Byron and the Language of War

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BYRON AND THE LANGUAGE

OF WARMICHAEL WILLIAMS

a

aUniversity of South Africa

Published online: 30 Jan 2009.

To cite this article:MICHAEL WILLIAMS (1998) BYRON AND THE LANGUAGE OF

WAR, English Studies in Africa, 41:1, 29-40, DOI: 10.1080/00138399808691264

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BYRON AND THE LANGUAGE

OF

WAR

MICHAEL W ILLIAMS

They Came of that Same Stubborn Stock that

At Runnymede for Freedom W ithout Fear Stood

Wherefore They Gave the Treasure of Their Blood

To Stablish Freedom H ere

he words are by Rudyard Kipling, and they appear on the Anglo-Boer

War M onum ent in Graham stown. Almost a cen tury after the war, many

T

re likely to find these lines more than a little troubling . The implied link

with Runnymede, and therefore with the signing of Magna

Carta,

s surely at

once complacent and spurious. For what freedom and for whom

-

were the

men of Grahamstown and the District of Albany fighting? Even if this is a

reference to the rather doubtful question of the rights of the Uitlanders, then it

must a lso be conceded that there were other, larger, altogether less pious and

altogether more materially substantial motives for extending the boundaries of

the British Empire.

Of course, it is true

-

and this can apply, to some extent, to much war poetry

in general that the rhetoric

of

war memorials is a special and very public

sub-genre, one in which large and imprecise gestures are made to celebrate the

dead and console the living: gestures which, a hundred years later, might seem

a little ridiculous. Nor is it only in the harsh light of post-coloniality that the

motives and the achievements of the war may be q uestioned. Such questions

were being posed by many writers at the time of the war, and a year after it ended

Kipling himself wro te, in The Settler

209),

of the need to

atone

For the set folly and the red breach

And the black waste of it all

.

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30

ENGLISH STUDIES 41. .98

Indeed, while there were many jingoistic outbursts in favour of the war, there

wa s also opposition to it. As M alvern van Wyk Smith has argued, there was a

clear emergence of the kind of war poetry which we have come to associate

almost exclusively with World War

I

(ix).

Van Wyk Smith notes, of course, that the same dichotomy between pro- and

anti-war poetry wa s produced by the First world War. Rupert Brooke began his

1914

sonnet-sequence w ith a poem entitled, with an uncertain irony, Peace:

Now , God be thanked

Who

has matched us with His hour

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

With hand ma de sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

To

turn, as swim mers into cleanness leaping

Th e poem en ds with the lines:

Naugh t broken sav e this body, lost but breath;

Noth ing to sha ke the laughing hearts long peace there

But on ly agony , and that has ending;

And the worst friend and enem y is but Death.

Brooke d ied of blood-poisoning early in

1915

while in transit to the Dardanelles

campaign, and

so

never

-

as the phrase has it

-

saw action. It is pointless to

speculate whether, had he done so, his view would have changed, but we all

know tha t many of his fellow poets were very articulate in their inversion of the

genre. Rosenberg, Blunden, Gurney, Sassoon, Graves, all expressed, in their

own ways, what W ilfred Ow en famously labelled

The old Lie: D u k e et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

5 5 )

Yet it is also true that there is another positive view

of

war, one that has

existed in poetry sin ce ancient times, and one that does not merely take solemn

notice of th e human sacrifice in the man ner of Rupert Brooke, but that positively

celebrates the action s of war. Th e obvious, indeed inescapable, instance here

is

Homers

Iliad:

Meriones, bold

as

the g od of battles, snatched up

a

bronze spear

from inside the hut and went after Idomeneus with a high heart

bent on war. The two were like Ares the Killer and his son, the

fierce and indomitable Panic-maker before wh om the staunchest

warrior turns ail, when they set out for the wars, marching from

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BYRON AN D THE LANGUAGE OF WAR 31

Thrace to join the Ephyri or the haughty Phlegyans and to bring

victory to one side and turn a deaf ear to the others prayers. (242)

Plainly, the more assertively heroic the soldier is in demeanour and in conduct,

the closer he approximates to the godlike.

More than twenty-five centuries later we can still find poetry that celebrates

this idea and this ideal. Consider Oswald Mtshalis poem The Birth of Shaka

12):

His baby cry

as of a cub

tearing the neck

of the lioness

because he was fatherless.

The gods

boiled his blood

in a clay pot of passion

to course his veins.

His heart was shaped into an ox shield

to foil every foe.

Ancestors forged

his muscles into

thongs as tough

as wattle bark

and nerves

as sharp as

syringa thorns.

This is not to say that the celebration of war has been a constant, or indeed

that it is exactly the same things that have always been celebrated. Sometimes

what one age celebrated was just what a succeeding age questioned. This pattern

can be obviously and economically illustrated by considering the shift between

Chaucers Troilus and Criseyde, where the chivalrous codes are, largely, still

intact and honoured, and ShakespearesTroilus and Cress ida,where these same

codes are subjected to critical questioning, and, at times, to ridicule. In Henry V

Part

I

Shakespeare gives Falstaff words that empty the idea of military honour

of all positive meaning:

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32 ENGLISH STUDIES 41.1.98

Can honou r set a leg? No . O r an arm? No. Or take awa y the grief

of a wo und? No. Honour hath no skill in surgery then? No. What

is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What

is

that

honour? Air. A trim reckoning Who hath it? He that died

a-Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it?

No.

Tis

insensible, then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the

living? No. W hy? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore

I l l

none

of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon - and

so

ends my catechism.

(V i

130-40)

Elsewhere, when Shakespeare se eks to glorify war, as in Henry V, the attempt

is not unproblematic, as the killing of the French prisoners reminds

us.

And the

emphasis that is placed, in this play, on national as well as individual honour

brings us close to a modem understanding of the links between war and

nationalism. Similarly, M tshalis tribute to Shakas prowess is also surely about

Zulu

nationalism and the threat to that nationalism:

His eyes were lanterns

that sho ne from the da rk valleys of Zululand

to see white swallows

Com ing across the sea.

For the writer intent on praising national military achievements, even a

disaster can be pressed into service. We all remember the phrase Som e one had

blundered from Tennysons The Charge o f the Light Brigade and in a sense

that phrase gave Tennyson his poem

508,

1 1 . He borrowed and adapted it

from an editorial in The Timesof 13November

1854.

ennyson may have found

his own version rhythmically more satisfying, but the original phrase is far more

powerful semantically than Tennysons version: the actual phrase in the editorial

is some hideous blunder. But then too great an emphasis on the folly of

ordering six hundred men to Charge for the guns would undermine any

celebration of the event

so

perhaps Tennysons version reflects his own

semantic,

as

well as rhythmical preferences. T his is the last stanza of the poem:

When can their glory fade?

the wild charge they made

All the world wondered.

Honour the charge they made

Honour the L ight Brigade,

Nob le six hundred

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BYRON AN D THE LANGUAGE OF WAR 33

On e poet wh o single-handedly unites very many of th e diverse ways in which

war can be treated is Byron. He praises the military virtues of individual and

nation alike: he shows the excitement and the pity and the horror of war: he

subjects the motives for war, and its achievements, to a serious critique: he a lso

satirises and he pokes fun. It must at once be said that it is not only about war

that Byron shows this diversity. Range and variety of this sort

is

a central

characteristic especially of

his

later writing . In

Don Juan I

for example, at the

moment of the mutual seduction of Juan and Julia, Byron reflects on the

sweetness of

first and passionate love it stands alone,

Like Adams recollection

o

his fall;

Th e tree o f knowledge has been pluckd

-

alls known . .

(stanza

127)

The s tanza ends with a reference to the fire stolen by Prometheus. But Byrons

thinking

on

first love takes its full resonance from the four stanzas that

immediately precede this one,

in

which he reflects on a wide diversity of things,

good and bad, positive and negative, that can be called sweet, including a

gondoliers song, the evening star, a rainbow, the welcoming bark of a dog,

wine, rural mirth,

a

legacy, avarice, revenge, pillage, and quarrels.

This is a quality in Byrons writing that has always fascinated, or puzzled,

or irritated his readers. In

18 19,

his publisher, John Murray wrote to him and

mentioned that one such reader objected to the sense of being scorched and

drenched at the same time. Byron acknowledged that this reader was a very

clever fellow but he also very vigorously defended h is method:

Did he never play a t Cricket or walk a mile in hot weather? - did

he

never spill a dish of tea over his testicles in handing th e cup to

his charmer to the great sham e of his nankeen britches?

-

did he

never swim in the sea at Noonday with the Sun in his eyes and on

his head which

all

the foam of ocean could not cool?

(Letters and Journals 6 : 207)

And

so

on and on.

Byrons w ritings on war, though, are interesting not ju st because they o ffer

another exemplification o f this method, but also because they sh ow him using

the method in an attempt to com e to term s with som e large political and literary

dilemmas. Here a consideration of the background and the context of Byrons

writings becomes necessary. Jerome M cGann, w hose recent edition of Byrons

poetry has done so much to encourage a renewed and special interest in such

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34 ENGLISH STUDIES 41.1.98

questions, shows himself to be fully aware of the complexities involved:

When we think of poems in their historical contexts, our

historicist biases even in their New Historicist modes

-

take

those contexts o be located primarily in the past, or

-

if we have

read our Nietzsche and Foucault with care - in the present and the

past. And when we think more deeply about such matters we also

understand that these historical contexts are multiple and

conflicting: heteroglossial, as Bakhtin would say.

The Third World of Criticism 97)

McGann reads Byrons contemptuous rejection of cant

in

his Preface to Cantos

VI,VIIandVIIIofDonJuan-VIIandVIIIaretheWarCantos-asan indication

of

the point and seriousness with which he undertook to rededicate

[on]

J [ u a n ] to its new beginning

-

that is to say, to its new,

self-conscious, and more comprehensive aspirations toward

political and ideological commentary and commitment.

Byron,

Poetical Works 5:

295-97,7

18

Others who,

in

the last two decades, have joined in the re-appraisal of Byrons

political thinking include John Farrell 134-49), Malcolm Kelsall l46-69) and

Jerome Christensen 1

0-1

9,214-20).

In

1809 Byron spent some five weeks in Portugal and Spain, while the

Peninsular War was still in progress. He was in Spain when the battle ofTalavera

took place, and his comments in his letters are a mixture of seriousness and fun

which we might expect from a very articulate young man he was 21 on his

first journey abroad. As we have seen, this mixture was also to characterise his

later poetry:

Spain is all

in

arms, and the French have every thing to do over

again, the barbarities on both sides are shocking. I passed some

French prisoners on the road o Seville, and saw a spy who was

condemned to be shot, you will be surprised to hear that the

Spanish roads are far superior to the best English Turnpikes, and

the horses excellent, eggs wine always to be had, no meat or

milk, but every thing else very fair. -4adiz is the prettiest town

in Europe...

Letters

and

Journals 1 2

17)

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BYRON AND THE LANGUAGE OF WAR

3s

The reference to barbarities is a reminder that this particular war had

increasingly implicated the civilian population, and, indeed, the term guerilla

warfare comes from the Peninsular campaign. The very quick and easy

transition from the doomed spy to the quality of roads, horses, eggs and wine is

shocking as no doubt, it was meant to be.

Byrons experiences in Portugal and Spain were the basis for

Childe

Harolds Pilgrimage

I , which when published together with Canto I I

in

1812,

immediately established Byrons reputation as a poet. There is an interesting

shift

in

register from the letters to the poetry, though, and it is as if the young

poet felt that

aspoet

he could no longer playfully switch subject matter and tone.

Rather, he invokes the national spirit of Spain, calling it to a battle that he

acknowledges will be wasteful of human life, and that may be futile:

Awake, ye sons of Spain awake advance

Lo Chivalry, your ancient goddess, cries,

But wields not, as of old, her thirsty lance,

Nor shakes her crimson plumage in the skies .... I , stanza 37)

And again:

And must they fall? The young, the proud, the brave,

To swell one bloated Chiefs unwholesome reign?

N o

step between submission and a grave?

The rise of rapine and the fall of Spain?

I .

53)

In the previous stanza, Napoleon is referred to as Gauls Vulture.

These references to Napoleon are especially interesting, since Byron is

seldom if ever -elsewhereas consistently hostile, as consistently one-sided,

in

his treatment of Napoleon: this points to a dilemma that Byron was beginning

to grapple with in his early poetry. It is significant that when he returned to

London after his first journey to Europe he came under the influence of the

Holland House set, a group of moderate Whigs who opposed the increasingly

shrill and increasingly popular hostility in England to Napoleon. Four years

later, and a year after the battle, Byron visited Waterloo, and his account of the

visit, in

Childe Harolds Pilgrimage

I l l conveys something of the excited

anticipation of the battle, and of the heroic conduct to come:

There was the sound of revelry by night,

And Belgiums capital had gathered then

Her Beauty and her Chivalry

.

111.

21

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36

ENGLISH

STUDIES 4 I

1.98

but he also conveys a powerful sense of loss and waste. And his account of

Napoleon is now equally balanced:

There sunk the greatest, nor the worst of men,

Whose spirit antithetically mixt

One moment of the mightiest, and again

On little objects with like firmness fixt ....

1 1 1 . 36

The account that Byron offers of Waterloo is contained in a few pages; Byron

may well have felt that to write at greater length, at that particular time, on this

subject, and

in

this way, would be a waste of time. Byrons arch-enemy, Robert

Southey the poet laureate, spoke at least for once, surely, for the vast majority

of his countrymen and women when his account of Waterloo The Poets

Pilgrimage to Waterloo 735 presented the battle, rather smugly, as a triumph

for British virtue over a Satanically vile French tyrant:

If among hateful tyrants of all times

For endless execration handed down

One may be found surpassing all

in

crimes,

One that for infamy should bear the crown,

Napoleon is that man, in guilt the first,

Pre-eminently bad among the worst.

Byron, of course, consistently doubted whether there was any such thing as

British virtue.

When, some years later, Byron came to write the War Cantos of

Don uan

- he earlier claimed, in a letter to Thomas Moore, that the poem is meant to be

a little quietly facetious upon everything

(Letters

undJournuls 6: 67 he did

not take as his subject any battle from the Napoleonic wars although the

Napoleonic wars are everywhere implied in his War Cantos). Instead he chose

the siege

of

Ismail of

1790,

in

which Russian forces, seeking to extend their

empire to the south, attacked a Turkish city. This was

an

eventon the very fringes

of the continent of Europe, and by the 182Os, after the Revolutionary and

Napoleonic wars, on the fringes also, surely, of European consciousness.

Byrons is, of course, the satirists favourite trick, exemplified most obviously

by Swift: dont write about the England of George 11; write about Lilliput and

Brobdignag.

Jerome McGann makes a couple of very interesting points about Ismail, and

these are both points that, as McGann notes, Byron himself stresses. There was

an unusually high rate of civilian casualties

-

it

is

tempting to take this back to

Byrons reaction to the war on the Peninsula. McGanns other point is that there

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BYRON AN D THE LANGUAGE OF WAR

37

were a significant number of royalist French mercenaries fighting with the

Russians (Byron,

Poetical

Works

5: 716- 19, 728-29 .

These are soldiers who,

one can presume, had little stomach even for the very m oderate constitutional

reforms that had been made

in

the first months of the French Revolution , and

who were willing to sell their services to any country, provided it was

sufficiently European, and sufficiently autocratic.

Byrons account of the siege gives

us

just about every facet of war. There

are consc ious echoings of Homeric splendour:

Oh, thou eternal Homer I have now

To paint a siege, wherein more men w ere slain,

With deadlier engines and a speedier blow,

Than in thy Greek gazette (VII, stanza 79

The notion that

The Iliad

is

to

be regarded as a military gazette (a mere listing,

for official purposes, of those who died in a particular battle) suggests that even

when he was. being m ost serious, Byron could also be joking . There are

reflections on the war as a conflict of nationalities and religions, reflections that

also convey a powerful sense of the sheer physical excitem ent a battlefield can

generate, and of the horrifyingly casual suddenness of dea th:

The march The charge The shouts of either faith

Hurra And Allah and, one mom ent more,

The Death-cry drow ning in the battles roar.

(VII.

87

There are accoun ts of brave and comradely conduct that mingle praise for the

individual with a biting satire on the occasion for such conduct, as when Byron

reveals how Juan sees the battle:

if he must needs destroy,

In such good company as always throng

To battles, sieges, and that kind o f pleasure,

N o less

delighted to employ his leisure;

But always without malice; if he warrd

O r loved , it was with what we call the best

Intentions,

(VIII.

24-25

There is a record

of

the hideous violence perpetrated on civilian and sold ier, on

child, wom an, and man alike:

Upon a taken bastion where there lay

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38

ENGLISH STUDIES

4

I .

1.98

Thousands of slaughtered men, a yet warm group

Of murdered women, who had found their way

To this vain refuge, made the good heart droop

And shudder .

VIII.

91)

Or, to take another instance, when a Russian soldier, treading over fallen foes,

is bitten on the Achilles tendon with such force by a Turk that the jaw remains

clamped to the Russians foot even after the Turks head is severed VIII. 83).

And there are also some savage

-

and savagely funny -jokes about the events

of a battlefield. It is interesting that some of the best jokes are directed against

the French mercenaries,

as

for example when the Prince de Ligne is wounded

in the knee and another officer insists on having him removed at once from the

battlefield where he is

Amidst some groaning thousands dying near, -

All common fellows, who might writhe, and wince,

And shriek for water into a deaf ear .

VIII. 11)

The officer, who

could thus evince

His sympathy for rank, by the same token,

To teach him greater, had his own leg broken.

By the end of the War Cantos Byron has provided his readers with the

opportunity of probing the causes, the conduct, and the consequences of war, of

seeing the thing, one could say, whole. The effect is certainly not to depoliticise

war: rather it is to suggest ways of thinking about war that do not merely rely

on narrow dogma, whether moral or political, and that are not the product of

self-serving jingoism. We can perhaps get some measure of this achievement

by way of a quotation from Michel Foucault, who was so many times drawn to

focus on events and ideas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.*

In The Archaeology

of

Knowledge there is a passage that reflects something

central to much of his thinking, albeit something that for many of Foucaults

critics is centrally problematic to that thinking. Foucault puts it thus:

My aim was to analyse . . history,

in

the discontinuity that no

teleology would reduce in advance; to map it in a dispersion that

no pre-established horizon would embrace; to allow it to be

deployed

in

an anonymity on which no transcendental

constitution would impose the form of the subject; to open it up

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BYRON AND THE LANGUAGE OF WAR

39

to a temporality that would not promise the return of any dawn.

My aim was to cleanse it ofall transcendental narcissism

. 203)

It is difficult to say exactly how much of this Byron would have wanted,

or

how

consistently he would have wanted it. But it is the case that, at many points in

his later writings, he was seeking to cleanse history, including the history of

war of all transcendental narcissism.

NOTES

I .

Later in on

Juan

Byron is wryly ironic on the subject of military gazettes. Noting that an

acquaintance w ho died at Waterloo was misnamed in the

Waterloo Gazette,

he wrote:

There

s

fame

a man is killed, his name is Grose, and they print it Grove.

See

DonJuan

VIII, 137-44

and n.

Foucaults thinking on power, on sexuality an d on justice an d punishment has recently been

linked suggestively to Byron. See Je rom e Christensen 4-5,5 1-56,259-62.

2.

W O R K S CITED

Brooke, R upert.

Collec ted Poems.

Ed. George Edward Woodberry. New York: John Lane, 1915.

Byron, George Gordon, Lord.

Complete

Poetical Works.

Ed. Jerome J. McGann. 7 vols. Oxford:

Letters and Journals.

Ed. Leslie A. Marchand. 13 vols. London: John Murray,

Christensen, Jerome.

Lord Byrons Strengths: Romantic Writing and Commercial Sociew.

Farrell,

John P. Revolution as Tragedy: The Dilemma ofth e Moderate rom Scott to Arnold. Ithaca:

Oxf ord University Press, 1980-93.

1973-94.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Cornell University Press, 1980.

Foucault, Michel. The ArchaeologVofKnowledge. Trans. A.M . Sheridan Smith. London: Routledge,

1989.

Homer. The Iliad. Trans. E.V. Rieu. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968.

Kelsall, Malcolm. Byrons Politics. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987.

Kipling, Rudyard.

Kiplin gs Verse:

Inclusive

Edition.

London: Hodder and Stoughton,

1927

McGann, Jerome J. The Third World of Criticism. In

Rethinking Historicism: Critical Readings

in Romantic Histoty By Marjorie Levinson, Marilyn Butler, Jerome McGann and Paul

Hamilton. Oxfo rd: Basil Blackwell, 1989.

Mtshali, Osw ald Joseph. Sounds of Cowhide

Drum

ohannesburg: Renoster Books, 1971.

Owen, Wilfred.

Collec ted Poems.

Ed. C. Day Lewis. London: Ch atto and W indus, 1963.

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40 ENGLISH STUDIES 41.1 .98

Shakespeare, William.

The Firsf Parf ofKing Henty I Y

Ed. A.R. Humphries. London; Methuen,

Southey,

Robert. Poems.

Ed. Maurice

H .

Fitzgerald. London: Henry Froude, 1909.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord.

Tennyson:

A

Selected Ed ifion.

Ed. Christopher Ricks. Harlow: Longman,

Van Wyk Smith, Malvern. Drummer Hodge: The Poetry

of

fhe Anglo-Boer Wur 1899-1902).

1966.

1969.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.

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Byron and the Language of War