Barrack Room Ballads

"Making mock o' uniforms
That guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms
And they're starvation cheap."

Somehow it doesn't matter to me that Kipling is jingoist and a patronizing racist and that occasionally I can't understand what he's talking about. Barrack room ballads was written for

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soldiers and Kipling understodd the soldier's experience and is not always complimentary to the Army command or to "The Widow of Windsor" and her wars. Readers will also find many phrases that have become commonplace in the language. While it lacks the some personal favorites ("If", "The Ballad of East and West"), this is a good collection to get an introduction to Kipling's poetry.

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Read with context, these are a brilliant portrayal of the individuals who comprised the “thin red line” of the British infantry.
Published in 1892 at the height of the British Empire, these verses do include racial epithets and record the military forces that maintained colonialism, but they are

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written in colloquial English about the ordinary soldier (private), not the officers and gentlemen.
The verses are set mainly in the Indian subcontinent, but they try to capture the experience of the infantry in any war, the boredom, senselessness of orders and arbitrary death, for little warmth and reward. This selection most famously starts with Danny Deever, whose hanging is witnessed by Files-on-Parade, who recalls drinking his beer a score of times, and also includes Gunga Din, the regimental bhisti who carries water for the soldiers and dies rescuing an injured soldier, and Mandalay, with a time-expired soldier in drizzling London recalling the “Burma girl” he left behind in Mandalay.
But there is no shying away from the likelihood of death, this from The Young British Soldier:
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
And should the soldier survive to return to Britain, then there is little to look forward to, with the Troop-Sergeant-Major reduced to being a hotel doorman in Shillin’ a Day:
Oh, it drives me half crazy to think of the days I
Went slap for the Ghazi, my sword at my side,
When we rode Hell-for-leather
Both squadrons together,
That didn't care whether we lived or we died.
But it's no use despairin', my wife must go charin'
An' me commissairin' the pay-bills to better,
So if me you be'old
In the wet and the cold,
By the Grand Metropold, won't you give me a letter?

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