Fiction · 1892
Barrack-room Ballads
The poems that made Kipling's name, written in the voice of the British private soldier rather than about him. Here is "Danny Deever", hanged in the morning while the regiment is paraded to watch; "Tommy", on what happens to a soldier at the door of a public house in peacetime; "Gunga Din", the regimental water-carrier; "Fuzzy-Wuzzy", a salute from the ranks to the Sudanese who broke a British square; "Mandalay"; "The Widow at Windsor"; "The Young British Soldier", giving advice that ends with the rifle and the soldier's own brains; and "Gentlemen-Rankers", the drinking song of men who have come down in the world.
Rudyard Kipling published the First Series in 1892, mostly out of verses written for the Scots Observer, and a Second Series followed in 1896 with "Bobs", "Back to the Army Again", "Cholera Camp", "The Ladies" and "The Mother-Lodge" among others. The ballads were attacked for their dialect and their music-hall swing and read anyway, by soldiers as much as by critics.
This Bibliomancer edition presents both series complete.
Contents
- Dedication
- Danny Deever
- Tommy
- Fuzzy-Wuzzy
- Soldier, Soldier
- Screw-Guns
- Cells
- Gunga Din
- Oonts
- Loot
- ‘Snarleyow’
- The Widow at Windsor
- Belts
- The Young British Soldier
- Mandalay
- Troopin’
- The Widow’s Party
- Ford o’ Kabul River
- Gentlemen-Rankers
- Route Marchin’
- Shillin’ a Day
- ‘Bobs’
- ‘Back to the Army Again’
- ‘Birds of Prey’ March
- Sappers
- That Day
- A Song of Instruction
- Cholera Camp
- The Ladies
- Bill ‘Awkins
- The Mother-Lodge
- The Sergeant’s Weddin’
- The Jacket
- The ‘Eathen
- The Shut-Eye Sentry
- ‘Mary, Pity Women!’
- For to Admire
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About this edition
The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1865–1936 · Modern
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was born in Bombay, sent to England at five, and returned to India at sixteen to work as a journalist in Lahore and Allahabad, where the stories collected in Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) were written. Back in England from 1889, and for some years in Vermont, he wrote The Jungle Book (1894), Captains Courageous, Kim (1901), the Just So Stories and a great deal of verse. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, the first English-language writer to receive it.
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