I hope members of the Mailbase will forgive me if I wander rather off course - there is a (marginal) connection to Kipling at the end.
Following our member Meredith Dixon's finding of the Raymond Asquith quote, I got hold of a copy of Raymond Asquith: Life and Letter and have now read the whole of the verse about which Wavell wondered, and which Meredith Dixon quoted for us.  The lines quoted in the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Verse are printed as two four-line stanzas, but in Joliffe's edition of Raymond's letters (Joliffe is Raymond's grandson), the two four-line stanzas are printed as one eight-line stanza, and there is a further eight line stanza, as follows:
"Now cod dies hard, and you know it
For I've written a book about cod.
And God dies hard, for Jowett
Has written a book about God.
Yes cod is hard and God is hard
But the hardest thing I've seen
Tough and bluff and bloody rough
Is a soldier of the Queen.”

Joliffe prefaces this quote with the remark "Raymond's parody of Kipling's jingoistic and highly successful poem, Soldiers of the Queen, was composed about this time"  - "this time" being March 1900, when Raymond had just been elected President of the Oxford Union (he was a student at Balliol College, as one may deduce from the reference to Jowett (Master of Balliol 1870-1893)..

The whole verse, I think, can best be described as 'jejune', in the sense of 'puerile':  And the first verse was in bad taste, I suggest, even in those heady fin de siècle days, when the attitude of many of the privileged classes was that 'God is an Englishman'.  Altogether, it seems to be a typical piece of undergraduate ‘fun’ – but what poem Joliffe thought young Raymond was parodying is beyond me.  Kipling had just written “The Absent-minded Beggar”, and Asquith’s verses have the same metre, but that is about all – and Soldiers of the Queen was part of the libretto of the Gilbert and Sullivan light opera Patience written about 17 years earlier.

I have only just dipped into Joliffe’s book, but it seems to me that it illuminates the life of privileged Edwardians (amongst whom we must count Kipling, though he’d earned his privilege by his genius) and so is in some way relevant to a study of Kipling and his milieu.

Alastair Wilson