Where in Barrack Room Ballads Mr Kipling has attempted to do more than fill up the feet of an irresponsible line, his verse only succeeds in defining the weakness, in a corresponding kind, of his prose. We have seen that one weakness of his soldier tales is their over emphasis of the brutal aspect of war, natural in an author of sensitive imagination attempting to identify himself with the soldier's point of view. In the prose tales this exaggeration is only occasional. In Barrack Room Ballads it is more pronounced.
We may take three stanzas of Snarleyow as evidence that Mr Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads, unlike the songs of Puck and the greater mass of his verse, really had to be metrical; also as evidence that, in so far as they attempt to be more than a galloping chorus in dialect they are less admirable than the adventures of Ortheris and Mulvaney. The Battery was charging into action and the Driver had just been saying that a Battery was hard to pull up when it was taking the field:
"'E 'adn't 'ardly spoke the word, before a droppin' shell
A little right the battery an' between the sections fell;
An' when the smoke 'ad cleared away, before the limber wheels,
There lay the Driver's Brother with 'is 'ead between 'is 'eels.
"Then sez the Driver's Brother, an' 'is words was very plain,
'For Gawd's own sake get over me, an' put me out o' pain.'
They saw 'is wounds was mortial, an' they judged that it was best,
So they took an' drove the limber straight across 'is back an' chest.
"The Driver 'e give nothin' 'cept a little coughin' grunt,
But 'e swung 'is 'orses 'andsome when it came to 'Action Front!'
An' if one wheel was juicy, you may lay your Monday head
'Twas juicier for the niggers when the case began to spread."
The brutality in this incident is forced in idea and expression beyond anything we find in Soldiers Three. It is this continuous forcing of idea and expression which persists in virtually all Mr Kipling's verse except where the jingle is all that matters. We have only to recall recitations from the platform or before the curtain of some of Mr Kipling's popular poetry to realise, sometimes a little painfully, that verse is for him not a threshold of the authentic Hall of Song, but, too often, a door out of reality into the sentimental and overwrought.
Comparing the soldier tales and the soldier songs it is often possible, however, to miss the author's flagging, because, as we have seen, the soldier songs are the best songs, whereas the soldier tales are not the best tales. The full extent of the inferiority of Mr Kipling's verse to Mr Kipling's prose cannot, however, be missed if we compare the finer grain of Mr Kipling's prose with the poems that deal with similar themes. Read first The Story of Ung (The Seven Seas) and afterwards the tale of the Flint Man found upon the Downs by Dan and Una (Rewards and Fairies). Or, to take an even more telling instance, recall the most perfect of all Mr Kipling's tales The Miracle of Purun Bhagat, and afterwards read the poem that is proudly set at the head of it:
"The night we felt the earth would move
We stole and plucked him by the hand,
Because we loved him with the love
That knows but cannot understand.
"And when the roaring hillside broke,
And all our world fell down in rain,
We saved him, we the Little Folk;
But lo! he does not come again!
"Mourn now, we saved him for the sake
Of such poor love as wild ones may.
Mourn ye! Our brother will not wake,
And his own kind drive us away!"
—Dirge of the Langurs.