Kipling had shown a growing apprehension of Germany as the real enemy of the British Empire, at least since 1896 when the Kaiser had sent a telegram of support for the Boers after they had repulsed the disastrous Jameson Raid.
He had also, after his return from America in 1899, developed an association with the navy since they invited him to visit their ships in Dartmouth and Plymouth when he was living in Torquay. With his usual enjoyment of a man’s world he settled into a relationship with sailors and ships which was personally rewarding if not greatly productive in literary terms. This gave him an understanding of the battle for naval supremacy in which Germany, already the dominant land power in Europe, aimed to rival Britain as the dominant sea power. Kipling was warning The Teuton is angry, and is taking measures and steps as hard and fast as he can . . . The Teuton has his large cold eye on us . . .194
In a personal reflection of Britain’s relations with France, Kipling also found much to admire in neighbours across the Channel, making a particular friend of the uncompromising patriot Georges Clemenceau, twice Prime Minister of France, who visited Bateman’s in September 1909 and remained a friend. At last Kipling had found a politician he could respect. Both were influenced by the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 in which France had been quickly overrun and accepted humiliating peace terms. The next war, it was widely believed, would be similarly fast and furious.
Kipling played no part in comment on or reaction to the events of summer 1914, leading to the war he had long predicted. He was still writing about Ulster as the primary flashpoint of political excitement in mid-July as the international crisis over Sarajevo developed. On 4 August 1914 Carrie noted in her diary she had a cold, Kipling wrote, Incidentally Armageddon begins.
When this long-prophesied war broke out he welcomed the national reaction with relief, I confess I feel rather proud of the way in which England has bucked up at the pinch and tho’, as you know, I am not an optimist by nature I can’t help feeling cheerful over this.195
The Boer War may have been a ‘lesson’ and it had its horrors, but for the British the majority of deaths were still, as they had been in previous wars, from disease caused by poor planning and inadequate sanitation. Kipling criticised this ill-preparedness but still regarded war, as it had been through his youth and most of the 19th century, as a sort of character-building adventure to make men out of boys.
Enthusiasm for the war caught the imagination of young men including John Kipling, a good-natured boy, not academic and with no particular abilities, who was destined for the services. He was sent away to St Aubyn’s School, Rottingdean at the age of ten, presumably because it was felt boarding school values would do him some good. Kipling’s letters to his son show a willingness to engage with emotional issues, even if the sentiments are conventional. He applauds John for facing homesickness with stoicism: I understand that you did not flop about and blub and whine but carried on quietly. Good man! Next time it will come easier to you to keep control over yourself and the time after that easier still. On the issue of homosexuality he warned John against, any chap who is even suspected of beastliness . . . Give them the widest of wide berths. Whatever their merits may be in the athletic line they are at heart only sweeps and scum and all friendship or acquaintance with them ends in sorrow and disgrace.196
John was sent to Wellington College in Berkshire, which trained boys for Sandhurst. His lack of academic achievement suggested he would not pass the Sandhurst entrance exam so he went on to a private army crammer in Bournemouth in 1913. He was to have a career in the navy but his eyesight was too poor, so he tried for the army where the sight qualifications were lower. John had applied for a commission on 10 August 1914, in the first week of the war, and a week later Kipling took him to Maidstone for the physical examination but they turned him down for eyes.197
A story is told of how Kipling, accompanied by John, was helping to recruit volunteers outside the Bear public house in Burwash High Street when a neighbour, George Pagden, snapped, ‘Why don’t you send your own bloody boy?’ The remark cut Kipling to the quick and he was said never to have set foot in the local village again.198
Kipling decided to pull strings and ask his old hero and acquaintance from India and South Africa, Lord Roberts, for a nomination. He met Roberts on 10 September at the Irish Guards HQ, whereupon the colonel of the regiment said John should report at once. Thus, with many attempts and only after pulling strings at the highest level, John Kipling was commissioned into the Irish Guards and told to report to Warley barracks on 14 September.
The family busied itself with war work: Carrie and Elsie sewing socks and Kipling visiting hospitals in the south of England and writing. He wrote two series of articles for the Daily Telegraph: ‘The New Army in Training’ and, after a visit to the Western Front in August 1915, ‘France at War on the Frontier of Civilisation’. He was able to see some of the aftereffects of modern warfare with the countryside burned yellow for miles from a German gas attack, trees splintered into toothpicks and a ruined farm where no brick stood on another.
Kipling and his old school friend Dunsterville had been back in contact for some time. Dunsterville had not had the career Kipling had predicted for him; he had put in hard years in the Indian Army and was now a retired colonel. Once the war was in progress he was sent to India, to the north-west frontier then to the southern Caucasus, where his skeleton army Dunsterforce convinced the Turks by a series of tricks that a large army was present so they should not invade the Southern Caucasus in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. It was a truly Stalky-style moment at a time when there was little light relief.
The first phase of the war in 1914 followed the Schlieffen Plan for the German advance which had been in development for more than a decade when it was finalised in 1905. It involved the violation of Belgian neutrality as a key element; the armies would sweep through Belgium and knock out France in a swift blow.
In the event, fierce resistance from the Belgian population held back the advance, to which the Germans responded with the destruction of property and the execution of civilians, intended to cow the population. This behaviour was exaggerated into widespread atrocity stories which were used to stimulate the British population into war-fever.
Britain entered the war from a treaty obligation to guarantee Belgian neutrality, and in defence of the French ally. Before the end of 1914 stalemate had set in with the armies facing each other across a 365-mile line of trenches from the Swiss border to the coast. The great offensives of the following years, including at Loos in 1915, were attempts to break the deadlock.
The excitement of war stimulated the last great burst of creativity in Kipling’s life. The first, published in The Times, was a call to arms written in the first weeks of war:
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!
When Belgian refugees began to flood into Britain telling of the German advance, Kipling adopted a more grim tone with ‘The Beginnings’:
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good
When the English began to hate.
Kipling’s letters showed him much moved by tales of atrocities allegedly committed by the Germans as they crossed a fiercely resisting Belgium. A story on this theme, ‘Swept and Garnished’, has an elderly German woman with a fever visited by the ghosts of Belgian children killed by the German army.
A story with far greater depth was ‘Mary Postgate’, also written in 1915, where a spinster brings up and seemingly falls in love with her employer’s nephew, despite his contemptuous treatment of her. He joins the Flying Corps and dies on a training flight. Mary is given the task of burning his things and as she does so, a child is killed in the village. It is suggested she was hit by a bomb dropped by a German aeroplane, though the doctor involved says it was a rotten stable beam which broke and threw debris down, hitting the child. He makes a point of telling Mary this, when she calls in to the village to get fuel for her bonfire, as he knows that in the fog of war it will be assumed that any unexpected death was caused by the Germans.
The beastliness of war and of the Germans is not stressed; it is Mary’s employer and her nephew who are unpleasant, and the unrequited love of Mary for the young flyer is repeated incessantly. While Mary is burning the young man’s possessions she sees a German airman who has fallen from a plane and is trapped, injured, in a tree nearby. She lets him die, enjoying her long pleasure in a scarcely veiled sexual description where she vigorously stokes the fire and brings herself to a climax: an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel . . . She closed her eyes and drank it in . . . ‘Go on’ she murmured half aloud. ‘That isn’t the end.’ Then the end came very distinctly in a lull between two rain-gusts. Mary Postgate drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot.
At the end of the story she goes home and has a hot bath. There is no external evidence to suggest there ever really was an airman; all we see is Mary’s perception as she curses the ‘pagan’ hanging in the tree while she excites herself in front of the pyre on which burn the last remains of her unrequited love. She has been freed by the atmosphere of war to unleash those passions that a bourgeois life of self-restraint has kept bottled up within her.
Even at this stage in the national drama, in many ways the culmination of Kipling’s imperial mission when the Empire must succeed or fail on the character of its men, Kipling had to create something bigger than himself. Mary Postgate, perhaps the finest fiction to come out of the First World War, is written as if it were driven by something stranger and more profound than Kipling’s conscious thought.
Why We Died
The family often visited John in London, sending the Rolls Royce to his barracks and the four of them going to the theatre. It was not something the parents usually did, but was much to the taste of John and Elsie.
There is no doubt that John wanted to get to war and brought a degree of boyish enthusiasm to the task. Kipling wrote that as he had toiled to make life pleasant for his children, he resented the shadow over his children’s lives, but the young went to war with passion.
John was not sent directly to the front; he first served in Dublin then waited impatiently in London while his friends were dispatched. Finally he was sent forward into what would be known as the Battle of Loos, the British wing of the autumn offensive (the French attacked simultaneously in Champagne).
John Kipling’s last thoughts were represented in 26 letters to his parents starting ‘Dear Old Things’ on Monday 16 September 1915. ‘I am writing this in a train proceeding to the firing line at 15 mph (its top speed) . . . we are billeted in a splendid little village nestling among the downs about 20 miles from the firing line . . . the country is looking awfully nice.’
Later the going was harder: ‘Never in my life have I seen rain like this the roads are flooded, there are feet of mud. The heavy firing has brought this on it hasn’t stopped for two days . . . ’His final letter, dated 25 September, reads: ‘Just a hurried line as we start off tonight, the front line trenches are nine miles off from here so it won’t be a very long march. This is the great effort to break through and end the war . . . Funny to think one will be in the thick of it tomorrow and one’s first experience of shell fire not in the trenches but in the open.’199
The Kiplings were all at Bateman’s when they received a telegram from the war office on 2 October to say John was ‘missing’. As they were to find out by slow and painful enquiry over the following months, he had been among the leading companies advancing in the Battle of Loos. John was firing his revolver when he was shot through the head, seriously wounding him, and he was laid under cover in a shell hole. The Germans then drove the British troops back and it was years before the spot where he had been laid was back in British hands. He was one of thousands reported missing in this battle alone.
The Kiplings made enquiries via neutral channels, American and Swiss officials, and Carrie was ‘busy at my desk with correspondence about John’s men and the hope of finding something, from the wounded men.’ They toured hospitals on the South Coast where the wounded had been taken. By 15 October Carrie was writing, ‘Seven weeks to the day since John was last seen and still no news. Constant and steady investigation has gone on and always we just miss seeing the man who could tell us.’200
Kipling wrote ‘My Boy Jack’ about this sad quest:
‘Have you heard news of my boy Jack?’
Not this tide
‘When d’you think that he’ll come back?’
Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.
Kipling accepted John’s death as a fact in a way in which Carrie perhaps never did. He wrote stoically to Lionel Dunsterville, It was a short life. I’m sorry that all the years work ended in that one afternoon but – lots of people are in our position and it’s something to have bred a man.201
As usual, in his grief Kipling refused to talk and avoided reminders of John.
Kipling once asked exactly how much older Haggard was than himself. Haggard said ten years and Kipling replied, Then you have the less time left in which to suffer. Haggard considered his friend was speaking of the death of their sons. ‘John’s death has hit him very hard,’ he wrote, ‘I pointed out that this love of our lost sons was a case of what is called “Inordinate affection” in the Prayer Book. “Perhaps” he answered, “but I do not care for ordinate affection.”’202
Another close observer of Kipling, D C Ponton, Elsie’s teacher and occasionally (in the holidays) that of John from 1911 to 1914, saw him soon after John had been posted as ‘wounded and missing’. ‘Mr Kipling had no inclination to appeal for sympathy. All he said was, “The boy had reached the supreme moment of his life, what would it avail him to outlive that?” and the father concentrated himself not on revenge but on writing words that would comfort the bereaved and warn the world against making too easy conditions with a ruthless enemy.’203 All family events were now overshadowed by the shade of the missing boy. On 2 February 1917 Elsie’s 21st birthday was reported as, ‘A quiet coming of age and all the coming of age we shall have in our little family now.’204
Kipling continued with non-fiction writing about the men and machines in war. He wrote Sea Warfare in 1916, a compilation of articles on the navy, and in 1917 started work on a history of the Irish Guards in the war. It was obviously a long homage to his son, via the lives of the men with whom he served, but the two volumes, published in 1923, were also a return to a more balanced attitude to the Southern Irish. Kipling had enjoyed his Irish character Private Mulvaney but by the time of the Ulster crisis before the war began, he was speaking of them as if they were virtually sub-human. The regimental history, full of anecdotes and colourful language, restores warmth and humanity to his vision of Catholic Ireland. It could easily be remarked that a regimental history did not need a literary genius to write it, but this is to miss the point: Kipling needed the book for it meant his house was often visited by young men of John’s age who came to talk of the regiment and their experiences. Finishing the book was another kind of sadness for Kipling.
Oliver Baldwin (Stanley’s son), who had been at school with John, later remarked that the war had provided a tragedy that changed Kipling from a great human being to a man with great sorrow. ‘He was proud his son had joined the army at the age of 17. Here his inferiority complex had come out – he was not able to be a soldier himself, but his son was in uniform.’ When John went missing, ‘from that date Kipling became an entirely different man . . . It broke him completely. He shut up like a clam. All his creation went. He was not interested in creating anything new. All the lovely side of his nature – all the “Jungle Book”, all the playing with children, all the love for people – went like that. He concentrated himself in revenge.’ Baldwin said Kipling looked to him to avenge John, ‘He wanted me to take his son’s place, so that he would have somebody connected with him fighting.’205
Kipling had never shown much restraint in writing about the Germans; now the death of his son sent him into a welter of lunatic theorising. He tried to connect up the pacifists, socialists and anyone who felt there should be a negotiated peace by claiming that they were all covert masochists and they yearned for the overt sadism of the Germans. Germans, of course, were constitutionally wicked: The one certain note of the German character under stress, is its unfailing beastliness and its use of certain well known forms of perversion and degeneracy. As for the pacifist, German atrocities stimulated a certain perverted interest. Thus both the Germans prosecuting the war and the British wanting an end to the war without outright victory were sexual perverts.206 Once again, as in ‘Mary Postgate’, Kipling conceives of the war through the metaphor of the unleashing of dark desires, best kept concealed, an indication of his own feelings as he struggled through the overwhelming challenges of the time.
Kipling’s delight in the persecution of long-naturalised citizens of German extraction can only be explained in terms of mental imbalance. He described, for example, in September 1918 how a party of Huns – dog and three dry bitches (in fact an elderly invalid man and three old women) were chased out of their home overlooking the sea by a lynch mob on the premise that they signalled to the enemy and congratulated each other when dead British seamen were washed ashore.207 It is indicative of Kipling’s mental disturbance that he was writing about this not to one of the hacks with whom he often corresponded but to Stanley Baldwin, then Financial Secretary to the Treasury. Most letters to politicians from people in that state of mind are immediately thrown in the waste paper bin.
He continued raging against the politicians even though the despised Lloyd George’s coalition government of 1917 was winning the war, and now included his cousin Baldwin and his friend Bonar Law. Doubtless through his political connections, Kipling was invited in September 1917 to become one of the Imperial War Graves Commissioners. He drafted most of the public words found on war graves, including suggesting the use of a phrase from Ecclesiastes for the standard lapidary ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ and others such as that for unidentified remains: A Soldier of the Great War Known unto God.
In terms of poetry, his output was now fragmentary and bitter. It is best characterised by Epitaphs, short poems – sometimes only two lines – that blamed politicians and civilian munitions workers for the slaughter.
‘A Dead Statesman’, for example, says
I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
In what way, one might ask, were politicians more responsible for the war than imperialist poets or industrialists? What were the dead defrauded by? A dream of empire? The belief that it was ennobling to die for your country? The anticipation that the war would be short? Kipling seems to have moved beyond hatred of the Austro-Hungarians and the Germans, who might reasonably be considered prime movers in the war that began in August 1914. Any general condemnation of politicians could equally well be directed by the German or French dead against their own statesmen. Reason had completely departed Kipling, to be replaced by grief.
In an even more troubling verse couplet the dead say:
If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.
Yet who was the dead son and who the father in his particular case? Kipling seems to have had somewhere in his mind the shocking knowledge that merely hanging the Kaiser would not assuage war guilt: there was a wider responsibility for the illusions of youth and the sacrifice of 1914–18, and part of it was his.