Hold it, kids, you're firing on a friend!

Students at my graduate school, then called the Victoria University of Manchester, have risen up in righteous anger to deface a poem by Rudyard Kipling, painted on the wall of the Student Union. This is presumably to protest his celebrations of the British soldier, for example:

When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier . . .
So-oldier of the Queen!

You'd have to be rather dense to interpret that as a glorification of war!

Like the sanctimonious Americans who deface statues of Robert E. Lee, the Manchester undergraduates would benefit by reading the past with more intelligence.