Oh how shall I its deeds recount
  Or measure the untold amount
  Of ills that it has done?
  From China’s bright celestial land
  E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
  It journeyed with the sun.

  O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains
  Where Russian exiles toil in chains
  It moved with noiseless tread;
  And as it slowly glided by
  There followed it across the sky
  The spirits of the dead.

  The Ural peaks by it were scaled
  And every bar and barrier failed
  To turn it from its way;
  Slowly and surely on it came,
  Heralded by its awful fame,
  Increasing day by day.

  On Moscow’s fair and famous town
  Where fell the first Napoleon’s crown
  It made a direful swoop;
  The rich, the poor, the high, the low
  Alike the various symptoms know,
  Alike before it droop.

  Nor adverse winds, nor floods of rain
  Might stay the thrice-accursed bane;
  And with unsparing hand,
  Impartial, cruel and severe
  It travelled on allied with fear
  And smote the fatherland.

  Fair Alsace and forlorn Lorraine,
  The cause of bitterness and pain
  In many a Gaelic breast,
  Receive the vile, insatiate scourge,
  And from their towns with it emerge
  And never stay nor rest.

  And now Europa groans aloud,
  And ‘neath the heavy thunder-cloud
  Hushed is both song and dance;
  The germs of illness wend their way
  To westward each succeeding day
  And enter merry France.

  Fair land of Gaul, thy patriots brave
  Who fear not death and scorn the grave
  Cannot this foe oppose,
  Whose loathsome hand and cruel sting,
  Whose poisonous breath and blighted wing
  Full well thy cities know.

  In Calais port the illness stays,
  As did the French in former days,
  To threaten Freedom’s isle;
  But now no Nelson could o’erthrow
  This cruel, unconquerable foe,
  Nor save us from its guile.

  Yet Father Neptune strove right well
  To moderate this plague of Hell,
  And thwart it in its course;
  And though it passed the streak of brine
  And penetrated this thin line,
  It came with broken force.

  For though it ravaged far and wide
  Both village, town and countryside,
  Its power to kill was o’er;
  And with the favouring winds of Spring
  (Blest is the time of which I sing)
  It left our native shore.

  God shield our Empire from the might
  Of war or famine, plague or blight
  And all the power of Hell,
  And keep it ever in the hands
  Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands,
  Who fought and conquered well.