At times like these–as, I am pretty sure, I have mentioned before–I console myself by taking down Michael Turner’s fine anthology Parlour Poetry and reading Sir Francis Doyle’s stirring poem “The Private of the Buffs.”

Here is Turner’s note to the poem:

To this fine tribute to English scorn for lesser breeds, the poet appended this extract from The Times of 1860: “Some Sikhs and a private of the Buffs (the East Kent Regiment), having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning they were brought before the authorities and commanded to perform the kotow. The Sikhs obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked on the head, and his body thrown on a dunghill.” The Elgin of line 6 is the eighth Lord Elgin, ambassador to China at the time of the war between that country and Britain.

Turner also adds a biographical note on the poet, beginning thus:

Sir Francis Hastings Charles Doyle, second baronet (1810-1888), came of military stock and most of his male relatives seem to have been colonels at the very least. He went to Eton and Oxford, where, the Dictionary of National Biography. reports, “his intercourse with Gladstone became very intimate.”….

The story of the private of the buffs was recycled by George MacDonald Fraser in one of the Flashman books.