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The Five Nations, Volume II

Chapter 19: THE INSTRUCTOR
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About This Book

A collection of poems presents varied portraits of imperial life, alternating lyric meditations and narrative sketches that examine duty, ceremony, and the costs of military service. Several pieces evoke remote landscapes and the routines of men on outposts or on the march, while others address public memory, faith, and private loss. Voices shift from colloquial to formal, mixing irony, solemnity, and exhortation, with recurring motifs of travel, comradeship, and the tension between patriotic pride and the sorrow or absurdity that accompanies conflict and empire.

THE INSTRUCTOR

(CORPORALS)

At times when under cover I ’ave said,
To keep my spirits up an’ raise a laugh,
’Earin’ ’im pass so busy over-’ead—
Old Nickel Neck, ’oo isn’t on the Staff—
There’s one above is greater than us all.’
Before ’im I ’ave seen my Colonel fall,
An’ watched ’im write my Captain’s epitaph,
So that a long way off it could be read—
He ’as the knack o’ makin’ men feel small—
Old Whistle Tip, ’oo isn’t on the Staff.
There is no sense in fleein’ (I ’ave fled),
Better go on an’ do the belly-crawl,
An’ ’ope ’e’ll ’it some other man instead
Of you ’e seems to ’unt so speshual—
Fitzy van Spitz, ’oo isn’t on the Staff.
An’ thus in mem’ry’s gratis biograph,
Now that the show is over, I recall
The peevish voice an’ ’oary mushroom ’ead
Of ’im we owned was greater than us all,
’Oo give instruction to the quick an’ the dead—
The Shudderin’ Beggar not upon the Staff.