For one would not retreat, nor ’t other flinch.
LXXVIII
Another column also suffered much:—
And here we may remark with the historian,
You should but give few cartridges to such
Troops as are meant to march with greatest glory on:
When matters must be carried by the touch
Of the bright bayonet, and they all should hurry on;
They sometimes, with a hankering for existence,
Keep merely firing at a foolish distance.698
LXXIX
A junction of the General Meknop’s men
(Without the General, who had fallen some time
Before, being badly seconded just then)
Was made at length with those who dared to climb
The death-disgorging rampart once again;
And, though the Turk’s resistance was sublime,
They took the bastion, which the Seraskier
Defended at a price extremely dear.699
LXXX
Juan and Johnson, and some volunteers,
Among the foremost, offered him good quarter,
A word which little suits with Seraskiers,
Or at least suited not this valiant Tartar.
He died, deserving well his country’s tears,
A savage sort of military martyr:
An English naval officer, who wished
To make him prisoner, was also dished:
LXXXI
For all the answer to his proposition
Was from a pistol-shot that laid him dead;700
On which the rest, without more intermission,
Began to lay about with steel and lead—
The pious metals most in requisition
On such occasions: not a single head
Was spared;—three thousand Muslims perished here,
And sixteen bayonets pierced the Seraskier.701
LXXXII
The city’s taken—only part by part—
And Death is drunk with gore: there’s not a street
Where fights not to the last some desperate heart
For those for whom it soon shall cease to beat.702
Here War forgot his own destructive art
In more destroying Nature; and the heat
Of Carnage, like the Nile’s sun-sodden slime,
Engendered monstrous shapes of every crime.
LXXXIII
A Russian officer, in martial tread
Over a heap of bodies, felt his heel
Seized fast, as if ’twere by the serpent’s head
Whose fangs Eve taught her human seed to feel;
In vain he kicked, and swore, and writhed, and bled,
And howled for help as wolves do for a meal—
The teeth still kept their gratifying hold,
As do the subtle snakes described of old.703
LXXXIV
A dying Muslim, who had felt the foot
Of a foe o’er him, snatched at it, and bit
The very tendon which is most acute—
(That which some ancient Muse or modern wit
Named after thee, Achilles!) and quite through’t
He made the teeth meet, nor relinquished it
Even with his life—for (but they lie) ’tis said
To the live leg still clung the severed head.
LXXXV
However this may be, ’tis pretty sure
The Russian officer for life was lamed,
For the Turk’s teeth stuck faster than a skewer,
And left him ’midst the invalid and maimed:
The regimental surgeon could not cure
His patient, and, perhaps, was to be blamed
More than the head of the inveterate foe,
Which was cut off, and scarce even then let go.
LXXXVI
But then the fact’s a fact—and ’tis the part
Of a true poet to escape from fiction
Whene’er he can; for there is little art
in leaving verse more free from the restriction
Of Truth than prose, unless to suit the mart
For what is sometimes called poetic diction,
And that outrageous appetite for lies
Which Satan angles with for souls, like flies.704
LXXXVII
The city’s taken, but not rendered!—No!
There’s not a Muslim that hath yielded sword:
The blood may gush out, as the Danube’s flow
Rolls by the city wall; but deed nor word
Acknowledge aught of dread of Death or foe:
In vain the yell of victory is roared
By the advancing Muscovite—the groan
Of the last foe is echoed by his own.
LXXXVIII
The bayonet pierces and the sabre cleaves,
And human lives are lavished everywhere,
As the year closing whirls the scarlet leaves705
When the stripped forest bows to the bleak air,
And groans; and thus the peopled city grieves,
Shorn of its best and loveliest, and left bare;
But still it falls in vast and awful splinters,
As oaks blown down with all their thousand winters.
LXXXIX
It is an awful topic—but ’tis not
My cue for any time to be terrific:
For checkered as is seen our human lot
With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
Too much of one sort would be soporific;—
Without, or with, offence to friends or foes,
I sketch your world exactly as it goes.
XC
And one good action in the midst of crimes
Is “quite refreshing,” in the affected phrase706
Of these ambrosial, Pharisaic times,
With all their pretty milk-and-water ways,
And may serve therefore to bedew these rhymes,
A little scorched at present with the blaze
Of conquest and its consequences, which
Make Epic poesy so rare and rich.
XCI
Upon a taken bastion, where there lay
Thousands of slaughtered men, a yet warm group
Of murdered women, who had found their way
To this vain refuge, made the good heart droop
And shudder;—while, as beautiful as May,
A female child of ten years tried to stoop
And hide her little palpitating breast
Amidst the bodies lulled in bloody rest.707
XCII
Two villainous Cossacques pursued the child
With flashing eyes and weapons: matched with them,
The rudest brute that roams Siberia’s wild
Has feelings pure and polished as a gem—
The bear is civilised, the wolf is mild;
And whom for this at last must we condemn?
Their natures? or their sovereigns, who employ
All arts to teach their subjects to destroy?
XCIII
Their sabres glittered o’er her little head,
Whence her fair hair rose twining with affright,
Her hidden face was plunged amidst the dead:
When Juan caught a glimpse of this sad sight,
I shall not say exactly what he said,
Because it might not solace “ears polite;”708
But what he did, was to lay on their backs,
The readiest way of reasoning with Cossacques.
XCIV
One’s hip he slashed, and split the other’s shoulder,
And drove
