THE DOG OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE

Andrew Motion

The Dog of the Light Brigade

The Dog of the Light Brigade

We have to remember: when Raglan and others

decided that hour had come, and did as they felt,

and ordered their mess-mates and countrymen

yes, the noble six hundred, most of whom never

had even so much as imagined what shooting

and shelling were like, away from the Shires,

much less endured it - when they had advanced them

up to the mouth of the innocent valley known later

thanks to the Laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson,

thanks be to him, as the Valley of Death, the din

of their bugling and clanking and neighing and stamping

and shouting stretched back to the stables a distance

behind them, and woke there the pampered fox terrier

kept by the men as a mascot, who thinking that this

was the point of his madcap existence, revealed at last,

sprang from his bed among tit-bits of horse-dung,

squeezed through a crack in the ill-hammered planks

of a door, then again through the arms of a boy,

and sped off to join them. This was the dog

who was never surprised in the barracks. Most nights,

indulged with a table-side seat in the mess, he gazed

on the feces of men whose acceptable practice was drink-

ing until one collapsed, whose moustachioed mouths

repeated the same snorting farmyard of noises over and over,

viz: Frenchmen and Russians and women and Prussians

and Turks and women, until they were cancelled,

one by the other, or smudged in the baccy-fug,

wine-fumes and high-collared heat of the moment,

but nothing, no nothing had ever prepared him

for this, for the firecracker racket that rattled

the air they rode into, the po-faced hilarious crash

of men who could empty an armful of bottles

straight off and not bat an eyelid, the curious

antics of horses in kneeling, or slithering sideways,

or stopping stock-still, which is why he kept pace

with them all the way through to the cannon-line

bouncing the heathery turf and yap-yapping

his head off, a maddening brown-and-white blur

at the corner of everyone's eye, and then turning round

when the rest of them also turned round, and skittering

back, bounding higher this time to get clear of the men

he could no longer play with, until losing patience,

and anyway puffed with the effort of running

(although the whole business had lasted fifteen

or so minutes at best), and then strutting off

to the stables to sample the tit-bits of dung

he had saved, before a quick session of mousing,

and after that, falling asleep.

from Public Property (Faber & Faber, 2006), copyright © Andrew

Motion 2003, used by permission of the author and the publisher.