Boots

By Rudyard Kipling

“Boots” is Rudyard Kipling’s poem in the voice of a British infantryman on the march in South Africa during the Second Boer War, trying not to go mad from the sight of the boots in front of him. It first appeared in The Five Nations (Methuen, 1903), among the “Service Songs” that close the book, and its 32 lines hammer out the beat of marching feet around a refrain that never changes: “There’s no discharge in the war!”

Our reading is that “Boots” is less a poem about war than about a mind under monotony. Nothing happens in it: no battle, no enemy, no death. The danger the soldier fears is inside his own head, and the poem’s relentless repetition is not decoration but the threat itself, the thing he keeps trying and failing to escape.

ON THIS PAGE
Summary · The Poem · Background · Analysis and Themes · Form and Technique · Notable Lines · Themes · FAQ
Glossary · In Popular Culture · Related Poems

Summary

The speaker is a foot soldier in a column marching across South Africa. He opens by naming what he and his comrades are doing, slogging over Africa, foot after foot, while the boots of the men ahead rise and fall in front of his eyes. Every stanza ends with the same reminder that there is no discharge in the war: no release and no way out until it is over.

In the second stanza he tallies distances, a jumble of daily mileages that blur into one another. Then the warnings begin. Don’t look at what is in front of you, he tells himself, because men go mad from watching the boots. He tries to think of something else, and the effort cracks into a prayer to be kept from going lunatic.

He tries counting the bullets in his bandolier, but if his eyes drop, the boots will get on top of him. He can stand hunger, thirst, and weariness, he says, but not the constant sight of them. The days are bearable because of company; the nights bring visions of forty thousand million boots. In the last stanza he swears that after six weeks of marching through hell, the worst of it is not fire or devils but boots, moving up and down again.

The Poem

The text below follows “Boots” as printed in The Five Nations, volume 2 of Methuen’s Service Edition of Kipling’s works (1914), as transcribed by Project Gutenberg. Kipling gave the poem the subtitle “(Infantry Columns of the Earlier War).” The dialect spellings, apostrophes, and dashes are all his.

We’re foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin’ over Africa!
Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa—
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again!)
    There’s no discharge in the war!

Seven—six—eleven—five—nine-an’-twenty mile to-day—
Four—eleven—seventeen—thirty-two the day before—
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again!)
    There’s no discharge in the war!

Don’t—don’t—don’t—don’t—look at what’s in front of you
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again);
Men—men—men—men—men go mad with watchin’ ’em,
    An’ there’s no discharge in the war.

Try—try—try—try—to think o’ something different—
Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again!)
    There’s no discharge in the war.

Count—count—count—count—the bullets in the bandoliers;
If—your—eyes—drop—they will get atop o’ you
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again)—
    There’s no discharge in the war!

We—can—stick—out—’unger, thirst, an’ weariness,
But—not—not—not—not the chronic sight of ’em—
Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again,
    An’ there’s no discharge in the war!

’Tain’t—so—bad—by—day because o’ company,
But night—brings—long—strings o’ forty thousand million
Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again.
    There’s no discharge in the war!

I—’ave—marched—six—weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
It—is—not—fire—devils dark or anything
But boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again,
    An’ there’s no discharge in the war!

Background

Kipling saw the Second Boer War (1899–1902) at close range. The war was fought between Britain and the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and Kipling, who spent the English winters of those years in Cape Town, became one of its loudest public voices. In the spring of 1900, after the British took Bloemfontein, he spent a short time in the captured town helping to produce The Friend, a newspaper for the troops.

The campaign of 1900 under Lord Roberts was above all a war of marching. His army entered Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, on March 13 and pushed north to Pretoria, capital of the Transvaal, which fell on June 5. Infantry covered hundreds of miles on foot across the open veld, often short of food and water and weakened by disease. In the guerrilla phase that followed, long columns spent months chasing Boer commandos that rarely stood to fight. Those are the columns of Kipling’s subtitle, and the endless tramping is the poem’s whole world.

The Five Nations was published by Methuen in London in September 1903. “Boots” sits in its closing section, “Service Songs,” a run of poems in soldiers’ voices drawn from the South African war, alongside pieces such as “Chant-Pagan,” “M. I.,” “Columns,” and “Piet.” The Kipling Society’s notes suggest it may have been written specifically for the collection.

The same notes connect the poem’s central image to Kipling’s own early life. As a 19-year-old reporter covering a durbar at Rawalpindi in 1885, he admired the mechanical precision of “an infinity of booted feet,” and his diary from those exhausting days records the marching legs coming back to him when he tried to sleep. Whether or not that memory fed the poem directly, “Boots” is built on the same fear: that a repeated sight can lodge in the mind and refuse to leave.

Analysis and Themes

“Boots” is made from very little: one image, one refrain, and a voice trying to hold itself together. Its power comes from the way those few pieces are pressed against one another until the strain begins to show.

The Enemy Is Monotony

There is no enemy in “Boots.” No Boer fires a shot, nobody is wounded, and the only bullets are the ones the speaker counts in his bandolier to keep his mind busy. What threatens him is the march itself, the same boots rising and falling ahead of him hour after hour. Kipling takes boredom, usually the least dramatic part of soldiering, and turns it into something close to horror. The speaker can “stick out” hunger, thirst, and weariness, the hardships any war poem might list, but not “the chronic sight” of the boots.

A Mind Talking to Itself

The poem is a monologue, but most of it is spoken inward. Don’t look, try to think of something different, count the bullets: these are orders the soldier gives himself, coping tricks that fail one after another. The third stanza states what is at stake, that men go mad with watching, and the fourth breaks into a prayer. By the last stanza he has turned outward again, swearing like a witness that he has marched “six weeks in ’Ell” and can certify that hell is made of boots. The comedy of that claim does not cancel its desperation.

No Discharge

The refrain comes from the Bible. Ecclesiastes 8:8 says, in the King James Version, that “there is no discharge in that war,” in a passage about death, which no one can escape. Kipling moves the phrase into army language, where a discharge is release from service, and the line works on both levels. The soldier cannot leave the column, and behind that lies the hint that what he faces is as inescapable as mortality. The refrain is also the only line in each stanza without the hammering dashes, so it lands every time with the flat finality of a door closing.

Kipling’s Private Soldier

Like the Barrack-Room Ballads of the 1890s, “Boots” speaks in the voice of the ordinary British soldier, with his dropped h’s and clipped endings: “’unger,” “’Ell,” “movin’,” “’Tain’t.” Kipling is often remembered as a champion of empire, and The Five Nations contains poems that cheer it on, but here he gives the private soldier’s experience without glory. The poem never asks why the men are marching. It only records what the marching does to them, and that silence about the cause is part of its force.

Form and Technique

“Boots” has 32 lines in eight four-line stanzas. The first three lines of each stanza are long and broken up by dashes; the fourth, set in from the margin, is the short refrain, “There’s no discharge in the war,” sometimes with “An’” in front. The poem has no regular rhyme scheme. It holds together through repetition instead: a line about boots moving up and down again appears in every stanza, with small changes in spelling and punctuation each time.

The meter is a matter of beats rather than counted syllables. Most lines open with four heavy words separated by dashes, as in “FOOT—FOOT—FOOT—FOOT,” followed by a quicker falling run, “SLOG-gin’ O-ver AF-ri-ca.” Ralph Durand, in his 1914 handbook to Kipling’s poetry, claimed that reading the first four words of each line at two words a second gives the pace of a marching foot soldier. Whether or not the timing is exact, the dashes force the reader to stamp out each word, so the poem is felt in the body as much as heard.

The dashes also chart the speaker’s state of mind. In the first stanzas they separate nouns and numbers, the bare facts of the march. Later they break up whole thoughts, “Oh—my—God—keep—me” and “It—is—not—fire—devils,” so that his sentences come out in the same clipped steps as his feet. The marching rhythm has taken over his language. In the final stanza, the boots line drops from four “boots” to three, a small break in the pattern that sounds like a stumble at the very end.

Notable Lines

Three passages show how the poem moves from description to the edge of breakdown.

We’re foot—slog—slog—slog—sloggin’ over Africa!
Foot—foot—foot—foot—sloggin’ over Africa—
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up and down again!)
There’s no discharge in the war!

Lines 1 to 4

The opening sets the pattern for the whole poem. Four stamped words, a long trailing phrase, the image of the boots in brackets, and then the refrain. The brackets matter: at first the boots are an aside, something the speaker notices in passing. By the sixth stanza they have lost their brackets and taken over the line.

Try—try—try—try—to think o’ something different—
Oh—my—God—keep—me from goin’ lunatic!
(Boots—boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again!)
There’s no discharge in the war.

Lines 13 to 16

Here the self-help fails. The speaker tells himself to think of something different and immediately breaks into a prayer, each word of it marched out like a step. The boots line returns straight after, as though nothing he does can keep it away.

I—’ave—marched—six—weeks in ’Ell an’ certify
It—is—not—fire—devils dark or anything
But boots—boots—boots, movin’ up an’ down again,
An’ there’s no discharge in the war!

Lines 29 to 32

The ending has the tone of sworn evidence. Hell, he insists, is not the fire and devils of sermons but this ordinary sight repeated without end. The missing fourth “boots” in line 31 is the only break in the poem’s pattern, and it comes just as he reaches the end of his strength.

Themes

Four ideas run through the poem’s eight stanzas.

The first is endurance. The soldier can bear hunger, thirst, and weariness, and the poem honors that toughness while showing exactly where it runs out.

The second is madness. “Boots” is one of the earliest English poems to treat the mental strain of soldiering as seriously as physical danger, years before the term shell shock came into use in the First World War.

The third is entrapment. The refrain shuts every stanza like a gate, and its echo of Ecclesiastes turns a soldier’s complaint about his term of service into a statement about the human condition.

The fourth is the common soldier’s voice. Kipling lets an ordinary private speak for himself, in his own accent, about an experience that official accounts of the war had little room for.

Frequently Asked Questions

These are the questions readers most often ask about “Boots.”

What Is “Boots” by Rudyard Kipling About?

It is about a British infantryman marching for weeks across South Africa during the Second Boer War. The endless sight of the boots in front of him threatens to drive him mad, and the poem follows his attempts to keep control of his mind while the refrain reminds him that there is no way out.

What War Is “Boots” About?

The Second Boer War (1899–1902), fought between the British Empire and the Boer republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The subtitle, “Infantry Columns of the Earlier War,” and the opening picture of soldiers slogging over Africa place the poem among the long marches of that campaign.

What Does “There’s No Discharge in the War” Mean?

In army terms, a discharge is release from service, so the soldier is saying there is no way out until the war is over. The phrase echoes Ecclesiastes 8:8, “there is no discharge in that war,” where the war is death itself, which gives the refrain a darker second meaning.

Why Does “Boots” Repeat Words So Often?

The repetition imitates marching. Heavy single words separated by dashes match the fall of feet, and the same refrain closes every stanza. It also shows the soldier’s state of mind: the monotony he describes is the thing threatening his sanity, so the poem makes the reader feel it too.

Who Reads “Boots” in the 28 Years Later Trailer?

The voice belongs to the American actor Taylor Holmes, from a recording of the poem he made in 1915. The first trailer for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, released in December 2024, was built around it, and the recording also plays in the film itself, released in 2025.

Glossary

Kipling writes in a soldier’s working-class London speech, with dropped h’s and clipped endings. These are the words and phrases most likely to need a gloss.

• sloggin’ (line 1): Slogging; walking heavily and with great effort over a long distance.
• discharge (line 4): Official release from military service. The phrase echoes Ecclesiastes 8:8.
• to-day (line 5): Today; the hyphenated spelling was standard in 1903.
• lunatic (line 14): Insane; “goin’ lunatic” means going mad.
• bandoliers (line 17): Belts worn over the shoulder with loops or pockets for rifle cartridges.
• get atop o’ you (line 18): Get on top of you; overwhelm you.
• ’unger (line 21): Hunger, with the h dropped as in the speaker’s accent.
• chronic (line 22): Constant and unending; in British slang it could also mean very bad.
• ’Tain’t (line 25): It ain’t; it isn’t.
• ’Ell (line 29): Hell.
• certify (line 29): Formally declare something to be true, as a witness or an official would.

In Popular Culture

“Boots” has had a long second life as a recording, and that recording has outlived almost every other reading of the poem.

In 1915 the American actor Taylor Holmes recorded a dramatic reading of the poem that begins as a steady march and ends close to hysteria.

T. S. Eliot included “Boots” in A Choice of Kipling’s Verse (1941), the selection that helped bring Kipling back to the attention of critics.

Holmes’s recording has reportedly been played in U.S. military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) training for its psychological effect.

The same recording drove the first trailer for Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, released in December 2024, and Boyle also used it in the film itself, released in 2025.

Related Poems

If “Boots” stayed with you, these poems share its soldier’s voice, its war, or its driving rhythm.

• The Man He Killed by Thomas Hardy: A soldier’s monologue from the years of the Boer War, puzzling over why he shot a man who might have been his friend.
• Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen: A later war poem that opens on exhausted soldiers marching half asleep and turns their misery against the language of glory.
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson: A Victorian war poem driven, like “Boots,” by an insistent rhythm, though to very different ends.
• If— by Rudyard Kipling: Kipling’s best-known poem, a father’s advice on keeping your head, which reads differently beside a soldier struggling to keep his.