The jaunty rhythm, internal rhyme (in the first and third line of each stanza) and frequent alliteration ( “through mirk and through mire”; “great guns were gleaming” ) echo the brisk marching pace of the soldiers. However the highly contrived rhyme and the stilted (artificial) syntax to which it leads (as in the penultimate stanza) make the narrator's mode of address seem somewhat unnatural. We do not (as we do with The Man He Killed) have a clear and immediate sense of the narrator's character.