William Simpson, The Attack on the Malakoff (1855)
:
We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do,
We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too!
We've fought the Bear before and while we're Britons true
The Russians shall not have Constantinople!
—Victorian music hall song
Like a dog trotting, friendly, by your side,
With eyes alert on all the passing scene,
Tribal memory takes things in its stride—
Seldom forgetting that which once has been.
Monks Orthodox and Catholic fought over the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem,
And presently the great powers of the day fought, too, back then,
A hundred and seventy years past—
Three middling lifetimes end to end, gone fast.
Russia was beaten—the French and British
Had the Minié rifle, a winning bet,
With four times the range of a muzhik's muzzle-loading musket.
Over 450,000 Russians died, most of cholera, it's true,
Almost 100,000 Frenchmen, most of that illness, too,
And half that many Ottoman asker.
Of the British (22,000 or so dead), their descendants choose to remember,
prêt-à-porter, the Cardigan sweater, Raglan sleeve, and balaclava,
Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade,"
Though, also, worth boasting of, Florence Nightingale.
She, God knows, adorns the tale.
What did so many suffer and die for?
The suffering of the horses, above all,
Starving and perishing by thousands in the mud,
Or raked with fire in imbecile "cavalry actions,"
Wrenches the heart these many decades on,
The cruel carelessness of General Cardigan chills the blood.
In 1856, the powers of the West
Imposed a humiliating peace:
Tsardom's long-drawn-out death throes began.
The tribe does not forget, it bides its time, clinging to what has been.
Vladimir Putin rules the Russians now.
Why do so many of them, it seems, support him, you ask,
Waging yet another war that heedless time will scorn?
What goes around comes around, to the seventh generation born!
Lieutenant General James Thomas Brudenell, 7th Earl of Cardigan
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
—Alfred Lord Tennyson, "The Charge of the Light Brigade"
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