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COMPARISION OF BAYONET CHARGE AND THE EMIGREE
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In ‘Bayonet Charge’ and in ‘The Émigrée,’ Hughes and Rumens present lives changed utterly by war.
Hughes portrays a soldier undergoing a crisis of conscience, suddenly questioning his reasons for
fighting. Rumens portrays not a perpetrator of war but a victim, someone exiled from their now-
defunct homeland by the chaos of revolution. Both poets aim to show how war can affect body and
mind and leave wounds that last long beyond the armistice.
Hughes shows the brutalising effects of war. An infantryman awakes “suddenly” to find himself
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“stumbling...towards a green hedge that dazzled with rifle fire.” The in medias res opening
emphasises the soldier’s shock and disorientation as he runs towards a faceless enemy. The third-
person soldier is unnamed, distancing us from him but also allowing him to represent every soldier
struggling to survive the Great War. By comparison, Rumens presents the effects of war on a civilian.
The speaker, speaking in the first-person, creating a sense of immediacy and intimacy, speaks of her
“sunlight-clear” memories of the country she fled as a child. Though memories usually fade, for this
speaker the memories seem to burn bright. The country is not named which creates a sense of
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universality; the émigrée perhaps represents the experiences of all people displaced by war.
Hughes then shows the effects of how war is often justified. The soldier’s motivation is symbolised
by
a “patriotic tear.” However, the tear “had brimmed”, and now there is “sweating like molten iron” in
his chest. The simile replaces the abstraction of patriotism with liquid metal, suggesting that king
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and
country, used in wartime recruitment efforts, have been replaced by pain and fear. By contrast,
Rumens presents the émigrée’s love for her country remaining strong in exile. The speaker is
“branded by an impression of sunlight,” suggesting the memory is physically marked on her body,
rendering ephemeral memory permanent. Moreover, the extension of the earlier sunlight imagery
creates a contrast between the dark present and the happier memories of youth, perhaps suggesting
the importance of patriotism for keeping hope alive among émigrés forced from war-damaged cities
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Hughes then presents war causing a crisis of conscience. The soldier slows to ponder his place in the
“cold clockwork of the stars and the nations.” This moment leads to the end of the poem’s extended
first sentence, the created caesura emphasising the soldier’s bewilderment. The metaphor presents
war as a device controlled by national leaders, exploiting soldiers as cogs in the war machine,
perhaps reflecting the ‘domino effect’ of ultimatums that led to war in 1914. Similarly, Rumens
shows how war affects the minds and identities of its victims. Defiantly, the speaker celebrates her
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now-banned language: “I can’t get it off my tongue. It tastes of sunlight.” Again, the speaker
juxtaposes imagery of sunlight with the forces of state repression. The language is all she retains of
her home country, and she savours it like a delicious cultural delicacy just as is common among
émigré communities where language is a centripetal force that holds the exiles together.
As the poems climax, the poets show how war leads to life-changing realisations. Hughes’ soldier,
startled by a hare, the only other living creature in no man’s land, runs; as he runs, he replaces
traditional motivations for war, echoes of Great War propaganda, with his own desperate need to
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survive: “King, honour, human dignity, etcetera dropped like luxuries.” The simile suggests these
motivations are weights holding the soldier back, an un-ending list of frivolous items that must be
discarded in the leap for survival. Similarly, Rumens shows the émigrée realising that she can never
go back: “they accuse...they circle...they mutter.” The repetition presents the speaker hounded by
“they”, malevolent informers who seek to destroy her identity. However, completing the extended
sunshine metaphor, in an emphatic extra final line, the speaker says her “shadow falls as evidence of
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sunlight.” Though the speaker has been overshadowed, the fact she can still cast a shadow, can
survive into an extra line, suggests that she lives to bear witness to what once was, and ends the
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