From your reading of the poem "The Man He Killed," explain how the poet feels about war.

This poem by Thomas Hardy makes fairly clear that the poet thinks war "quaint and curious"—specifically because it seems to be such a stupid and pointless exercise. The speaker in the poem describes having shot and killed another man because war and politics have decreed them to be each other's "foe." However, the speaker is filled with wonderment and confusion about this because the other man is, on personal terms, not someone he has any dislike for. On the contrary, he is someone who, if the two were to meet in a "bar," the speaker would buy a drink for; or if he were short of money, the speaker would lend "half a crown" to. The speaker is making the point that, in war, both sides are essentially the same: they are made up of very similar young men who do not want to kill each other and who nurse no personal enmities. The similarity between the two is underlined through phrases like "just as I," as the speaker considers the fact that nothing divides him from the man he has killed but the lines which have been drawn between them by politics and their governments.