Welcome to Beastly Tales. Each has a message, a moral. All are meant to have an element of humour. Naturally, any names included do not depict real folk but are included as part of the joke.

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(As with Beastly Banter Beastly Tales is written and illustrated by Richard Hersel.)

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Richard Hersel

RAGTIME REVELS

There, on the balconies a pair of doxies he saw.
They were in business, a paradox of war.
That’s just the way it was, and who can say more?
They had their Piano Bar, on the ground floor.
They played Ragtime music from morn to midnight.
Sundown began the action, when there was no light.

Honky Tonk played in a drinking saloon.
A bouncer ousting a drunken baboon.
The whole enterprise, designed to extract money from dopes.
And the desperate, looking to fulfil fallen hopes.
Escapism is what it was all about.
Interludes of amour, on a hard drinking bout.
Festus Falstaff had returned from the front.
Two months of trench fighting, he’d borne the brunt.
A touch of trenchfoot slowed him from dancing.
And there is no Ragtime music when with bayonets, they’re advancing.
Just then an officer blowing a whistle, “over the top lads!”
And then they were running about like dissolute gads.
That is to say, with seemingly no purpose for,
Taking back land they’d lost the day before.

Falstaff counted the days before they might be relieved,
(Unless H.Q again had them deceived).
And the platoon could retreat back well behind the front line,
Perhaps avoid the Big Push, on the way to the Rhine!