Reader Comments: The internet is amazing, isn't it?

Tom Garrett 11 months, 1 week ago

I ran across a poem, found it interesting, and spent some time running down its origin. I thought you might enjoy reading it:

“In times of war, and not before, God and the soldier men adore; When the war is o’er and all things righted, The Lord’s forgot and the soldier slighted.”

When I went looking for its author there were several sites that said Rudyard Kipling had written it, but as far as I knew I had read all of his poems, and I didn't remember that one.

Scouting around the net I came across a site named The Kipling Society.** After an enormous amount of searching around the site I finally found this comment in a discussion of a Kipling poem named "Tommy," which is about soldiers.

"In 'The History of Bucks County, Pennsylvania,' written in 1876 by W.W.H. Davis, the author records that after the battle of Trenton on 26 December, 1776, Hessian troops taken prisoner in the battle were held in the Presbyterian Church in Newtown, and that after they were taken out, the following verse was found written on the wall of the church in red chalk:"

“In times of war, and not before, God and the soldier men adore; When the war is o’er and all things righted, The Lord’s forgot and the soldier slighted.”

"Davis says that tradition credits the verse to a Hessian captive, but he adds that it is '...extremely doubtful, as the writing was in English.'"

I think this is where the idea that Kipling wrote the poem may have originated, since the poem is quoted on a page of the Kipling Society site, and someone reading quickly could get the idea that it was one of his.

Eventually though, I finally found out who REALLY said it!

It was a poet who lived almost two hundred years before our Revolutionary War: Francis Quarles, an English religious poet (1592 to 1644).

You can find him in Wiki.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis...

And you can read some of the things he had to say on this site:

http://www.worldofquotes.com/author/F...

Here's the way he originally said it:

“Our God and soldiers we alike adore ev'n at the brink of danger; not before: After deliverance, both alike requited, Our God's forgotten, and our soldiers slighted”

The internet is really something, isn't it?

I think I go out on the net and see if I can find out where I put my coffee cup down ten minutes ago.

Why not? Everything else is out there somewhere. :-)

**Link to the Kipling Society: http://www.kipling.org.uk/

Dan Haapala 11 months, 1 week ago

Please forgive my change of subject, But I have a question closer to home about our Government. It comes from a quote attributed to Congressman David Crockett in a book written by Edward Ellis.

It deals with the turn of events when the U.S, Government got into the dole out program and one Davy Crockett first approved then opposed the congressional decision. Here's the link.

http://www.fee.org/library/ Hook up and read, then post.

Tom Garrett 11 months ago

Dan,

Without clicking on the link I'm going to assume that you mean Crockett's "Not Yours to Give" speech. I remember reading about that somewhere nearly fifty years ago (maybe History magazine?). If I am not mistaken a novelist named Elliott (?) [that's the wrong name, but close] wrote a novel in which he included that speech. It isn't mentioned in Crockett's autobiography, though, so I suspect the novelist was taking a little "literary license."

And why not? It would have been like Crockett to feel that charity began at home instead of in Congress.

In truth, Crockett sometimes voted one way on such issues, and sometimes the other way. He used a fine sense of what was right and what was wrong in making his judgments.

Wouldn't it be nice if everybody did?

There used to be a quarterly magazine called "The Crockett Chronicle." I ran across three issues of it in the sales room of the Payson Library about five years ago. I don't remember which editions they were, but they were fairly new at that time. The article totally demolished the story about that speech and said it was entirely the idea of the novelist. Since the magazine was written to keep Crockett's memory alive, not to run him down, I have no doubt that it was accurate. I no longer have the magazines. Don't remember what I did with them (probably donated them to the senior center up here), but the magazine may still be published, and so you might be able to check the archives on the web, or you might be able to find a copy of the edition on Amazon.

I'm still waiting for my eye to normalize or I'd help you out with the research. Everything I just wrote is strictly from memory, which is working better than my eye at the moment.

Or at least I hope so. :-)