SIC TRANSIT...

Just what does it mean to write? Or be able to write? No, I

Just off Calcutta

The Mediterranean stretched before him.

In smouldering scuttled hulks, the enemy fleet

lay dead, once pride and pest

of that placid main. The heat

troubled him; he felt oppressed.

And the land held nothing for him.

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His eyes roved over the waste. All round,

death rose in listless wisps of smoke: its reek

would drape history like a shroud.

Turning, he gazed awhile on his salt streak,

that runnel of ruin he had ploughed

to neuter this obstinately fecund ground.

Tired, he faced northwards again, and home.

His eyes briefly brimmed. No unlettered lout,

his mind hovered on distant Troy,

and saw in a poet

The history of exploration might well be the history of human stupidity. Throughout its tortuous course folly abounds, reason unaccountably takes a backseat, and the seamier shades of human nature bloom overnight like toadstools after a shower. Successes are in spite of these obvious deterrents, more in the nature of happy accidents; largesse scattered by a Providence basking in the glow of a fine cognac, since there was no way the laws of probability could have so decreed.

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But it is the failures which arrest our attention, haunt us long after the players, inept, inadequate or plain unlucky have gone to theirValhallas. Robert Falcon Scott was the quintessential British tragic hero, the man done out of the Pole by the deviousness (as the British saw it) of a vile foreigner

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of far off 1918 the guns fell silent on the Western Front. The lamps which went out all over Europe four terrible years before on an early August evening would never be lit again; the Edwardian twilight faded permanently into the gloom. The muffled drums of retreat rolled the recessionals everywhere, and friend and foe alike stood still with bowed heads for the most moving piece of music in all creation, the Last Post.

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The decades since have seen many questionable wars, a few dubious peaces; but man

Anyone knowing anything of military mores

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