All posts tagged A Friend of the Family

War Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling (1990)

An excellent Oxford University Press collection edited by Andrew Rutherford, showcasing Kipling’s fictional and poetic responses to three distinct military eras:

the small wars of the Late Victorian period 1889-1899
the Boer War 1899-1902
the Great War 1914-18.

Despite setbacks and defeats, in the first period nobody doubted the duty of Empire to expand and spread good government and law; the Boer War disheartened both the nation and Kipling with its evident mismanagement and incompetence; and the Great War left millions bereaved, not least Kipling himself, who lost his only son, John.

Thus, as Rutherford shrewdly points out, the tone of Kipling’s writing about the three periods can be broadly divided into epic, satiric, and elegiac.

Having seen the incompetence of the Boer War at first hand, Kipling spent the next decade warning the country that it wasn’t taking the threat to its security seriously enough, despite some military and naval reforms, in a series of minatory poems and warning stories.

When the Great War came, Kipling was goaded to fierce anger by the aggression and cruelty of the Hun, resulting in the white hot anger of the early war stories, such as ‘Swept and Garnished’ and Mary Postgate, both written in 1915. In September of the same year his son was declared missing presumed dead on his first day in action. For the rest of the war Kipling kept up a steady, indeed impressive, rate of journalistic reporting in support of the war effort – writing France at War, The Fringes of the Fleet, Destroyers at Jutland, The War in the Mountains and The Eyes of Asia – but avoided writing fiction about it.

Moreover, in 1917 Kipling took on the task of writing the official history of his son’s regiment, the Irish Guards, a task which required interviewing soldiers in person, and reading soldiers’ letters and diaries over a sustained period. It was a demanding labour which took until 1923 to complete.

It is only then, with his debt to the dead fulfilled, that Kipling seems to have been able to return to the subject of the War in fiction, and the stories he wrote in the 1920s – especially the series of tales set in the London Freemasons’ Lodge for ex-soldiers – ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’, The Janeites, A Madonna of the Trenches, A Friend of the Family – have a new depth and subtlety, an empathy and pity which is a new flavour in his work. This deeper mature tone is part of what helps to make his post-war collection, Debits and Credits, his best book.

Imperial Frontiers

The Drums of Fore and Aft (1889)
A Conference of The Powers (1890)
The Light That Failed, chapter two (1891)
The Mutiny of The Mavericks (1891)
The Lost Legion (1892)
Slaves of The Lamp, part two (1897)

The Boer War

The Way That He Took (1900)
The Outsider (1900)
A Sahibs’ War (1901)
The Comprehension of Private Copper (1902)
The Captive (1902)

The Great War

‘Swept and Garnished’ (1915)
Mary Postgate (1915)
Sea Constables (1915)
Introduction to The Irish Guards in the Great War
A Friend of the Family (1924)
A Madonna of The Trenches (1924)
The Gardener (1925)

1. The Imperial Frontiers

The Drums of Fore and Aft (1889) Quite a long story, the gist of which is that an inexperienced Indian Army regiment is brought up to the North-West Frontier, and involved in a massed attack on a force of Pathans, alongside a Gurkha regiment and some Highlanders. Being completely inexperienced and – crucially – lacking older soldiers and officers with experience of the terrain and of fighting Afghans, the first attack of fifty or so Muslim fanatics armed with terrifying man-high machetes makes the Fore and Aft break in a screaming panic and run back to the pass they emerged from. The two coarse orphan fourteen-year-old drummer boys who were with the band, Jakin and Lew, are left behind in the mad flight, recover a drum and fife, have a swig of rum from a canteen of one of the casualties, and set about playing the stirring military tune, ‘the British Grenadier’, marching up and down between the Afghan lines and the trembling regiment cowering in its retreat. Shamed by their officers and humiliated by the example of the boys Jakin and Lew, the regiment regroups and charges back out, this time co-ordinated with attacks by the Gurkhas and Highlanders on its flanks, and decimates the Afghans, though not before both boys have been shot dead by the enemy.

There’s story enough here, but not much below the surface is a blatant tract or pamphlet lamenting the lack of training, the shortness of service and the disorganisation which can lead to such lamentable catastrophes. Also it is very violent. Early on, while still in barracks, Lew and Jakin establish their street credentials by kicking the crap out of an officer’s son they find spying on them. The battle itself is described with, for its day, pretty stomach-churning realism.

The English were not running. They were hacking and hewing and stabbing, for though one white man is seldom physically a match for an Afghan in a sheepskin or wadded coat, yet, through the pressure of many white men behind, and a certain thirst for revenge in his heart, he becomes capable of doing much with both ends of his rifle. The Fore and Aft held their fire till one bullet could drive through five or six men, and the front of the Afghan force gave on the volley. They then selected their men, and slew them with deep gasps and short hacking coughs, and groanings of leather belts against strained bodies, and realised for the first time that an Afghan attacked is far less formidable than an Afghan attacking; which fact old soldiers might have told them.
But they had no old soldiers in their ranks.
The Gurkhas’ stall at the bazar was the noisiest, for the men were engaged — to a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block — with the kukri, which they preferred to the bayonet; well knowing how the Afghan hates the half-moon blade.

‘To a nasty noise as of beef being cut on the block’. Wow.

Kipling Society notes

A Conference of The Powers (1890) The narrator hosts a reunion in his London apartment for his friends, ‘Tick’ Boileau, ‘the Infant’ (who is to appear in other Kipling stories for the next 30 years), and Nevin. All are under 25 and have seen active service in India and on its frontiers. They are yarning away and putting the world to rights when there’s a knock and in comes the noted older novelist, ‘Eustace Cleever’. The rest of the ‘story’ amounts to the older man listening to the stories the young Army officers tell about their experiences and realising how little he understands about the lives of the men who maintain the Empire and keep him in the luxurious lifestyle to which he’s become accustomed. Particularly a long account by the Infant of a punitive expedition he led into Upper Burma to capture the leader of some dacoits or bandits, known as the Boh.

The story emphasises the pampered ignorance of London-based Liberals – and contrasts it with the clear-eyed enthusiasm and modesty of the Empire’s devoted servants. It also doesn’t scant on the reality of guerilla warfare and the dacoits’ savagery:

The Burmese business was a subaltern’s war, and our forces were split up into little detachments, all running about the country and trying to keep the dacoits quiet. The dacoits were having a first-class time, y’ know — filling women up with kerosine and setting ’em alight, and burning villages, and crucifying people.’
The wonder in Eustace Cleever’s eyes deepened. He could not quite realise that the cross still existed in any form.
‘Have you ever seen a crucifixion?’ said he.
‘Of course not. ‘Shouldn’t have allowed it if I had; but I’ve seen the corpses. The dacoits had a trick of sending a crucified corpse down the river on a raft, just to show they were keeping their tail up and enjoying themselves. Well, that was the kind of people I had to deal with.’

No wonder Kipling’s forthrightness made such a shattering impact on a literary world used to Tennysonian idylls.

The Light That Failed, chapter 2 (1891) The protagonist of Kipling’s early novel is an artist, Dick Heldar. His boyhood love for Maisie is frustrated so, like so many Victorian young men, he goes off adventuring round the Empire, only not as a soldier but as a freelance war artist. He bumps into a journalist named Torpenhow and Kipling packs in references to a lot of the small wars of the late 1870s and 1880s which they report and illustrate together, before they find themselves part of the expeditionary force sent up the Nile to rescue General Gordon, trapped in Khartoum, capital of Sudan, by the forces of the Muslim religious leader, the Mahdi. In the climax of the novel, Dick, Torpenhow and a host of British troops are all relaxing by the Nile, fixing boats and sails and clothes when they are subject to a surprise attack by several thousand Sudanese. The Brits quickly form into a square to fight off wave after wave of fanatical attackers, until the square gives and becomes the cockpit for savage hand-to-hand fighting.

Dick waited with Torpenhow and a young doctor till the stress grew unendurable. It was hopeless to attend to the wounded till the attack was repulsed, so the three moved forward gingerly towards the weakest side of the square. There was a rush from without, the short hough-hough of the stabbing spears, and a man on a horse, followed by thirty or forty others, dashed through, yelling and hacking. The right flank of the square sucked in after them, and the other sides sent help. The wounded, who knew that they had but a few hours more to live, caught at the enemy’s feet and brought them down, or, staggering into a discarded rifle, fired blindly into the scuffle that raged in the centre of the square.
Dick was conscious that somebody had cut him violently across his helmet, that he had fired his revolver into a black, foam-flecked face which forthwith ceased to bear any resemblance to a face, and that Torpenhow had gone down under an Arab whom he had tried to ‘collar low,’ and was turning over and over with his captive, feeling for the man’s eyes. The doctor jabbed at a venture with a bayonet, and a helmetless soldier fired over Dick’s shoulder: the flying grains of powder stung his cheek. It was to Torpenhow that Dick turned by instinct. The representative of the Central Southern Syndicate had shaken himself clear of his enemy, and rose, wiping his thumb on his trousers. The Arab, both hands to his forehead, screamed aloud, then snatched up his spear and rushed at Torpenhow, who was panting under shelter of Dick’s revolver. Dick fired twice, and the man dropped limply. His upturned face lacked one eye.

I wonder if anyone had described contemporary warfare with quite such brutal honesty before.

The Mutiny of The Mavericks (1891) A satirical and comic story about nameless conspirators in America (highly reminiscent of the American scenes in the early Sherlock Holmes novels) who fund an Irish conspirator to join ‘the Mavericks’, nickname of a (fictional) Irish regiment in the British Army in India. This conspirator, Mulcahey, tries to spread sedition and is quickly recognised for what he is by the men, led by Dan Grady and Horse Egan, who come up with the simple idea of playing along, and telling Mulcahey everything he wants to hear, in exchange for an endless supply of beer.

One fine day Mulcahey sees the barracks in uproar, the men chanting and shouting, officers running in fear, the men consorting with native Indians – at last! The mutiny has broken out! But Kipling is taking the mickey. The men have been told they’re going to the Frontier to see some fighting and are excited about it. Moreover, Dan and Horse now make it crystal clear to Mulcahey that he’s not wriggling out of it, he’s coming along too. And when the battle starts they’re digging a bayonet into Mulcahey’s calf, so the only way is forwards. In fact Mulcahey goes wild with panic-fear, storms a compound, leads others to capture enemy artillery and then runs on, bereft of gun, hat or belt after the fleeing Afghans, one of whom turns and runs him right through the chest with a large knife. Dead.

All this time Mulcahey had been drawing funds from his ‘mother’ in New York, a front for the anti-British conspirators. The story ends on a comic note as the ‘mother’ receives a letter of condolence saying Mulcahey died bravely in battle and would have been recommended for a Victoria Cross, had he survived – which happens to arrive at the same time as a crudely forged letter from Dan and Horse promising to keep up the subversive work, if only they can be sent some more funds, on behalf of Mulcahey, who’s a bit under the weather, like.

Kipling is astonishing assured and confident of his subject i.e. the structure, organisation and morale of Irish regiments within the British Army. The American secret society comes over as melodramatic, but events in Ireland during this period involved conspiracies and atrocities. Although he is optimistic about the attitude of the average Irish soldier, it’s the detail and thoroughness of the portrayal, combined with schoolboy high humour, which impresses. Who else was trying anything like this kind of depiction of the reality of the British Empire?

The Lost Legion (1892) Told as if to a journalist (as Kipling indeed was). Some officers are leading a night-time cavalry foray into the foothills of Afghanistan to arrest a persistent bandit leader, Gulla Kutta Mullah. But they keep on hearing the chinking of cavalry behind them rather than in front; it isn’t their own forces and the bandits’ horses are silent.

Our boys are able to penetrate beyond the watch towers of the bandits because the bandits are calling to each other in terror about something. Our chaps realise it’s because down in the valley the Afghan bandits can see the ghosts of an entire native Indian regiment, which rebelled in the Great Mutiny of 1857, which fled the British into the marches of Afghanistan, and which was massacred a generation earlier. Now their ghosts have returned to haunt and paralyse the Afghans. Their dread allows the little expeditionary force to take Gulla Kutta Mullah’s village by surprise and (much to Kipling’s ironic disgust) politely arrest him and his other men wanted for various crimes and murders.

Slaves of The Lamp, part two (1897) ‘The Infant’ who told the novelist Eustace Cleaver the long account of his capture of the dacoit Boh in Burma in the story ‘A Conference of the Powers’ – is now 30 and has inherited a vast country house. He invites the narrator – identified as ‘Beetle’ from the Stalky stories – to come along to a reunion of boys, now men, from the old Coll.

There’s much larking about and reminiscing which, basically, turns into hero worship of Stalky himself, three of the men describing their encounter with him in the North-West Frontier, fighting the Afghans. Stalky is portrayed as a super-hero, at one with his men (Sikhs) who worship him, given to sneaking off for acts of derring-do. Since he and his men are besieged in an old fort by two Afghan tribes, Stalky sneaks out and kills some of one tribe, marking them with the victor’s sign of the other tribe. Next day, when the fort is under attack, he again sneaks out of the secret passage he’s found, with his Sikhs, and shoots at one tribe from the lines of the other, thus leading both tribes to end up fighting each other.

The others compound this by saying Stalky went on to pacify the border, dragoon the tribes into building roads, doing everything bar mint his own coinage, before being called to Simla to explain himself to the Imperial authorities.

The story brims over with schoolboy slang and enthusiasm. Stalky had adopted a tune from the pantomime of Aladdin which the boys had put on as schoolboys, as a signal to his troops, and the group of men convened at the Infant’s house keep stopping their tale to sing it, falling about laughing, all clamouring for more details of Stalky’s acts of heroism. Alas, Kipling’s boundless schoolboy confidence was to come a cropper in the Boer War, where the true Stalkies, the canny, sassy, unconventional fighters, turned out to be the Boers.

2. The Boer War (1899-1902)

The Way That He Took (1900) One of four stories about the Boer War published in the Daily Express then collected in a volume called Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. It is a good atmospheric depiction of the landscape and people of South Africa, showcasing Kipling’s trademark research and understanding. In the first part a troop train pulls into a siding where detachment of Mounted Infantry are waiting. A captain gets talking to a nurse from the train and she turns out to have been born in the country, and have wonderful memories of a carefree childhood in the wide open spaces. This is the only scene of a man and a woman being tender and speaking softly under the stars that I can recall in any Kipling.

The second part commences a few months later when the captain has joined his regiment and they are in operations out on the veldt. In fact we first of all have a long scene where the leader of a Boer commando outlines a cunning plan – to send off the cattle trucks and some auxiliaries to stir up a lot of dust, and then wait on the low hills surrounding a little valley for the British regiment to come up – and shoot them like pigs in a pen. He knows the Brits will send a scouting party – who will poke around, draw the false conclusion the Boers are retreating, and return to the main force – and then lure them into the trap. It is crucial that a handful of men on a slope take a few pot shots at the scouting troop, enough to give them the impression they’re a rear-guard action – this will make the retreat seem even more real.

Sure enough the Brits see the dust cloud and send a scouting party. It is led by the captain we met talking to the nurse. He trots with his men through the twisting valleys to the place where a camp has apparently been struck and seems to be falling for the ploy. But then in a few vivid paragraphs, he realises something is wrong. It is as vivid as a movie. The hairs on his neck rise as he realises it’s a trap and it seems like someone else’s voice speaking when he gives the order to his sergeant, calmly to turn the men and go back.

At the last minute he remembers something the nurse had told him about her childhood, about how she and her siblings, on all their many ramblings, never went back the way they came. And suddenly taking this as his inspiration, the captain orders the men not to go back through the winding valley where (we know) a handful of Boers are waiting to take pot shots at them and one of them had singled him out as the officer to be killed. Thus, into this very military story, an element of voodoo slips. For it was the happenstance of remembering the nurse’s casual words, which saves the captain’s life.

The Outsider (1900) Another of the stories originally published in June 1900 (i.e. still in the early phase of the Boer War) in the Daily Express and only much later collected in a volume called Land and Sea Tales for Scouts and Guides. Like the one above, it is a vivid impassioned story. Simply, but with great detail and persuasiveness, it contrasts the hard professional life of Jerry Thumper, an engineer on the Rand, and the privileged, limited worldview of a dunderheaded Army officer named Walter Setton. While his father the vicar and his mother fuss about buying Walter the correct socks for his posting to South Africa, Jerry is commanding men at the gruelling work of gold-mining on the Rand.

Their separate lives and experiences clash when Walter – wounded after a stupid attempt to capture a solitary Boer which turned out to be a trap and from which he only escaped with his life due to the canniness and bravery of Australian Irregulars – is posted to the most out-of-the-way railway station the Army can find to hide him. But even here he causes damage, because Jerry and his mates – kicked out of the Rand by Dutch rebels – have formed a corps of Railway Volunteers and are skilfully repairing the railway lines which the Boers have been at pains to blow up, and which are vital for ferrying British troops around the battlefield.

Kipling describes in great technical detail the engineering challenge Jerry and his men face trying to rejoin two severed lengths of railway line, and are right at the vital moment of riveting them together, when ignorant, stupid, blinkered, narrow-minded, officious Lieutenant Setton intervenes, demanding to know who gave them orders to do this work, and insisting they stop immediately until he receives written authority etc etc – intervening just long enough for the girders to collapse and knock over some braziers which start a small bush fire, insisting his soldiers escort the furious engineers to his tent for a dressing-down. In fact later that day it is Setton who is visited by an incandescent Colonel of Engineers who gives him an epic bollocking, and we last see him reduced to overseeing a saddle-cloth and boot-lace division.

The ‘story’ seethes with Kipling’s anger at the grotesque incompetence, narrow-mindedness and baseless snobbery of the English officer class – a long way from the hero worship of Stalkey and his mates. Every other nationality – the Australians and New Zealanders, the Canadians and especially the Boers themselves, are superior men and soldiers in every way.

The life of Second-Lieutenant Walter Setton followed its appointed channel. His battalion, nominally efficient, was actually a training school for recruits; and to this lie, written, acted, and spoken many times a day, he adjusted himself. When he could by any means escape from the limited amount of toil expected by the Government, he did so; employing the same shameless excuses that he had used at school or Sandhurst. He knew his drills: he honestly believed that they covered the whole art of war. He knew the ‘internal economy of his regiment’. That is to say, he could answer leading questions about coal and wood allowances, cubic-footage of barrack accommodation, canteen-routine, and the men’s messing arrangements. For the rest, he devoted himself with no thought of wrong to getting as much as possible out of the richest and easiest life the world has yet made; and to despising the ‘outsider’ — the man beyond his circle. His training to this end was as complete as that of his brethren. He did it blindly, politely, unconsciously, with perfect sincerity. As a child he had learned early to despise his nurse, for she was a servant and a woman; his sisters he had looked down upon, and his governess, for much the same reasons. His home atmosphere had taught him to despise the terrible thing called ‘Dissent’. At his private school his seniors showed him how to despise the junior master who was poor, and here his home training served again. At his public school he despised the new boy — the boy who boated when Setton played cricket, or who wore a coloured tie when the order of the day was for black. They were all avatars of the outsider. If you got mixed up with an outsider, you ended by being ‘compromised’. He had no clear idea what that meant, but suspected the worst. His religion he took from his parents, and it had some very sound dogmas about outsiders behaving decently. Science to him was a name connected with examination papers. He could not work up any interest in foreign armies, because, after all, a foreigner was a foreigner, and the rankest form of outsider. Meals came when you rang for them. You were carried over the world, which is the Home Counties, in vehicles for which you paid. You were moved about London by the same means, and if you crossed the Channel you took a steamer. But how, or why, or when, these things were made, or worked, or begotten, or what they felt, or thought, or said, who belonged to them, he had not, nor ever wished to have, the shadow of an idea. It was sufficient for him and for high Heaven (this in his heart of hearts, well learned at his mother’s knee) that he was an officer and a gentleman incapable of a lie or a mean action. For the rest his code was simple. Money brought you half the things in this world; and your position secured you the others. If you had money, you took care to get your money’s worth. If you had a position, you did not compromise yourself by mixing with outsiders.

Rarely has Kipling’s dichotomy between the dirty-handed, practical-minded men who do things – his beloved engineer class – and the superior, snobbish, ignorant English upper-classes been more fiercely delineated. It’s brilliant.

A Sahibs’ War (1901) – Umr Singh is a Sikh in the British Army who is in South Africa, tasked with going to Stellenbosch to collect horses. The text is his monologue to a Sahib who helps him get a ticket for the right train, in which he a) shows off his knowledge of Indian customs, religion, traditions and service in the Indian Army b) laments the British setbacks in the Boer War due to their being too courteous and considerate of the Boer guerrillas. The Sikh thinks it silly of the British not to have used the Indian Army to put down the Boers, silly and subversive, for if the Brits fail in South Africa other colonies will take note of their weakness.

But privately to me Kurban Sahib said we should have loosed the Sikhs and the Gurkhas on these people till they came in with their foreheads in the dust.

The reason being it is a White Man’s war. Umr is not happy to be given command of a load of ‘niggers’, Kaffirs, who are ‘filth unspeakable’. But the core of the story is how Umr and his Sahib, Captain Corbyn – both of whom volunteered to take ‘sick leave’ from their Indian regiment to come and fight the Boers – are tricked by Boers in an ‘innocent’ farmhouse who in fact organise an ambush of them in which Corbyn is killed.

In a rage Umr and the Muslim servant Sikandar Khan go back to the farmhouse to take revenge, beheading one of the wounded Boers inside it and taking the mentally sub-normal son to hang him in a nearby tree as punishment for the treacherous farmer-priest and his wife. At which point the spirit of Kurban Sahib appears to Umr and three times forbids him from hanging the boy, ‘for it is a Sahibs’ war’.

This latter part of the text, the account of the ambush and then the narrator’s revenge, is vivid and powerful, and the appearance of the Sahib’s ghost eerie – it has a real imaginative force – Kipling’s daemon pushing through. But it is embedded in a text which overflows with contempt, hatred, resentment and is continually teetering on the edge of, not just violence but sadistic violence, vengeful hateful violence.

Epitomised in the last few lines when Umr returns to the site of his Sahib’s death and rejoices to find, not only a memorial carved by the Australians (a platoon of whom were with Corbyn and Umr when they were ambushed) – but that the farmhouse, the well, the water tank, the barn and fruit trees – all have been razed from the face of the earth, by the ‘manly’ Australians, who aren’t shackled by the British concern for ‘fair play’. The narrator rejoices, Kipling rejoices, and the reader is meant to rejoice in this act of nihilistic vengeance – the kind of scorched earth policy which will characterise so much of 20th century history.

Kipling Society notes

The Comprehension of Private Copper (1902) – A Boer guerrilla captures Private Alf Copper who had strayed unwisely far from his platoon. The Boer descants at length to Alf about how his father, a Transvaal shop-keeper, was deceived out of his livelihood by the British. But he gets a shade too close to Alf, who lays him out with one well-aimed punch.

Kipling couldn’t be more frothingly on the side of the British Army and against the treacherous, arrogant, deceiving Boers. Now it’s Alf who takes the stunned Boer captive and marches him back to the the English lines. Here they arrive to discover that Alf’s mates are looking over a British Liberal paper, which is, as usual, blackening their names, attacking the whole idea of ‘Empire’ and accusing British soldiers of abuse and worse. A fellow Tommy of Alf’s jokingly quotes it:

‘You’re the uneducated ‘ireling of a callous aristocracy which ‘as sold itself to the ‘Ebrew financier. Meantime, Ducky”— he ran his finger down a column of assorted paragraphs —“you’re slakin’ your brutal instincks in furious excesses. Shriekin’ women an’ desolated ‘omesteads is what you enjoy, Alf . . ., Halloa! What’s a smokin’ ‘ektacomb?’

The general idea is that both the arrogant Boer and the treacherous Liberals back home think the British Tommy doesn’t know what he’s fighting for and is a poor, badly educated pawn – but, Oh yes he does, and Oh no he isn’t, respectively! The humiliation of the Boer is part of the enjoyment of the story and, by extension, the humiliation of the hated Liberals at home by the reality of the tough-minded, no-nonsense British soldier.

The Captive (1902) – Starts as a third-person account of a journalist visiting a Boer prisoner of war camp during the Boer War (1899 to 1902). He is free to walk among the prisoners and gets talking to one in particular, at which point the narrative changes into a long, rambling, first-person account given by an American – Laughton O. Zigler from Akron, Ohio.

Zigler brought over a field gun and ammunition of his own design to sell to the Boers and ended up getting involved with one of their commandos, led by Adrian Van Zyl, fighting in the field alongside them against the British, until finally captured and brought to this camp. Kipling characteristically stuffs the man’s monologue with technical know-how about the artillery piece, the ‘hopper-feed and recoil-cylinder’, trying to out-man and out-engineer the reader.

It’s hard not to find Zigler’s facetious tone as he jokes about ‘laying out’ the British boys with his gun, offensive.

‘They [the Boers] fought to kill, and, by what I could make out, the British fought to be killed. So both parties were accommodated.’

The war is seen as a comradely adventure between ‘friends’ and all the British officers admit to being ‘a bit pro-Boer’. Is this how combatants saw the Boer War? Or is it the sentimental self-serving view of a privileged observer? In this account both sides spend half the time trying to kill each other and the other half being complimentary; often the combatants had actually met socially, dined and gossiped: now they are trying to kill each other.

The second half of the monologue describes a dinner the British General and officers give for Zigler and Van Zyl, comparing notes like professionals. The British General is mighty lofty and complacent, hoping the war will go on another five years or so, so that he can knock his ragtag collection of floor-walkers and stevedores into a professional army. Nothing is mentioned of the rank incompetence and idiocy which made the Boer War such a shambles for the British. (See The Boer War by Thomas Pakenham.) And a ghost walks over the text when the General boomingly declares:

‘It’s a first-class dress-parade for Armageddon.’

These are the kind of heartless pro-war sentiments for which, although put into the mouths of fictional characters, Kipling was so criticised. The ‘story’ is rammed full of political point scoring, relentless sarcasm about the stupidity of politicians and so on – though these are couched in Zigler’s down-home Yankee terminology:

‘Well, you’ve an effete aristocracy running yours, and we’ve a crowd of politicians. The results are practically identical.’

‘I tell you, Sir, there’s not much of anything the matter with the Royal British Artillery. They’re brainy men languishing under an effete system which, when you take good holt of it, is England…’

Overall the story is of a piece with Kipling’s other ‘warning’ poems and stories, warning that only eternal vigilance could keep Britain safe from her ever-present enemies, and lamenting the failure of peacetime politicians to pay enough heed.

Kipling society notes

3. The Great War

‘Swept and Garnished’ (1915) It is the first autumn of the Great War. Old German widow Miss Ebermann is in bed in her apartment in Berlin with a heavy cold, whining at her maid to bring medication from the chemists, and the maid scuttles off. To Miss E’s surprise, when she next opens her eyes, she sees, first one little child poking about in her room, and a moment later, five little children.

Miss Ebermann shouts at them to get out of her apartment, telling them they have no right to break into her home like this. But the children reply that they have been told to come here until ‘their people’ come to reclaim them. And then, through a series of hints, the reader realises that the children are from a town in Belgium where someone fired on the German army passing through, who promptly massacred the inhabitants and burnt it to the ground. Miss Ebermann remembers letters from her son at the front claiming that the German army has to carry out ‘justice’ when it is attacked by treacherous civilians. Now she is seeing the ghostly victims of German ‘justice’.

Her and the reader’s suspicions are crystallised when the children finally agree to leave, but on their way out, as they turn to go, Miss Ebermann sees their horrific open wounds and they leave blood puddled all over her bedroom floor. When the maid comes back into the room she finds the old lady on her hands and knees trying to scrub the blood off the floorboards, so the place is ‘swept and garnished’ ready for the Lord.

The Kipling Society website gives useful historical notes to this story, listing genuine German atrocities from early in the war, including the rumours that the Germans cut off the right arms of Belgian boy children, so they wouldn’t be able to fight in the future. Kipling’s stories are no longer about helping tottering old ladies in health spas as they were only a few short years previously. All is changed, changed utterly.

Mary Postgate (1915) This is an extraordinary story, combining war, vengeance, sadism and barely suppressed sexuality. Mary Postgate is the plain Jane, 44-year-old personal maid to old Miss Fowler. She fetches and carries without question, is always well organised and emotionless. Miss Fowler’s nephew, Wynn, is orphaned and comes to live with them and Mary brings him up almost as a surrogate son though he is unceasingly rude, arrogant and unfeeling to her. When war comes all the sons go off and Wynn enlists in the Air Force, coming to visit them in his fine uniform until one day he is reported dead, having died in a training accident – the implication being that he fell, maybe 4,000 feet, from the cockpit of one of those primitive early aircraft.

Both Mary and Miss Fowler are strangely unemotional – Miss Fowler had expected Wynn’s death all along, Mary had completely repressed her anxiety. The two women agree to donate Wynn’s uniform to the Forces, but to burn all his private belongings. Kipling then gives is a moving page-long description of a young man’s belongings, stretching back through all his toys and school prizes, which Mary collects and takes to the incinerator at the bottom of the garden.

Then she has to go buy some paraffin in the village and, on the way back, she and a friend she’s bumped into, hear a bang and a wail and run behind a house to find a local child, Edna, has been blown up by a casual bomb dropped from a German plane, maybe returning from a bombing raid on London. The friend, a nurse, wraps the little girl’s body in a blanket, which immediately soaks with blood and they carry it indoors. Here the blanket falls open and Mary sees, for a second, poor little Edna’s body torn ‘into those vividly coloured strips and strings’. (Not so far-fetched. I was recently at Essendon, a little village in Hertfordshire. Here, in the early hours of 3 September 1916, a German airship returning from a raid on London dropped a bomb on the village which killed two sisters and damaged the east end of the church. Dead, out of the blue, for no reason, except the incompetence and stupidity of the German Army High Command which thought it could invade and conquer France in 6 weeks in August 1914.)

Staggering out of the house with the eviscerated child, Mary regains control of herself and walks back to the big house. Here she wheelbarrows dead Wynn’s belongings down to the incinerator and begins piling them in to burn. It is at this point that she hears a noise from the trees at the end of the garden and discovers a German airman who also seems to have fallen from the skies and crashed through trees, landing badly injured not far from the incinerator.

And this is the crux of the story: for although Mary gets an old revolver from the house (the kind of thing which seems to have been much more common in those days than now) she decides to deliberately let the man die in agony without calling for a doctor or any help.

And it is in the phrasing of the physical bodily pleasure this gives her, that many critics detect a sexual element, some going so far as to say that the dying man’s death throes give the lifelong repressed virgin an orgasm, as all kinds of anger and repressions brought to a climax.

As she thought — her underlip caught up by one faded canine, brows knit and nostrils wide — she wielded the poker with lunges that jarred the grating at the bottom, and careful scrapes round the brick-work above… The exercise of stoking had given her a glow which seemed to reach to the marrow of her bones. She hummed — Mary never had a voice — to herself… A woman who had missed these things [love, a husband, children] could still be useful — more useful than a man in certain respects. She thumped like a pavior through the settling ashes at the secret thrill of it… She ceased to think. She gave herself up to feel. Her long pleasure was broken by a sound that she had waited for in agony several times in her life. She leaned forward and listened, smiling… 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. ‘That’s all right,’ said she contentedly…

Anger, revenge, violence, sadism, repressed sex – this is an extraordinarily powerful, haunting concoction of a story.

Sea Constables (1915) ‘A tale of ’15. In February 1915 the German High Command declared the North Sea a war zone in which all merchant shipping, including neutral ships, were liable to be attacked and sunk without warning. This story describes four Royal Navy men meeting at a choice restaurant in London.

The four men sat down. They had the coarse-grained complexions of men who habitually did themselves well, and an air, too, of recent, red-eyed dissipation. Maddingham, the eldest, was a thick-set middle-aged presence, with crisped grizzled hair, of the type that one associates with Board Meetings. He limped slightly. Tegg, who followed him, blinking, was neat, small, and sandy, of unmistakable Navy cut, but sheepish aspect. Winchmore, the youngest, was more on the lines of the conventional prewar ‘nut,’ but his eyes were sunk in his head and his hands black-nailed and roughened. Portson, their host, with Vandyke beard and a comfortable little stomach, beamed upon them as they settled to their oysters.

In Kipling’s usual late manner they settle down to telling stories, then concentrate on swapping notes about the Neutral vessel (presumably American, though it isn’t stated) which they were all partly involved in tailing through the North Sea, down the Channel and round into the Irish Sea. Winchmore starts it and hands over to Maddingham who played the lion’s share. The ‘Newt’, as they nickname the neutral vessel and its captain, claims to be carrying oil for Antigua, which they think a likely story. Maddingham follows him into an unnamed West coast port where the American captain prompts a Court of Inquiry into the way he’s being closely tailed and chased. This is given as one of the several examples in Kipling where the British bend over backwards to be fair and above board to an enemy which is utterly unscrupulous – an approach he thought bedevilled our efforts in the Boer War, the kind of ‘health and safety gone mad’ sentiment you can read any day in the Daily Mail. One of the four at table, Tegg, was a lawyer during the inquiry.

And that’s what you get for trying to serve your country in your old age!’ Maddingham emptied and refilled his glass.
‘We did give you rather a grilling,’ said Tegg placidly. ‘It’s the national sense of fair play.’

The Newt goes back to sea, closely followed again by Maddingham who tags him up and down the Irish Sea, in stormy foggy weather, regularly hailing the captain on his bridge and exchanging insults. Maddingham and the others suspect he was planning to rendezvous with a German submarine and transfer his cargo of oil to it. Eventually the Newt puts into Cloone Harbour, where the captain takes to his bed, ill with bronchial pneumonia. Dying, he asks Manningham to help him organise his affairs and write a will. Manningham sticks to his orders and refuses.

This is taken as the crux of the story, where a usually decent man fails to show common humanity / oversteps some moral mark, and is interpreted in some commentaries as an example of how war deforms morality. As usual the text is dense with naval jargon as swished around by a bunch of chaps used to shorthand expressions, fleeting references, who share the same values and so don’t have to explain their sentiments and views. A number of critics point to the clipped approach of these later stories, and the way they’re couched in talk, in reams of highly technical or slang or dialect speech, as evidence that Kipling had forged a kind of ‘modernist’ style of his own. Maybe. This is how the main talker, Maddingham, talks:

‘He set the tops’ls in his watch. Hilarity won’t steer under any canvas, so we rather sported round our friend that afternoon, I believe. When I came up after dinner, she was biting his behind, first one side, then the other. Let’s see — that would be about thirty miles east-sou-east of Harry Island. We were running as near as nothing south. The wind had dropped, and there was a useful cross-rip coming up from the south-east. I took the wheel and, the way I nursed him from starboard, he had to take the sea over his port bow. I had my sciatica on me — buccaneering’s no game for a middle-aged man — but I gave that fellow sprudel! By Jove; I washed him out! He stood it as long as he could, and then he made a bolt for Harry Island. I had to ride in his pocket most of the way there because I didn’t know that coast. We had charts, but Sherrin never understood ’em, and I couldn’t leave the wheel. So we rubbed along together, and about midnight this Newt dodged in over the tail of Harry Shoals and anchored, if you please, in the lee of the Double Ricks. It was dead calm there, except for the swell, but there wasn’t much room to manoeuvre in, and I wasn’t going to anchor. It looked too like a submarine rendezvous. But first, I came alongside and asked him what his trouble was. He told me he had overheated his something-or-other bulb. I’ve never been shipmates with Diesel engines, but I took his word for it, and I said I ‘ud stand by till it cooled. Then he told me to go to hell.’

Kipling Society notes

Introduction to The Irish Guards in the Great War (1923) A few years after his son’s death in 1915, serving with the Irish Guards, Kipling was approached to write the official history of the Irish Guards during the war. He took the task very seriously, suspending his fictional writing and working his way through a mountain of official records, soldiers’ letters and diaries, and also interviewing scores of survivors of the various battles and campaigns. The result has often been praised as a thorough and unflashy chronicle of the regiment’s war. Throughout Kipling is concerned with the life of the soldier, from the soldier’s point of view, consistent with the Tommy’s-eye-view he had developed even before the Barrack Room Ballads.

The introduction is short but powerfully conveys the speed of events, the complete unpreparedness of the British forces, the scale of the slaughter and the terrifying turnover of men, and all the time the buzz of men’s conversations.

They speculated on all things in Heaven and earth as they worked in piled filth among the carcases of their fellows, lay out under the stars on the eves of open battle, or vegetated through a month’s feeding and idleness between one sacrifice and the next.
But none have kept minutes of those incredible symposia that made for them a life apart from the mad world which was their portion; nor can any pen recreate that world’s brilliance, squalor, unreason, and heaped boredom. Recollection fades from men’s minds as common life closes over them, till even now they wonder what part they can ever have had in the shrewd, man-hunting savages who answered to their names so few years ago.
It is for the sake of these initiated that the compiler has loaded his records with detail and seeming triviality, since in a life where Death ruled every hour, nothing was trivial, and bald references to villages, billets, camps, fatigues, and sports, as well as hints of tales that can never now fully be told, carry each their separate significance to each survivor, intimate and incommunicable as family jests.

A Friend of the Family (1924) Frame: The fourth in a series of stories Kipling wrote set in the Masonic Lodge, ‘Faith and Works 5837’. Four chaps get chatting over dinner – Bevin, Pole, a sassy Australian with a glass eye named Orton, and the narrator. They yarn about their respective trades (Bevin owns a chicken farm and is diversifying into herbs). They all grumble that all they wanted after the War was Judgement and justice, instead of which they got talk talk talk. Grumble grumble grumble.

‘We didn’t want all that talk afterwards — we only wanted justice. What I say is, there must be a right and a wrong to things. It can’t all be kiss-an’-make-friends, no matter what you do.’

But if any generation had a right to grumble it’s the men who went through the war. Kipling conveys the way they fall to remembering incidents e.g. on the beach at Gallipolli, then go quiet, their faces suddenly tight, with the awful memories.

Story: Once they’re all comfortably settled after dinner, Bevin tells the story of Hickmot, a quiet Australian from the back of beyond, ‘brought up among blackfellas’, who was the only survivor of his battalion at Gallipolli and seconded to what was left of Bevin’s battalion. He was very quiet, very unobtrusive. Then a new draft came out including a man from the narrator, Bevin’s, village, one Bert Vigors. His dad was a market-gardener and they tried to exempt Bert on account of the family business but the local tribunal didn’t listen and he was drafted. The same tribunal exempted the son of a Mr Margetts, also a market gardener, because he hired a canny lawyer and was friends with some of the tribunes. Result: Vigors’ business goes bust, Margett’s old man buys it up.

Vigors won’t stop moaning to anyone who’ll listen about his Grievance, so quite quickly all the boys nickname him ‘the Grief’ and avoid him – all except Hickmot. He’ll listen to Vigors about his Grievance for hours so long as Vigors will then listen to him talking about sheep in the Outback. The two become inseparable. Soon Hickmot cops it in the leg and is shipped home and then Vigors is killed.

Bevin knows he right on the edge of a breakdown and wonders whether he’ll win a VC for some reckless exploit or go postal and shoot everyone around him. Just in time he is brought out of the trenches. He is posted back to England as a bomb instructor. Since the training camp is near his home village, he is able to marry his sweetheart – who just happens to have been Bert Vigors’s sister – and sleeps at home in his own bed, before going off to instruction duty every day.

Then they get a letter from the Brighton hospital where Hickmot is recovering from his wounds, asking if he can come and stay. Since Bert’s sister (now Bevin’s wife) had read so much about Hickmot in the letters which Bert sent home, she says Yes. Hickmot arrives for his visit, with one leg amputated above the knee, hardly says a word, but fits right in and does all the chores. One day he unobtrusively accompanies Bevin to bomb instruction, holing up in the dugout where the duds are kept till used, then accompanying Bevin home at the end of the day. Then they see him onto the train to Roehampton, where he will be fitted with a prosthetic leg.

That night there is a series of explosions in the village, the villagers initially thinking they must be stray bombs from an air raid and running out into the street in panic. But Bevin and another officer quickly realise the damage is suspiciously localised; in fact, it is limited to the market gardener Margett’s property: the roof of his house has been bombed, so it burns down, two hay ricks set afire, the furnace in his greenhouse has exploded, demolishing the building and all his horses been mysteriously released to trample and graze in the new fields he’d bought off Vigors’s dad. Oddest of all, Bevin had applied to the local council to dam a local stream to create a duck-pond for his wife’s ducks but been refused permission. But a bomb happens to have exploded under the bank of the stream and blocked it exactly where Bevin wanted. Fancy that!

By now Bevin’s dinner companions are laughing. Silent Hickmot must have listened to all Vigor’s grievances in the trenches, and made a plan to enact justice for the injustice of Vigors’s drafting and his death. Asking to come and stay with Bevin was just a ruse to see the lie of the land and, when he learned that Bevin was giving bomb training, Hickmot hatched his brutal revenge on the all-conquering Margett family.

Revenge: So it is one of Kipling’s many ‘revenge’ stories, but this time the brutality of the war somehow justifies it, and also justifies it as comedy, or farce – and also – in the injustice of Vigors’s drafting and death – makes it very moving. On the surface it’s a story about how at least one soldier carried out poetic justice. But the real impact of the story comes from the many little touches in it indicating just how psychologically damaged and scarred by war the talkers are. There are several moments in his telling where Bevin’s face grows stiff and his hands go to tighten a belt he isn’t wearing, unconsciously carried back to the trenches.

More overtly, he admits that, after Hickmot’s wounding and Vigors’s death, he was reaching breaking point: he had a funny taste in his mouth and a sense of being distant from everything – just when his superiors had the sense to post him home as a bomb instructor. He is, in fact, just one more of Kipling’s many, many men on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

‘It took ’em five minutes to make me understand I was saved. Then I vomited, an’ then I cried. You know!’ The fat face of Bevin had changed and grown drawn, even as he spoke; and his hands tugged as though to tighten an imaginary belt.’

A Madonna of The Trenches (1924) Frame: One of several post-War stories set in the Freemason Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’. The narrator is helping the Senior Warden who is also a doctor, Dr Keede. During a lecture a new recruit, Strangwick, has a nervous attack, has to be helped out and administered a sedative. The noise of scraping chairs had reminded Strangwick of the noise made by the leather straps of the corpses which the French used to build their trenches over, of the squeaking noise the straps made when you walked on the duckboards laid over them. God. What horror. But as Keede gently questions and sympathetically listens to the stammering man, he draws out a story which is far weirder and stranger than mere post-traumatic stress.

Story: Strangwick was in the same regiment as an older man, Sergeant Godsoe, who he’d known since a boy and had been a father figure to him and his sister. On the day in question, Godsoe was found dead in a sealed gas room in the trenches, with two lighted braziers. Asphyxiation. Dr Keede knew about the incident but thought, like everyone else, it was an accident – that the gas-proof door banged shut and locked Godsoe in by accident.

Now Strangwick slowly, hesitantly, in his working class idiom, explains that Godsoe had been having an affair with his (Strangwick’s) auntie Armine, his mum’s sister (real name, in fact, Bella). Auntie Armine had given Strangwick, on his most recent leave, a note to take back to Godsoe, saying her little trouble would be over on the 21st and she was dying to meet him as soon as possible thereafter.

Strangwick, in his job as a runner on the fateful 21 January, thinks he sees his Auntie Armine at a corner of an old French trench, and, when he tells Godsoe, the latter realises what it means and makes Strangwick take him back to the scene. Here Strangwick’s hair stands on end as he realises that the apparition he thought was a trick of the light earlier on, really is the ghost of his Auntie who – he later finds out – had died of cancer that morning. The ghostly figure is holding out her arms to Sergeant Godsoe, imploring him with a terrifying look on her face to join her – and the Sergeant calmly beckons her into the gas room with the braziers and barricades the door behind him. He deliberately asphyxiated himself, killed himself, so that he can be with his lover for all eternity.

Frame: Having got all this out of his system, Strangwick sleeps. The Brother who introduced him comes along and apologises for his behaviour. He’s been under a lot of strain, he explains, on account of a ‘breach of promise’ action brought against him by his sweetheart, after Strangwick broke off the engagement. The Brother doesn’t know why he broke it off – but we know the full story and the way the sight of a) a middle-aged love affair b) and the ghostly horror of his ‘uncle’s death, have unhinged Strangwick. And there is a final irony because the Brother who brought him to the Lodge… is his actual Uncle, Auntie Armine’s husband! Only Strangwick knows that his Uncle’s wife was so totally unfaithful to him. And this is another element or level in his hysteria.

A spooky story, sure enough – but for me the ghost story element is outweighed by the touching sensitivity to hysterical soldiers shown by the narrator, the doctor and the other Masonic members, who quietly come to enquire if they can help. It is a community of men looking after men.

Strangwick, who had been fidgeting and twitching for some minutes, rose, drove back his chair grinding across the tesselated floor, and yelped ‘Oh, My Aunt! I can’t stand this any longer.’ Under cover of a general laugh of assent he brushed past us and stumbled towards the door.
‘I thought so!’ Keede whispered to me. ‘Come along!’ We overtook him in the passage, crowing hysterically and wringing his hands. Keede led him into the Tyler’s Room, a small office where we stored odds and ends of regalia and furniture, and locked the door.
‘I’m — I’m all right,’ the boy began, piteously.
‘‘Course you are.’ Keede opened a small cupboard which I had seen called upon before, mixed sal volatile and water in a graduated glass, and, as Strangwick drank, pushed him gently on to an old sofa. ‘There,’ he went on. ‘It’s nothing to write home about. I’ve seen you ten times worse. I expect our talk has brought things back.’
He hooked up a chair behind him with one foot, held the patient’s hands in his own, and sat down.

It feels a world away from the cocky young men kicking their native servants in Plain Tales, nearly 40 years earlier.

The Gardener (1925) Written 10 years after Kipling’s own son, Jack, went missing during the Battle of Loos, this short story is about a well-off single woman, Helen, who adopts the orphaned son of her scapegrace brother, George, who had got an unmarried woman pregnant.

When George died in India, Helen arranged the passage home of the baby, named him Michael, and raised him as his ‘Aunty’. Michael goes through prep and public school and is scheduled to go up to Oxford when the Great War breaks out. He enlists into a regiment which is posted to fill the gap in the Loos Offensive. (This is the prolonged battle during which Kipling’s only son was killed, aged barely 18.)

Helen at once accepts the terrible message of the telegram, and communes with the vicar and others in the village who have also lost sons.

After some years she gets an official letter notifying her that Michael’s body has finally been found and buried in Hagenzeele Third graveyard, the letter giving the grave’s row and number.

Helen decides to go and visit it and finds herself entering what Kipling describes as a well-established process for travelling to France, feeling like she is entering a sausage factory, a production-line type machine, which had been set up to process literally millions of grieving relatives.

She arrives at the pre-booked hotel in France, where she has a strange encounter with an insistent fellow grave visitor, who insists on sitting with her at dinner and nattering on about this and that, before she more or less forces her way into Helen’s bedroom to confess that, when she said she was visiting her friends’ sons’ graves, she was lying – she is in fact compulsively visiting and revisiting the grave of the only man she ever loved but who belonged to another.

Helen gets rid of her and lies in bed shaking. Everybody’s lives seem wracked. Next morning she walks to the graveyard and is appalled by the rows upon rows of graves, some 20,000 in total. A young man planting flowers helps her, asking the number of Michael’s grave and takes her to it. In the very last line there is the strong, ghostly implication, that the young man is Christ.

A man knelt behind a line of headstones — evidently a gardener, for he was firming a young plant in the soft earth. She went towards him, her paper in her hand. He rose at her approach and without prelude or salutation asked: ‘Who are you looking for?’
‘Lieutenant Michael Turrell — my nephew,’ said Helen slowly and word for word, as she had many thousands of times in her life.
The man lifted his eyes and looked at her with infinite compassion before he turned from the fresh-sown grass toward the naked black crosses.
‘Come with me,’ he said, ‘and I will show you where your son lies.’
When Helen left the Cemetery she turned for a last look. In the distance she saw the man bending over his young plants; and she went away, supposing him to be the gardener.

A masterpiece, a genuinely great story, which is all in the selection, the paring back to the barest essentials, just three short scenes conveying the relationship between the growing Michael and his Aunt – the disconcerting scene at the hotel with a distraught fellow grave visitor – and then just these seven sentences at the end. I’m crying as I write this.

Other Kipling reviews

Debits and Credits by Rudyard Kipling (1926)

He observed, of a cake of dried poppy juice: ‘This has power to cut off all pain from a man’s body.’
‘I have seen it,’ said John.
‘But for pain of the soul there is, outside God’s Grace, but one drug; and that is a man’s craft, learning, or other helpful motion of his own mind.’ (The Eye of Allah)

Published eight long years after the end of the Great War, eleven years after his only son, John, was reported ‘missing presumed dead’ during the 1915 Battle of Loos, and gathering together all the short stories Kipling wanted to keep from the previous decade, Debits and Credits contains 14 stories and 21 poems.

In their range and, especially, in their worked-over depths and subtleties, this is by far his best volume of stories – some are flawed and uneven, cryptic and apparently callous – but many others are crafted and subtle and moving.

The stories

1. The Enemies to Each Other

2. Sea Constables (1915) ‘A tale of ’15. In February 1915 the German High Command declared the North Sea a war zone in which all merchant shipping, including neutral ships, were liable to be attacked and sunk without warning. This story describes four Royal Navy men meeting at a choice restaurant in London.

In Kipling’s usual late manner the four old pros settle down to telling stories, before slowly drifting into swapping notes about the Neutral vessel (presumably American, though it isn’t stated) which they were all partly involved in tailing through the North Sea, down the Channel and round into the Irish Sea.

Winchmore sets the ball rolling, then hands over to Maddingham who played the lion’s share. The ‘Newt’ (as they nickname the neutral vessel) claims to be carrying oil for Antigua, which they think a likely story. Maddingham’s ship pursues the neutral vessel into the Irish Sea and then into an unnamed West of England port, where the American captain prompts a Court of Inquiry into the way he’s being closely tailed and chased.

This is portrayed as one of the umpteen examples in Kipling where the British bend over backwards to be fair and above board to an enemy (in this case suspected enemy) which is utterly unscrupulous – an approach he thought bedevilled our efforts in the Boer War – and the kind of ‘health and safety gone mad’ sentiment you can still read any day in the Daily Mail.

One of the four at table, Tegg, was a lawyer during the inquiry.

Kipling Society notes

3. ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’ (1917) In a pet shop the narrator briefly meets a man who he later bumps into running a tobacconist’s shop. He is a Mason and invites the narrator along to a meeting of his Lodge (‘Faith and Works 5837’) that night. The narrator helps vet half a dozen Masons in Army uniform who have turned up hoping for recognition and admission. It is a way to suggest the appalling damage to the war injured, men with jaws shot away, who’ve lost arms or legs, the huge holocaust of the injured, plus those Kipling calls the ‘shell-shockers’ or just ‘shockers’. One Brother explains how a severe ‘mental case’ was rehabilitated by being given the Lodge’s jewellery to clean and look after. Practical therapy.

The point of the story is the compassion the men show to each other. They vote on what ceremonies to perform and then the half-crippled men are helped to carry them out. For many it’s the only religion or ritual they’ve ever had. Others gain dignity and self-respect by performing the (unspecified) rituals, even if they need help from the able-bodied. A crippled man is carried by a sergeant Major into the organ loft where he softly plays Bach. A ‘silent’ Brother is moved to slobber and squawk something which another Brother interprets as a Welsh placename. Acceptance. Forgiveness. A one-legged Corporal explains to the narrator that it was all the tobacconist’s idea, to revive the Lodge and just create a place, a safe space, where wounded, injured, broken men can talk and support each other.

All Ritual is fortifying. Ritual’s a natural necessity for mankind.

This is not a ‘story’, it is in effect a lightly fictionalised journalistic feature. Kipling became a Freemason back in India in the 1880s. What is interesting is the new feel in the ‘story’ -a more mature sense of forgiveness, acceptance, mercy – and a deeper understanding of the healing power of ritual and ceremony which is not conventional empty Church ritual, something somehow more effective and inclusive.

Exactly the same message as in W.B. Yeat’s famous poem A Prayer For My Daughter (1919):

How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?

Kipling Society notes

4. The United Idolaters (1924) Another ‘Stalky’ story i.e set among staff and pupils at a comically exaggerated version of Kipling’s own rather unconventional public school, United Services College in Devon. The ‘story’ loosely describes the craze among pupils and masters for Joel Chandler Harris’s Brer Rabbit and Brer Fox stories, collected in his best-selling Uncle Remus books (the first one of the series was published 1881).

Apart from the ostensible subject matter, it is useful to have Kipling’s own formulation of how the arcane and laboured facetiousness of public schoolboy slang was created from contemporary fads and crazes.

As the Studies brought back brackets and pictures for their walls, so did they bring odds and ends of speech — theatre, opera, and music-hall gags — from the great holiday world; some of which stuck for a term, and others were discarded… In a short time the College was as severely infected with Uncle Remus as it had been with Pinafore [1878] and Patience [1881] …. The book was amazing, and full of quotations that one could hurl like javelins.

It is interesting that Kipling acknowledges the aggression that can be implicit in groups, sets, circles of people using in-jokes and in-quotations, to fight each other or to keep outsiders out.

The comedy is in the escalation of the craze, as one of the boys buys a tortoise which is quickly painted house colours and hoisted by a rope up on a stick, and processed round the various form rooms to the accompaniment of Brer Rabbit-style songs. Then Stalky, Beetle, M’Turk and others make a good effigy of the Tar Baby (a character in the books).

Soon the school has divided into competing factions, each with distinct war chants, supporting either the Tar Baby or Brer Tortoise – some of the boys dress up in increasingly ludicrous outfits. A tug-of-war rope is introduced, which causes mayhem, and eventually desks are knocked over, windows smashed and even a fire grating wrenched out in the collective chaos.

Ultimately it all ends in a heroic number of canings by the Head, and the issuance of thousands of lines of Latin to be done as punishment by countless culprits. To give a sense of the schoolboy slang:

‘It was worth it,’ Dick Four pronounced on review of the profit-and-loss account with Number Five in his study.
‘Heap-plenty-bong-assez,’ Stalky assented.
‘But why didn’t King ra’ar up an’ cuss Tar Baby?’ Beetle asked.
‘You preter-pluperfect, fat-ended fool!’ Stalky began —‘Keep your hair on! We all know the Idolaters wasn’t our Uncle Stalky’s idea. But why didn’t King —’
‘Because Dick took care to paint Brer Terrapin King’s House-colours. You can always conciliate King by soothin’ his putrid esprit-demaisong. Ain’t that true, Dick?’
Dick Four, with the smile of modest worth unmasked, said it was so.

A running sub-plot throughout has been the appearance, at the start, of a new master to the school, a Mr Brownell. He is appalled all the way through by the school’s lax rules and permissiveness and utterly disgusted by the Brer Rabbit ‘riots’. He is shown at the end, having a bitter argument with the rest of the staff, before leaving in a huff. His stiff priggishness throws into relief the essential innocence of the schoolboy hijinks.

Kipling Society notes

5. The Wish House (1924) Frame: Two old Sussex ladies, Mrs Ashcroft and Mrs Fettley meet to do some knitting in the sunshine, not much bothered by the packed charabancs motoring by down to the local football ground (the kind of framing detail which Kipling delights in). They fall to telling stories about men, men they’ve loved and lost. Mrs Fettley tells a story about a man she loved, who had died quite recently. But Kipling is such a savage editor of his own works, that the entire account of their affair has been cut and is only referred to obliquely.

Mrs. Fettley had spoken very precisely for some time without interruption, before she wiped her eyes. ‘And,’ she concluded, ‘they read ‘is death-notice to me, out o’ the paper last month.’

Then Kipling adjusts himself, makes himself more comfortable, eases deeper into the atmosphere he’s created.

The light and air had changed a little with the sun’s descent, and the two elderly ladies closed the kitchen-door against chill. A couple of jays squealed and skirmished through the undraped apple-trees in the garden. This time, the word was with Mrs. Ashcroft, her elbows on the tea table, and her sick leg propped on a stool…

Story: Now Mrs Ashcroft reveals that she was desperately in love with one Harry Mockler, Bert Mockler’s son. They feel in love when she came down from London to the area to work. When the time came for her to return to London, she went to the lengths of scalding her arm to delay her return.

Then they arranged between them for Harry to get a job up ‘Lunnon’ so they could be close. ‘‘Dere wadn’t much I didn’t do for him. ‘E was me master.’ But, eventually, Harry tired of her and took to other women.

It is then that a new element enters the text: their charwoman’s ‘fiddle girl’ — Sophy Ellis.

Mrs Ashcroft, it appears, was susceptible to severe headaches. During one of them Sophy, a little slip of a girl, goes off to a ‘wish house’ – just a non-descript terraced house that’s been abandoned for some time, and speaks her wish through the letter box to the ‘token’ within. Her wish is to take Mrs Ashcroft’s headache upon herself. And Mrs Ashcroft’s headache disappears. It is now that Sophy reappears at the house, looking awful and, when Mrs Ashcroft asks why, slowly, hesitantly, the girl tells the story of the wish house and how she’s taken Mrs A’s headache upon herself. Stuff and nonsense, the older woman cries.

Then she bumps into Harry in the street – still besotted with him, though he shamefacedly avoids her – and notices he is looking very ill. She learns that he’s been in hospital, having cut his foot badly with a spade and gotten a bad infected.

So, after some thought and hesitation, Mrs Ashcroft goes to the ‘wish house’, at the address Sophy told herself about – furtively, embarrassed, knocks and hears an eerie shuffling and pokes open the letter box.

I stooped me to the letter-box slit, an’ I says: “Let me take everythin’ bad that’s in store for my man, ‘Arry Mockler, for love’s sake.” Then, whatever it was ‘tother side de door let its breath out, like, as if it ‘ad been holdin’ it for to ‘ear better.’
‘Nothin’ was said to ye?’ Mrs. Fettley demanded.
‘Na’un. She just breathed out — a sort of A-ah, like. Then the steps went back an’ downstairs to the kitchen — all draggy — an’ I heard the cheer drawed up again.’

And, to her amazement, she learns soon after that Harry is healed. Oh how happy she is. And yet the restored man carries on with his womanising while she, for her part, develops a nasty ulcer on her shin which she’s had ever since. It is the physical form of Harry’s illness, which she has taken upon herself.

And that’s it. Now she knows she is dying. And Mrs Fettley, in the closing pages of the story herself confesses that she’s going blind. Two afflicted old women at the end of their lives. The story ends with Mrs Ashcroft pitifully needing reassurance that her sacrifice has been worth it, that by taking Harry’s pain she will guarantee his love… in another place.

‘But the pain do count, don’t ye think, Liz? The pain do count to keep ‘Arry where I want ’im. Say it can’t be wasted, like.’

This is a stunning story and his portrayal of two ailing old ladies is a tremendous advance in Kipling’s art from the casual misogyny of his early tales. He shows a tremendous imaginative sympathy with physical pain and with a certain kind of muted psychological suffering. This is just one of a set of late tales which reach out and depict older women with a tremendous vividness and sympathy.

Kipling Society notes

6. The Janeites (1924) Further incidents in the Freemasons’ Lodge (“Faith and Works 5837”) introduced in the previous story, ‘In the Interests of the Brethren’. That was set in 1917; this one is set in autumn 1920. As with so many Kipling texts, there is the Frame and the Yarn.

Frame: The narrator has become a regular at the lodge and is helping to clean it on a Saturday afternoon, with a rag-tag body of ex-soldiers. Up in the organ loft sharp-eyed Anthony – a taxi-driver who served in Palestine and is always ready to tell acerbic anecdotes about life in a cab – is supervising big strong damaged Humberstall, as they polish the acacia-wood panels of the Lodge organ.

Humberstall served in an artillery battery, was badly wounded, recuperated at home back in Leicestershire, before sneaking back to rejoin his old regiment. His kindly Major recognises his need to be there, but tactfully orders him to become mess-waiter i.e. allots him a safe job away from the front. It is here, helping the head waiter, Macklin (much given to drunkenness) that he overhears a conversation between two officers – Captain Mosse and Major Hammick, a private detective and divorce lawyer in civilian life – discussing a woman they call ‘Jane’.

Story: Macklin explains to Humberstall the origins of the conversation he overheard: there is a Society of ‘Janeites’, membership of which allows officers to speak freely to men and vice versa. Macklin offers him membership, for a fee and so Humberstall pays up a ‘bradbury’ (slang for £1). Macklin explains that the society is based on the works of a woman who wrote long ago, Jane Austen, and makes him read Jane’s six novels. Humberstall (who is telling this narrative) is struck by how ordinary and recognisable all the characters are.

There is a longish sequence where Macklin and Humberstall get into trouble for chalking the names of three Austen characters on the sides of their big guns, with much larkey humour. Then the Germans launch their March Offensive in 1918 and roll up a lot of the Western Front, a naive officer comes past their position with a squad of little more than kids who are all wiped out in a barrage and then – the barrage lands on the guns and mess of our characters.

Humberstall recovers consciousness to find himself blown clear of the main damage, with his clothes blown off. There are corpses and body parts everywhere. He dresses with the clothes of a corpse, before staggering back to what’s left of the mess and discovering that Mosse, Hammick, Macklin and all the others are dead.

Humberstall hitches a lift on a retreating lorry, but at the nearest railhead he is prevented from squeezing onto a packed troop train by an officious nurse. It is here that his half-understood membership of ‘the Janeites’ gives him one last boost – he mentions to her superior that the officious nurse blocking him from the train reminds him of Miss Bates (from Austen’s novel Emma) – and the superior nurse is so impressed that she makes a space for him and his stretcher, not only on the train, but near a fire. And so his knowledge of Jane Austen probably saved his life.

Frame: Worshipful Brother Burges, who set up the Lodge and who we met in the first story, calls out to the soldiers that tea’s ready, and the Brethren cease their labours for refreshment. Big broken Humberstall ends his yarn and lumbers down the ladder, and sharp little Anthony turns to ask the narrator whether ‘the Janeites’ really existed. The narrator replies that it’s too complex a story for a man like Humberstall to have invented.

Anthony says he’s been seeing a lot of Humberstall’s sister, who’s giving him advice about how to look after Humberstall. ‘Careful,’ smiles the narrator: ‘Jane was a great match-maker and all her novels are about match-making. Maybe the Janeites will have one last legacy, and create a love affair between Humberstall’s sister and Anthony.’ Anthony blushes. Jane’s legacy lives on.

Kipling Society notes

7. The Prophet and the Country (1924) Frame: This is another ‘motoring story’ and Kipling adopts the persona of the permanently disgruntled petrolhead, outraged that the police pull him over, outraged that any other vehicle gets in his way, outraged and disgusted of Tunbridge Wells (or Burwash, Sussex, in his case). His car breaks down and as he is preparing to spend the night in the car a sort of caravan pulls up driven, it soon emerges, by an American, all conveyed in Kipling’s characteristic allusive style.

I diagnosed it as a baker’s van on a Ford chassis, lit with unusual extravagance. It pulled up and asked what the trouble might be. The first sentence sufficed, even had my lights not revealed the full hairless face, the horn-rimmed spectacles, the hooded boots below, and the soft hat, fashioned on no block known to the Eastern trade, above, the yellow raincoat.

Story: The American tells his story which is a long rambling account of how, after his wife died, he decided to dedicate his life to making a film about the disastrous effects of Prohibition on the American national character. He predicts that weaning the entire nation off the Demon Drink will make it as weak and helpless as when the teetotal red Indians or Pacific Islanders were exposed to rum and whiskey i.e. after a long enough time teetotal, the Land of the Free will become vulnerable to attack from East and West by booze-wielding enemies.

The film he planned to make was based around photos of an angry red Indian, of his wife’s best friend who hoped he would marry her when he was widowed and of a motley crew of tourists in the wilderness, looking ‘unutterably mean’. As a ‘treatment’ for a film this is incomprehensible, and really just a frame for the American – named Mr Tarworth from Omaha Nebraska – to boom on in loud pretentious capitalised proper nouns.

He spoke in capital letters, a few of which I have preserved, on our National Spirit, which, he had sensed, was Homogeneous and in Ethical Contact throughout — Unconscious but Vitally Existent. That was his Estimate of our Racial Complex. It was an Asset, but a Democracy postulating genuine Ideals should be more multitudinously-minded and diverse in Outlook.

When word of this mad project got around, Tarworth was lambasted as an anti-American traitor, becoming so unpopular he was forced to leave the country, hence his touring round England. And the film ‘treatment’? Safe in the Bank of England but he wouldn’t consider trying to produce it here, as he is

‘a one-hundred-per-cent. American. The way I see it, I could not be a party to an indirect attack on my Native Land.’

I suppose this is a comedy, and some kind of satire against State Intervention, and maybe also against a certain kind of Americans’ booming self-importance – but in lots of ways it doesn’t make sense (the whole idea of working up a screenplay from four photos is bizarrely unlikely) and its irony and sarcasm – if that’s what they are p are certainly not very funny.

Kipling Society notes

8. The Bull that Thought (1924) Frame: The narrator is touring France in a motor car, and has discovered a particularly straight stretch of road in the south, where you can get up to an amazing 90 kilometres per hour! (Since his chauffeur is Mr Leggatt, this is presumably the same narrator as in ‘The Horse Marines’ and, by extension, the other Pyecroft stories which featured a chauffeur named Leggatt.)

In the hotel where he’s staying, he meets Monsieur Andre Voiron, a well-off local businessman, who he takes along on the night-time drive to attempt maximum speed. Impressed, M. Voiron, back at the hotel, gets out his finest champagne and tells the narrator the story of a bull.

Story: They breed bulls hereabouts to send to the arena at Arles. One particular calf was always more intelligent than the others, chasing the boys who baited it; hiding and ambushing its enemies. He reports the time the bull assassinated a rival and then calmly cleaned its horns in the dust – very unusual. When it was taken to Arles its horns were padded with cloth to take part in pretend bull-fighting; but half way through the bout, it rubbed the pads off on the ground and terrorised its tormentors. Thereupon it was bought by Voiron’s chief herdsman Christophe, and Voiron returned to business.

The main part of the story occurs when Christophe informs Voiron that the bull – named, by the way, Apis – was scheduled to appear in a small bullring near Barcelona. The core of the story is how Apis humiliates (and kills) all the matadors and picadors sent to kill him, until an old-timer, Chisto, who used to play with him when he was a calf, defuses him, playing with him, frisking and then, in alliance, walking peacefully back to the gate through which Apis entered – and his life is spared.

According to bullfighting experts the story is misleading in at least two respects; if anyone is killed in a bullfight it is stopped immediately; bulls in bullfights are completely virgin – they have never seen the cloths or stands and gestures before; any bull which has and so has learned to dodge them and attack the matadors, is spotted and excluded. Lots of commentators overlook these factual flaws in interpreting the story as a metaphor for the artist and his art.

Kipling Society notes

9. A Madonna of The Trenches (1924) Frame: One of several post-War stories set in the Freemason Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’. The narrator is helping the Senior Warden who is also a doctor, Dr Keede. During a lecture a new recruit, Strangwick, has a nervous attack, has to be helped out and administered a sedative. The noise of scraping chairs had reminded Strangwick of the noise made by the leather straps of the corpses which the French used to build their trenches over, of the squeaking noise the dead men’s straps made when you walked on the duckboards laid over them. God. What horror. But as Keede gently questions and sympathetically listens to the stammering man, he draws out a story which is far weirder and stranger than mere post-traumatic stress.

Strangwick, in his job as a runner on the fateful 21 January, thinks he sees his Auntie Armine at a corner of an old French trench, and, when he tells Godsoe, the latter realises what it means and makes Strangwick take him back to the scene. Here Strangwick’s hair stands on end as he realises that the apparition he thought was a trick of the light earlier on, really is the ghost of his Auntie who – he later finds out – died of cancer that morning. The ghostly figure is holding out her arms to Sergeant Godsoe, imploring him with a terrifying look on her face – and the Sergeant calmly beckons her into the gas room with the braziers and barricades the door behind him. He deliberately asphyxiated himself, killed himself, so that he can be with his lover for all eternity.

Frame: Having got all this out of his system, Strangwick sleeps. The Brother who introduced him comes along and apologises for his behaviour. He’s been under a lot of strain, he explains, on account of a ‘breach of promise’ action brought against him by his sweetheart, after Strangwick broke off the engagement. The Brother doesn’t know why, but we know the full story and the way the sight of a) a middle-aged love affair b) and the ghostly horror of his ‘uncle’s death have unhinged Strangwick. And there is a final irony because the Brother who brought him to the Lodge is his actual Uncle, Auntie Armine’s husband. Only Strangwick knows that his Uncle’s wife was so totally unfaithful to him. And this is another element or level in his hysteria.

It feels a world away from the cocky young men kicking their native servants in Plain Tales, nearly 40 years earlier.

Kipling Society notes

10. The Propagation of Knowledge (1926) Another ‘Stalky’ story i.e set among staff and pupils at a comically exaggerated version of Kipling’s own rather unconventional public school, United Services College in Devon. Mr King is trying to teach the class about Augustan literature. This story makes clearer than ever before that the elaborate facetious sarcasm of the teachers is a coping mechanism, a way of managing the daily battle with obstructive, obtuse and dilatory pupils.

Then King implored [Beetle] to vouchsafe his comrades one single fact connected with Dr. Johnson which might at any time have adhered to what, for decency’s sake, must, Mr. King supposed, be called his mind.

The focus of the story is when an external examiner comes down to the school to supervise their Army Preliminary Exam. Mr King sets a preparatory general knowledge exam and we are shown the boys conspiring and confabulating on how to divide up their thin store of knowledge so as all to get a pass. There is no notion whatever of individual boys being assessed on their work and merits; the whole ethos is that specialists in one area share around the likely answers on that topic, and that the whole group works together. In this rather unconventional way, the school – knowingly or not – fosters team effort, co-operation and a rough sense of fairness and comradeship.

‘Beetle’, the bookish bespectacled Kipling figure in the stories, has been recognised for his literary talents, let off maths and given free run of the headmaster’s extensive library. Here he stumbles across the theory that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Bacon or some other aristocrat. He shares this with his Form and when they hesitantly raise it in their next lesson Mr King goes mad, delivering a long tirade against this ‘imbecile and unspeakable girls’— school tripe’.

Which gives the boys a sneaky idea. When the external examiner arrives to work through their papers with the boys one or two casually float the notion that Shakespeare didn’t write his own works and… the examiner, a Mr Hume, far from exploding, listens with interest. Aha. He may be a devotee of the theory. In which case they may be able to distract him onto it and away from asking tricky questions about the Augustans. Which is what happens. In a carefully co-ordinated attack, the boys ask a series of leading questions about the Shakespeare theory which lead Hume into a lengthy consideration of the theory… only realising, embarrassed towards the end of the time, that he’s meant to be quizzing them about the Augustans. Nonetheless, he goes away impressed with their studiousness and says ‘

he would have particular pleasure in speaking well of this Army Class, which had evinced such a genuine and unusual interest in English Literature, and which reflected the greatest credit on their instructors.

Victory to the boys, Stalky, Beetle, M’Turk, Vernon and the others! And when Hume mentions in passing to Mr King the boys’ surprising knowledge of literature and especially the Shakespeare theory, King is left beside himself with rage and chagrin. I found this genuinely funny and enjoyable, like the other Stalky story in this volume; I think because they are genuinely humorous and light in tone, unlike the Stalky stories from the 1890s which were significantly more savage and cruel.

Kipling Society notes

11. A Friend of the Family (1924) Frame: Fourth of the stories set in the Masonic Lodge ‘Faith and Works 5837’. Four chaps get chatting over dinner – Bevin, Pole, a sassy Australian with a glass eye named Orton, and the narrator. They yarn about their respective trades (Bevin owns a chicken farm and is diversifying into herbs). They all grumble that all they wanted after the War was Judgement and justice, instead of which they got talk talk talk. Grumble grumble grumble.

Bevin knows he right on the edge of a breakdown and wonders whether he’ll win a VC for some reckless exploit or go postal and shoot everyone around him. Just in time he’s posted back to England as a bomb instructor, marries his sweetheart – who just happens to have been Bert Vigors’s sister – and sleeps at home in his native village, before going off to instruction duty every day.

They get a letter from the Brighton hospital where Hickmot is asking if he can come and stay. Since Bert’s sister read about him in the letters Bert sent home, she says Yes. Hickmot arrives, with one leg amputated above the knee, hardly says a word, but fits right in and does all the chores. One day he unobtrusively accompanies Bevin to bomb instruction, holing up in the dugout where the duds are kept till used, then accompanying home at the end of the day. Then they see him onto the train to Roehampton, where he will be fitted with a prosthetic leg.

That night there is a series of explosions in the village, the villagers initially thinking they must be stray bombs from an air raid but Bevin and another officer quickly realise the damage is very localised; in fact it is limited to the market gardener Margett’s property: the roof of his house has been bombed, so it burns down, two hay ricks set afire, the furnace in his greenhouse has exploded demolishing it, all his horses released to trample and graze in the new fields he’d bought off Vigors’s dad. Oddest of all, Bevin had applied to dam a local stream to create a duck-pond for his wife’s ducks and been refused permission. But a bomb happens to have exploded under the bank of the stream and blocked it exactly where Bevin wanted. Fancy.

By now his listeners are laughing. Silent Hickmot had listened to all Vigor’s grievances and made a plan to enact justice for the injustice of his drafting and his death, and take revenge on the all-conquering Margett family.

Revenge: So it is one of Kipling’s many ‘revenge’ stories, but this time the brutality of the war somehow justifies it, and also justifies it as comedy, or farce – and also makes it very moving. On the surface it’s a story about how at least one soldier carried out poetic justice. But the real impact of the story comes from the many little touches in it indicating just how psychologically damaged and scarred by war the talkers are. There are several moments in his telling where Bevin’s face grows stiff and his hands go to tighten a belt he isn’t wearing, unconsciously carried back to the trenches. More overtly, he admits that, after Hickmot’s wounding and Vigors’s death, he was reaching breaking point, with a funny taste in his mouth and a sense of being distant from everything – just when his superiors had the sense to post him home as a bomb instructor. He is, in fact, just one more of Kipling’s many many men on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

12. On the Gate (1926) Set in 1916 and, according to various sources, drafted and finished in that year, then slowly pruned back over the following decade.

It is quite a funny comic sketch set at the Gates of Heaven where St Peter is feeling overwhelmed by the flood of dead people and – like an Army staff officer or schoolmaster – is struggling to keep his junior staff up to the mark. Death has called by for a chat and sympathises. Furthermore, it turns out there are several ‘deaths’ all in a highly bureaucratic civil service.

‘Thanks to this abominable war,’ he began testily, ‘my N.C.D. has to spend all its time fighting for mere existence. Your new War-side seems to think that nothing matters except the war. I’ve been asked to give up two-thirds of my Archives Basement (E. 7-E. 64) to the Polish Civilian Casualty Check and Audit. Preposterous! Where am I to move my Archives? And they’ve just been cross-indexed, too!’

Death in fact takes St Peter on a tour of the cramped office and over-burdened civil servants – in this case seraphs and cherubim – struggling with all the paperwork and the confused causes of death these days. St Peter watches as a signal comes through on the wireless (Heaven has all the latest technology!) about a deserter and traitor being executed. He makes haste back to the Gates – what with all the crowds these days the ‘Lower Establishment’ (i.e. hell) is picking off stragglers heading towards heaven.

The basic premise sounds almost like a Monty Python sketch and there are some funny details, like the way St Peter deputises St Ignatius Loyola and St Christopher to the Admissions Board while he goes for his walkabout with Death – the former liable to let anyone in who argues with sufficient subtlety, while St Christopher is a sucker for anyone who’s wet and muddy. But overall it is arch and mechanical and there are satirical hits about contemporary England which the modern reader senses but doesn’t really ‘get’.

And there is some of Kipling’s strange science fiction visionariness.

The Saint and Death stayed behind to rest awhile. It was a heavenly evening. They could hear the whistle of the low-flighting Cherubim, clear and sharp, under the diviner note of some released Seraph’s wings, where, his errand accomplished, he plunged three or four stars deep into the cool Baths of Hercules; the steady dynamo-like hum of the nearer planets on their axes; and, as the hush deepened, the surprised little sigh of some new-born sun a universe of universes away.

13. The Eye of Allah (1926) As usual a group of men consort and yarn, only it is the 13th century and the men in this story are monks at the monastery of St Illod’s, who specialise in copying manuscripts. The main figure is John Otho or John of Burgos, a leading illustrator.

The Sub–Cantor looked over his shoulder at the pinned-down sheet where the first words of the Magnificat were built up in gold washed with red-lac for a background to the Virgin’s hardly yet fired halo. She was shown, hands joined in wonder, at a lattice of infinitely intricate arabesque, round the edges of which sprays of orange-bloom seemed to load the blue hot air that carried back over the minute parched landscape in the middle distance.

In the first half he journeys to Spain, to Burgos, for twenty months, ostensibly to research Moorish designs, the Spanish way of illustrating devils and to buy materials for the art work of the monastery. But in a sensitive conversation with the Abbot, Stephen, John admits that he is going to visit his infidel lover. it was a more relaxed age.

As in the Puck of Pook’s Hill stories, a lot of effort has gone into the factual background. As John, the Abbot, Martin the senior copyist, Clement the sub-cantor, the Infirmarian (doctor) and so on meet and chat and stroll around, the physical layout of the monastery is very precisely described – I shouldn’t be surprised if Kipling had made a diagram, or based it on a real monastery and carefully located each encounter.

John went down the stairs to the lane that divides the hospital and cook-house from the back-cloisters.

The Abbot and his guests went out to cool themselves in an upper cloister that took them, by way of the leads, to the South Choir side of the Triforium.

As to ‘plot’, the various conversations head towards a particular dinner, when the Abbot is entertaining two visitors, Roger a doctor from Salerno, and Roger Bacon, the English philosopher, and there is a good deal of impassioned discussion about the dead hand of ancient authors, and of the Church authorities, who prevent reasoned discussion (Roger Bacon) and the study of human anatomy (Roger of Salerno). The Abbot shrewdly defuses the tension by suggesting they look at John’s illustration for the scene of the Gadarene Swine in the copy of Luke’s gospel he is illuminating.

Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances — a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately toward their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.

Discussion of where John gets his inspiration prompts him to get out a device he bought from the Arabs in Spain and they call ‘the eye of Allah’. It is a primitive microscope, with one lens, held between compass-type wooden pins. The Abbot, the two Rogers, John and Thomas the Infirmarian all look, in turn, through it at a drop of water, and are amazed and appalled to see the microscopic world of creatures wriggling and squirming in the liquid. It is a whole New World and the monks feverishly discuss whether it is a Hell or Heaven, and the two Rogers argue that this opens up vast new worlds for knowledge and research, but that they risk – as recent experimenters and rebels have – being burned at the stake for their trouble. But the Abbot is master here, insisting that the world is not ready for this knowledge. He insists on being handed the eye of Allah, crushes the crystal lens and burns the rest of it in the fire.

The whole story reminds us that Kipling was the nephew of the famous pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, so moved in aesthetic circles in his boyhood, and was no mean draughtsman himself, as his own illustrations to the Just So Stories demonstrate. Indeed, the distinctness of the detail could be compared to the bright lucidity of a pre-Raphaelite painting.

Roger of Salerno was quite quiet till they regained the dining-room, where the fire had been comforted and the dates, raisins, ginger, figs, and cinnamon-scented sweetmeats set out, with the choicer wines, on the after-table. The Abbot seated himself, drew off his ring, dropped it, that all might hear the tinkle, into an empty silver cup, stretched his feet towards the hearth, and looked at the great gilt and carved rose in the barrel-roof… The bull-necked Friar watched a ray of sunlight split itself into colours on the rim of a crystal salt-cellar…

It could be a scene by Millais. It is also a good example of the way the later stories are made up of multiple layers: the factual background of the monastery; a detailed account of the art of illumination; the almost buried references to John’s beloved in Spain who, we learn, in a brief aside, died during childbirth, in his arms; then the learnèd debate about the state of scientific knowledge; and only then does the narrative reach its climax with the showing of the microscope. The story feels like it has been honed and burnished to reveal multiple depths and layers.

And this is also one of the late stories which feature art and sheds some light on Kipling’s own seriousness in his craft.

‘My meaning is that if the shape of anything be worth man’s thought to picture to man, it’s worth his best thought.’

‘In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after that.’

14. The Gardener (1925) Written 10 years after Kipling’s own son, Jack, went missing during the Battle of Loos, this short story is about a well-off single woman, Helen, who adopts the orphaned son of her scapegrace brother, George, who had got an unmarried woman pregnant.

Helen at once accepts the terrible message of the telegram, and communes with the vicar and others in the village who have also lost sons.

After some years she gets an official letter notifying her that Michael’s body has finally been found and buried in Hagenzeele Third graveyard, the letter giving the grave’s row and number.

Helen gets rid of her and lies in bed shaking. Everybody’s lives seem wracked. Next morning she walks to the graveyard and is appalled by the rows upon rows of graves, some 20,000 in total. A young man planting flowers sees her, comes over, asks the number of Michael’s grave and takes her to it. In the very last line there is the strong, ghostly implication, that the young man is Christ.

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All posts tagged A Friend of the Family

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