ARTICLE

In January 1917 the Colonel Commanding the Irish Guards contacted Rudyard Kipling, the world’s best-known author, to ask if he would write the regimental history of the Great War. Kipling readily accepted and for the next five and a half years Battalion diaries and maps, along with other official records and private correspondence, were delivered to Bateman’s, his secluded home near Burwash in Sussex. His private secretary during this endeavour was (1) Dorothy Ponton and she recorded him as saying, “This will be my great work; it is being done with agony and bloody sweat.” Final proofs were completed in January 1923, with publication across two volumes in April of that year.

In the first volume, on 12th August 1914, we march with the 1st Battalion from Wellington Barracks in central London, led by the regimental band, to Nine Elms station, where they entrain for Southampton and a sea journey to Le Havre. In those early days they were welcomed by crowds of enthusiastic civilians in awe at the novel sight of British troops on French soil. By the time the new recruits of the 2nd Battalion arrive a year later, the town was one large military camp and their presence taken for granted. The 1st Battalion sped on to face the German army at Mons and the retreat thereafter. The armchair historian can follow their steps over the next four years from the pages of the history as they fight in the well-known engagements of the war; Ypres, Loos, the Somme, Passchendaele, Cambrai, the Spring Offensive of 1918 and Arras. When the Armistice is signed, they find themselves at Maubege, not far from where the original members of the battalion began their war in 1914. The 2nd Battalion left Brentwood Station for the journey to the front on 16th August 1915. It underwent its baptism of fire at Loos, (2) ‘the greatest battle in the history of the world’. They followed in the footsteps of their sister Battalion in the engagements that led to victory in 1918.

Kipling writes that in future years ‘the ghosts may laugh at the neatly groomed histories’ that were published after the war. His is no ‘neatly groomed’ affair. He is aware of the limitations within which he is working. ‘A battalion's field is bounded by its own vision. Even within these limits, there is large room for error. Witnesses to phases of fights die and are dispersed; the ground over which they fought is battered out of recognition in a few hours; survivors confuse dates, places and personalities, and in the trenches, the monotony of the waiting days and the repetition work of repairs breed mistakes and false judgments.’ As a result of this Kipling limits himself ‘to matters which directly touched the men's lives and fortunes’ and which in turn touched him and which make this narrative of war a very personal one.

Deep personal reasons lay behind his agreement to write the history in the first place.  John, his only son and a second lieutenant in the 2nd Battalion, had been killed leading his men into action in the early stages of the Battle of Loos. The invitation to write the history of the Guard’s was couched in terms of creating a ‘memento’ of his son’s service. In his introduction to the work, Kipling is clearly referencing his personal experience of loss when he writes of the ‘many, almost children, of whom no record remains. They came out from (3) Warley with the constantly renewed draughts, lived the span of a second lieutenants’ life and were spent.’ John’s fate is briefly summed up in the second volume of the history. On the 27th September 1915 in the attack around Chalk Pit Wood, ‘second Lieutenant Kipling was wounded and missing.’ John, only (4) eighteen and six weeks old, was not found. For many years afterwards his parent’s, like many others in similar circumstances, held out hope that his remains would be discovered, but this was not to be the case in their lifetime. His name was eventually recorded on a panel on the Loos Memorial. His loss had a tremendous impact on the physical and mental health of both parents. Throughout the writing of the history Kipling suffered increasingly from poor personal health, completing his commission ‘by dint of sheer will-power’.

Kipling knew many of the young men who fought. They visited Bateman’s and told their stories. Throughout his writing career he had a personal interest in representing the experiences of the common soldier, and examples of this are numerous throughout his Great War history. His under stated, matter-of-fact descriptions of warfare and its individual impacts are emotive and can be harrowing.

‘By night the front-line sat and shivered round braziers in the freezing dark while bits of new- made trench fell around them and listening-posts at the head of old saps and barricaded alleys reported imaginary night attacks. When they worked on a captured trench they were like as not to find it bottomed, or worse still, revetted, with an enemy corpse, which the sliding mud would deliver hideously into the arms of the party. On such occasions the sensitive would be sick, while the more hardened warmed and ate their food unperturbed amid all the offal.’

There is the experienced veteran, sharing a trench under bombardment with a dead friend and a ‘lad’ newly arrived curled into a ball and shaking in terror at every shell-burst, being asked by an officer if everything was ‘cosy’. There’s 2nd Lieutenant Hine, who ‘showed himself by getting up on to the parapet, and was shot through the head at once, probably by a sniper’; the 25-year-old ‘was utterly convinced that he would not be killed in the war.’ There’s the unfortunate fate of the officer whose observation balloon broke loose when being hauled down; ‘soon after, something black, which had been hanging below the basket, detached itself and fell some 3000 feet. We heard later it was (5) Captain Radford (Basil Hallam). His parachute apparently caught in the rigging and in some-way he slipped out of the belt which attached him to it.’ And there’s the more fortunate escape of  CSM Wilson, from a POW camp near Serre; ‘he covered 16 KM in the darkness, steered towards the permanent glare over the front, reached the German line at dawn, lay up in a shell-hole all through the day and, finally, wormed across to us by marking down an NCO of ours who was firing some lights, and crawling straight on to him. Seeing his condition when he arrived, the achievement bears out the Diary's tantalizingly inadequate comment: "In private life he was a Bank accountant.”’ The fate of captured German POWs makes for uncomfortable reading. They are fed rum by their captives and made to dance; ‘men stood about and laughed till they could hardly stand, and when the fun was at its height a chance shell out of the darkness to the eastward wiped out all the tango class before their eyes.’

Pre-war, Kipling had issued numerous warnings about the might of Germany and his personal belief that it was a threat to civilization and the Empire. The inhuman behaviour of the Hun is amply illustrated in his history. They are described as ‘malignant apes’ as regards the wanton destruction they leave in their wake. It was pro-Boche-agents who were responsible for mixing steel shavings into the baled hay that killed a number of army horses. Passing through Ypres, it was felt necessary to ‘warn the companies that the enemy might attack behind a screen of Belgian women and children, in which case the battalion would have to fire through them.’ Prior to this the 1st Battalion had already experienced how unconventional this war would be. Around the village of Soupir, ‘the battalion had its first experience of the German use of the white flag ….. (they) found some 150 Germans sitting around haystacks and waving white flags. They went forward to take their surrender and were met by a heavy fire at 30 yards range, which forced them to fall back.’ A few days later, ‘they judged it strange to find a man apparently dead, with a cloth covering his face, lying in a hollow under a ridge commanding their line, who turned out to be quite alive and unwounded. His rifle was within short reach, and he was waiting till our patrols had passed to get to his work. But they killed him, angrily and with astonishment.’ Two weeks later, one of their own, Lieutenant Brooke, was fatally wounded by a shell burst and the manner of his death clearly reflected the difference between the foes. ‘He was brought into the A.D.S by his own men who made the R.A.M.C. stretcher bearers walk behind as they would allow none but themselves to carry him. They bade him farewell before they returned to their trenches and went out openly weeping. His last words to them where that they were to ‘play the game’ and not to revenge his death on the Hun.’

Before the war, Kipling had regularly warned of the lack of preparation and readiness for military action of British forces for a European war. And this is expressed a number of times in the history. In relation to the 2nd Battalion, he writes, ‘They had parted long ago with any delusion as to the War ending that year or the next. The information that came to them by word of mouth was not of the sort dispensed in the Press, and they knew, perhaps a little more than the public, how inadequate where our preparations.’ His assessment of plans for the conduct of the Battle of Loos are equally stark.  ‘It does not seem to have occurred to anyone to suggest that direct infantry attacks, after 90-minute bombardments, on works be gotten out of a generation of thought and prevision, scientifically built up by immense Labour and applied science, and developed against all contingencies through nine months, are not likely to find a fortunate issue. So, while the press was explaining to a puzzled public what a far-reaching success had been achieved, the ‘greatest battle in the history of the world’ simmered down to picking up the pieces on both sides of the line, and a return to autumnal trench work, until more and heavier guns could be designed and manufactured in England. Meantime, men died.’ When the ‘war was still young’, the 1st Battalion were ‘taught how to throw bombs made out of jam pots…..the jam pot bomb died early but not before it had caused the sufficiency of trouble to its users.’ As Kipling puts it, ‘the price of making war on the spot of the moment was paid, day in and day out with the bodies of young men subject to every form of death.’

The history was published to some mixed reviews. John Buchan writing in The Times praised the portrayal of events and its ‘reverence and understanding’; whilst Edmund Blunden accused Kipling of being ‘too dispassionate’. Whilst there is no doubt that in his fiction, he could powerfully explore the impact of the war – no better short story than The Gardener illustrates this; the life of Helen Turrell, the death of her ‘nephew’ and her visit to his grave – the History of the Irish Guards is a literary work. It is this that makes it readable in a way that many or most other regimental histories are not. As a personal labour of love and remembrance and a testament to the cost of war it has stood the test of time.

Notes

1. Ponton, Dorothy. Rudyard Kipling at Home and Work. 1953.

2. Attributed to General Haking in Vol 2.

3. Warley: the Guards training barracks in Essex, described in the history as ‘dingy out-of-date’; ‘condemned as unfit for use by the Honourable East India Company a trifle of fifty years ago.’

4. According to the memorial plaque in Burwash parish church

5. 'On a windy Sunday evening at Couin, in the valley north of Bus-les-Artois, they saw an observation balloon, tethered near their bivouacs, break loose while being hauled down. It drifted towards the enemy line. First they watched maps and books being heaved overboard, then a man in a parachute, jumping for his life, who landed safely. "Soon after, something black, which had been hanging below the basket, detached itself and fell some 3000 feet. We heard later it was Captain Radford (Basil Hallam). His parachute apparently caught in the rigging and in some way he slipped out of the belt which attached him to it. He fell near Brigade HQ." Of those who watched, there was not one that had not seen him at the 'Halls' in the immensely remote days of 'Gilbert the Filbert, the Colonel of the Nuts.

Further Reading

Kipling, Rudyard. The Irish Guards in the Great War. 2 Volumes. The History Press. 2017.

Lycett, Andrew. Rudyard Kipling. London. 2015.

Ricketts, Harry. Rudyard Kipling, A Life. New York. 1999.

The Kipling Society. http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/