), 1062. 17 Roberts, ‘Free Trade in the Army’, 1063. 18 Roberts, ‘Free Trade in the Army’, 1073. 19 Zarena Aslami, The Dream Life of Citizens: Late Victorian Novels and the Fantasy of the State (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 88. 20 Hardy, The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars, in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes (London, 1908), 3:343. 21 Hardy, The Dynasts, 3:343n. 22 See Anna Henchman, The Starry Sky Within: Astronomy and the Reach of the Mind in Victorian Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 23 See Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). 24 Bill Briggs, ‘Can Washington Get Vets Off the Streets? Tens of Thousands Homeless Despite Billions in Spending’, NBC News.com, 29 March 2013 <https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/in-plain-sight/can-washington-get-vets-streets-tens-thousands-homeless-despite-billions-v17503141> [accessed 21 May 2018]. 25 Briggs, ‘Can Washington Get Vets Off the Streets?’ 26 Barack Obama, ‘Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address’, 20 January 2015 <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/01/20/remarks-president-state-union-address-january-20–2015> [accessed 21 May 2018]. © 2019 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Military Relics: Soldiers and Sailors at Home in Thomas Hardy’s The Trumpet-Major
JF - Journal of Victorian Culture
DO - 10.1093/jvcult/vcy075
DA - 2019-12-06
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/military-relics-soldiers-and-sailors-at-home-in-thomas-hardy-s-the-gzicNh0DDA
SP - 521
VL - 24
IS - 4
DP - DeepDyve
ER -