CHRONICLER OF THE GREAT WAR

In 1926 the Kipling poem ‘A Legend of the Truth’ was published. It tells of Truth, ‘rising from the bottom of her well’, looking at the world and horrified by what she saw, returning to her ‘seclusion’. She leaves in her place her sister Fiction. ‘Then came a War when’ Fiction, stating that the task is beyond her, hands the ‘work’ back to her sister.

​

Tablets and pen transferred, she fled afar,
And Truth assumed the record of the War...
She saw, she heard, she read, she tried to tell
Facts beyond precedent and parallel-
Unfit to hint or breathe, much less to write,
But happening every minute, day and night.
She called for proof. It came. The dossiers grew.
She marked them, first, "Return. This can't be true."
Then, underneath the cold official word:
"This is not really half of what occurred."

She faced herself at last, the story runs,
And telegraphed her sister: "Come at once.
Facts out of hand. Unable overtake
Without your aid. Come back for Truth's own sake!
Co-equal rank and powers if you agree.
They need us both, but you far more than me!"

The final line could almost stand as a cipher for the body of work – non-fiction, poetry and short-story fiction – that Kipling continued to publish from 1914 until his death in 1936.

In press articles and speeches, he had long warned of the danger posed by Germany and the lack of preparedness on the part of Britain to fight in any conflict. He supported conscription as a way of mobilising the population. At home at Bateman’s in East Sussex, as the retreat from Mons was in full flow, he worked on the poem ‘For all we have and are’.

‘FOR all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gate!

Published in The Times on September 2nd, it caught the mood of the moment, calling upon the British public to defend the very survival of civilisation against the barbarian.

In October he was working on the short story ‘Swept and Garnished’, followed by ‘Sea Constables’ and ‘Mary Postgate’. All three have been criticised as ‘unethical’, and they reveal much about his deeply held feelings as well as public attitudes at the time.

The first is a tale of a Berlin mother who is visited by the spirits of children who have been maimed during the German invasion of Belgium. Stories of Belgian atrocities had circulated widely in the press. Writing on the 28th of October, Kipling described ‘one hospital in London where they try to treat the women and little girls who have been raped…. I have not yet seen any mutilated children, but they can be verified.’

The sea story deals with a neutral blockade-runner whose appeals for help are ignored, leading to his death. Kipling had strong views on neutrality and, up until their entry into the war, American and British governments quarrelled over neutral trade with Germany.

In a story based on revenge, Mary Postgate deliberately refuses aid to a downed and injured German pilot and rejoices at his death. Three years later, whilst staying in Newquay, in a letter to Stanley Baldwin, Kipling well illustrated how his enduring hatred of Germans was shared by locals who demonstrated outside a hotel where a registered German family were staying. ‘They hove stones and smashed windows and tried to get in with the very laudable intent of heaving both the Huns and the boarding housekeeper over the cliffs. But being in expert in the detail of lynching, they were dissuaded by a local town councillor who managed to get the Huns out of a back door in a car.’

From the end of the war, until his death in 1936, he published two further collections of short stories: Debits and Credits in 1926 and Limits and Renewals in 1932. They show him experimenting with different writing styles that reflect the impact of the war.

On the Gate: A Tale of ’16 is a comedic story illustrating how heaven and hell cope with the influx of the dead created by war and the ethical questions this raises. The Janeites, is an account of a group of soldiers who are admirers of the works of Jane Austen. It also provides a detailed description of the valuable work of the heavy artillery. The Woman in his Life revolves around one John Marden, a Royal Engineer in the war, ‘who eventually found himself at a place called Messines, where he worked underground, many months.’ In civilian life he teams up with other veterans to set up an engineering firm but begins to have a breakdown due to his experiences in the war. ‘He said not a word of the horror, the blackness, the loss of the meaning of things, the collapses at the end, the recovery and the retraversing of the circle of the night’s Inferno; nor how it had waked up a certain secret dread which he had held off him since demobilisation.’ John’s salvation lies through his pet dog Dinah. A Madonna of the Trenches is a tale with a supernatural theme, that also recounts graphically life in the trenches. The story takes place in a masonic ‘Lodge of Instruction’, where ‘many ex-soldiers came….in the years after the war, the wonder is there was not more trouble from Brethren whom sudden meetings with old comrades jerked them back into their still raw past.’ Clem Strangwick is a young veteran who has a breakdown. He is treated by a doctor who ‘had had his experience as medical officer of a South London Battalion’ and who knew the young man. They talk of their experiences. ‘It was a bit by Sampoux, that we had taken over from the French. They’re tough, but you wouldn’t call ’em tidy as a nation. They had faced both sides of it with dead to keep the mud back.’ The horror of this still appears to effect Strangewick. ‘My God, yes! When the Buckboard-slats were missin’ you’d tread on ’em, an’ they’d creak.’ As the story unfolds it’s clear that what’s preying on his mind is something more than the physical experience of trench warfare.

Between 1915 and 1918 Kipling wrote many factual accounts of aspects of the war: France at War and The New Army in Training (1915), Sea Warfare (1916), The War in the Mountains (1917) and The Eyes of Asia (1918). He spent five years working on The History of the Irish Guards in the Great War. Published in 1923 it is a powerful and highly regarded regimental history. It is his poetry however that still has the power to move, surprise and shock.

Mesopotamia was published in July 1917 in the London Morning Post, having been turned down by The Telegraph as too hard hitting. It is a protest poem that dealt with the Mesopotamia Campaign.

THEY shall not return to us, the resolute, the young,
The eager and whole-hearted whom we gave:
But the men who left them thriftily to die in their own dung,
Shall they come with years and honour to the grave?

Britain had declared war on Turkey on the 5th November 1914 and one day later British troops – the majority being Indian – disembarked from British ships in the Persian Gulf, successfully capturing Basra by the end of November, along with 1000 POWs, with few casualties of their own and securing the safe supply of oil. The fighting continued and ten months later, under the command of General Charles Townshend, they occupied the town of Kut-al-Amara, 120 miles from Baghdad. Underestimating the resolve of the Turks, they believed the way was open to Baghdad. At the Battle of Ctesiphon (November 1915) they suffered a dramatic defeat and were forced to retreat back to Kut, where the Turkish army laid siege to the town for 147 days, before Townshend was forced to surrender. Of the 11, 800 men stationed in the town, 4 250 died on the way to or in POW camps. In comparison to the conditions endured by his men, Townshend and his officers were treated well in captivity. British Press and public were outraged at the conduct of the campaign and the political and military leadership was roundly condemned. The Parliamentary Commission established to investigate matters, published its report in 1917 and stating that ‘lamentable ignorance and laziness as well as ill-founded optimism on the part of the military and civil authorities who were responsible for the planning of the campaign.’

Kipling’s only son John was killed during the opening stages of the Battle of Loos in 1915 and his body remained undiscovered during his parent’s lifetime. Apart from a brief reference in his History of the Irish Guards in the Great War, Kipling made no mention of his son in his writing, but the experience of loss informed his future work.

My Boy Jack, written after the Battle of Jutland, commemorated those sailors who had lost their lives. It is a powerful emotional piece, that was set to music at the time and performed widely in music venues across the country.

"HAVE you 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.

The Children, written in 1917, is graphic in its description of the physical impact of battle on the bodies of ‘our children who died for our lands’.

That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven -
By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes - to be cindered by fires -
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
But who shall return us our children?

With works such as these, Kipling easily stands shoulder to shoulder with those soldier poets of the Great War, although his contribution – as a father, as a civilian, as a popular author of fiction – has not been so widely acknowledged.