“Breaker” Morant
2 thoughts on ““Breaker” Morant”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Literature of the Great War
ENGL 348. Fall 2025. Dr. Scanlon
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Mike, by chance I was reading just a little about the Boer War this weekend, which is a conflict I don’t know much about. But what was being discussed was the 1914 conviction that Englishmen, or humans more broadly, could never again be as brutal and inhumane as they had been in that conflict because they had progressed as a civilization, but that veterans and witnesses of the Boer War remained badly psychologically damaged heading into the Great War.
The linguistic choices in this poem is really cool. It’s fun that this piece got published in 1902 because it’s not the type of refined language I’d expect from a published author in that era. I feel as though I could hear a modern-day British person speaking this poem aloud and I wouldn’t be surprised by it.
Dr. Scanlon, the 1914 conviction that humans could never again be that brutal is honestly hilarious, given that that’s how people responded to World War One… and World War Two… and during the Vietnam War people said never again… my gallows humor is quite amused at the fact that we humans never learn from our own mistakes.