Rudyard Kipling and the Great War

Rudyard Kipling was more than just the man who wrote The Jungle Book, although I confess that whenever I hear his name, the first thing that trots through my brain is “the great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River.” That phrase has been lodged in my head since childhood and apparently cannot be evicted, even for nonpayment of rent.

Kipling was one of the most famous writers alive when Europe went to war in 1914.  He had written about soldiers, sailors, empire, India, England, and most every other subject a properly mustached Englishman might discuss after dinner.  He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature.  People listened when he spoke, which is a dangerous condition for any writer.

Like most Europeans, Kipling was confused about the causes of the First World War.  That is all right: we are still confused about them.  Historians have spent more than a century sorting through alliances, nationalism, imperial rivalries, mobilization schedules, and Serbian conspirators.  We can explain the war with great confidence for about fifteen minutes, after which somebody asks one sensible question and the whole contraption starts leaking oil.

What makes the Great War especially troublesome is that, for the Europeans who entered it, this was not a simple war between good and evil.  It was not even clearly a war between “them” and “us.” The kings and emperors were cousins.  The ruling classes vacationed in one another’s countries, read one another’s books, and married one another’s daughters.  Then, in August 1914, they put on different uniforms and commenced killing one another by the trainload.

Kipling did not hesitate.  He believed that         Germany had to be defeated and his poetry sounded like a trumpet.  In “For All We Have and Are,” published in 1914, he warned that civilization itself was at stake.  “The Hun is at the gate,” he declared.  There was no room for ambiguity or for a fellow who wanted to study the railway schedules one more time.  Britain must fight.

This was not simply Kipling waving a flag from a comfortable chair.  He wrote propaganda, visited military units, and urged young men to serve.  He had spent much of his career praising the ordinary British soldier while pointing out that respectable civilians treated him like a stray dog in peacetime but discovered his virtues whenever shooting started.  Understanding hypocrisy, unfortunately, does not make a man immune to it—or to enthusiasm.

Then the war reached into his own house.

Kipling’s only son, John, wanted to serve.  John was young, short, and so nearsighted that the Army could have hidden the German Army across the examination room and he might not have spotted it.  The Royal Navy rejected him.  The Army rejected him.  These were not unreasonable decisions.  A battlefield is a poor place for an officer who cannot clearly see the men he is supposed to lead.

But John wanted a uniform and his father wanted him to have one.  Kipling used his friendship with Lord Roberts, the celebrated old field marshal and colonel of the Irish Guards, to help John obtain a commission.  It is tempting to tell this as a domineering father’s shoving an unwilling boy toward the guns.  That is too easy.  John was eager to serve.  Father and son had been raised on duty, honor, empire, and sacrifice.  They both believed the same sermon.

John Kipling became an officer in the Irish Guards at the age of sixteen.  In September 1915, not long after his eighteenth birthday, he went into action at the Battle of Loos.  Loos was Britain’s largest offensive of the war up to that time and it was an early demonstration of the military principle that, when a bad plan fails, headquarters may improve it by sending in more men.

On September 27, John led his platoon through shellfire and machine-gun fire.  Witnesses later gave confused accounts, as witnesses to battles often do.  He may have been wounded in the face and was seen stumbling or falling.  Then he disappeared into the smoke, mud, and wreckage.  He never came home. 

On his first day at the front, John went into his first attack carrying an officer’s revolver, not—as legend sometimes has it—merely a swagger stick.  By the time the Battle of Loos sputtered to its miserable conclusion, roughly 16,000 British and Empire soldiers were dead and more than 50,000 had become casualties.  John Kipling had lasted less than one day.

Rudyard and Carrie Kipling refused to abandon hope that John had been wounded or captured.  They followed every rumor, questioned survivors, and searched for any scrap of information that might tell them what had happened to their son.  None ever brought him home nor was John’s grave identified during either parent’s lifetime.  Kipling later supplied the Imperial War Graves Commission with the inscription “Known unto God” for the graves of unidentified soldiers.  For him, the words were horribly personal: they described his own boy as well as any of the nameless dead.

After John’s death, Kipling did not suddenly become a pacifist.  This is important, because history is seldom courteous enough to arrange itself into a clean moral lesson.  Kipling continued to believe that Germany had to be defeated.  He did not decide the war was unnecessary simply because it had become personally unbearable.  But the trumpet in his poetry acquired a crack.

The change can be heard in “My Boy Jack,” with its repeated plea for any kind of “news of my boy Jack?”  The poem originally accompanied Kipling’s writing about the naval Battle of Jutland and the death of a young sailor, Jack Cornell; “Jack” was not simply a private nickname for John.  Still, no grieving father could write those lines without pouring something of himself into them.  The answer comes back with the sea: not this tide, nor any tide.  Patriotic consolation remains, but consolation is not comfort.

By the end of the war, Kipling’s verse had become harder, colder, and far less impressed by speeches.  In “The Children,” he wrote of the young: “They believed us and perished for it.” In his Epitaphs of the War, he compressed the judgment of an entire generation into two lines:

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

Those lines are sometimes treated as Kipling’s confession that he had been wrong about everything.  That is too simple.  He may have been condemning the political leaders who failed to prepare Britain for war, the propagandists who disguised its cost, the older men who handed noble phrases to younger men, or himself.  The power of the lines lies in the fact that all those answers can sit together on the same mourners’ bench.

Kipling spent the postwar years helping the Imperial War Graves Commission decide how the dead should be remembered.  He chose words for cemeteries and memorials, including “Their Name Liveth for Evermore” and “Known unto God.” The great public poet of empire became one of the writers of its grief.  He could help ensure that John and the other dead did not vanish into French soil and government statistics.

And there is the lesson we keep forgetting:  Wars begin with maps, flags, speeches, and confident men explaining why the enemy has left us no choice.  The young hear, “honor, destiny, security, and duty”.  Some of it may be true.  Then the troop trains leave—and the meaning of the words changes.

The men who start a war usually believe they understand what they are doing.  The fathers who encourage their sons usually believe they are teaching courage.  The sons who go usually believe they will return.  Everybody may be sincere, and yet, the graveyards fill just the same.

Kipling’s journey from “The Hun is at the gate” to “because our fathers lied” does not prove that patriotism is foolish or that every war is avoidable.  It proves something less comfortable: righteous certainty is cheapest before the casualty lists arrive.  A nation may have to fight… but before it sends its children, it owes them the truth—about the cause, the cost, the mistakes, and the odds of coming home.

That is a debt old men have been refinancing—using the blood of young men as collateral—for a very long time.