Someone posted the Rudyard Kipling poem that contained the famous line about "a woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke." I wanted to say thanks, but now I can't find it anymore.
Kipling wrote in a letter about a meeting in America with another famous cigar smoker:
"...I have seen Mark Twain this golden morning, have shaken his hand and smoked a cigar -- no, two cigars -- with him, and talked with him for more than two hours!"
Rudyard wrote a book of poetry called "Barrack-Room Ballads", in which he wrote the line that gave James Jones the title for his most famous novel. The phrase is from the poem "Gentlemen Rankers":
We're poor little lambs who've lost our way,
Baa! Baa! Baa!
We're little black sheep who've gone astray,
Baa--aa--aa!
Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree,
Damned from here to Eternity,
God ha' mercy on such as we,
Baa! Yah! Bah
The Yale Glee Club began singing Gentleman Rankers to a tune of disputed origin (some think it was written by a Harvard grad!) around 1902. When some members of the glee club began calling themselves the Whiffenpoofs, after a mythical fish from a Gilbert-Sullivan opera, and wrote and sang a parody of the poem, it became known as the Whiffenpoof Song. One of the changes was "damned" became "doomed."
