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The Five Nations, Volume II

Chapter 20: BOOTS
By Rudyard Kipling
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Poetry

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.

BOOTS

(INFANTRY COLUMNS OF THE EARLIER WAR)

We’re foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin’ over Africa!
 Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa—
 (Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again!)
 There’s no discharge in the war!
Seven—six—eleven—five—nine-an’-twenty mile to-day—
 Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty-two the day before—
 (Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again!)
 There’s no discharge in the war!
Don’t—don’t—don’t—don’t—look at what’s in front of you
 (Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again);
 Men—men—men—men—men go mad with watchin’ ’em,
 An’ there’s no discharge in the war.
Try—try—try—try—to think o’ something different—
 Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!
 (Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again!)
 There’s no discharge in the war.
Count—count—count—count—the bullets in the bandoliers;
 If—your—eyes—drop—they will get atop o’ you
 (Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again)—
 There’s no discharge in the war!
We—can—stick—out—’unger, thirst, an’ weariness,
 But—not—not—not—not the chronic sight of ’em—
 Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again,
 An’ there’s no discharge in the war!
’Tain’t—so—bad—by—day because o’ company,
 But night—brings—long—strings o’ forty thousand million
 Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again.
 There’s no discharge in the war!
I—’ave—marched—six—weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
 It—is—not—fire—devils dark or anything
 But boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again,
 An’ there’s no discharge in the war!