Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy... Judgment Day

Channel Firing by Thomas Hardy was written in the time frame when the English army was exercising at sea at the dawn of World War I. First person is used throughout the poem; we can assume it is one of the “dead person” buried (maybe an ex-serviceman, a hero) talking while the windows are being shattered by the blast and quivering of guns being fired for “practice” (10) in the English Channel. The fracas was so intense that all the “dead men” believed “Judgment Day” (4) has come. We can envision the frightening “comic” of the scene there when the skeletons are portrayed suddenly sitting up as if they were ready for the great day to finally arrive.
The humor takes an impudent turn as Hardy brings in God into actions, reassuring the corpses that it is not time for the Judgment Day but merely “gunnery practice” (10), adding that the world is as it was when the dead men “went below” (11) to their graves. That is a general statement saying that every country is trying to make its methods of destruction more efficient to “win over the world.” Unfortunately, the only way they can achieve that is by shedding more blood, making “red war yet redder.” (14) God sees the world as insane. There is no brightness in the future by going to war. The pride of a country should be watching its citizen grow old. The dead are obviously now “helpless in such matters”. In other words, the living does nothing “for Christes sake.” (15) Note how the old fashioned spelling, “Christes,” adds to the humor of the stanza. God carries on, observing that those to blame for the “gunnery practice” are lucky that it is not the Day of Judgment. Otherwise, their belligerent threats would be punished by their having “to scour Hell’s floor…” (19-20) While the suggested chastisement is somewhat absurd, and so comic, it is almost a fitting one. Certainly Hell, if there is such a place, seems the appropriate one for the war makers. With a hint of malevolence, God claims that He will guarantee that His Judgment Day will be far worse than they imagine stating with such condescension (laugh): “Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet…” (21-24) He admits that He may not insist, though, as everlasting rest seems more suited to the human condition. The scriptural illustration of the blowing of the trumpet that warns for the end of the world seems rather ironic when God, Himself, plainly uses it.
After line 25, it seems like God stops talking as if he thought his intervention was explicit enough. Right then, the skeletons started to talk to each other about the gunnery practice wondering if men will ever realize that the world would be a better place without any wars. That clearly is a denunciation of armed conflict. Significantly, while many of the skeletons nod, “And many a skeleton shook his head,” (29) as if to imply that man will never acknowledge peace. The preacher, himself, lost hope in human nature and wished he had not lost his time giving sermons to people not willing to receive them. He mentions that “Instead of preaching forty years” (30) he would rather have “…stuck to pipes and beers.” (32). That shows great desperation on his part; he, who devoted so much of his life to others, is now contemplating men’s craziness.
The last stanza of the poem drops the somewhat “over-exaggerated” humor of the previous lines. Instead, Hardy writes of the threatening sound of the guns, ready “to avenge.” (34) What does he mean? Avenging what? Do men even know or realize why they do what they do? Perhaps he further suggests that civilizations are hopeless because man's nature never makes any moral progress whatever era we are in.
Even though the poem is meant to make his reader grin, it is written with a tad of dry wit; the humor is of a macabre kind, and “Channel Firing” is not a light-hearted piece. The humor is actually meant seriously to show the stupidity and ignorance of those who wish to make war and think they will profit from it. On the long-run, wars hurt every one of those participating in them.