Turned back within its socket—these reward
Your rank and file by thousands, while the rest
May win perhaps a ribbon at the breast!
XIV
Yet I love Glory;—Glory’s a great thing:—
Think what it is to be in your old age
Maintained at the expense of your good King:
A moderate pension shakes full many a sage,
And Heroes are but made for bards to sing,
Which is still better—thus, in verse, to wage
Your wars eternally, besides enjoying
Half-pay for life, make Mankind worth destroying.
XV
The troops, already disembarked, pushed on
To take a battery on the right: the others,
Who landed lower down, their landing done,
Had set to work as briskly as their brothers:
Being grenadiers, they mounted one by one,
Cheerful as children climb the breasts of mothers,
O’er the intrenchment and the palisade,656
Quite orderly, as if upon parade.
XVI
And this was admirable: for so hot
The fire was, that were red Vesuvius loaded,
Besides its lava, with all sorts of shot
And shells or hells, it could not more have goaded.
Of officers a third fell on the spot,
A thing which Victory by no means boded
To gentlemen engaged in the assault:
Hounds, when the huntsman tumbles, are at fault.
XVII
But here I leave the general concern
To track our Hero on his path of Fame:
He must his laurels separately earn—
For fifty thousand heroes, name by name,
Though all deserving equally to turn
A couplet, or an elegy to claim,
Would form a lengthy lexicon of Glory,
And, what is worse still, a much longer story:
XVIII
And therefore we must give the greater number
To the Gazette—which doubtless fairly dealt
By the deceased, who lie in famous slumber
In ditches, fields, or wheresoe’er they felt
Their clay for the last time their souls encumber;—
Thrice happy he whose name has been well spelt
In the despatch: I knew a man whose loss
Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose.657
XIX
Juan and Johnson joined a certain corps,
And fought away with might and main, not knowing
The way which they had never trod before,
And still less guessing where they might be going;
But on they marched, dead bodies trampling o’er,
Firing, and thrusting, slashing, sweating, glowing,
But fighting thoughtlessly enough to win,
To their two selves, one whole bright bulletin.
XX
Thus on they wallowed in the bloody mire
Of dead and dying thousands—sometimes gaining
A yard or two of ground, which brought them nigher
To some odd angle for which all were straining;
At other times, repulsed by the close fire,
Which really poured as if all Hell were raining
Instead of Heaven, they stumbled backwards o’er
A wounded comrade, sprawling in his gore.
XXI
Though ’twas Don Juan’s first of fields, and though
The nightly muster and the silent march
In the chill dark, when Courage does not glow
So much as under a triumphal arch,
Perhaps might make him shiver, yawn, or throw
A glance on the dull clouds (as thick as starch,
Which stiffened Heaven) as if he wished for day;—
Yet for all this he did not run away.
XXII
Indeed he could not. But what if he had?
There have been and are heroes who begun
With something not much better, or as bad:
Frederick the Great from Molwitz658 deigned to run,
For the first and last time; for, like a pad,
Or hawk, or bride, most mortals after one
Warm bout are broken in to their new tricks,
And fight like fiends for pay or politics.
XXIII
He was what Erin calls, in her sublime
Old Erse or Irish, or it may be Punic;—
(The antiquarians659—who can settle Time,
Which settles all things, Roman, Greek, or Runic—
Swear that Pat’s language sprung from the same clime
With Hannibal, and wears the Tyrian tunic
Of Dido’s alphabet—and this is rational
As any other notion, and not national;)—
XXIV
But Juan was quite “a broth of a boy,”
A thing of impulse and a child of song;
Now swimming in the sentiment of joy,
Or the sensation (if that phrase seem wrong),
And afterward, if he must needs destroy,
In such good company as always throng
To battles, sieges, and that kind of pleasure,
No less delighted to employ his leisure;
XXV
But always without malice: if he warred
Or loved, it was with what we call “the best
Intentions,” which form all Mankind’s trump card,
To be produced when brought up to the test.
The statesman—hero—harlot—lawyer—ward
Off each attack, when people are in quest
Of their designs, by saying they meant well;
’Tis pity “that such meaning should pave Hell.”660
XXVI
I almost lately have begun to doubt
Whether Hell’s pavement—if it be so paved—
Must not have latterly been quite worn out,
Not by the numbers good intent hath saved,
But by the mass who go below without
Those ancient good intentions, which once shaved
And smoothed the brimstone of that street of Hell
Which bears the greatest likeness to Pall Mall.661
XXVII
Juan, by some strange chance, which oft divides
Warrior from warrior in their grim career,
Like chastest wives from constant husbands’ sides
Just at the close of the first bridal year,
By one of those odd turns of Fortune’s tides,
Was on a sudden rather puzzled here,
When, after a good deal of heavy firing,
He found himself alone, and friends retiring.
XXVIII
I don’t know how the thing occurred—it might
Be that the greater part were killed or wounded,
And that the rest had faced unto the right
About; a circumstance which has confounded
Caesar himself, who, in the very sight
Of his whole army, which so much abounded
In courage, was obliged to snatch a shield,
And rally back his Romans to the field.662
XXIX
Juan, who had no shield to snatch, and was
No Caesar, but a fine young lad, who fought
He knew not why, arriving at this pass,
Stopped for a minute, as perhaps he ought
For a much longer time; then, like an ass
(Start not, kind reader, since great
