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: