Axis & Allies - damowords

Warʹs Progress
With Gordonʹs blood encrusted at Khartoum,
Bit‐chomping Churchill blushing vernal haste ‐
Advancing to an oblivious doom
Brave Dervishes drift cross the desert waste;
Fifty thousand,
Led by bearded Emirs,
Cross tiger‐lily sand, raising courageous cheers.
Hail Maxim, military king,
As the sʹcockacoka glows,
Deathʹs mechanical chattering
Scatters Dervishes in rows,
Forms tanglʹd heaps of suffering,
But few foe come to blows
As tho they wore tartan at Culloden ‐
Dowsʹd in blood the desert sands grew sodden.
ʺWell, war has changʹd,ʺ young Winston said,
Watching with Kitchener,
Sunset flows red, above the dead
Rose a haunting clamour,
ʺLa llaha illa llah Muhammed Rasul Allah!ʺ
Omdurman
1896
The Boer War
The last defiant tribe of Africa
Launches a bold attack upon the foe,
The empireʹs finest face a brave farmer,
Finding themselves impotent from the blow;
Paddy Sumner,
The same day he quit school,
Join’d the Queens Lancashire to sail from Liverpool.
He dug a trench at Spion Kop,
Being more a shallow grave,
Mausers did maim as kill did Krupp,
Avarice wave‐after‐wave,
Harvest scythemen cut down the crop,
The day such culling gave,
That Churchill, watching from a safer height,
Determinʹd on the world to set aright.
To beat the Boerʹs pernicious sword
Camps of concentration
Proud women hoard, a chequerboard
Of barbʹd‐wire fills the nation,
British victory tastes bitter at the devastation.
Vereeniging
1902