This is an extract from a publication of University College Dublin.

Vae Victis was written in 1933.

Brian O’Nolan wrote under the pen names of Flann O’Brien and Myles na Gopaleen. He was born in 1911 in County Tyrone. A resident of Dublin, he graduated from University College after a brilliant career as a student (editing a magazine called Blather), and joined the Civil Service, in which he eventually attained a senior position. He died in Dublin on 1 April 1966. His novels included At Swim-Two-Birds, The Dalkey Archive, The Third Policeman, The Hard Life and The Poor Mouth (originally published in Irish as An Béal Bocht).

I was amazed at the keen insight into our mere College affairs which the great man showed. But I noticed a subtle change come over him after drinking his coffee. The buoyancy vanished from his manner. He seemed to become a little irritable. Still he read me from the back of an envelope this ode after the manner of Piers Plowman.

Vae Victis!

Oh! College Rugby Club! Oh! College Rugby Club!

You warded off Wanderers wonderfully.

 You manxed up Monkstown manfully,

With luck against you, you broke Blackrock.

But I cannot get in right perspective

The fact that you were bet by Bective.

'But,' said I, always a purist in literature, 'surely "bet" is not what the best people would say.'

Mr Prune gurgled ominously. A beet-red flush suffused his face in waves of rapidly-increasing intensity. Terrible wrath peeped through his eyes.

'How dare you, sir' he exploded, and lifting his dispatch-case and walking-stick, he stalked splutteringly away.

Brother Barnabas did not take kindly to the poet.

Thank you to Des Broderick for passing on the above extract