Dirge of the Dead Sisters

... Dirge of the Dead Sisters This poem is written to commemorate the Nurses who died in the South African War. Kipling wrote this poem when he went to South Africa as a journalist. For the first time doubt had entered his mind about military supremacy as he watched first hand the affects of war. In the first stanza Kipling asks "Who recalls the.... Faces of the Sisters with the dust upon their hair?" He asks this because the answer would most likely be very few people, when the true hero's in the war were actually heroines such as the nurses that followed in the path that Florence Nightingale had set them. Kipling continues by describing the gory corpses "Blanket-hidden bodies, flagless, followed by the flies", by flagless he means undefined, no longer soldiers fighting for their country, but corpses awaiting their burial. With this image in your mind already you receive an image

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