Battle of the light brigade poem9/23/2023 ![]() The Russians occupied two Turkish provinces, taking them within striking distance of Constantinople.Ĭontrol of the Turkish capital would give the Russians access to the Mediterranean and so threaten the French colonies in North Africa, British lines of communication to India, and other territories on the Mediterranean seaboard. The Tsar of Russia demanded that he should be recognised as the protector of Christians within the Ottoman Empire. The Orthodox monks, looking to their co-religionists in Russia, claimed that the Turks were not ensuring their safety. Palestine-the Holy Land-was at that time part of the Ottoman Empire, which also included much of the Balkans, bordering on the Russian Empire. The war, in which Britain and France were confronting the Russians in the Crimea and elsewhere, had originated in a violent squabble between Catholic and Orthodox monks in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, believed by Christians to be the site of the stable in which Jesus was born. ![]() This was, though, a time of imperial rivalry between the European powers which then dominated world politics and deployed their armies and navies to protect what they saw as their ‘vital interests’. It may seem odd to modern readers that British troops should have been fighting on the southern border of Russia. The poem is full of the young Kipling’s passionate anger at the capacity of the British to neglect the soldiers who serve them and their Empire. More funds are raised, and although some of the money goes to other causes, the men are given enough to live on. Now-in Kipling’s account-he is moved by their plight and writes some more lines which touch the hearts of the public. Tennyson, noted for the majestic musical language of his verse, had been Poet Laureate since 1850, and had written the much-celebrated poem, “The Charge of the Light Brigade” when he first heard of the battle, in which British troops had shown great bravery in a suicidal advance on the Russian guns. Twenty veteran soldiers, survivors of the Charge of the Light Brigade during the Crimean War in 1854, and now destitute, go to see Alfred Lord Tennyson for help. ![]() a scrapbook held in the Kipling Papers at the University of Sussex: Stories, Poems, etc.The Works of Rudyard Kipling (Wordsworth Poetry Library).“The Last of the Light Brigade” is collected in: The poem has also been known as “Our Veterans”. ![]() See the new Rudyard Kipling bibliography (February 2010) by David Alan Richards (p. James’s Gazette, and on 24th May 1890 in The Week’s News, the supplement to The Pioneer in Allahabad on which Kipling worked from 1887 to 1889. First published on 28 April 1890 in the St. ![]()
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