We have done with Hope and Honor, we are lost to Love and Truth,
We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung;
And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth.
God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

These lines are from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Young British Soldier,” a didactic piece written in the late Victorian era to instruct raw recruits in the hard realities of army life. Kipling, who had close familiarity with the British imperial military world through his journalism and Indian upbringing, frames the poem as blunt advice from an experienced soldier to a newcomer. The quoted stanza comes from the section warning against drink, brothels, and the exploitative “temptations” that surround garrisons—forces that can rapidly erode a young soldier’s ideals. The tone is deliberately unsentimental: a moral and psychological caution delivered in barrack-room vernacular.

The stanza compresses a tragedy of premature disillusionment. “Hope and Honor,” “Love and Truth” name the ideals with which youth often begins; the speaker claims those ideals have been spent or forfeited, and that the descent is incremental—“rung by rung”—as if moral collapse is a series of small surrenders rather than one decisive fall. The bitter paradox, “the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth,” suggests that suffering is intensified by how early one learns corruption and loss. The closing plea—“God help us”—is less pious comfort than an acknowledgment that knowledge of “the worst” can arrive before character is ready to withstand it.