The South African veldt, the battlefield of the Boer War, is the primary setting of “Drummer Hodge.” From the perspective of Hardy, it represents what is “foreign” and “Strange” in a quickly modernizing world in which the conquest of distant lands is possible, and the resulting warfare encroaches upon the countryside, pre-industrial innocence represented by Hodge and his “Wessex home” (5-12). South Africa’s geographical distance also represents reaching the outermost bounds of knowledge that is nearly beyond the understanding of average, individual humans – “Young Hodge the Drummer never knew– / Fresh from his Wessex home– / The meaning of the broad Karoo” (7-9). As such, the South African setting contributes to a theme found in many of Hardy’s literary works: the clash of the old, familiar world with a new, opaque, and even frightening world because of the unstoppable forces of modernity that cannot be understood or...