But what they fought each other for,
I could not well make out.

These lines come from Robert Southey’s comic narrative poem “The Battle of Blenheim,” first published in 1796. The poem is framed as an old man, Kaspar, recounting to children a famous battle after they find a skull in the fields. As Kaspar repeats the conventional refrain that it was “a famous victory,” the children press him for reasons and moral meaning. The quoted couplet captures Kaspar’s inability (or refusal) to explain the cause of the slaughter, reflecting Southey’s youthful anti-war politics and his skepticism toward patriotic justifications for mass violence.

The speaker’s admission—he “could not well make out” why the armies fought—underscores the poem’s central irony: wars are celebrated as glorious while their purposes are obscure to ordinary people and their human costs are concrete. Southey contrasts the clarity of suffering (burned homes, dead bodies, orphaned children) with the vagueness of political motives, suggesting that “victory” is an inadequate moral category when the reasons are unintelligible or irrelevant to those who pay the price. The line also critiques inherited narratives: Kaspar has absorbed the language of triumph without understanding, exposing how tradition can normalize atrocity.