In May of 1914, just three months before the beginning of World War I, the poem “Channel Firing,” by the English poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, was first published. Hardy later called it prophetic of the upcoming global catastrophe.
The poem’s subject matter, humankind’s inability to learn of the madness and sacrilege of war, is serious, but its tone is ironic, even comic. The poem’s narrator is a dead person buried in a country churchyard not far from the coast of England who’s awakened by naval artillery practice. The roar shook the coffins of the dead and broke the chancel window in the parish church. The narrator says that he and the other dead thought it was Judgment Day, and sat upright; dogs barked, and a startled mouse on the altar dropped a crumb of communion bread.
Then God speaks in the poem, explaining that it’s not the end of the world, just gunnery practice out at sea. God tells the dead that things are normal, [quote]
“All nations striving strong to make
Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters
They do no more for Christés sake
Than you who are helpless in such matters. . . . “
God adds that it’s lucky for those who are threatening war that it isn’t in fact Judgment Day, because [quote] “they’d have to scour/Hell’s floor” instead of, presumably, mopping the deck of their ship.
And so the dead lie down again, and one says, “I wonder,/Will the world ever saner be,” – that is - sane enough to forego war. The answer provided by the poem’s penultimate stanza is no:
And many a skeleton shook his head.
‘Instead of preaching forty year,’
My neighbour Parson Thirdly said,
‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’
Not only are future prospects for peace poor, the final stanza takes us back into history and suggests that it was ever thus: the roar of the guns is heard not only further and further inland but also further and further back in history:
Again the guns disturbed the hour,
Roaring their readiness to avenge,
As far inland as Stourton Tower,
And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.
Stourton Tower was built in 1766 to commemorate King Alfred’s victory over the Danes in 879; primarily decorative, it’s what architects call a folly tower. Cadbury Castle, which was centuries older, is associated with fictional Camelot. And the Neolithic site Stonehenge dates back four to five thousand years, before human history was even written down.
