Don Juan
Page 33
To vie with thee would be about as vain
As for a brook to cope with ocean’s flood,
But still we moderns equal you in blood;
81
If not in poetry, at least in fact,
And fact is truth, the grand desideratum,
Of which, howe’er the Muse describes each act,
There should be ne’ertheless a slight substratum.
But now the town is going to be attacked;
Great deeds are doing. How shall I relate ’em?
Souls of immortal generals! Phoebus watches
To colour up his rays from your dispatches.
82
Oh ye great bulletins of Bonaparte!
Oh ye less grand long lists of killed and wounded!
Shade of Leonidas, who fought so hearty
When my poor Greece was once, as now, surrounded!
Oh Caesar’s Commentaries! Now impart ye,
Shadows of glory (lest I be confounded),
A portion of your fading twilight hues,
So beautiful, so fleeting to the Muse.
83
When I call ‘fading’ martial immortality,
I mean that every age and every year
And almost every day in sad reality
Some sucking hero is compelled to rear,
Who when we come to sum up the totality
Of deeds to human happiness most dear,
Turns out to be a butcher in great business,
Afflicting young folks with a sort of dizziness.
84
Medals, ranks, ribbons, lace, embroidery, scarlet
Are things immortal to immortal man,
As purple to the Babylonian harlot.
An uniform to boys is like a fan
To women. There is scarce a crimson varlet
But deems himself the first in glory’s van.
But glory’s glory, and if you would find
What that is – ask the pig who sees the wind.
85
At least he feels it, and some say he sees,
Because he runs before it like a pig;
Or if that simple sentence should displease,
Say that he scuds before it like a brig,
A schooner, or – but it is time to ease
This canto, ere my Muse perceives fatigue.
The next shall ring a peal to shake all people
Like a bob major from a village steeple.
86
Hark, through the silence of the cold, dull night
The hum of armies gathering rank on rank.
Lo, dusky masses steal in dubious sight
Along the leaguered wall and bristling bank
Of the armed river, while with straggling light
The stars peep through the vapours dim and dank,
Which curl in curious wreaths. How soon the smoke
Of hell shall pall them in a deeper cloak!
87
Here pause we for the present, as even then
That awful pause, dividing life from death,
Struck for an instant on the hearts of men,
Thousands of whom were drawing their last breath.
A moment, and all will be life again.
The march, the charge, the shouts of either faith,
Hurrah! and Allah! and one moment more,
The death cry drowning in the battle’s roar.
Canto VIII
1
Oh blood and thunder! And oh blood and wounds!
These are but vulgar oaths as you may deem,
Too gentle reader, and most shocking sounds.
And so they are; yet thus is glory’s dream
Unriddled, and as my true Muse expounds
At present such things, since they are her theme,
So be they her inspirers. Call them Mars,
Bellona, what you will – they mean but wars.
2
All was prepared – the fire, the sword, the men
To wield them in their terrible array.
The army like a lion from his den
Marched forth with nerve and sinews bent to slay,
A human Hydra, issuing from its fen
To breathe destruction on its winding way,
Whose heads were heroes, which cut off in vain,
Immediately in others grew again.
3
History can only take things in the gross;
But could we know them in detail, perchance
In balancing the profit and the loss,
War’s merit it by no means might enhance,
To waste so much gold for a little dross,
As hath been done, mere conquest to advance.
The drying up a single tear has more
Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.
4
And why? Because it brings self-approbation;
Whereas the other, after all its glare,
Shouts, bridges, arches, pensions from a nation,
Which (it may be) has not much left to spare,
A higher title or a loftier station,
Though they may make Corruption gape or stare,
Yet in the end except in freedom’s battles
Are nothing but a child of Murder’s rattles.
5
And such they are, and such they will be found.
Not so Leonidas and Washington,
Whose every battlefield is holy ground,
Which breathes of nations saved, not worlds undone.
How sweetly on the ear such echoes sound.
While the mere victor’s may appal or stun
The servile and the vain, such names will be
A watchword till the future shall be free.
6
The night was dark, and the thick mist allowed
Nought to be seen save the artillery’s flame,
Which arched the horizon like a fiery cloud
And in the Danube’s waters shone the same,
A mirrored hell! The volleying roar and loud
Long booming of each peal on peal o’ercame
The ear far more than thunder; for heaven’s flashes
Spare or smite rarely – man’s make millions ashes.
7
The column ordered on the assault scarce passed
Beyond the Russian batteries a few toises,
When up the bristling Moslem rose at last,
Answering the Christian thunders with like voices.
Then one vast fire, air, earth and stream embraced,
Which rocked as ‘twere beneath the mighty noises,
While the whole rampart blazed like Etna when
The restless Titan hiccups in his den.
8
And one enormous shout of ‘Allah’ rose
In the same moment, loud as even the roar
Of war’s most mortal engines, to their foes
Hurling defiance. City, stream, and shore
Resounded ‘Allah!’ And the clouds, which close
With thickening canopy the conflict o’er,
Vibrate to the eternal name. Hark, through
All sounds it pierceth, ‘Allah! Allah! Hu!’
9
The columns were in movement one and all,
But of the portion which attacked by water
Thicker than leaves the lives began to fall,
Though led by Arseniew, that great son of Slaughter,
As brave as ever faced both bomb and ball.
‘Carnage’ (so Wordsworth tells you) ‘is God’s daughter’;
If he speak truth, she is Christ’s sister, and
Just now behaved as in the Holy Land.
10
The Prince de Ligne was wounded in the knee.
Count Chapeau-Bras too had a ball between
His cap and head, which proves the head to be
Aristocratic as was ever seen,
Because it then received no injury
More than the cap
; in fact the ball could mean
No harm unto a right legitimate head.
‘Ashes to ashes’ – why not lead to lead?
11
Also the General Markow, Brigadier,
Insisting on removal of the Prince
Amidst some groaning thousands dying near –
All common fellows, who might writhe and wince
And shriek for water into a deaf ear –
The General Markow, who could thus evince
His sympathy for rank, by the same token
To teach him greater, had his own leg broken.
12
Three hundred cannon threw up their emetic,
And thirty thousand muskets flung their pills
Like hail to make a bloody diuretic.
Mortality, thou hast thy monthly bills.
Thy plagues, thy famines, thy physicians yet tick
Like the deathwatch within our ears the ills
Past, present, and to come, but all may yield
To the true portrait of one battlefield.
13
There the still varying pangs, which multiply
Until their very number makes men hard
By the infinities of agony,
Which meet the gaze, whate’er it may regard –
The groan, the roll in dust, the all-white eye
Turned back within its socket – these reward
Your rank and file by thousands, while the rest
May win perhaps a ribbon at the breast.
14
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, makes mankind worth destroying.
15
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 entrenchment and the palisade,
Quite orderly as if upon parade.
16
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.
17
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.
18
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 dispatch; I knew a man whose loss
Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose.
19
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.
20
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.
21
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.
22
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 Molwitz 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 into their new tricks,
And fight like fiends for pay or politics.
23
He was what Erin calls in her sublime
Old Erse or Irish or it may be Punic
(The antiquarians, 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.) –
24
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 afterwards, 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.
25
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.
26
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.
27
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 fou
nd himself alone, and friends retiring.
28
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.
29
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 Homer thought
This simile enough for Ajax, Juan
Perhaps may find it better than a new one) –
30
Then like an ass, he went upon his way
And what was stranger, never looked behind;
But seeing, flashing forward like the day
Over the hills a fire enough to blind
Those who dislike to look upon a fray,
He stumbled on to try if he could find
A path to add his own slight arm and forces
To corps, the greater part of which were corses.
31
Perceiving then no more the commandant
Of his own corps, nor even the corps, which had
Quite disappeared (The gods know how. I can’t
Account for everything which may look bad
In history; but we at least may grant
It was not marvellous that a mere lad
In search of glory should look on before,
Nor care a pinch of snuff about his corps.) –
32
Perceiving nor commander nor commanded
And left at large like a young heir to make
His way to – where he knew not – singlehanded,
As travellers follow over bog and brake
An ignis fatuus, or as sailors, stranded,
Unto the nearest hut themselves betake,
So Juan, following honour and his nose,
Rushed where the thickest fire announced most foes.
33
He knew not where he was nor greatly cared,
For he was dizzy, busy, and his veins
Filled as with lightning, for his spirit shared
The hour, as is the case with lively brains;
And where the hottest fire was seen and heard,
And the loud cannon pealed his hoarsest strains,
He rushed, while earth and air were sadly shaken
By thy humane discovery, Friar Bacon.
34
And as he rushed along, it came to pass he
Fell in with what was late the second column,
Under the orders of the General Lascy,
But now reduced, as is a bulky volume
Into an elegant extract (much less massy)