from dark defile to gethsemane bloody, ‘juicy’ with the Driver’s Brother’s blood; but then we are exhorted not to
careabout this one way or the other. The ‘moril’ is anything but ‘plainly to be seen’;
it shifts, depending on our standpoint in the poem.
InBarrack-Room Balladssuch ambivalence is inseparable from the evocation
of war in all its particularity and complicatedness; but it does not extend to the
causes, or ideals, or political calculations, which lie behind the ‘barbarious wars’.
These ‘larger’ issues are taken for granted, or simply ignored. In ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ the
origins of the war in the Sudan against Muslim rebel tribes led by the Mahdi are
summed up in one line: ‘Our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’
did.’ The speaker is more interested in paying his rollicking tribute to the fact that
theSudanesedervisheshaddonesomebreakingoftheirown:
Then ’ere’stoyou, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, an’ the missis an’ the kid;
Our orders was to break you, an’ of course we went an’ did.
We sloshed you with Martinis, an’ it wasn’t ’ardly fair;
But for all the odds agin’ you, Fuzzy-Wuz, you broke the square.^16The ‘square’—the famous infantry formation against which Ney’s cavalry had
foundered at Waterloo—may be symbolic of order, of British courage and discip-
line, but it is not reducible to a symbol (and it is not courage which triumphs, but
superior fire-power). For the speaker it is less a national-historical matter than one
of professional pride (or chagrin); to put it another way, thoughts of Waterloo are at
the reader’s discretion, and are not enforced by the poem’s rhetoric. The limitation
in point of view which Kipling imposed on himself served him well; it made
possible the truths ofBarrack-Room Ballads, which still retain their scandalous, or
even (in respect of modern pieties) blasphemous force. The framework for this
understanding and voicing of the soldier’s mentality cracked with the Boer War
and disintegrated in 1914–18.
III
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When the Boer War broke out in October 1899, Kipling and his wife Carrie had
still not settled in a permanent home; in the month it ended, in June 1902, they
bought Bateman’s, near Burwash in Sussex, where they remained for the rest of
their lives. Although Kipling spent a good deal of time in South Africa during the
war, he was no longer a local reporter; his primary focus shifted to England herself,
(^16) Kipling, ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’, ibid. 401; the ‘square’ was breached at the Battle of Tamanieb, 13 Mar.
- ‘Martinis’ are Martini-Henry rifles; their proximity with ‘sloshed’ makes the line a bit ludicrous
today, but Kipling had probably not come across the cocktail (the firstOEDcitation is 1897), and
could not foresee that ‘sloshed’ would come to mean ‘drunk’ (first citation 1946); he is using it as a
euphemism for ‘slaughtered’.