On Remembrance Sunday

‘The history of Waterloo field is to be ploughed and sowed and reaped and mowed: yet once in a way these acts of husbandry were diversified with a great battle, where hosts decided the fate of empires. After that agriculture resumed its sullen sway.’
The young Thomas Hardy copied this passage from Charles Reade into his notebooks. No doubt it was still in his mind when, years later, he wrote his great and justly famous poem of wartime, In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'...

                       I

Only a man harrowing clods

    In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

    Half asleep as they stalk.

                       II

Only thin smoke without flame

    From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

    Though Dynasties pass.

                       III

Yonder a maid and her wight

    Come whispering by:

War’s annals will cloud into night

    Ere their story die.

    Hardy takes his 'breaking of nations' theme from Jeremiah: 'Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms.' This chimes with a passage in Les Murray's wonderful poem, The Say-But-The-Word Centurion Attempts a Summary (which Bryan A commends in a recent tweet):
'If death is now the birth-gate into things unsayable
in language of death's era, there will be wars about religion
as there never were about the death-ignoring Olympians...'
Too sadly true. Read the whole poem here, and marvel. Bryan calls it the best argument for Christian belief he has ever read. If this is true, it is surely because it is less an argument than a dazed recognition.