Snarleyow - Analysis

A brutal joke about loyalty

Kipling’s central claim is as cold as the gun-metal world it describes: in battle, the army demands a kind of loyalty that cancels ordinary human bonds. The poem opens with a half-forgetting narrator who don’t remember now what the battle was, but remembers exactly the name of the lead horse, Snarleyow. That lopsided memory tells you what this speaker’s life has been trained to hold onto: the working parts of a battery—horses, wheels, commands—more than the meaning of the war itself. The repeating refrain drives the point home: down in the lead, even the bold Bombardier becomes a little whipped dog, not because he lacks courage, but because the system forces obedience at the point where metal and flesh meet.

Snarleyow’s death and the first test

The poem’s first shock is the roundshot that nearly cuts the horse in half: almost tore in two. Snarleyow still tries to do what he has been trained to do—follow after—and that training turns tragic when he fouled the limber and wedges his head between ’is ’eels. The Driver’s Brother screams to stop, but the Driver answers with the poem’s harsh logic: there is ain’t no stopping when a battery is changin’ ground. The tension here is immediate and human: the Driver feels very sad because he broke the beggar in, yet he insists duty makes stopping impossible. The horse is both a comrade and a tool; compassion exists, but it is treated as a private weakness that must not interfere with motion.

The hinge: the brother replaces the horse

The poem turns savage when the exact image returns—this time with a man. A shell drops between the sections, and after the smoke clears, the Driver’s Brother lies in the same position as Snarleyow: ’is ’ead between ’is ’eels. That repetition is the hinge of the poem’s meaning. The Driver’s earlier refusal, which sounded like necessity when it concerned a horse, now becomes an inescapable moral trap when it concerns family. The Brother’s plea—for Gawd’s own sake—doesn’t ask for rescue, only for the battery to roll over him and end it. The men decide it was best and drive the limber across his back an’ chest, turning the machinery of war into a deliberate instrument of mercy that is also, unavoidably, an execution.

Hardness as a job requirement

After this, the Driver’s reaction is chillingly minimal: a little coughin’ grunt, and then he swings his horses smartly to Action Front. The poem doesn’t pretend this is noble; it presents it as what the job forces a person to become. The line about the wheel being juicy pushes the speaker into grotesque humor, as if joking is the only permitted way to acknowledge blood. Even worse, the speaker’s racist slur—niggers—arrives in the same offhand tone, showing how this voice has been trained into dehumanization on multiple levels: enemies are reduced to a category, and one’s own dead can be reduced to mess on a wheel. The poem isn’t offering that language as admirable; it lets it stand as evidence of what prolonged war does to a tongue and a conscience.

The “moril” and the price of winning

The final moril is blunt: You ’avn’t got no families when you serve the Queen. The contradiction is that the poem tells this as practical advice—work your bloomin’ guns if you want to win—while showing the psychic cost of that “winning”: you must act as if you have no brothers even while you are literally driving over one. The refrain returns one last time, insisting that the real battlefield isn’t only against an enemy, but inside the soldier who has to keep moving.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

If the battery can roll over a dying man because it was best, what exactly is the boundary between mercy and obedience? The poem forces the uncomfortable thought that the same machinery that demands inhuman speed also supplies the excuse for inhuman choices—until the speaker can only call it a moril, as though morality itself has been replaced by procedure.