“And, General, how hold out our sweethearts,
        Sworn loyal as doves?”
      “Many mourn; many think
      It is not unattractive to prink
    Them in sable for heroes.  Some fickle and fleet hearts
        Have found them new loves.”

    “And our wives?” quoth another, resignedly,
        “Dwell they on our deeds?”
      “Deeds of home; that live yet
      Fresh as new—­deeds of fondness or fret,
    Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly,
        These, these have their heeds.”

Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the glory of war.  His imagination has always been curiously interested in soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military show.  One has only to read The Dynasts along with Barrack-room Ballads to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude of the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician.  Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and tobacco rather than of eternity.  The real world to Mr. Hardy is the world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous irrelevance.  That is what he makes emphatically clear in In the Time of the Breaking of Nations:—­

    Only a man harrowing clods
      In a slow silent walk
    With an old horse that stumbles and nods
      Half asleep as they stalk.

    Only thin smoke without flame
      From the heaps of couch grass: 
    Yet this will go onward the same
      Though Dynasties pass.

    Yonder a maid and her wight
      Come whispering by;
    War’s annals will fade into night
      Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy’s poems about war are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love.  Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both.  His lovers, like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory.  Lovers are always severed both in life and in death:—­

    Rain on the windows, creaking doors,
      With blasts that besom the green,
    And I am here, and you are there,
      And a hundred miles between!

In Beyond the Last Lamp we have the same mournful cry over severance.  There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in the works of Mr. Hardy.  It is too long to quote in full, but one may give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:—­

    When I re-trod that watery way
    Some hours beyond the droop of day,
    Still I found pacing there the twain
      Just as slowly, just as sadly,
      Heedless of the night and rain. 
    One could but wonder who they were
    And what wild woe detained them there.