Bayonet Charge: you wake up already running

In the First World War, how many of the wounds treated in British hospitals were made by bayonets? The bayonet charge is the war's famous image, so it is tempting to guess a lot. One study of more than two hundred thousand wounds treated by British medical services in France and Flanders found fewer than one in a hundred came from a bayonet. More than half came from shells, fired by guns the soldiers often never saw. Ted Hughes called his poem Bayonet Charge, and halfway across a field his soldier finds out he is not the hero of a hand-to-hand fight at all. What he is instead comes to him mid-stride.

Bayonet Charge is still in copyright, so this video quotes short pieces of it; have the anthology open if you can. It begins in the middle of the action: "Suddenly he awoke and was running - raw". Starting in the middle of things has a Latin name, in medias res. There is no order, no reason and no before. He is simply already running, in a hot, scratchy uniform, across a ploughed field towards a hedge full of rifle fire. Why would Hughes give us no before, and start mid-run? Because the man running has no before either. Nobody has explained the charge to him, so the reader is dropped into it exactly as confused as he is. Then Hughes puts us inside his body. The rifle he lugs is "numb as a smashed arm", part of him, and already broken. And the patriotism he once felt, a tear in his eye, has become sweat pouring off him. The body is where the belief used to be. The grand feeling has turned into heat and effort. Opening an answer on in medias res and the word suddenly is where most students begin, and one examiner's report calls those references "productive avenues". Keep them, then go further in the same paragraph, into the rifle and the sweat.

In the second verse, he almost stops, and asks himself a question. He wonders in what "cold clockwork of the stars and the nations" he was the hand pointing at that moment. The hand of a clock moves because the machine behind it moves. He sees himself as one moving part in a huge machine of countries and fate, and the machine does not even know he is there. One examiner's report puts it like this: Particularly successful interpretations were those where the soldier was becoming a robotic, unthinking weapon of war and this was further supported by the rifle numb as a smashed arm simply being so much a part of him that it had replaced his arm. So the habit to copy is linking two images. The clockwork and the smashed arm make the same point together: the man is turning into machinery. Here are two sentences about the same lines. Enjambment means a sentence running over the end of a line. The first: Hughes uses enjambment. The second: the sentences run over the ends of the lines, so the reader is hurried on like the soldier, with no time to think. Which of those two is actually analysis? Sentence two. Only that sentence says what the run-over lines do to the reader. The same report warns that a mere observation of the techniques or even a vague comment about flow and pace will not achieve above Level 2 AO2 if it is not tied to meaning. AO2 is the part of the marking about the writer's methods. The fix is a rule for every method sentence: name the technique, then say what it does, in the same sentence. Caesura, a pause in the middle of a line, needs the same treatment.

The third verse brings the one other living thing in the field. The gunfire throws up a "yellow hare" that rolls like a flame and crawls in a circle, its mouth open and silent. Why put a hare in a poem about a soldier? Because the hare never had a side, and the war destroys it anyway. It shows the violence reaching everything in the field, not just the men who chose it. Look at where the hare comes from: "shot-slashed furrows". Furrows are the lines a plough cuts in a field to grow food. Here bullets have slashed them, so a farmer's field has turned into a battlefield. Put the hare beside those furrows and you have two images making one point: the war is wrecking nature too. And then the reasons go. The soldier plunges on with his bayonet, and "King, honour, human dignity, etcetera" are dropped like luxuries. Etcetera means and so on. The big reasons he was given are not even worth finishing the list of, and he drops them like luxuries he cannot afford to carry. The poem's last line names what drives him on now: "His terror’s touchy dynamite". His patriotism has gone, and fear has taken its place. Touchy dynamite goes off at the slightest knock. The man has become the weapon he carries.

So that is the discovery. In the second verse he almost stops, and sees himself as one moving part in a clockwork nobody explained to him. By the third, the reasons he was given are dropped like luxuries. A bayonet charge, in this poem, is a man becoming a machine part.

Six short pieces of Bayonet Charge are worth carrying, each with a job. "Suddenly he awoke and was running - raw": the poem starts mid-run, with no cause and no before. The "cold clockwork of the stars and the nations": he almost stops, and sees himself as a moving part in a machine that does not know he is there. "numb as a smashed arm": the rifle is part of his body, and that part is already broken. "King, honour, human dignity, etcetera": the reasons are dropped like luxuries, not even worth finishing the list of. "His terror’s touchy dynamite": the last line, where fear has turned the man into the weapon. And the "yellow hare": the war reaches the one thing in the field that has no side. In the cluster, Bayonet Charge answers the reality of conflict, and the hare lets it reach the power of nature as well.

One last stretch: three quick fills, the word arriving after each, then one sentence of your own. He sees himself as part of the cold what of the stars and the nations? Clockwork. The cold clockwork makes him a part in a machine. Now the rifle: numb as a smashed what? Arm. His rifle has become a broken limb. Try the reasons: King, honour, human dignity, etcetera, dropped like what? Luxuries. The reasons are things he cannot afford to carry. One more, your own: how would you finish "Hughes uses caesura" with its effect? Something like: Hughes uses caesura, so the line stops dead in the middle, just as the soldier almost stops. Technique, then effect, in one sentence. Fewer than one wound in a hundred came from a bayonet. Hughes's bayonet charge turns out to be about the machine behind it.

If you can name what shifts between the first verse and the second, this one's yours, and a thumbs-up files it as finished. Still slippery? Store it away, and write down how each verse feels, side by side, once.

Next in the chapter: Poppies: the grief that happens at home, three days early. Hopefully that's next in your feed, but if not, search for ScholaFly E L four oh, thirteen.

Every other video is on scholafly.com too, easy to search by video code or by keyword. Whatever you're revising, go there and have a look, or, watch the next video.