The Crimean War, Part 2

He was Wellington’s man, he was Raglan,
He had watched the hope of Corsican dreams
In Spain, where bitter was the battle cry,
Our ground, they said, we’ll bleed for every inch.
Though Pavel’s son had burned Muscovy down
He rode in Paris streets not two years past.
Yet Raglan shipped them to that foreign soil
And Tatar land they felt beneath their feet.
Strange ground it is whose grass can never die,
Where fit between the means and end
Proportion strong and right will not apply
A world where one to all will send
A world created by a single word
Not bloody from the blood all spent
Crimea’s souls at last will be interred
And goats from sheep to each is sent
But who fought for this place, whose was the ground?
Not Rus, nor Turk, nor Kievan Khanate,
And how can ground be owned and who owns it?
Where does he put it? Whose pocket has it?
Raglan! Was it yours? You blund’ring, weeping fool,
They hated you. What writ could give you space,
Who spared you, Aberdeen and Palmerston,
Or French-backed Rome and Third Jerusalem?
They shove in Nativity’s sacred hall
And blooded, empty rites enact,
Before an idol, virgin saint they crawl
A mutual ignorant pact.
Greek and Latin, Bishopric robes and all,
For this the limbs of men are gone,
What cannot stand must certainly soon fall,
And Sevastopol meets no dawn.
Bestride the horse, his sword, his gun, his teeth,
The rifle, the shot, spread artillery,
Fist and nail, bayonet, all Raglan’s men.
A dog pitch black once crept into his tent,
It tore the flap and chewed his gleaming boots
He broke it back with lunging feet to head
And brains spilled forth on Raglan’s sparkling toes,
Towards French-backed Rome and Third Jerusalem