Thomas Hardy's 'The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion'

Been a few days since I finished reading Hardy's 'Melancholy Hussar'.  With this 15-page short story, we're back with Hardy's tragedy of human fate theme, although we obviously don't feel it to any of the degree that we do  in his great tragedy novels such as 'Tess' and 'Jude', where we have 400 pages or so to build up empathy with the central characters' trials and suffering.  

Still, 'The Melancholy Hussar' was well worth a read.  Phyllis Grove is the central protagonist who lives a deeply unfulfilled life with her father on the Wessex Downs, and is unexpectedly and unromantically wooed by Humphrey Gould, an unreliable-looking bachelor of 30 from Bath. 

Gould goes off to Bath promising to return which he fails to do.  In the meantime, Phyllis starts an unusual, restrained, and yet heartfelt courtship with Matthaus Tina of the York Hussars from the King's German Legion, only communicating with each other over the Grove household garden wall.  Phyllis is struck by Tina's "dreadful melancholy" caused by his hatred of "England and English life".  Tina longs to return to his mother and native Saarbrucken in Germany, and draws up a plan to elope there with Phyllis.

And this is where the cruelty of human fate comes in.  Of all moments, this is when Humphrey Gould returns with a present for Phyllis, and she quite naturally believes he has returned to marry her, so she abandons her planned elopement, and Tina is forced to push on with his friend, Christoph, but no Phyllis.

However, as it cruelly turns out, with Phyllis resigned to a life of formal marriage rather than passionate love, Gould reveals the "monstrous secret" that he has married somebody else.  Moreover, several days later, while peering over the garden wall where she had until recently been meeting Tina, from a distance, she ends up witnessing Tina and Christoph being executed by firing squad for desertion as they had, by mistake, reached the shores of Jersey and not France.

Tina and Christoph are buried in a little church near the garden wall with "no memorial to mark the spot", but Phyllis diligently keeps the "mounds neat".  And finally, to give some kind of stoic symmetry to the tale, their graves end up "over-grown with nettles", as Phyllis' own grave ends up lying near theirs.