• 1148: Is crazy that Hololive is the only Vtuber agency that a CEO is beloved by the fans, submitted on 2023-03-20 09:00:03+08:00.
• 1149: Why did the Boshin war end so quickly (just 1 year) ?, submitted on 2023-03-20 12:25:05+08:00.
• 1150: Artificial Artistry Assessment - Weekly Discussion Thread, March 20th, 2022 (Y’all VTubers should chip in on this too), submitted on 2023-03-21 02:05:48+08:00.
• 1151: What is an ancient Greek city-state that would be able to be on par with Athens and Sparta if a few changes were made in their history?, submitted on 2023-03-21 12:00:41+08:00.
• 1152: What were the key factors that led to the rise of the Mongol Empire, and how did their military tactics and conquests impact the societies they conquered?, submitted on 2023-03-22 09:56:31+08:00.
• 1153: [meta] How would you feel if Wikipedia cited your answer from this sub?, submitted on 2023-03-22 22:27:35+08:00.
• 1154: [Broadway] Sara Porkalob vs 1776: is it okay to only put 75% into your job, or should you be running at 100% all the time? And what does any of this have to do with etiquette, toxicity, and racism anyway?, submitted on 2023-03-23 06:08:24+08:00.
• 1155: What does this tattoo mean?, submitted on 2023-03-23 13:33:45+08:00.
• 1156: What were the consequences on the Italian sociopolitical situation of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy leaving Rome after the Armistice of Cassibile?, submitted on 2023-03-23 15:55:32+08:00.
• 1157: A little bit of insight from Kiara about the roughness of appearing in EU conventions, in the form of a Twitter thread, submitted on 2023-03-24 02:39:21+08:00.
• 1158: Official Discussion Thread - Volume 9, Episode 6: Confessions Within Cumulonimbus Clouds, submitted on 2023-03-25 22:33:20+08:00.
• 1159: What stopped the mongols from destroying a portion of the Great Wall of China, going round the Great Wall of China or climbing over the Great Wall of China?, submitted on 2023-03-26 17:26:22+08:00.
• 1160: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of March 27, 2023, submitted on 2023-03-26 23:03:12+08:00.

1148: Is crazy that Hololive is the only Vtuber agency that a CEO is beloved by the fans, submitted on 2023-03-20 09:00:03+08:00.

—– 1148.1 —–2023-03-20 12:59:42+08:00:

I’m sceptical that Pekora is less well known than Fubuki at this point.

—– 1148.2 —–2023-03-20 13:54:12+08:00:

A meta phor what?

EDIT: Not a lot of Garth Marenghi fans here, I take it…

1149: Why did the Boshin war end so quickly (just 1 year) ?, submitted on 2023-03-20 12:25:05+08:00.

—– 1149.1 —–2023-03-21 09:08:49+08:00:

I’d like to elaborate on the linked posts (thanks /u/huianxin) and on /u/ParallelPain’s by pointing out that Yoshinobu’s situation when he surrendered in May 1868 was considerably less than ideal.

Firstly, Toba-Fushimi. Bakufu casualties were actually quite high, because although 15000 or so men were assembled at Osaka, Yoshinobu had been – not incorrectly – paranoid about local lords declaring for SatChō, and had thus detached considerable forces to garrison key areas, and as a result the combined forces at Toba, Fushimi, and Yodo on 27 January were perhaps 6000 men at a stretch. The 900 or so men killed or wounded would have constituted around 15% of the force, which in a premodern context would be considered par for the course for a defeated army. The casualty rate was much lower than most major American Civil War battles of course – for instance, the Confederates lost a third of their troops at Gettysburg, the Union a quarter – but still, a lost battle is a demoralising affair that troops can have difficulty recovering from, particularly if they are vigorously pursued. Moreover, the detached forces simply don’t seem to have been able to serve as a meaningful reserve in the wake of the collapse of the vanguard. So the army was defeated, split into two – one part going to Osaka and the other retreating to Edo – and there was very little ability to actually halt the continued SatChō advance. If the overall Bakufu war effort had been a little reluctant to begin with, then the defeat probably sapped much of whatever enthusiasm there had been.

We also ought to consider that Bakufu losses included not only killed and wounded on the battlefield, but critically, defections to the SatChō army among its central Japanese allies. The overall Bakufu expeditionary force at Osaka included at least 3700 men from its various allies. 1600 were from Aizu, but the remainder were predominantly from central Japan: 1000 from Tsu, 400 from Kuwana, and 1100 from Obama, Kameyama, and Himeji combined, along with uncertain numbers of others such as Matsuyama, Ōgaki, and Miyazu. But Tsu defected during the battle, Ōgaki and Miyazu shortly afterward, and Matsuyama withdrew from the war outright. Aizu and Kuwana were basically the only significant domains to contribute troops to the Bakufu force at Toba-Fushimi and still remain loyal afterward. Otherwise, the SatChō victory had essentially flipped the entirety of central Japan from broadly pro-Tokugawa to broadly pro-SatChō. The situation in northern Japan likewise did not favour the Tokugawa position. Only Aizu and to an extent Shōnai had supported the Bakufu at the start of the war, while the north had broadly declared neutrality. By April, many of the northern domains may have appeared to be aligned with the SatChō-controlled court, and on 3 May – about three weeks after Yoshinobu’s surrender on 11 April – Sendai actually formally sided with the court to attack Aizu. So the Tokugawa clan was further hamstrung by its diplomatic isolation: the other lords of Japan simply were not, by and large, willing to commit themselves to the defence of their old hegemon.

It’s worth restating ParallelPain’s point here that a consistent priority for most of the belligerents seems to have been to ensure that the overall political and territorial integrity of Japan remained intact, because it is worth noting that Yoshinobu did have a nuclear option that would have theoretically allowed him to continue fighting while also denying any claim to be an enemy of the court. This was Prince Kōgen, the abbot of Kan’ei-ji in Ueno (styled Rinnōji-no-miya) and grandson by adoption of Emperor Kōkaku (Meiji’s great-grandfather). It had been Tokugawa policy to ensure that the position of abbot of the Kan’ei-ji temple complex, just outside Edo, was held by a collateral prince of the imperial house, just in case it was deemed necessary to hoist their own rival emperor onto the throne. That Yoshinobu chose not to do this says a lot about his will and/or perceived ability to continue the fight. That the Northern Alliance, formed by Sendai after it fell out with SatChō within weeks of attacking Aizu, did install Kōgen as the Emperor Tōbu in August, says a lot about their investment in the fight.

Because, to pivot to that topic, we could honestly say it’s surprising the Boshin War lasted as long as it did. The northern domains seem to have rapidly cottoned on to the fact that imperial restoration was actually just a cover for establishing a Satsuma and Chōshū hegemony, and, under Sendai leadership, banded together in an alliance over the course of late May and June. The calculus of attrition probably favoured SatChō anyway, but the vicissitudes of fortune played a part in shaping the conflict to come. Perhaps most critically, Akita Domain rather dramatically switched sides on 21 August and split the Northern Alliance’s war effort onto two fronts, which limited Shōnai’s ability to reinforce the much-pressed defence of Aizu. But there were also other factors: Tokugawa loyalists by and large cohered around Vice-Admiral Enomoto Takeaki and his rather romantic ambitions of establishing an autonomous fiefdom on Hokkaido, rather than supporting the northerners who had chosen not to support the Bakufu at the start of the year. On the flip side, you had the secondary front in Nagaoka Domain, where a SatChō force under Yamagata Aritomo tried to advance eastward along the coast and take the key northern port city of Niigata, which was deemed a key lynchpin in the supply of arms to Aizu. Despite an apparent superiority in numbers that allowed the SatChō force to quickly seize Nagaoka Castle, Yamagata completely bungled his next moves, spread his forces too wide, and ended up losing the castle again to an Alliance counterattack; Niigata ended up being taken after the fall of Aizu by an army advancing westward from the mountains. But either way, the forces of fortune didn’t really decisively swing things either way, and the Northern Alliance collapsed under pressure from SatChō forces over the course of October and November.

As ever, the winter was not good campaigning season, hence there being no real attempt to land at Hokkaido in force until the following spring. But in many ways, the war could have ended in April 1868. Indeed, we could probably surmise that, for Tokugawa Yoshinobu, it should have done. But the persistence of some Tokugawa loyalists like Enomoto Takeaki or the shōgitai guerrillas, plus the rather tactless behaviour of SatChō envoys to the northern domains, helped keep the war going for months past the resolution of the original crisis over the continued status of the Tokugawa clan and its holdings.

—– 1149.2 —–2023-03-21 13:08:08+08:00:

I’m not entirely sure that’s the case, albeit going purely off what numbers I can glean from Totman, where adding together absolutely everything I can’t see more than about 7000 men involved – and that’s assuming relatively generous numbers for the uncountables. While the Bakufu theoretically had some 7000 regular troops (6000 in 12 regular battalions, plus the two battalions of Denshūtai/sappei), from what I can gather, only four to six of the battalions, plus the Denshūtai, were actually involved in the fighting.

EDIT: I probably ought to clarify that what I mean here are the numbers at the battle itself, rather than the total size of the expeditionary force.

—– 1149.3 —–2023-03-21 15:18:10+08:00:

Thanks! This certainly complicates the numbers I’d got from Totman, and would suggest potentially a much larger force overall (as in, originally assembled at Ōsaka) than the 15k he suggested, assuming that what Noguchi means by a ‘regiment’ is equivalent to what Totman means by a ‘battalion’, and that the six regiments/battalions engaged represented only half of the twelve total in the army writ large.

1150: Artificial Artistry Assessment - Weekly Discussion Thread, March 20th, 2022 (Y’all VTubers should chip in on this too), submitted on 2023-03-21 02:05:48+08:00.

—– 1150.1 —–2023-03-24 18:08:32+08:00:

Virtual Idols/VIdols seems to fit here; I’ve seen it used as a label by a number of groups like the Chinese one that had the firing and earnings controversy last year whose name escapes me.

1151: What is an ancient Greek city-state that would be able to be on par with Athens and Sparta if a few changes were made in their history?, submitted on 2023-03-21 12:00:41+08:00.

—– 1151.1 —–2023-03-21 14:37:38+08:00:

Sorry, but your submission has been removed because we don’t allow hypothetical questions. If possible, please rephrase the question so that it does not call for such speculation, and resubmit. Otherwise, this sort of thing is better suited for /r/HistoryWhatIf or /r/HistoricalWhatIf. You can find a more in-depth discussion of this rule here.

1152: What were the key factors that led to the rise of the Mongol Empire, and how did their military tactics and conquests impact the societies they conquered?, submitted on 2023-03-22 09:56:31+08:00.

—– 1152.1 —–2023-03-22 10:11:22+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

1153: [meta] How would you feel if Wikipedia cited your answer from this sub?, submitted on 2023-03-22 22:27:35+08:00.

—– 1153.1 —–2023-03-24 04:35:31+08:00:

I think what you’ve suggested aligns mostly with what I think. Kevin’s accounts weren’t posting premium answers, so the only way to earn money was being partnered for revenue from questions, and from what I can tell, only a portion of the questions Kevin and his accounts responded to were posted by his sockpuppets. At least a few were from real users. Maybe this was a plausible deniability scheme, but either way, Kevin’s approach was distinctly non-profit-maximising.

I think the interesting question is why he claimed all the various titles and accolades that he did on his main account: his PhD from the University of Austin being the big one. This is the sort of thing that is theoretically easy to check, but at the same time, if for whatever reason you don’t want to believe someone is lying – because to be honest why would anyone do this – you wouldn’t find it too difficult to work out some alternative rationale. In essence, Kevin was lying about his trustworthiness in order to build a self-sustaining circle of lies. Fascinatingly, he largely did this without producing a single sentence of original writing.

But part of me also wonders if it was some kind of curious social experiment. I don’t know if you also caught the sequel thread, but if not I highly recommend you do: Kevin had maintained at least 20 sockpuppet accounts, and had already survived a partial purge of these a couple of years before I dug up the ring again. By having this ecosystem of sockpuppets, he was able to build up a sort of barrier of plausible deniability, where unless you were aware of the plagiarism, then it seemed utterly implausible that all 15-ish of the active accounts engaging with each other were fake. He also brazenly re-used an already-banned account (Josue Dennis Chance) with the same profile picture and bio, and I cannot imagine that was done for any reason other than to stick the finger up at Quora’s nonexistent moderation. A lot of this feels like it was trying to see what he could get away with if nobody stopped him.

But at the same time, Kevin was still taking care to ensure the ruse made sense. The sudden asking of follow-ups to old answers suggests that Kevin was, if nothing else, aware that a failure to answer follow-ups on Quora, especially genuinely new ones, would be seriously detrimental to his image. This meant, on occasion, doing the ‘trickster plays against two chess grandmasters simultaneously’ gambit as I describe in the linked thread, wherein Kevin copy-pasted follow-ups from Quora onto AskHistorians, and then crossposted the AH replies back over to Quora. Which is a real gamble in general because you’re presuming that the original answerer will be willing to reply to the follow-up, but it’s especially risky with older answers where the users might have left the sub, or be too engaged in other pursuits to substantively engage. As noted in that thread, there was a tendency for Kevin to randomly reply in threads asking about older answers on a similar topic by a given user, which is pretty unusual, especially if the user in question doesn’t maintain an archive of links in their profile – which I do, to be fair.

But the weirdest part to me is that Kevin specifically reposted ELI5 comments as well as AskHistorians, and I’m genuinely curious what the rationale there was. Was he trying to diversify his content to avoid suspicion? This would be odd because a diverse range of expertises is more suspicious, not less. I really can’t think of any good reason to do that, other than, perhaps, because he wanted to prove that he could.

So as it stands I think there are a few possibilities:

1. Kevin was desperate for attention and found what he thought was an easy way to get it;
2. Kevin was somewhat delusional and believed that this AskHistorians crossposting was doing Quora a service (which in a sense I suppose it was);
3. Kevin was mainly doing it to prove that he could, and that nobody would stop him.

I think the most unfortunate element of all this is that Quora’s UI is not very friendly to archive searching, so now that Quora has actually taken action and purged things, we ordinary users performing Quora OSINT can’t really go back and dig up more on Kevin Richardson. So this is all we have to go on.

As an edited-in coda, I have to admit I get vague twinges of Tommy Tallarico from this, or at least hbomberbuy’s famous takedown recently. But that’s a more modern issue and not entirely analogous.

1154: [Broadway] Sara Porkalob vs 1776: is it okay to only put 75% into your job, or should you be running at 100% all the time? And what does any of this have to do with etiquette, toxicity, and racism anyway?, submitted on 2023-03-23 06:08:24+08:00.

—– 1154.1 —–2023-03-23 13:58:32+08:00:

Similarly, the idea that there’s one particular song where she’s giving 90%… as in her work-life balance swaps to 90:10 for that specific song?!

1155: What does this tattoo mean?, submitted on 2023-03-23 13:33:45+08:00.

—– 1155.1 —–2023-03-23 21:28:06+08:00:

While the character 樂 appears in various music-related compounds, on its own it typically just means ‘happiness’.

1156: What were the consequences on the Italian sociopolitical situation of Victor Emmanuel III of Italy leaving Rome after the Armistice of Cassibile?, submitted on 2023-03-23 15:55:32+08:00.

—– 1156.1 —–2023-03-23 16:40:20+08:00:

Hi there - unfortunately we have had to remove your question, because /r/AskHistorians isn’t here to do your homework for you. However, our rules DO permit people to ask for help with their homework, so long as they are seeking clarification or resources, rather than the answer itself.

If you have indeed asked a homework question, you should consider resubmitting a question more focused on finding resources and seeking clarification on confusing issues: tell us what you’ve researched so far, what resources you’ve consulted, and what you’ve learned, and we are more likely to approve your question. Please see this Rules Roundtable thread for more information on what makes for the kind of homework question we’d approve. Additionally, if you’re not sure where to start in terms of finding and understanding sources in general, we have a six-part series, “Finding and Understanding Sources”, which has a wealth of information that may be useful for finding and understanding information for your essay. Finally, other subreddits are likely to be more suitable for help with homework - try looking for help at /r/HomeworkHelp.

Alternatively, if you are not a student and are not doing homework, we have removed your question because it resembled a homework question. It may resemble a common essay question from a prominent history syllabus or may be worded in a broad, open-ended way that feels like the kind of essay question that a professor would set. Professors often word essay questions in order to provide the student with a platform to show how much they understand a topic, and these questions are typically broader and more interested in interpretations and delineating between historical theories than the average /r/AskHistorians question. If your non-homework question was incorrectly removed for this reason, we will be happy to approve your question if you wait for 7 days and then ask a less open-ended question on the same topic.

1157: A little bit of insight from Kiara about the roughness of appearing in EU conventions, in the form of a Twitter thread, submitted on 2023-03-24 02:39:21+08:00.

—– 1157.1 —–2023-03-26 08:07:58+08:00:

We have the chicken, but the eggs still ain’t coming…

(Don’t read too much into this, IDK what I mean either.)

1158: Official Discussion Thread - Volume 9, Episode 6: Confessions Within Cumulonimbus Clouds, submitted on 2023-03-25 22:33:20+08:00.

—– 1158.1 —–2023-03-26 12:28:06+08:00:

Ruby’s reaction to Crescent Rose is really telling, in a way it almost feels like the fact she didn’t have it gave her a convenient excuse for not fighting anymore but now she is faced with that burden again and she doesn’t know if she wants it back.

Huh, that’s a really interesting read, and it makes me curious what may or may not eventually come of it, especially in light of the scene last episode hinting that she may end up with Summer’s weapon.

1159: What stopped the mongols from destroying a portion of the Great Wall of China, going round the Great Wall of China or climbing over the Great Wall of China?, submitted on 2023-03-26 17:26:22+08:00.

—– 1159.1 —–2023-03-26 18:03:23+08:00:

If you mean the Mongols as in specifically pre-Yuan, then what stopped them destroying or circumventing the Great Wall was that it hadn’t been built yet. If you mean the period after the Great Wall had been built but before it was rendered useless because both sides of it were under the rule of the same empire, i.e. between about 1550 and 1644, then see here.

—– 1159.2 —–2023-03-26 18:08:35+08:00:

It was continuously built from 300 BC until 1700 AD

Again, no – several states, for separate reasons at separate times, built walls, sometimes but not always on the sites of prior walls. But that is not the same as a singular, continuous construction project, especially during long periods of nomadic rule in China when there was no reason to build walls between two parts of your own empire.

—– 1159.3 —–2023-03-26 18:11:49+08:00:

Google, shockingly, is only as good as the people contributing to it, and the people contributing to the high-volume search results about the Great Wall are largely talking out of their arse. Arthur Waldron’s The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth is what you need to read.

—– 1159.4 —–2023-03-26 18:17:41+08:00:

Uh. Yes. Pretty much. Not to shit too much on UNESCO but countries have an interest in portraying places as national heritage for the sake of recognition, and China is no different. China’s relationship between imperial and national history is something that can be really quite fraught, and attempting to depict grand civilisational continuities is part of that narrative construction.

—– 1159.5 —–2023-03-26 21:36:33+08:00:

No. The term changcheng (‘long walls’) appears in a variety of contexts well into the Ming period that imply that the phrase was not understood as a proper noun specifically denoting a specific set of frontier defences, but rather as a term for any set of contiguous fortifications. The principal Ming phraseology was the ‘nine Garrisons’ (jiuzhen), which encompassed all of the military assets, mobile and static, that covered their steppe border.

—– 1159.6 —–2023-03-27 06:27:04+08:00:

I don’t know why you decided just to assert the exact opposite of what my linked answers say without attempting to cite any sources, because no, that is untrue. We can be reasonably sure the Qin walls were maintained into the Han, but after that no new walls would be built until the Sui and those that did exist seem to have fallen into disrepair; the Sui walls again don’t seem to have been maintained for very long either. The Ming walls were built from scratch, and often do not follow the course of the Qin or Sui walls at all. If you can provide any kind of evidence that there was a northern frontier wall that was meaningfully still in existence between the 11th and 15th centuries, then you’d better do so.

—– 1159.7 —–2023-03-30 21:23:04+08:00:

What I’m referring to here is the idea of the walls constantly being built in roughly the same place. What Northern Qi, Khitan Liao, and Jurchen Jin did was build walls on the edges of their empires, which were at considerable geographical remove from the prior walls built by Han Chinese states.

1160: [Hobby Scuffles] Week of March 27, 2023, submitted on 2023-03-26 23:03:12+08:00.

—– 1160.1 —–2023-03-27 07:11:08+08:00:

DS9 had one of the only canon romances that most of the Trek fandom agreed was good- Kira/Oda

Kira/Odo is I think more polarising than that. Kira/Odo went ahead without really a full reckoning with all the heinous shit Odo got up to, and there’s also a decent slice of the fanbase who – I think quite fairly – read early-season Kira as very queer and who basically read Odo as the latest in a series of male flings for Kira that just didn’t really land (i.e. Bareil, Shakaar).

—– 1160.2 —–2023-03-27 08:56:04+08:00:

On the previous thread I wrote a little bit about ‘The Dutch in the Medway’, a poem from 1911 about an event in 1667 set to music from the 1680s by a musician in 1982, which military music enthusiasts on Youtube have tried to pass off as being an ‘English Folk Song’ or an ‘Anglo-Dutch War Song’, neither of which is entirely true, but neither of which is entirely false either. But today I want to talk about a different song, one which I have listened to on and off for the past 6 years if not longer: ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’. This will be a little stream-of-consciousness-y, as I wrote this partly while actually following the leads, so it may be a case of the text being used to organise my thoughts rather than my thoughts being used to organise the text, unfortunately.

The only recording of ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’ by a professional group is on the 1971 album Songs and Music of the Redcoats, essentially a tie-in with Lewis Winstock’s book of the same name, published the year before. Winstock sang in the chorus on part of the album, which was primarily recorded by Martyn Wyndham-Reed, a rather obscure trio called The Druids, and members of the Band of the Scots Guards. It’s a very interesting album with selections ranging from the First English Civil War (1642-6) to the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), some with lyrics and some purely instrumental, including a rather nice rendition of The Grenadier’s Return, and in the section simply labelled ‘Indian Wars’, it has this particular gem: ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’. Now, based on what people have reproduced of the album lining, Winstock had this to say about it:

Written at Kabul during the Second Afghan War, this seems to have been popular, as Kipling mentions it several times in his soldier stories.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War, fought between 1878 and 1880, loomed large in the Anglo-Indian historical memory, with serious political failures despite ostensible military successes. And these military successes were not total either. The Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 saw nearly 1000 British and Indian troops killed out of a force of 2500, in what was more or less the only battlefield defeat suffered by the Anglo-Indian army; the 66th (Berkshire) Regiment, one of the principal participants, would continue to mark ‘Maiwand Day’, even after its absorption into the Duke of Edinburgh’s Royal Regiment, until that regiment was dissolved in 1994. The war also saw an incident where 46 cavalrymen drowned attempting a night crossing of the Kabul River, an event Kipling marked with the appropriately-titled ‘Ford ‘O Kabul River’.

But to my eye, it’s not necessarily straightforward to claim that Kipling was recording a song. Kipling was born in India in 1865, but for the duration of the war, he was at a boarding school in Devon. It was, to be sure, a school run for the children of military officers (of which Kipling was not), but it doesn’t seem like the sort of vector by which soldiers’ songs would easily reach him. He would not return to India until he started his career as a journalist in 1882, and he then left again for London in 1889, and it is presumably in this period that he would have had the most contact with war veterans. In fact, he went on to have encounters with Second Afghan War veterans in various other places – the poem ‘That Day’, about the rout of the Berkshires at Maiwand, was inspired by an encounter with a veteran while on holiday in Bermuda in 1894.

Funnily enough, the one place I hadn’t thought to look until recently was the website of The Kipling Society, which maintains digitised copies of The Kipling Journal, which are made open-access after two years. And this includes the 178th issue of the journal from June 1971, with an article by (drum roll please)……… Lewis Winstock.

Bingo.

And what Winstock notes is that there is, in the British Museum, a copy of a song purportedly authored by one Phillip Crampton Neville, an officer in the 14th Lancers during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, titled ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’. I have so far been unable to track this down and I presume it simply isn’t online, but assuming that Winstock and others reproduced it faithfully for Redcoats, then it appears to be the case that instead of it being pieced together from fragments of Kipling, that Kipling instead pulled fragments out of that. In particular, the following reappear in Kipling:

Bang upon the big drum, crash upon the cymbals
We’ll sing as we go marching along boys, along
And although on this campaign
There’s no whiskey or champagne
Still, we’ll keep our spirits going with a song, boys!

This, the chorus of the song, appears in the short story ‘The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney’, as follows:

Bang upon the big drum, bash upon the cymbals,
As we go marchin’ along, boys, oh!
For although
in this campaign
There’s no whisky nor champagne,
We’ll keep our spirits goin’ with a song, boys!

But Kipling also appears to have included alternate lyrics for the second half of one of the verses:

So they sent a corp’ril’s file,
And they put me in the guard-room
For conduck unbecomin’ of a soldier.

At the beginning of another short story, ‘The Three Musketeers’, Kipling includes an anonymous ‘Barrack-Room Ballad’:

An’ when the war began, we chased the bold Afghan,
An’ we made the bloomin’ Ghazi for to flee, boys O!
An’ we marched into Kabul, an’ we tuk the Balar ‘Issar,
An’ we taught ‘em to respect the British soldier.

As recorded in Redcoats, the same verse goes:

Then we marched through Chalasan and we met the wild Afghan
And made him at Char Asiab for to run boys, oh!
And we marched into Kabul, and we took the Bala Hisar
And we made them to respect the British soldier.

Kipling’s version seems like a close enough deviation that might have gone around in the postwar period.

So what makes this interesting is that the reason that I thought ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’ might be a Kipling composite was listening through Peter Bellamy’s settings of the Barrack-Room Ballads to music, which includes the tune ‘The Bay’nit and the Butt’, where the verse from ‘The Three Musketeers’ is used. As it turns out, it was Bellamy taking liberties here, by taking that variant of the verse from ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’, following it up with a modified version of the anonymous ‘Barrack-Room Ballad’ which opens ‘The Taking of Lungtungpen’.

Which basically means that I was wrong, but in a good way – the song is in fact real. The appearances of bits and pieces of that song in Kipling are not indications that the song was actually pieced together from Kipling, but rather that fragments did make it into his work by authentic means. And so one can now listen to ‘Bang Upon the Big Drum’ with considerably less guilt about its historical authenticity. Unless someone digs up the original score from 1889 and finds cause for complaint.

—– 1160.3 —–2023-03-29 12:40:55+08:00:

Oh hello, History Masters’ student here, that makes three…

—– 1160.4 —–2023-03-30 11:59:44+08:00:

in a infinite skys the limit state.

I er….

Could you please clarify?

—– 1160.5 —–2023-03-31 05:13:54+08:00:

Oh I see now – I had been having difficulty parsing the sentence, which you’ve clarified is ‘an infinite “sky’s the limit” state’. Thanks!