The Men We Kill

We believe in the power of poetry to change the world, here at the Blasphemy Blog, being the starry-eyed idealists that we are. These days, with the country at war, our thoughts turn to our favorite poem about war, The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy.

The story of the poem is quite simple: a soldier reflects on the enemy he has just killed on the battlefield, and remarks on how, if he and the man he killed had met at a bar, they would have been just as likely to buy each other a drink. The surviving soldier is not necessarily traumatized by the killing ("Just so: my foe of course he was"), so much as he comes to a realization that war is an odd, unnatural thing quite different from everyday life. ("Quaint and curious war is!")

The key to this realization is the soldier's recognition of what his enemy has in common with him. ("But ranged as infantry, and staring face to face, I shot at him as he at me, and killed him in his place.") He sees his enemy as someone he can sit down and drink with, because they are of course both soldiers, both "ranged as infantry," and would presumably have a lot to talk about.

This makes us wonder, nowadays, with asymmetrical warfare now common, and uniformed soldiers now regularly fighting irregular insurgent forces, whether it will be as easy for us to see the common humanity in our enemies. Will it be possible for any American soldier to write a poem or a story about sitting down to a drink with a fanatical Iraqi insurgent? Or do we now consider ourselves too different from those we kill, or those we have others kill in our name?