"Where Ignorant Armies Clash by Night" and the Sikh Rebellion: A Contemporary Source for Matthew Arnold's Night-Battle Imagery‪.‬

The source for the night-battle imagery that concludes Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach"--"And we are here as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (ll. 35-38)--is almost unanimously thought to be a passage from Thucydides' account of the night battle of Epipolae: What lends special weight to this surmise is the fact that Arnold's father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, translated Thucydides and, as Tinker and Lowry note in their commentary on Arnold's poetry, "Thucydides was of course one of Dr. Thomas Arnold's favourite authors, and was studied in the fifth and sixth forms at Rugby. There is evidence that the passage about the 'night-battle' was familiar coin among Rugbeians." (2)