No doubt, O Kaiser, you have thought
Napoleon was a duffer
Compared to you, when you set out
To make Old England suffer.
But if you read your history books,
You'll very quickly find, Sir,
That Boney knew, despite his faults,
How to make up his mind, Sir.
You flutter up, you flutter down,
You flutter night and day, Sir,
Yet somehow victory won't look
Your mad and fluttering way, Sir,
But when the war by us is won,
And in Berlin our men, Sir,
You'll be a bit surprised to find
Where you will flutter then, Sir.
We laughed and thought it ripping; but the Doctor seemed to be hurt, and
said: "Silence, silence, boys! It ill becomes us to jest at the
spectacle of a fallen potentate, and still less so before he has fallen.
"A more pleasing effort is that of Travers minor," went on the Doctor,
picking up the poem of Travers. "We have here nothing to be described
as a picture of war, but rather the views of an intelligent and
Christian boy upon war. Personally, I think well of these verses. They
are unostentatious--no flash of fire--but a temperate lament on war in
general and a final conviction not lacking in shrewdness. I will not
say that I entirely agree with Travers minor in his concluding
assertion, but he may be right--he may be right. At any rate, the poem
is a worthy expression of an educated mind, and by no means the worst of
those with which we are called to deal."
He then read Travers minor, and we were all frightfully disappointed,
for it turned out that Travers hated war, so the result wasn't a war
poem at all, but a very tame affair without any dash about it--in fact,
very feeble, I thought. His brother would have despised him for writing
it. Of course, Peacock wanted a poem praising up the glory of war, not
sitting on it, like Travers minor did.