Wiki's featured Picture of the Day today is nothing short of a revelation to me....
Good god YES.
I LOVE IT.
Turns out it's an 1896 illustration from
Soldier Tales a short story compliation (did they have NO concept of homo-eroticism?) and this one is from a story by Rudyard Kipling (!!!!) called
The Taking of Lungtungpen originally written in 1887, about the British Army expeditionary force in Burma.
Another similar pic from the same story....
This is all stoking a thousand fantasies in me.
Nothing gets me going more these days than military does. I'm ALL military. Ridiculous to think this was the Victorian era and yet they're doing stories and illustrations like this.
I went and searched the full text of the whole story. It is, erm, not really very politically correct!
It's a humourous yarn told by an Irish character amongst a group of British Army blokes with 24 new young recruits, hunting local resistance fighters and elephants in the Burmese jungle. They're looking for the enemy village, they capture a Burmese local and make him squat down and threaten to beat him unless he talks (and they give him a few strikes to make sure he gets the message), and he reveals the location. Then the British all strip naked to swim up a river and they attack the village, naked, with rifles and machetes, and they kill 75 men and a few more elephants. A good lesson and a good initiation for all the new boys in their recruitment.
Outrageous.
I mean I thought Rudyard Kipling was just some sort of dry ordinary poet and classical romanticist.
I NEVER knew he was writing stuff like this! It's hardcore British militarist, imperialist, glorification.
It's all, of course, totally and utterly [STRIKE]fantastic[/STRIKE] disgraceful. Of course it is.
