Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads

“Now there were two men in one city;
the one rich and the other poor.”

Jack Barrett went to Quetta
Because they told him to.
He left his wife at Simla
On three-fourths his monthly screw:
Jack Barrett died at Quetta
Ere the next month’s pay he drew.

Jack Barrett went to Quetta.
He didn’t understand
The reason of his transfer
From the pleasant mountain-land:
The season was September,
And it killed him out of hand.

Jack Barrett went to Quetta,
And there gave up the ghost,
Attempting two men’s duty
In that very healthy post;
And Mrs. Barrett mourned for him
Five lively months at most.

Jack Barrett’s bones at Quetta
Enjoy profound repose;
But I shouldn’t be astonished
If now his spirit knows
The reason of his transfer
From the Himalayan snows.

And, when the Last Great Bugle Call
Adown the Hurnal throbs,
When the last grim joke is entered
In the big black Book of Jobs,
And Quetta graveyards give again
Their victims to the air,
I shouldn’t like to be the man
Who sent Jack Barrett there.

THE POST THAT FITTED

Though tangled and twisted the course of true love
This ditty explains,
No tangle’s so tangled it cannot improve
If the Lover has brains.

Ere the steamer bore him Eastward, Sleary was engaged to marry
An attractive girl at Tunbridge, whom he called “my little Carrie.”

Sleary’s pay was very modest; Sleary was the other way.
Who can cook a two-plate dinner on eight poor rupees a day?

Long he pondered o’er the question in his scantly furnished quarters —
Then proposed to Minnie Boffkin, eldest of Judge Boffkin’s daughters.

Certainly an impecunious Subaltern was not a catch,
But the Boffkins knew that Minnie mightn’t make another match.

So they recognised the business and, to feed and clothe the bride,
Got him made a Something Something somewhere on the Bombay side.

Anyhow, the billet carried pay enough for him to marry —
As the artless Sleary put it: – “Just the thing for me and Carrie.”

Did he, therefore, jilt Miss Boffkin – impulse of a baser mind?
No! He started epileptic fits of an appalling kind.

[Of his modus operandi only this much I could gather: —
“Pears’s shaving sticks will give you little taste and lots of lather.”]

Frequently in public places his affliction used to smite
Sleary with distressing vigour – always in the Boffkins’ sight.

Ere a week was over Minnie weepingly returned his ring,
Told him his “unhappy weakness” stopped all thought of marrying.

Sleary bore the information with a chastened holy joy, —
Epileptic fits don’t matter in Political employ, —
Wired three short words to Carrie – took his ticket, packed his kit —
Bade farewell to Minnie Boffkin in one last, long, lingering fit.

Four weeks later, Carrie Sleary read – and laughed until she wept —
Mrs. Boffkin’s warning letter on the “wretched epilept.”…

Year by year, in pious patience, vengeful Mrs. Boffkin sits
Waiting for the Sleary babies to develop Sleary’s fits.

PUBLIC WASTE

Walpole talks of “a man and his price.”
List to a ditty queer —
The sale of a Deputy-Acting-Vice-
Resident-Engineer,
Bought like a bullock, hoof and hide,
By the Little Tin Gods on the Mountain Side.
By the Laws of the Family Circle ‘tis written in letters of brass

That only a Colonel from Chatham can manage the Railways of State,