We have left Gul Kach behind us,
Are marching on Apozai,–
Where pleasure and rest are waiting
To welcome us by and by.
We’re falling back from the Gomal,
Across the Gir-dao plain,
The camping ground is deserted,
We’ll never come back again.
Along the rocks and the defiles,
The mules and the camels wind.
Good-bye to Rahimut-Ullah,
The man who is left behind.
For some we lost in the skirmish,
And some were killed in the fight,
But he was captured by fever,
In the sentry pit, at night.
A rifle shot had been swifter,
Less trouble a sabre thrust,
But his Fate decided fever,
And each man dies as he must.
Behind us, red in the distance.
The wavering flames rise high,
The flames of our burning grass-huts,
Against the black of the sky.
We hear the sound of the river,
An ever-lessening moan,
The hearts of us all turn backwards
To where he is left alone.
We sing up a little louder,
We know that we feel bereft,
We’re leaving the camp together,
And only one of us left.
The only one, out of many,
And each must come to his end,
I wish I could stop this singing,
He happened to be my friend.
We’re falling back from the Gomal
We’re marching on Apozai,
And pleasure and rest are waiting
To welcome us by and by.
Perhaps the feast will taste bitter,
The lips of the girls less kind,–
Because of Rahimut-Ullah,
The man who is left behind!
A few random poems:
- Николай Некрасов – Внимая ужасам войны
- Robert Burns: My Eppie Adair:
- Forth went the candid man by Stephen Crane
- Владимир Британишский – Быт
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Привет старому 1858-му году
- Playthings by Rabindranath Tagore
- Old Memory by William Butler Yeats
- Огюст Барбье – Шекспир
- Robert Burns: Fickle Fortune: Fragment
- As the poets have mournfully sung by W H Auden
- Нина Воронель – Запахи детства еще не забыты
- polyphony_in_a_cathedral.html
- Олег Бундур – Женские хитрости
- This Dust was Once the Man. by Walt Whitman
- A Tale of the Sea by William Topaz McGonagall
External links
Bat’s Poetry Page – more poetry by Fledermaus
Talking Writing Monster’s Page –
Batty Writing – the bat’s idle chatter, thoughts, ideas and observations, all original, all fresh
Poems in English
- The War Films by Sir Henry Newbolt
- The Black Hawk War of the Artists by Vachel Lindsay
- Repression of War Experience by Siegfried Sassoon
- Epitaph On An Army of Mercenaries by A. E. Housman
- CIA Dope Calypso by Allen Ginsberg
- A Day on the Beach of War by Tony Stringfellow
- The Paint-Kings by Washington Allston
- Rosalie by Washington Allston
- On The Luxembourg Gallery by Washington Allston
- Eccentricity by Washington Allston
- Art by Washington Allston
- America To Great Britain by Washington Allston
- Year’s End by Weldon Kees
- The Upstairs Room by Weldon Kees
- The Smiles Of The Bathers by Weldon Kees
- The Furies by Weldon Kees
- The Doctor Will Return by Weldon Kees
- The Bell From Europe by Weldon Kees
- The Beach by Weldon Kees
- Round by Weldon Kees
More external links (open in a new tab):
Doska or the Board – write anything
Search engines:
Yandex – the best search engine for searches in Russian (and the best overall image search engine, in any language, anywhere)
Qwant – the best search engine for searches in French, German as well as Romance and Germanic languages.
Ecosia – a search engine that supposedly… plants trees
Duckduckgo – the real alternative and a search engine that actually works. Without much censorship or partisan politics.
Yahoo– yes, it’s still around, amazingly, miraculously, incredibly, but now it seems to be powered by Bing.
Parallel Translations of Poetry
The Poetry Repository – an online library of poems, poetry, verse and poetic works

Violet Nicolson ( 1865 – 1904); otherwise known as Adela Florence Nicolson (née Cory), was an English poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Laurence Hope, however she became known as Violet Nicolson. In the early 1900s, she became a best-selling author. She committed suicide and is buried in Madras, now Chennai, India.