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 daniel karlin

Then sez the Driver’s Brother, an’ ’is words was very plain,

‘ForGawd’s own sake get over me, an’ put me out o’ pain.’

They saw ’is wounds was mortial, an’ they judged that it was best,

So they took an’ drove the limber straight across ’is back an’ chest.^14

The wounding of ‘Snarleyow’ and that of the Driver’s Brother are analogous—the
parallelism of the gruesome phrase ‘’is ’ead between ’is ’eels’ makes that clear. Yet
the Driver’s Brother first begs the Driver to ‘pull up’, and then to drive on; to show
the wounded animal mercy by not finishing him off, and to mercifully finish off the
wounded man. Concerning the horse the Driver is implacable: though he himself
‘broke the beggar in’, now that the horse is literally broken (‘almost tore in two’),
he shrugs all sentiment away. But he behaves differently with his brother. To begin
with, his responsibility is shared with other members of the gun team: ‘Theysaw ’is
wounds was mortial, an’theyjudged that it was best’, notHe saw...he judged;and
the implication must be that, had his wounds not been ‘mortial’,theymight have
judged differently. But then what? Logically the Driver should fulfil his statement
of ruthless intent—‘I couldn’t pull up, not foryou’—by driving over his brother’s
body, not in mercy but in pursuance of his duty. Does Kipling let him off the hook?
The poem’s last two quatrains deepen the problem rather than resolve it:

The Driver ’e give nothin’ ’cept a little coughin’ grunt,

But ’e swung ’is ’orses ’andsome when it came to ‘Action Front!’

An’ if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head

’Twas juicier for the niggers when the case begun to spread.

The moril of this story, it is plainly to be seen:

You ’aven’t got no families when servin’ of the Queen—

You ’avent got no brothers, fathers, sisters, wives, or sons—

If you want to win your battles take an’ work your bloomin’ guns!^15

These two stanzas seem at odds. In the first, the Driver does his job better for
the horror of what happened to his brother; his ‘little coughin’ grunt’ is both an
expression of self-control and an intimation of vengeful rage. The word ‘coughin’ ’
looks forward via its homophone ‘coffin’ to the ‘case’ which the Driver will unleash
on the ‘niggers’ (who have themselves been linguistically degraded; they were ‘a
native army-core [corps]’ earlier). In the economy of the poem the Driver keeps in
his emotions in one form in order to ‘spread’ them in another. The second stanza,
however, knows nothing of this; it proposes an absolute disavowal of human family
ties, let alone those which relate us to animals. (Snarleyow, who gives his name to
the poem, disappears from it half-way through.) ‘Bloomin’ ’ is a euphemism for
‘bloody’, so the phrase ‘bloomin’ guns’ may remind us of the wheel which is literally

(^14) Kipling, ‘ ‘‘Snarleyow’’ ’, ibid. 412–13.
(^15) Ibid. 413. ‘Monday head’ suggests a hangover after the weekend’s drinking (cf. ‘Monday mice’,
a euphemism for black eyes). ‘Case’ (‘case-shot’) is a form of ammunition used against infantry, in
which bullets loaded into a metal canister spread on impact.