Mecenaries and Housman:

Will Baude writes about mercenaries, concluding that he, like Housman, likes them. I'm not all that sure that Housman(*) likes mercenaries, though. The poem itself, like few other war poems, is surprisingly ambivalent. Sure, the mercenaries are defending things, but should these things be defended? Why has God abandoned their cause, because it's hopeless or because it's bad? It is unclear from the context of the poem.

I think this might be one of those poems that says something by not saying something. Most WWI poems choose a slant, either glorifying the soldiers (Brooke's "The Soldier," McCrae's "On Flanders Fields," and Binyon's "For the Fallen" or condemning the war (anything by Owen or Sassoon). So why doesn't Housman do this? Is he damning with faint praise? Or are these poems unfair comparisons?

I think based on the ambivalence of the poem, and of the views of other poems by Housman (there is one on Thermopylae, I think), that Housman sees mercenaries as inevitable and necessary, but not necessarily preferred to any other way of fighting, and I don't think that Housman would have said that he liked mercenaries. Else why wouldn't he say something about their courage, faithfulness? Why wouldn't he mourn their deaths?

The poem that I've found that is the closest to Housman's is Robert Graves' "To Lucasta on Going to War--for the fourth time."(**) This poem is about the life of professional soldiers, and why the Fusiliers fight. "That's not courage, that's not fear--Lucasta he's a Fusilier and his pride sends him here." Housman's mercenaries are ostensibly fighting for pay, but I don't think this is why mercenaries always fight (see the Flying Tigers, the best recent example of mercenaries. Many of them were owed months of back pay by the Chinese government after the US entered the war. I think in a very different world, I would have liked to have been a Flying Tiger. There's something about fighting and dying for a hopeless cause, a cause right but abandoned by the rest of the world, that appeals to both the Irishwoman and the southerner in me). One can't exactly compare Graves' fusilier with Housman's mercenary, I think, because we don't know enough of the motivation of the mercenary.

Still, though, Graves' poem has some similarities to Housman's. The ambivalence of the poet both to the war and to the soldiers, the idea that the deaths aren't to be mourned, the discussion of the reason for fighting, are unusual in WWI poetry.

(*) Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries
These, in the day when heaven was falling,
The hour when earth's foundations fled,
Followed their mercenary calling
And took their wages and are dead.

Their shoulders held the sky suspended;
They stood, and earth's foundations stay;
What God abandoned, these defended,
And saved the sum of things for pay.

(**)
It doesn’t matter what’s the cause,
What wrong they say we’re righting,
A curse for treaties, bonds and laws,
When we’re to do the fighting!
And since we lads are proud and true,
What else remains to do?
Lucasta, when to France your man
Returns his fourth time, hating war,
Yet laughs as calmly as he can
And flings an oath, but says no more,
That is not courage, that’s not fear—
Lucasta he’s a Fusilier,
And his pride sends him here.

Let statesmen bluster, bark and bray,
And so decide who started
This bloody war, and who’s to pay,
But he must be stout-hearted,
Must sit and stake with quiet breath,
Playing at cards with Death.
Don’t plume yourself he fights for you;
It is no courage, love, or hate,
But let us do the things we do;
It’s pride that makes the heart be great;
It is not anger, no, nor fear—
Lucasta he’s a Fusilier,
And his pride keeps him here.