Boots March On
Last night my daughter was chatting with her girlfriends when I heard them discussing a creepy old soundbite appearing on more and more TikTok videos. She didn’t know what it was called, only the words. “Boots, boots, boots, boots, movin’ up and down again.”
I immediately recognized it but wasn’t sure where I’d heard it before. So join me as we figure out how a 122 year old poem found its way to TikTok.
The Boer Wars
The Boer Wars were fought in southern Africa between the British Empire and the Boers, who were mainly Dutch-descended settlers called Afrikaners. The Second Boer War lasted from 1899 to 1902. It was the bigger and bloodier of the two conflicts.
The fighting took place in what is now South Africa, mostly in the territories of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The British wanted to control the rich gold and diamond resources there. The Boers fought fiercely to keep their independence. In the end, the British won and took over the Boer republics, laying the groundwork for the Union of South Africa.
Rudyard Kipling’s Views on the War
Kipling was a strong supporter of the British Empire, but he was also deeply aware of the costs of war on individual soldiers. Having lost close friends and later his own son in wartime, Kipling often wrote with sympathy for the common soldier’s burden.
In “Boots,” he wanted to convey the grinding, dehumanizing side of soldiering — not through blood and battle but through the psychological wear of endless marching and the loss of self. Unlike poems that glorify war, “Boots” is hauntingly fixated on the endless, mind-numbing grind. It’s a powerful example of Kipling’s realism about military life, stripped of romance.
Boots
“Boots” was first published in 1903 in The Daily Mail and later collected in his book The Five Nations.
The poem is narrated from the perspective of a weary British soldier trudging endlessly through the African veldt during the Second Boer War (1899–1902). Kipling wrote it during a time of intense British military engagement in South Africa. The conflict was known for its grueling marches, guerrilla warfare, and psychological toll on troops.
The structure of the poem mimics the relentless, repetitive, numbing experience of marching, with the word “boots” repeated almost hypnotically throughout. The poem opens and closes with the refrain:
“Boots — boots — boots — boots — moving up and down again,
There’s no discharge in the war.”
This rhythm reflects the soldier’s mental state — exhausted, semi-hallucinating, with time blurring into an endless slog. The poem deliberately uses repetition to capture the monotony and horror of war, showing how the mind can fixate on small details (like the sound and feel of boots) to cope with the overwhelming situation.
Boots (Trending Again)
In 1915, actor Taylor Holmes recorded Boots in New York for Victor Records. His haunting performance—calm at first, then shouting in anguish—later became a tool in U.S. military SERE training and resurfaced in the 2025 28 Years Later film trailer.
The poem’s eerie, repetitive rhythm lends itself perfectly to dramatic or unsettling sound bites — which is why it’s found new life on TikTok. It gets used to underscore feelings of:
Monotony and grind, paranoia, creeping horror, and dark humor. The cadence feels almost like a chant or spell, giving it a timeless, haunting quality that resonates far beyond the original context.
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