19 May 2025

Mild Monday - "Bridge-Guard in the Karroo" by Rudyard Kipling

The recent situation with refugees from South Africa put me in mind of this poem by Rudyard Kipling.

For Kipling, of course, the Afrikaner Boers were the enemy. I wrote in more detail about the Boer War here. It was messy—one of those wars we would peg today as horribly pointless. But this poem isn’t really about the war as such; instead, it is an evocative portrayal of British soldiers who have been sent out into the middle of nowhere to guard a railroad bridge.

Blood River Bridge, 1896 - Source: Atom

Oddly—although perhaps not so much so for Kipling—the poem’s epigraph references the Blood River, which is actually nowhere near the Karroo; it’s on the opposite side of South Africa, in fact. But it was at the Blood River where, some 75 years before Kipling wrote this poem (in 1901), the Boers won a near-miraculous victory against the Zulu. The reminder that Boers are a formidable enemy only increases the melancholy of the poem that follows.

For some real pictures of the Karroo, may I recommend this page.

Not everyone digs Leslie Fish’s cigarette-roughed voice, but her musical setting for this poem is a perfect match for the sense of loneliness the poem conveys:

Bridge-Guard in the Karroo

“. . . and will supply details to guard the Blood River Bridge” District Orders: Lines of Communication—South African War.

Sudden the desert changes,
The raw glare softens and clings,
Till the aching Oudtshoorn ranges
Stand up like the thrones of Kings —

Ramparts of slaughter and peril —
Blazing, amazing, aglow —
’Twixt the sky-line’s belting beryl
And the wine-dark flats below.

Royal the pageant closes,
Lit by the last of the sun —
Opal and ash-of-roses,
Cinnamon, umber, and dun.

The twilight swallows the thicket,
The starlight reveals the ridge.
The whistle shrills to the picket —
We are changing guard on the bridge.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the empty metals shine —
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

We slip through the broken panel
Of fence by the ganger’s shed;
We drop to the waterless channel
And the lean track overhead;

We stumble on refuse of rations,
The beef and the biscuit-tins;
We take our appointed stations,
And the endless night begins.

We hear the Hottentot herders
As the sheep click past to the fold —
And the click of the restless girders
As the steel contracts in the cold —

Voices of jackals calling
And, loud in the hush between,
A morsel of dry earth falling
From the flanks of the scarred ravine.

And the solemn firmament marches,
And the hosts of heaven rise
Framed through the iron arches —
Banded and barred by the ties,

Till we feel the far track humming,
And we see her headlight plain,
And we gather and wait her coming —
The wonderful north-bound train.

(Few, forgotten and lonely,
Where the white car-windows shine —
No, not combatants—only
Details guarding the line.)

Quick, ere the gift escape us!
Out of the darkness we reach
For a handful of week-old papers
And a mouthful of human speech.

And the monstrous heaven rejoices,
And the earth allows again,
Meetings, greetings, and voices
Of women talking with men.

So we return to our places,
As out on the bridge she rolls;
And the darkness covers our faces,
And the darkness re-enters our souls.

More than a little lonely
Where the lessening tail-lights shine.
No—not combatants—only
Details guarding the line!

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Thoughts?