Kipling had been warned by his doctors after his brush with death that he should not winter in England again and he was planning to revisit South Africa despite the approach of war. The discovery of vast gold seams had led to mass immigration into South Africa, which upset the ethnic balance. The Boers, of Dutch descent, wanted to keep political control in their republics and so imposed an ever-increasing residency qualification before white new arrivals had the vote. In effect this meant that the white immigrants, who produced a high proportion of the wealth of the states and paid the same proportion of taxes, had no representation.
The majority black population and the Indians had no political rights either; but though the natives were armed by both sides in the ensuing conflict, it was a ‘white man’s war’ over the question of which European faction should write the South African constitution. The situation escalated with the sending of British troops to the Cape Colony, which neighboured the Boer republics. Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal, demanded the British should stop sending troops. As the imperial power could not be dictated to, the British declared war on 11 October 1899.
The Boer War, now officially referred to as the South African War, lasted from 1899 to 1902. It progressed through three phases. In the first, the British suffered severe setbacks, particularly in the ‘Black Week’ of 10–15 December 1899 when the Boers beat the British in the field and besieged the British-held towns of Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley.
In the second phase, a new army sent under Lords Roberts and Kitchener relieved the besieged towns and occupied the main Boer cities of Bloemfontein, Johannesburg and Pretoria. The war was declared won.
Finally, Kitchener was left to ‘mop up’ remaining resistance. For the next 15 months a fierce Boer guerrilla campaign was opposed by a policy of denying the Boers any support in the field and dividing up the country with barbed wire and blockhouses, sweeping the countryside to track down guerrillas. The Boers were finally starved into surrender in May 1902.
The war was opposed by anti-imperialists, who felt it was a militarily pointless conflict being fought for the financial gain of men like Rhodes; and by idealists such as Kipling’s Aunt Georgie, who felt it was a brutal attack on a small nation which disgraced the British empire. It was also opposed by imperialists such as the journalist and campaigner W T Stead, who felt that the Boers had founded outposts of civilisation in Africa and other whites should support them in a civilising mission. Nothing of these reservations permeate Kipling’s letters or writing at this time. Fired by the imperial vision of Rhodes, he was a true enthusiast for war, unable to see the least merit in the Boers and feeling that the war would do no end of good in beefing up the British army, The war is having a splendid effect on the land and all fires will burn more clearly for the fierce draft that has been blown through them, he wrote.161
As his contribution to the war effort he wrote ‘The Absent- Minded Beggar’, a crude and thumping verse, more a song than a poem, and it was duly set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan in a tune as Kipling said guaranteed to pull teeth out of barrel-organs.162
It was a call that patriotism should not be enough, and that soldiers (and their women and children) should be supported by those who cheered them off to war,
When you’ve shouted ‘Rule Britannia’, when you’ve sung ‘God Save the Queen’,
When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth
Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine
For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?
It was published in the Daily Mail the month war was declared and was, Kipling said, the first time I ever set out of malice aforethought to sell my name for every blessed cent it would fetch.163 Handkerchiefs, tobacco jars, plates and other items were produced bearing the poem or part of it and sold to raise a quarter of a million pounds for a fund for soldiers and their families. Kipling and Carrie went to the Cape to give tobacco and other comforts to the troops in January 1900 at the height of Boer successes against the British, when even his friend Rhodes was besieged in the town of Kimberley.
Kipling writes with a rare boastful tone of his work in the Boer War, my position among the rank and file came to be unofficially above that of most Generals . . . My note-of-hand at the Cape Town depot was good for as much as I cared to take about with me. The rest followed. My telegrams were given priority by sweating R.E. sergeants from all sorts of congested depots. My seat in the train was kept for me by British Bayonets in their shirt-sleeves. My small baggage was fought for and servilely carried by Colonial details, who are not normally meek, and I was persona gratissima at certain Wynberg Hospitals where the nurses found I was good for pyjamas.164
Lord Roberts, now in command of the British force in South Africa, had of course known Kipling since his days in India and he knew Kipling’s skills could be put to better use than merely distributing tobacco. He sent for Kipling who spent the evening with him and once the Orange Free State capital Bloemfontein had been taken, Kipling was ordered there to meet men from the Times and from Reuters and to edit a paper for the troops. They took over the Boer newspaper, renamed it The Friend, and ordered the reluctant compositors and other staff to get working on Lord Roberts’s Official Proclamation to the enemy. Kipling had the satisfaction of picking up from the floor the proof of an article which the Boers had had no time to print, a really rude leader about myself.165
Kipling was appalled at the mismanagement of the war, in particular the disease cultivated by incompetence: an exhausted horse battery assigned the site of an evacuated typhoid hospital; drinking water taken from the contaminated Modder River and the organisation of latrines left to the manual workers who dug them. During the poorly executed battle of Paardeberg, Kipling went up with an ambulance train to the railhead at Modder River when the wounded were being evacuated, his first experience of war. He also came under fire for the first time in his life while taking refuge in a farmhouse during an ineffectual engagement by the British attempting to encircle a Boer detachment.
By June 1900 Lord Roberts had taken both the Boer capitals but the Boers fought on. The solution, initiated under Roberts but brought to its zenith under Kitchener who succeeded him, was a scorched-earth policy to destroy the farms, crops and livestock of the Boers so they could no longer live on the land. The Boer women and children were taken to concentration camps, which were widely criticised within Britain and subject to withering attack abroad.
The blackest indictment of Kipling’s tendency to shut out pain from his mind and refuse to contemplate Josephine’s death was his lack of sympathy with the Boers, whose children were the principal victims of the British concentration camp policy. Some 28,000 people died in the concentration camps, most of them children. Kipling wrote that the Boers were having the time of their lives – stealing from friends and foes alike and living on the fat of the land . . . We are looking after their wives and kids so they have nothing to worry about.166 The Boers were in fact maintaining a courageous and resourceful guerrilla war which became a classic of its kind, holding down the imperial force of half a million soldiers with a few thousand men in the field.
His South African experiences did not deliver rich prose for Kipling: he was not given to a detailed understanding of the lives of settlers and their interaction with natives as he had been in India. For the first time on a large scale he had allowed his political views to get in the way of his artistic understanding. At the end of the war Kipling considered the British had done the Boers a good turn, We put them in a position to uphold and expand their primitive lust for racial domination, he wrote.167 How he could reconcile believing this, while simultaneously respecting Rhodes with his racially-based imperialism is beyond reason. In general Kipling felt the experience has been wholesome. We were bung-full of beastly unjustified spiritual pride as we were with material luxury and over much ease.168
Rhodes had been besieged in Kimberley until February 1900 when Kipling had arrived at the start of the war. When the siege was lifted, he discussed with Kipling his proposed establishment of a house for the use of artists and writers. Carrie went with his architect to choose the site for The Woolsack, on Rhodes’s Groote Schuur estate at the Cape. He offered it to the Kiplings for as long as they wanted it and they were to visit each year until 1908, spending English winters walking amid the pine and eucalyptus and watching the animals. The children were particularly delighted with the zebras, a spitting lama and a lion cub, rejected by his mother and henceforth fed by bottle by Carrie, using stout motor-gloves.
Sir George Younghusband recalled meeting Kipling at camp in South Africa, peering through the upper half of his spectacles for distance viewing, walking fast to keep up with Rhodes who was considerably larger. As they were leaving camp the men of the 3rd Imperial Yeomanry gathered and raised a cheer.
‘Take off your cap, they are cheering you’ said Rhodes.
No they are not. They are cheering you. Take off your cap, said Kipling.
Someone wisely advised that the men were cheering them both, ‘Whereupon both, clinging close together for support, shyly took off their caps.’169
Cecil Rhodes was born in England in 1853 and was sent to Africa for his health, which was always delicate. Rejecting a farming life, he moved to Kimberley, the centre of diamond mining, where eventually hard work made him wealthy. He returned to England in 1873 to take an Oxford degree. While there he made his first will, for the founding of a secret society for ‘the extension of British rule throughout the world.’
Rhodes founded the De Beers mining company. Though a process of buying out rivals, he came to own 90 per cent of the world’s diamond production, and extensive gold interests. He dreamed of building a railway from the Cape to Cairo and moved into politics to facilitate further advances. By a series of tricks, dubious treaties and military threat, Rhodes’s British South Africa Company eventually dominated the lands of the Shona and the Matabele, which were given his name as Rhodesia.
He became prime minister of the Cape Colony from 1890 to 1896 when his connection with the Jameson raid, intended to stir a rebellion in the Transvaal, forced his resignation. The Boer War led to a questioning of Rhodes’s style of imperialism and his last years were marred by his coming under the spell of a seductive conwoman, Princess Radziwill.
Kipling spent a great deal of time with Rhodes, whose poor health meant he often lay on a couch. He received visitors thus, who would often be waiting for days to be seen, though Rhodes always had time for Kipling, who helped him with the details of the ‘Rhodes Scholars’ scheme to have men of high character from different parts of the British Empire and the US educated at Oxford. The scholarships have, ironically considering Rhodes’s racially superior views, enabled many non-white students to enjoy higher education. Their friendship was short-lived, as Rhodes’s health was failing fast. Kipling visited him almost every day during the winter of 1901–2, as he lay dying. Rhodes’s heart finally gave up on 26 March 1902, when the empire builder was 49 and the war was not yet won. Kipling wrote: No words could give you any idea of that great spirit’s power or the extent to which the country worshipped him.170 Kipling certainly worshipped him – almost literally, for he capitalised the pronoun in a manner normally reserved for deity: I don’t think that anyone who did not actually come across Him with some intimacy of detail can ever realise what He was. It was His Presence that had the Power.171
When the war ended with a day of public celebration in June 1902, on the other side of Rottingdean Square from Kipling Aunt Georgie hung a black banner saying: ‘We have killed and also taken possession,’ expressing her feelings on the brutal conduct of the war. A crowd of what passed for patriots gathered, trying to pull down the banner and set fire to Lady Burne-Jones’s hedge. The disturbance brought Kipling, recently returned from South Africa, rushing across the green to make a speech to calm the demonstrators, who left without further disturbance. It was not the only time after the brush with death in 1899 that he had to display a courage not apparent in him before. A deranged character who believed his mission was to kill Kipling followed him to South Africa and broke into The Woolsack with a revolver late one night. Kipling enticed him to sit down and have a drink before carrying out his duty, and talked with him, giving him whisky until the man fell asleep.
South Africa provided Kipling with inspiration for some of his most memorable verse. The experience of those involved in the war was reflected in ‘Dirge of Dead Sisters’, commemorating the nurses who died; and ‘Boots’, an evocation of the march of weary soldiers.
While Kipling was never able to accept that Britain had done anything wrong in the war, his tone after it was more thoughtful. He looked to what had been learned from it:
Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
In ‘The Settler’, a much finer poem, a British soldier turned farmer reflects as he turns the soil over which he has fought:
Here where my fresh-turned furrows run,
And where the deep soil glistens red,
I will repair the wrong that was done
To the living and the dead.
His South African connection led him to write lines adulating Milner and Rhodes and his most famous poem, ‘If’, was inspired by Leander Starr Jameson, whose reckless ‘raid’ on the Boers almost caused a war four years earlier than the Boer War and was the cause of Rhodes’s resignation as the Premier of Cape Colony. Jameson became Prime Minister in 1904 with his official residence on the Groote Schuur estate, which had been bequeathed to the nation by Rhodes. They were therefore neighbours when Kipling was in South Africa, but he was not again to visit the Cape after Jameson lost his position as prime minister to a Boer in 1908.
Jameson visited Kipling in Sussex in 1909 and it was after his departure that Kipling, wrote the poem ‘If’, with some of his most-quoted lines:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you . . .
. . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same . . .
. . . If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run . . .
Its almost biblical intonation and complex rhyme scheme make it Kipling’s best-loved poem, still widely quoted and it would be more widely quoted still had not Kipling so clearly masculinised it with the last line – you’ll be a Man, my Son! though the qualities represented in the poem were embodied perfectly well by Carrie Kipling and other women of Kipling’s acquaintance. Kipling was insisting on a gender separation when the western world was moving towards an appreciation of the similarities between men and women, not the differences.
It was doubtless because of his generous actions on behalf of the troops in particular that prime minister Lord Salisbury sent his secretary down to see Kipling in Sussex in 1899 to offer him a knighthood. He refused, as he was to refuse two further times – in 1903 and 1917 – followed by a refusal of the Order of Merit in 1921 and again in 1924.
He also refused to join the royal party when the Prince of Wales went to India in 1903 and again when he went as King in 1911. Why he refused awards from the empire he adored and the monarch he respected is not entirely clear. The official reason was that it might compromise his integrity and restrict his freedom of independent judgement. Kipling’s views were extremely well known, however, and no one offering an award was doing so in the expectation that he might become less of a Tory or of an imperialist. The deeper reason is probably Kipling’s superstition that his gift was supernatural and he should not tarnish it with such baubles of the world as a KCMG.
He seemed always to accept honorary degrees, however. McGill University in Canada was the first to confer an honorary degree on Kipling, in 1899, and henceforward he took them from the universities of Durham, Oxford, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Strasburg and Athens. He always felt he had missed something by not having a university education and this was some compensation – a recognition from the universities that he really deserved academic distinction and his lack of an undergraduate career was a mere oversight.
As he tried to learn the lessons of the new century, politics took more of his time, which was unhelpful for a creative writer. Politically Kipling was contemptuous of democracy, authoritarian in his conception of good government, in awe of military virtues and scornful of the blessings of peace.
On the practical side he founded the Rottingdean rifle range, largely at his own expense, in order to lead England in ‘preparedness’ for war by training the local youths to shoot. In the same cause he urged compulsory military drill and mocked England’s passion for games when, he felt, the effort could be better engaged in military training. As he berated the public in ‘The Islanders’:
Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented your souls
With the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals.
Kipling, of course, had been saved from compulsory games at school by his poor eyesight. At least no one could accuse Kipling of courting an easy popularity by saying what people wanted to hear. The editor of Kipling’s letters, Thomas Pinney, remarked that ‘the hortatory, scolding, even Cassandra-like tone in much of this work began to grate on some of Kipling’s public; it is at this time that Kipling starts to wear out the almost overwhelming welcome that he had until then received.’172 While Kipling was thus parading his prejudices, it is the more remarkable that he was also – during the Boer War – writing his most sophisticated long work in which there is no sign of the blustering conservative of his public life.
The Little Friend of All the World
The background of Kim had been with Kipling since his days in India and the unsuccessful Mother Maturin of 1885, but the notion of the Irish boy born in India and mixed up in native life was created while he was living in America, three times begun and left incomplete. At Rottingdean, and more particularly in Wiltshire when he talked it over with his father, Kipling developed the story of the boy taking a journey through northern India. Kipling said the best of the book, which he clearly loved, was contributed by his father.
Kipling declared that he would use a picaresque form: what was good enough for Cervantes was good enough for him. His mother scorned him, ‘Don’t you stand in your wool-boots hiding behind Cervantes with me! You know you couldn’t make a plot to save your soul.’173 This was true; Kipling was a master at the creation of characters and situations which are ideal for short stories, but he had no skill at the game of consequences which is plot making, and plots are considered essential in the modern novel.
Kim was completed in the summer of 1900. It is the last and largest of his works based on an India he had left more than ten years before. It is the story of Kimball O’Hara, the orphaned son of an Irish soldier, and a nursemaid of indeterminate race who finds his home in the bazaar of Lahore: he is friend of all the world because he can move with facility across race, caste, religious and class boundaries. He is first encountered sitting astride the antique bronze gun in front of the Lahore Museum (where Lockwood Kipling was curator). He meets a Tibetan lama who seeks a holy river. Kim seeks a red bull in a green field (the symbol of the Mavericks, his father’s regiment, though he does not know it) and the two set off on a journey. They go by railway and along the Grand Trunk Road, such a river of life, in search of their destiny. Part of the story involves a coded map of the battle formations for an attack on British forces on the north-west frontier, which Kim has been entrusted to carry by a horse dealer who is a spy for the British.
When he finds his father’s regiment, Kim is taken in by the army chaplains and sent to school. While the military authorities are eager for Kim to see himself as a sahib, he himself, and his spymaster, see more value in a shape-shifting, multilingual identity. He also has the choice between the Way of the lama’s spirituality, and the Great Game of British agents, a choice between contemplation and action, between East and West. Kim is, then, like Mowgli making his choice of the jungle or the village, between two worlds, and one is tempted to see these sympathetic boy characters as manifestations of Kipling’s own character.
The sympathy of the book was not only for the lama and Kim, the holy fool and his cunning sidekick. The Indian characters are all drawn with a sensitivity and depth that escapes the depiction of some of the English ones. In particular, Huree Chunder the Babu is an educated Indian of the type Kipling despised, a man always quoting Shakespeare and misusing erudite words. Yet he acquits himself with honour, willingly going into danger as a duplicitous guide for the Russian spies for the sake of the Great Game. He is a character both comic and heroic.
Kim was serialised in Cassell’s Magazine in Britain and McClure’s Magazine in the US, then published in book form in both countries. Joseph M Rogers, who worked on McClure’s, said that Kipling was paid the largest sum ever given an author for serial rights to it. He remembered Kipling still rewriting as the parts came out, ‘I know of no author who has a greater tendency to change and change again until it suits him. My recollection is that Kim was rewritten five times, three times after it was set in type. I think the most interesting manuscript I ever saw was that of the page-proofs of this book after it had been twice in type. It was filled with marginal corrections, some of minor and some of major importance. The author sought ever to get exactly the right word or phrase for his purpose and that manuscript was a terror to compositors – all the more so because Kipling is extraordinarily particular about having every word and punctuation mark inserted just as he wrote it.’174
The reception was muted by controversy over the war and by Kipling’s uncertain market: the intellectuals who reviewed books were the sort of people who disdained Kipling’s jingoism, even if they were not anti-war. As for Kipling’s stalwart supporters, the book’s allusive style and sensitive representation of India disconcerted those who were used to Kipling serving them rations of bully beef. On serial publication many readers were simply confused; they wanted more story and less colour.
The book showed to discerning critics, however, that there was more to Kipling than the drum-banging patriot that he was always presenting as his true self. Henry James, who only four years previously had been complaining of Kipling’s descent into simpler and simpler subjects, wrote to him, ‘I overflow, I beg you to believe, with Kim, and I rejoice in such a saturation, such a splendid dose of you . . . What a luxury to possess a big subject as you possess India . . . The way you make the general picture live and sound and shine, all by a myriad touches that are like the thing itself pricking through with a little snap – that makes me want to say to you: “Come, all else is folly – sell all you have and give to the poor!” by which I mean chuck public affairs, which are an ignoble scene, and stick to your canvas and your paint-box. There are as good colours in the tubes as ever were laid on, and there is the only truth. The rest is base humbug.’175
Kipling himself recognised the book was a bit more temperate and wise than much of my stuff, a remark which begs the question that if he knew much of his material was intemperate and unwise, why did he release it?176
His own explanation, given in verses ‘The Two-Sided Man’ used as an epigraph to a chapter is:
Much I owe to the Lands that grew –
More to the Lives that fed –
But most to Allah Who gave me two
Separate sides to my head.
I would go without shirt or shoe
Friend, tobacco or bread
Sooner than lose for a minute the two
Separate sides of my head!177
Kipling is saying he recognises his debt to the countries that nourished his imagination – England, India, America, South Africa – and to the people who guided him. Yet the defining characteristic of a dual personality was put in him not by these, but by God. It is more important than comfort and friendship and he will hold on to it. He was still divided between the sensitive poet of the United Services College study and the aspiring soldiers of Stalky & Co.
It is easy to condescend to Kipling and tell him in retrospect, as his sophisticated contemporaries did, that he should cultivate the sensitive artist and dismiss the rhyming patriot. Kipling’s barely coded response is quite straightforward: both sides of his character are necessary for his life. Whatever his critics say, his duality is not a curse to be rid of, but a God-given boon.