Dorset Yeomanry

The Dorset Yeomanry is the regiment in which G. Etheridge Hayward volunteers to serve as a trooper during the Second Boer War. Though the novel gives no account of the regiment’s operations, Hayward’s decision to join it becomes a revealing test of the distance between his cultivated theories and the forces that move people to act.

Hayward’s enlistment

When Philip Carey meets Hayward in London, Hayward says that he is sailing for the Cape on Sunday. Asked what he will do there, he explains that he is going as a trooper in the Dorset Yeomanry. The choice surprises Philip: among the men leaving for the war are qualified hospital staff recruited by the Government, as well as volunteers who enlist as troopers and are assigned hospital work once their medical studies are known. Hayward, however, identifies himself specifically as a Yeomanry trooper.

A reversal in character

For eight years Philip has known Hayward, whose youthful intimacy with him began in Philip’s eager admiration for his knowledge of art and literature. That ardour has faded into habit, and Philip now sees a man whose conversation retains its delicate literary appreciation but whose contempt for action and worldly success has come to irritate him. Hayward’s enlistment therefore contradicts the role Philip has long assigned him: the observer who talks about life without entering its practical contests.

Hayward cannot give a settled explanation for going. Asked what prompted him, he says only that he thought he ought to. Philip senses that some uneasiness in Hayward’s soul has made action seem necessary, even though Hayward cannot account for it. The regiment thus appears less as the outcome of an articulated political argument than as the concrete destination of an impulse that outruns explanation.

Narrative significance

The Dorset Yeomanry’s importance lies in this brief but pointed encounter, not in a narrated military history. Philip has regarded patriotism as prejudice and imagined Hayward standing aside from conflict; Hayward’s enlistment unsettles that expectation. It also sharpens the novel’s recurring question about whether people act according to their stated philosophies or are driven by forces their reason only later tries to explain.