John Kipling went missing in action at the Battle of Loos, in northern France, one hundred years ago, on September 27, 1915. The eighteen-year-old lieutenant was likely the most widely searched-for soldier of the First World War. His father was, by then, England’s first Nobel laureate in literature and its foremost poet of empire.
A frantic Rudyard Kipling mobilized every resource available. The Prince of Wales, the Crown Princess of Sweden, and the American ambassador in London all tried to help. The Royal Flying Corps dropped mimeographed sheets behind enemy lines in case “der Sohn des weltberühmten Schriftstellers Rudyard Kipling” had been kidnapped or taken prisoner. To Kipling’s wife, Carrie, the threat of capture seemed as dreadful a prospect as death: her husband’s hatred for the Hun (Kipling’s term for Germans, when he was not calling them “wild beasts” or “Evil Incarnate”) had been brandished in his recruitment speeches and newspaper articles. How would the “Hun” treat their wounded son if he had him in his power?
Sick with anxiety, Carrie and Rudyard visited war hospitals and interviewed soldiers from John’s regiment, the Irish Guards, hoping for a scrap of information. Nothing conclusive emerged. An eyewitness told a friend of theirs that a shell had exploded over John’s head, smashing his jaw and leaving him weeping in pain. The friend, though, deemed it too cruel to pass this information on to the Kiplings. John was destined, like Thomas Hardy’s Drummer Hodge, to rest “uncoffined” until 1992, when his remains supposedly were found in Chalk Pit Wood—though there is still some doubt about that claim.
Kipling memorialized their harrowing search in his bleak 1916 poem, “My Boy Jack,” in which a father asks for news, any news, of his sailor son, only to receive the unchanging answer, “Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.” (This was the second child whom the Kiplings had lost. Their six-year-old daughter, Josephine, for whom the stories in “The Jungle Book” were written, had died of pneumonia, in New York, in 1899.)
Kipling is often derided as an imperialist zealot who prostituted his prodigious genius for propaganda and politics. Even during the war, he received letters saying that he deserved to lose his son for cheering it on. But that was a misreading of his repeated warnings about a German invasion, against which he said that Britain ought to prepare itself. He certainly indulged in empire-worship, but this was only one aspect of a paradoxical and contentious man. In his poetry, Kipling dramatizes war as a primitive affliction, one that unleashes exhilaration as well as rage and terror. John’s ghost haunts these writings, scorching them with fury. In “The Children,” for instance, the poet quietly reiterates the promise of retribution, only to return to an unbearable impasse: “But who shall return us our children?” The poem “A Death-Bed” sets out to be overtly distasteful, gloating over the news that the German Kaiser has throat cancer; sorrow and ghoulish anger converge in the one contemptuous word he uses for the man whom he holds responsible for the war: this.
Some die shouting in gas or fire;
Some die silent, by shell and shot.
Some die desperate, caught on the wire;
Some die suddenly. This will not.
Kipling’s finest war story, “Mary Postgate,” was fueled by hate. The title character is a forty-four-year-old spinster who helped to raise a young man named Wynn, who’s become a pilot in the war. Devastated by the news that he’s been killed during a trial flight, she steps into the garden to make a bonfire of his possessions. When she hears a groan, she looks around to discover a wounded German pilot pinioned under a branch. He begs for a doctor, but all Mary can think of is Wynn, and the “ripped and shredded” body of a village girl freshly killed by a bomb that could well have been dropped by this fair-headed “thing hunched under the oak-tree.” “Nein,” she says harshly. Then, as she watches the fire blaze and hears the German’s piteous cries, she is moved to such a heightened emotional state that she has what is almost certainly an orgasm: “an increasing rapture laid hold on her. She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel … drew her breath short between her teeth and shivered from head to foot.” Once the “thing” is quiet and “Wynn’s things” are an ashen heap, Mary goes in to have a long, hot bath, after which she sprawls on the sofa looking “quite handsome.” A scandalized relative of Kipling’s called it “the wickedest story ever written.” But by massaging the erotic springs of violence so vital to war, and stripping away all norms of decency, Kipling illuminates the depths of our darkest fantasies of revenge.
The story, which was published in 1917, burnished Kipling’s reputation as a demented and reactionary old man. But people continued to read him: he remained the most popular poet in England during the war. (Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon would become famous only much later, while Rupert Brooke was known at the time mainly for a single sonnet, “The Soldier.”) Kipling’s aggressively patriotic stance on war was well known, thanks to his fund-raising activities for the Boer Wars in Africa, which he called, prophetically, “a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.” A single poem of his, “The Absent-Minded Beggar,” set to music by Arthur Sullivan, raised a staggering quarter of a million pounds for soldiers’ families.
His connection with the Tommies went back to his “Barrack-Room Ballads,” which was published in 1892, when he was in his twenties. He gathered the material for them over tankards of beer at the garrison near Lahore, where he loved hanging out as a young journalist in India. All that beer-fuelled camaraderie had allowed him to become a secular chaplain of “the bare horrors of the private’s life.” The soldiers of his poems are drunken, looting, syphilitic lowlifes, because “single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints.” But, as he never ceases to remind the smirking highbrow reader, they are nonetheless a band of brothers whose sweat is salting down “Missis Victorier’s” vast empire. In 1915 alone, “Barrack-Room Ballads” sold 29,000 copies. Soldiers carried these poems to the front lines in Flanders, France, and Palestine. Crouched at the Somme, the poet Ivor Gurney read “The Fringes of the Fleet,” Kipling’s booklet of naval sketches, while in London, Edward Elgar set Kipling’s poems to music; they were performed to sold-out halls. In her memoir, “Testament of Youth,” the war nurse Vera Brittain recalled that “when the groans of anesthetized men made the ward a Bedlam,” she kept herself going by murmuring under her breath two verses from “Dirge of Dead Sisters,” Kipling’s haunting poem dedicated to the dead nurses of the Boer Wars.
Kipling was too old to serve in the war. In fact, throughout his life, he never saw a day’s action, and his naïveté about the fighting becomes clear in the letters he wrote to John urging him to cover his trench with rabbit wires to keep shells at bay. Most war poets focussed on what they saw around them: the plight of the English infantry on the Western Front. Kipling brought a different perspective. A Bombay-born child of Empire, his gaze travelled to its rims. His “Epitaphs of the War” salutes an unsung range of actors, from the Hindu Sepoy in France (one million Indian soldiers fought in the war) to victims in faraway Cairo and Salonika. The other wings of the armed forces were also remembered: submarine sailors facing “eggs of death” in the “shuddering waters,” and the young R.A.F. pilot, “his milk-teeth still unshed,” bombing enemy cities.
Kipling even dedicated a couplet to the reviled deserter. In “The Coward,” the person deserving of the titular epithet is not the soldier who has deserted but the leader who ordered that deserters be shot. (“I could not look on Death, which being known, / Men led me to him, blindfold and alone.”) Throughout the war, Kipling’s rage at the Hun was matched by his rage at incompetent generals. He smote these “idle-minded overlings” as unforgivingly as Sassoon did, calling on Biblical metaphor to heighten the magnitude of the betrayal:
They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning
Delivered them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning.
Still, he was also an old-fashioned conservative who believed in valor and sacrifice and the defense of the realm. While Wilfred Owen denounced Horace’s patriotic maxim, “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” as “the old Lie,” Kipling continued to read Horace, whom he had studied at school, throughout the war. As a member of the War Graves Commission, he suggested that the most fitting inscription would be the simplest, “He died for his country.”
In memory of John, Kipling, at fifty years old, undertook the task of writing the history of the Irish Guards. It was a tedious and exhausting task that took seven years and left him, according to Carrie’s diary, “yellow and shrunken.” Through the war years, he trudged on stoically with his public duties: Red Cross work, visiting the wounded, touring the front, writing poems and stories. Stoicism, after all, was the keystone of “If,” the manifesto of manliness dedicated to John, which was repeatedly voted Britain’s most beloved poem. But just as “If” had been written for John, so too, in a case of surpassingly bitter symmetry, was Kipling’s other landmark poem that also opened with that title word:
The lies that Kipling had in mind were the half-truths and distortions that the country’s politicians and opinion-makers had resorted to at a time of war, in order to stir up a blood-and-khaki belligerence. Kipling himself had slyly fanned the worst rumors of German atrocities in Belgium. But the ulcerating guilt captured in that brutal couplet calls to mind something else that Kipling did: pull strings to get John a commission, after John had twice been rejected on account of weak eyesight. In doing so, Kipling had oiled open the backdoor to the slaughterhouse that was the Western Front and sneaked in his only son. In the chasm between those two poetic ifs—one celebrating heroism and manhood, the other unmasking the men who manipulate such useful ideals—lies the tragic irony of Rudyard Kipling and the war.