All posts tagged ‘Swept and Garnished’

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

A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (1917)

Introduction

In his excellent biography of Kipling, Charles Carrington devotes much of chapter 16 to a fascinating picture of the political scene in Britain from 1909 to 1914. He reminds us that the pre-Great War years weren’t the summery idyll they’re often painted as, but a time of intense social and political strife. In 1909 the all-powerful Liberal government launched David Lloyd-George’s ‘People’s Budget’ to raise taxes on the wealthy and create a welfare state – like other well-off people the Kiplings were alarmed at the possibility of new ‘super’ taxes, death duties and so on biting into their hard-earned savings, and took advice about how to protect their assets. The aristocratic House of Lords threatened to repeatedly block the Budget Act and so, in 1910, the government called two general elections to bolster their mandate, the second resulting in a hung Parliament in which the Liberals were only kept in power by the Irish Nationalist vote and therefore had to make promises to introduce a new Home Rule Bill for Ireland. It was only King George V’s threat to create enough Liberal peers to swamp the Conservative majority in the House of Lords which finally coerced the Lords into passing the Budget and then the 1911 Parliament Act which limited their powers. 1911 also saw a wave of mass strikes hit various key industries, including mining and railways, with extreme radicals calling for a general strike to overthrow the entire capitalist system.

Most threatening of all, the Liberal threat to bring in a Home Rule bill for Ireland led to extreme fighting talk from the Ulster Unionists. It is generally forgotten that the summer of 1914 was dominated not by concerns about Germany, but by the threat of civil war breaking out in northern Ireland, where the Unionists were buying guns and ammunition from Germany, while nationalists in the south were forming a rival army. The threat of civil war was so real that Kipling’s wife, Carrie, helped set up one of the numerous committees being formed to cope with the influx of refugees expected from Ireland once fighting broke out.

It was these years which saw Kipling’s reputation as an extreme right-wing propagandist crystallised. In newspapers, articles, interviews and speeches, Kipling turned himself into a spokesman for the extreme right in politics, the so-called ‘die-hards’ in Ulster, an opponent of everything the Liberals stood for, railing against Trades Unions, the Suffragettes, radicals and anti-Imperialists, the nationalist Irish and so on.

From 1909 until 1914 he threw himself into party activity on the extreme right wing, attending party meetings in London and even speaking for Max Aitken, at an election meeting. Rudyard Kipling lost some of his popularity in those years; no longer the spokesman of the forgotten men, the soldiers and sailors, the British overseas, he seemed to have become the propagandist of the Tory Party.

This collection

This is the immensely troubled background to many of the stories collected in this volume. And yet Kipling’s work is a paradox, larger than his critics or his times, larger than the man himself – because arguably the best stories in this collection have nothing to do with politics but are the unbridled farces, The Vortex and The Village That Voted That Earth Was Flat. The collection also includes a sort of spy story, a bizarre science fiction tale, and another instalment of his schoolboy ‘Stalky’ stories. The title is fitting: the stories truly are ‘a diversity of creatures’.

By the time the volume came out in 1917, Britain and the world had been utterly transformed by three years of war. The most ‘relevant’ stories for most readers will have been the last two, Mary Postgate and ‘Swept and Garnished’, bitter, angry violent tales which themselves reflected the early years of the war.

Altogether, the variety of subject matter and tone make it a very uneven, puzzling, dazzling, almost bewildering collection.

The stories

1. As Easy as A.B.C. (1912) This is an extraordinary story. It’s a sequel to With the Night Mail (published in 1905) and, like it, is a science fiction tale set in the future. It is 2065, 65 years after With the Night Mail and the world is controlled by the ‘Aerial Board of Control’ (the ‘A.B.C.’ of the title), a ‘semi-elected semi-nominated’ body.

This future world is divided into scattered settlements of people living far apart. There are fewer people and the birthrate is declining as people live longer. The key central idea to this vision and the story is that society has outgrown crowds and demagoguery and democracy. The most valuable good in this world is Privacy, which everyone jealously guards.

The story is triggered when there is an outbreak of ‘crowds’ organised by a group of the hated ‘democrats’, who have started to congregate in northern Illinois. The story takes the form – as so often in Kipling – of following a group of very talkative men, representatives (from different nations, including Italian and Russian) of the A.B.C., who are dispatched in an airship complete with advanced weapons, to quell this disgusting outbreak of crowdism and mob violence.

The representatives arrive with a fleet of other aircraft, overpower the crowds of poor deluded ‘democrats’, scoop them up into their planes and carry them back to London where they will be put on display in the theatre as a cautionary example of the old barbaric ways which led to such violence and social instability.

We are so used to science fiction being used in a broadly left-wing or liberal cause that it’s quite a shock to see it used so nakedly – and so oddly – in the opposite cause, by a reactionary who diagnoses mass movements and the trend towards democracy as the great perils of modern society.

2. Friendly Brook (March 1915) Alas, we are among Sussex peasants, as grossly caricatured and deliberately given to impenetrable jargon as Kipling’s Indians and Boers and Tommies.

‘Now we’ve a witness-board to go by!’ said Jesse at last.
‘She won’t be as easy as this all along,’ Jabez answered. ‘She’ll need plenty stakes and binders when we come to the brook.’
‘Well, ain’t we plenty?’ Jesse pointed to the ragged perspective ahead of them that plunged downhill into the fog. ‘I lay there’s a cord an’ a half o’ firewood, let alone faggots, ‘fore we get anywheres anigh the brook.’
‘The brook’s got up a piece since morning,’ said Jabez. ‘Sounds like’s if she was over Wickenden’s door-stones.’
Jesse listened, too. There was a growl in the brook’s roar as though she worried something hard.
‘Yes. She’s over Wickenden’s door-stones,’ he replied. ‘Now she’ll flood acrost Alder Bay an’ that’ll ease her.’
‘She won’t ease Jim Wickenden’s hay none if she do,’ Jabez grunted. ‘I told Jim he’d set that liddle hay-stack o’ his too low down in the medder. I told him so when he was drawin’ the bottom for it.’

Two peasants, Jabez and Jesse, are fixing some overgrown hedge, when they discuss old Jim Wickenden and his surprisingly casual attitude to his hay being carried away by the flooded brook. This gives rise to a long yarn about Jim, living with his mother who had a stroke, and how they adopted a Barnado baby from up Lunnon, raising her (Mary) as their own, until a man turns up claiming to be Mary’s natural father, festooned with legal documents etc, who has to be paid off, but comes back a month later. I think he is effectively blackmailing the family to allow Mary to stay with them, and then Jesse continues to tell how he and Jim were clearing rubbish from the brook when an odd object floated past, and they pulled it out with a ‘pooker’, and it was the man from Lunnon, drowned. They take what money they find in his pocket, then let him float off. Jesse and Jim go to the latter’s house where the mute mother claims to know nothing about it all, and Mary is upstairs studying.

Did Mary murder the man? Or did he take money, have a dash of whiskey and slip in the flooded brook and drown? Who knows? Who cares?

3. In The Same Boat (1911) London in the Edwardian era. Conroy is addicted to najdolene pills to manage a recurring nightmare of being aboard ship and hearing men scream in the engine room and stark terror as a man screams in his face this ship is going down and all is lost. His suave specialist Dr Gilbert introduces him to a fellow patient, the statuesque beautiful Miss Henschil whose similar terror is a vision of men with faces covered in mildew pursuing her across a beach. Over a series of train excursions from London they discuss their symptoms and, by talking, manage to control them, slowly giving up the pills. The denouement comes when Miss Henschil’s nurse, dumpy freckly Miss Blabey, reveals that she spoke with Miss H’s mother who revealed that the faceless men incident actually happened – she visited a leper colony in India when pregnant with Miss H, and the leprous men followed her. This revelation makes the shadow pass from her mind, she is suddenly whole and restored. And when Conroy visits his mother in Hereford, she also confirms that his night terror – which he’d never told her about – was an actual incident which happened to her when she was pregnant and on board a ship returning from India in 1885, when two stokers were scalded by steam and a man thought he’d play a cruel joke on her by telling her the ship was going down. She quickly realised it was a ‘joke’ and forgot about it – but in both cases the fright was obviously so intense that, somehow, it penetrated the souls of the little foetuses in their mothers’ wombs.

Interesting as the premise for a horror story; and interesting insight into drug addiction in the Edwardian era.

4. The Honours of War (1911) A Stalky tale. The narrator, the grown-up Beetle of the schoolboy Stalky stories, motors to the house of old Army friend, nicknamed ‘the Infant’, where he meets old pal, Lieutenant–Colonel A.L. Corkran, known in his schooldays as ‘Stalky’, now retired. They overhear two young officers, Eames and Trivett, explaining to the Infant that they ‘ragged’ a chap, Wontner, who was a bit rules and regs and intellectual-like, as you do, and, when he threatened to write to the War Office and implicate their beloved colonel, they wrapped him in a sack, thrust him in the boot of a car and have driven him here. Now. He is in the boot in the car in the garage!

The Infant is appalled and Stalky descends the stairs from where he and the narrator have been hiding and listening, to deliver an impressive tongue-lashing to the two young zealots, then despatches Beetle to untie the very angry officer from his sack. They get him in and play up to his pompous lecturing and hectorings and Stalky and the Infant try to placate him over dinner. Finally the imperturbable butler, Ipps, takes them upstairs to where the guilty pair, Eames and Trivett, are sleeping like babes. Wontner, with the others’ connivance, gets two sacks and some rope and ties them up, then asks help manhandling them down into a car, in which they all drive back to the barracks.

Slowly Wontner thaws. When Stalky reveals that he is a serving officer Wontner begins to realise what a pompous ass he’s made of himself. He stops the car in the High Street, goes into a milliners shop to buy all sorts of fabrics and, when they arrive at the barracks, dress his two sacked officers up to look like Japanese geishas, in which state they waddle into the mess. There is uproar, the Colonel is summoned, Wontner makes apologies for behaving such an insufferable prig, and all hell breaks loose as they open bottles, sing and threaten to party till dawn. Stalky and Beetle slip back to the car and drive back to the Infant’s.

I enjoyed this story very much, maybe because I understood it and got the tone straightaway; it seems like a direct ancestor of P.G. Wodehouse or early Evelyn Waugh, admittedly in army uniform. But the upper class setting and the tone of clipped irony from the first sentences is easy to get and enjoyable once you accept its tone and milieu (unlike so many of Kipling’s impenetrable tales).

5. The Dog Hervey (1914) Set in cosy, rural Sussex among middle-class families with big houses and servants, typified by Mrs Godfrey and her daughter Milly. The narrator’s friend, Attley, has a dog who’s given birth to puppies, and invites his circle round to choose ones to adopt. A manky one with a squint is chosen by a ‘dark, sallow-skinned, slack-mouthed girl’, Miss Sichliffe. After a few weeks Attley turns up with the dog, saying it’s come down sick and Miss S doesn’t know how so can the narrator look after it; he finds the dog eerie and uncanny. Now named Hervey, this clumsy squinting dog spends all its time looking at him. A few weeks later, the narrator gets a call that their friends, Mrs Godfrey and Milly, have been taken sick on Madeira. He takes a ship there and a lot of time passes as he and Attley nurse the ladies back to health. They fall in with a wealthy yacht-owner named Shend. Eventually they all ship back to Blighty, and on board the steamer Shend reveals that he is an alcoholic, who comes to him one night on the verge of delirium tremens. The narrator does a man’s job, listening to him, keeping him talking, and eventually Shend confesses that one of his hallucinations is of a funny squint-eyed dog. The ship docks and the narrator’s loyal chauffeur is there to collect him in the motor. They drive back through Sussex and stop at the gate of Moira’s house, where she happens to be outside gardening. Young Shend alights and goes to speak to her and they turn towards the house. The dog Hervey is there, skulking, and needs little encouragement to jump into the narrator’s car and be driven home, there to rejoin the narrator’s other dog, Malachi.

I read this story fairly carefully and still don’t understand what it was ‘about’ – a splendid example of the obscurity and impenetrability of many later Kipling stories.

6. The Village that Voted the Earth was Flat (1917) Like many a motorist Kipling thought he had a God-given right to ignore all rules of the road and cried blue murder if he or any of his friends were pulled up for breaking the law. In this story the narrator is merrily breaking the speed limit in a car along with Woodhouse, a journalist who specialises in rescuing failing papers, Ollyett a young man just down from Oxford, and a Tory M.P., Pallant.

They are charged with speeding in a village, Huckley, by a constable who maliciously presses their horn to frighten the horse of the local Justice of the Peace, Sir Thomas Ingell, M.P., who’s riding by. When they’re hauled up in court a) they hear a few other landowners joking about how convenient it is to have long stretches of road which encourage motorists to speed, so that you can fine ’em and make a fortune b) Ingell is crude, rude and dismissive before fining them twenty-three pounds, twelve shillings and sixpence. The next case after them is another motoring offence, the culprit the famous music hall impresario, ‘Bat’ Masquerier, whose Jewishness Ingell insults by implying that ‘Bat’ lives in Jerusalem.

Our foursome and Bat meet up for a dinner in London and hatch a monstrous plan. The newspapers will begin a small but ongoing campaign to mock and ridicule Huckley, deliberately inviting letters, comments, mild derision, and this they do. But it is as nothing compared to Masquerier’s plan which is enormous – it is to ferry down all his music hall stars, the girls, the bands, all pretending to be members of the fictitious Geoplanarians’ Annual Banquet and Exercises – a version of the Flat Earth Society; they have a huge party, get all the villagers blind drunk and hold a vote in which all 438 drunkenly agree and vote that the earth is flat, as well as festooning the village with posters, banners and spraying their slogan in Sir Thomas’s walls and gates.

Not only does this get into the Press but Masquerier rewrites the lyrics of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’ to become ‘The village that voted the earth was flat’, and has it simultaneously launched in his music halls in all Britain’s cities, as well as recorded on the new phonographs and accompanied by film for cinematographs. It becomes a phenomenon, sweeping the civilised world. Huckley becomes a laughing stock but there is more. On a visit to the village the infuriated Ingell comes running out to shut up yet another charabanc of singing, joking, kodaking tourists, but is witnessed attacking Pallant. Pallant now brings a law case for assault but so manages it that his lawyer, on the day in court, with the world’s press assembled, apologises for bringing the case now that they have been apprised of Sir Thomas’s infirmity – and darkly hinting that something unmentionable in Ingell’s character or past renders the case otiose. This dark hint is picked up and amplified and speculated upon by the world’s media.

But even this isn’t enough, because, in the climactic scene, the narrator is invited along to the House of Commons to witness the climax of several days of feverish debate on the troubled issues of the day – only for Pallant to manage things so that he mentions the ill-fated village of Huckley and triggers an outburst of the song, ‘The village that voted the world was flat’, the entire House joining in in helpless mirth and hysterics until the Prime Minister himself enters the House and all hands point towards him in ridicule and tearful hysterics. What began as a few ideas to get their own back on a rather brusque Justice of the Peace has ended up in the farcical ridiculing of the entire political system. Sir Thomas’s humiliation is complete; we see him going into the Whips office to ask to be allowed to resign his seat.

It’s long but there’s a lot of material to get through and it moves at a rattling pace. If you can forgive the Jeremy Clarkson-style self-pity of a bunch of lawbreaking petrolheads as the initial premise, it’s hard not to be carried away by the unstoppable pace of the comedy and the grotesque dimensions of farcicality which it eventually reaches.

7. In The Presence (1912) This is a thoughtful, reflective, strange and evocative story. The setting is entirely Indian but not the hectic desperate India of the early tales, something much more mellow and experienced. The officers of a Sikh regiment in the Indian Army are taking their leisure.

He folded his arms and sat down on the verandah. The hot day had ended, and there was a pleasant smell of cooking along the regimental lines, where half-clad men went back and forth with leaf platters and water-goglets. The Subadar–Major, in extreme undress, sat on a chair, as befitted his rank; the Havildar–Major, his nephew, leaning respectfully against the wall. The Regiment was at home and at ease in its own quarters in its own district which takes its name from the great Muhammadan saint Mian Mir, revered by Jehangir and beloved by Guru Har Gobind, sixth of the great Sikh Gurus.

In the first half, the Regimental Chaplain tells the tale of Rutton Singh and Attar Singh, two Sikhs whose family were being persecuted by their mother’s kinfolk. Eventually the persecution gets so severe they take four days leave, steal the revolver of Attar Singh’s Sahib, travel to their village and carry out a massacre of all their mother’s kin. Then they take refuge on the roof of a building in the village and await punishment. When none comes, the two men make all the correct religious rituals – they make shinan – and have their colleagues shoot them in the head. The whole tale is told by Sikhs who are most concerned that the proprieties are observed and that everything is done correctly. We hear no white man’s voice. We see their actions from the point of view of their own people, interpreted through their own tradition.

‘So Attar Singh abandoned his body, as an insect abandons a blade of grass.

After meditating on this tale and the impeccable correctness of the young men’s behaviour, it is the turn of the Subadar–Major to tell a yarn: this concerns the time he was in England, which happened to coincide with the death of King Edward VII (died May 1910). The story concerns four Gurkhas who are called on to attend the body – hence the title, In the presence. They have one hour shifts while tens of thousands of mourners traipse by to pay their respects. Much emphasis is put on their devotion to duty, on details like the fact that, although the Gurkha uniform includes stiff collars, they had to bow their heads lower than the Grenadier Guards with whom they shared the vigil, because the inclination of their heads wasn’t so obvious due to the Guards big hats and the Gurkhas’ small berets.

The tone of Kipling voodoo is introduced because the most difficult aspect of the vigil turned out to be staring at hundreds, then thousands, of disembodied feet trudging by. The vision of these feet, tramp tramp tramping becomes an ordeal for the Guardsmen – who can only bear half an hour of it at a time – and even more so a test of the unflinching devotion to duty of the Gurkhas who insist on putting in the full hour, for ‘the Honour of the Armies of Hind’. The Gurkhas are cared for / in the charge of a white officer who it is emphasised, understood their religious rituals and requirements, Forsyth Sahib, who made sure they got food prepared to their requirements.

Their duty is pushed to the edge when three of them volunteer to transport the vast amount of flowers and bouquets which have been laid at the shrine, to ‘Wanidza’ (Windsor Castle), leaving behind the fourth of their colleagues who puts in a four-hour stint till his eyes are buzzing like a weaver’s shuttle. Thus quietly, with no bloodshed or bugles, duty was done, devotion demonstrated.

When he has finished the story the Regimental Chaplain and the Subadar–Major contentedly smile at good deeds well done. Law. Order. Correct form.

‘We came well and cleanly out of it,’ said the Subadar–Major.
‘Correct! Correct! Correct!’ said the Regimental Chaplain. ‘In an evil age it is good to hear such things, and there is certainly no doubt that this is a very evil age.’

8. Regulus (1917) There are about five strands running through this story which made it, ultimately, quite hard to know whether I’d ‘understood’ it. The setting is the unnamed public school of the ‘Stalky’ stories. Mr King the Latin master is taking the class word by word through an ode of Horace’s which concerns Regulus, the Roman general who preferred to die rather than betray his fatherland, refused the offer of freedom and betrayal and walked nobly towards his torture and death. As I studied Latin myself I found this first part quite interesting and more readily comprehensible than much Kipling.

After the lesson, Mr King is shown in dispute with Mr Hartopp the (short) chemistry teacher, arguing the merits of their respective subjects, King insisting that as well as grammar, Latin teaches:

‘Balance, proportion, perspective — life!’

There is a lot of knowing, facetious banter between the pupils, Stalky, Beetle, Mullins, Vernon, Perowne, Malpass and Winton. The latter releases a mouse in the drawing lesson of Mr Lidgett. there is a complicated discussion between the Headmaster, Mr King and Lidgett – I think what is happening is Winton’s mouse trick must result in him being caned by his prefect ‘Potiphar’ Mullins, but the Head considerately orders him to write out five hundred lines of Virgil, which will delay the inevitable. Mr King drops in to help him. A bunch of boys come in to tease him, until Winton snaps and goes berserk and tries to hurt the teaser till they all sit on him to quell his passion. Thus calmed, he finally goes upstairs to receive his caning (after the narrator has casually described the caning of two smaller boys, aged 12).

One little boy is caned and then Potiphar makes a point of complimenting him on his bearing and the boy goes away grateful. Rather like the Ethiopians in the story ‘Little Foxes’ are grateful for being whipped. Then Potiphar canes Winton, before handing him his football ‘cap’, confirming that he’s got a place in the First Eleven. Not only that, but Mr King collars Winton to announce that he has appointed him the latest sub-prefect. At the very end Stalky is overheard mockingly referring to Winton as ‘Regulus’, on account that he bravely faced up to his punishment. ‘See?’ smiles Mr King. ‘A little of it sticks among the barbarians.’

These were the institutions which trained the men who went out to run the British Empire. Kipling’s school – the basis of all his ‘Stalky’ stories – was specifically set up to train the sons of Army officers themselves destined to go out and staff the Army. What comes over is corporal punishment, Latin and a fierce sense of clannishness reinforced by the facetious schoolboy slang.

9. The Edge of the Evening (1912) Another sequel: in this one we meet again American inventor Laughton O. Zigler in the heart of London, who we last saw in a prisoner of war camp in South Africa during the Boer War (as told in the story ‘The Captive’ in the collection Traffics and Discoveries). Now Zigler is rich and renting the massive country house and estate of a friend – in fact, of the English officer who took custody of him after he and his Boer commando were captured during the war.

Zigler has branched out from developing the artillery he was making in the Boer War story, and is now running a variety of companies producing all sorts of new technologies. He insists on the narrator coming to stay, so their chauffeur-driven car goes to the narrator’s hotel, he collects his bags, and they motor down to the country.

It’s a grand big house which he’s renting off Lord Marshalton: there’s a list of the famous people who have visited, overlooking a race course, with a Temple to Flora, and four footmen who greet them at the portico, carry in their bags, the narrator changes and comes down to a house full of American guests, all poking and prodding the furniture, squinting at the paintings and rummaging through the book cases. Kipling introduces an array of American types over dinner, the pushy young men, the drawling Southern lady who bad mouths Abraham Lincoln, and so on. Henry James would have had a heart attack at the lack of subtlety; it all seems more to me like the amiable satire of P.G. Wodehouse, with another stereotypically unflappable butler – Peters – the brother of Ipps in the earlier story, ‘the Honours of War’.

After dinner Zigler takes the narrator for a walk in the park and tells him about the time he had Lord Lundie the Appeal Court Judge (who appears in the earlier story, ‘The Puzzler’) and Burton–Walen, the editor, Lord Marshalton down to stay and they spent the day playing golf and were making their way back across the park as dark was falling when out of nowhere a biplane landed on the lawn and two flyers get out to fix her. As our foursome approach one of the men turns and fires a revolver at them, narrowly missing Lord Marshalton, so Zigler cracks him round the head with his golf club, while the other man makes a run for it, until tackled and brought down hard to earth.

Our foursome stand back and realise both men are dead, necks broken by golf club and awkward fall. They go through the flyers’ pockets and the cabin of the plane and find plenty of evidence that they are spies, the plane stuffed with aerial photos of English military installations. What makes it weird and very Kipling is that Lord Lundie now holds a kind of impromptu coroner’s court where witnesses are called to describe the events. Some aspect of this is meant to be funny, but it’s also macabre and a bit sadistic at the same time. So many of Kipling’s stories have this disquieting flavour.

They rack their brains how to dispose of the bodies then Zigler has the bright idea of piling them back in the biplane, firing up the engine, with his three accomplices holding it in place, then hanging a weight on the joystick and all letting go – and away the biplane climbs into the sky carrying its corpses south towards the English Channel never to be heard of again.

And with that Zigler proposes to the narrator that they go back inside and rejoin the merry party.

11. The Horse Marines (1910) This is the last of the six stories featuring Royal Navy Petty-Officer Emmanuel Pyecroft and it is another comical, indeed farcical tale. (Although Pyecroft was meant to be a way in to Kipling’s beloved Navy, it is odd that this story, like several of the others, is entirely set on land.) The narrator is down in Portsmouth to collect his motor car which has been recently repaired and is being delivered by sea and driven by his ‘engineer’, Mr Leggatt. He asks why it has such expensive tyres and Leggatt says he better ask Mr Pyecroft so they motor off to find Pyecroft helping out his crotchety uncle in his grocer’s shop. They have a meal together after which Pyecroft tells him the adventure: he and a French sailor on leave, Jules, bump into Leggatt in London and persuade him to give them a lift to Portsmouth. Outside the city they are ambushed by a group of Boy Scouts and their ‘umpire’, a Mr Morshead. He wants to rag his uncle, a Brigadier-General (Army), who is on Whitsun manoeuvres with his brigade somewhere in the Downs. So in Portsmouth they buy a load of fireworks and a rocking horse, then they drive up to the South Downs, to a place between two rival groups of the brigade, set up the rocking horse and fire off all sorts of fireworks. Both ‘sides’ of the brigade see it and think the other is taking the mickey out of them, which leads to a massive pitched battle using a vast pile of manglewurzels as ammunition.

Pyecroft’s style, his slang, his idiolect, is almost completely impenetrable, so that I found the story almost impossible to follow. It was only reading the Kipling Society’s notes which helped me understand what actually happened in the story.

12. ‘My Son’s Wife’ (1913) A satire on Frankwell Midmore, a complacent radical of ‘the Immoderate Left’, who enjoys the radical lifestyle i.e. lots of dining, pontificating, endless meetings and enjoyable affairs also known as ‘Experiments in Social Relations’. He inherits a house from a widowed aunt and land in the country (sounding suspiciously like the Sussex countryside so lavishly described in the Puck books) at the same time as his latest Experiment on Social relations dumps him and, after initially thinking he’ll ruthlessly sell it all off and dispossess the shabby peasant who rents a rundown barn on his land, Frankwell… collapses in the house of the old lady who lives in the house, the dead aunt’s maid, Rhoda Dolbie. She puts him to bed and over the next few days feeds him and nurses him back to health, explains more about old Mr Sidney the peasant who lives with his fourth woman, out of wedlock, and about mad Jimmy the idiot boy, who’ll run any errand as long as it’s not across water – that gives him ‘is fits, like.

She tells him the ruts in the drive are from the local Hunt cantering past, that the dam on the book needs fixing, old Mr Sidney wants a new pig-pound and so on. Recovering over a week or so, Kipling shows in a hundred little details, how Frankwell’s Immoderate Left soul slowly becomes intrigued by the utterly alien rural community he’s stumbled into, he reads about it, listens more to old Miss Dolbie’s stories and advice. And slowly slowly learns to value country ways, the fox hunting, with the commanding Master of the Hunt and the attractive young Miss Sperrit, always humming and singing, the brook that needs fixing, old Mr Sidney’s obstinate humour – and slowly comes to despise the glib, fancy, superficial ‘values’ of his London set.

They all agreed, with an eye over his shoulder for the next comer, that he was a different man; but when they asked him for the symptoms of nervous strain, and led him all through their own, he realised he had lost much of his old skill in lying. His three months’ absence, too, had put him hopelessly behind the London field. The movements, the allusions, the slang of the game had changed. The couples had rearranged themselves or were re-crystallizing in fresh triangles, whereby he put his foot in it badly.

Briefly, the brook that bisects Frankwell’s property floods after days of heavy rain, and Frankwell finds himself intimately involved in every aspect of it, from rescuing Mr Sidney’s live-in lover, and his pig, to handling Jimmy gone mad with fear, to watching up late with Rhoda and then, when he’s investigating the damage the next day, he’s joined by Miss Sperrit, the attractive young belle of the local Hunt, and all of a sudden, when they are knocked off their feet by Mr Sidney’s squealing pig running past them in a panic and both land in the mud – they realise they are in love.

As starkly as the Liberal anti-Imperialists are just ignorant of what they’re discussing, and don’t understand the subtle webs of culture, tradition, loyalty and devotion which bind together Sahibs and native peoples, webs they would rip apart with their facile talk of ‘democracy’ and ‘independence’ – so the superficial ‘radicals’, the urban metropolitan elite, just don’t understand the honesty,frankness, deep-rootedness, faithfulness, love of land and love of country, self respect and respect for others, which rural life encourages.

All this and it manages to be a love story as well, quite a sweet and fetching love story.

13. The Vortex (August 1914) A comic sequel to the story ‘The Puzzler’ in Actions and Reactions. The narrator once again plays host to the Hon. A.M. Penfentenyou, ‘Premier in all but name of one of Our great and growing Dominions’, who has brought with him the modern-thinking Mr Lingnam who has all sorts of clever theories about converting the British Empire into a loose federation of Dominions. I think this is an idea Kipling loathed and so Lingnam is created to be the butt of all sorts of satire. But it turns out to be just as simple a farce as ‘The Puzzler’, for Lingnam insists on driving them all in a hired car to the nearest village, for a pint of local beer and a picnic, when he is in collision with a cyclist who was carrying what turn out to be four full bee hives. In a few seconds the charming high street of the little village the railways station beneath the bridge and the green with the funfair are turned into a war zone as swarms of bees go on the rampage, Lingnam throws himself into the village pond, Penfentenyou barges into the nearest house then locks the door and the narrator covers himself with all available rugs, tucks his trousers into his socks and is reduced to tears of helpless mirth at the spectacle around him. ‘Traditional Sussex village reduced to chaos by mishap with bees’. I smiled all the way through it.

14. ‘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.

15.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.

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

Other Kipling reviews

Strange Tales by Rudyard Kipling (2006)

One of several repackagings of Kipling short stories by the bargain reprint house, Wordsworth Editions, this one is a selection of horror or ghost stories, with a brisk introduction by David Stuart Davies, and containing:

The Mark of the Beast (1890) In India, some chaps get drunk on New Year’s Eve and one of them, Fleete, blind drunk, rushes into a temple they’re passing and stubs out his cigar on the forehead of a statue of Hanuman the Monkey God. A leprous priest of the god appears from nowhere and grapples with the drunk, biting him on the breast. Almost immediately Fleete falls ill with a fever. The following day he asks for raw chops as the mark on his chest grows. The narrator and his friend, the policeman Strickland, become concerned. They keep Fleete at Strickland’s house and within days he is howling like a wolf and grovelling in the dirt. At this stage I was speculating that they’d either find a cure for the way Fleete appears to be becoming a werewolf, or that Fleete turns completely wolf and has to be hunted down and shot with a silver bullet!

Neither. Instead, Strickland and the narrator hear the leper priest (in a horrible detail, the leper is incapable of speaking – he has only a ‘slab’ for a face – and can only make a horrible mewing noise) prowling round outside the house. So they nip out and grab him, bring him inside and then – in a sequence that is actually far worse than the werewolf/possession description – they torture the leper priest by tying him to a bedstead and applying red-hot gun barrels heated in a fire.

Eventually, unable to bear the torture any longer, the priest is released, staggers over the feverish Fleete and simply touches him on the chest and the curse is lifted – simple as that. Strickland and the narrator release the priest, who goes off without a sound, not even mewing. Within a few hours Fleete has had a bath and is restored to jolly good humour, imagining he’s been on a long drunk. Only Strickland and the narrator know – not only what was happening to Fleete but, what they both know is worse, that they have behaved immorally enough to be dismissed from the Service.

This is a harsh initiation into the sadism and cruelty which lurks beneath the surface and sometimes is just on the surface, of so much of Kipling’s early writing.

The Return of Imray (1891) Another story collected in Plain Tales From the Hills, told by the same narrator and also featuring Strickland from the Police, as above. A man called Imray disappears and, after a while, Strickland rents his bungalow. The narrator comes to stay. It rains and Kipling describes India in the casually knowledgeable way he did in scores of stories and poems, making the place his imaginative fiefdom for generations of readers.

The heat of the summer had broken up and turned to the warm damp of the rains. There was no motion in the heated air, but the rain fell like ramrods on the earth, and flung up a blue mist when it splashed back. The bamboos, and the custard-apples, the poinsettias, and the mango-trees in the garden stood still while the warm water lashed through them, and the frogs began to sing among the aloe hedges.

But Strickland’s dog, Tietjens, refuses to enter the bedroom, preferring to be outside in the rain. Our chaps ponder this odd behaviour. Then they notice some snakes’ tails dangling through the gap between the fabric ceiling and the rafters in the bedroom. Strickland pulls that part of the ceiling away to reach the snakes and discovers – the mummified of Imray carefully hidden among the rafters! It emerges that Imray’s servant, who Strickland has inherited – Bahadur Khan – murdered and hid his master because Imray patted his son on the head and soon after his son sickened and died.

There is a harshness in the story itself – but even in details it is repellent. Here, as in so many other places, Kipling goes out of his way to be offensive to women.

If a mere wife had wished to sleep out of doors in that pelting rain it would not have mattered; but Tietjens was a dog, and therefore the better animal.

Maybe he thought this was funny, maybe he was trying to fit in with the boys, maybe he thought this was ‘manly’ talk. But this kind of throwaway insult damages his stories not because it’s offensive (though it is offensive) as that it’s just crude, and it tends to bring out the crudeness of the rest of the narrative with it.

The Phantom Rickshaw (1889) First person narrative (most of them are) told by Theobald Jack Pansay who had a ship-board romance with Agnes Keith-Wessington, wife of another officer in the service, but then breaks it off in order to concentrate on his fiancee, Kitty. Agnes, however, refuses to accept the end of the affair and plagues Pansay, following him everywhere, turning up at the most embarrassing junctures in her yellow-panelled rickshaw.

Pansay’s (emotional) brutality makes her pine away and die of a broken heart, not that he cares much. But as he squires pretty Kitty around Simla – the rest town for British officers in northern India – to his horror, the rickshaw and dead Agnes appear again and again, parked across the road, blocking his path when they’re out riding, and everywhere Pansay hears the ghost’s pitiful voice declaring it’s all some ‘hideous mistake’.

When he overcomes his horror enough to try talking to the ‘ghost’, his friends think he’s talking into empty air and is drunk or going mad. Kitty breaks off the engagement with a man who’s become the laughing stock of the town. Pansay’s life falls to pieces and the final section of the text is journal entries in which the narrator describes himself waiting resignedly for his own inevitable death.

Pity me, at least on the score of my ‘delusion’, for I know you will never believe what I have written here. Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death by the Powers of Darkness I am that man.
In justice, too, pity her. For as surely as ever woman was killed by man, I killed Mrs. Wessington. And the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me.

The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes (1885) Another first-person narrative, this time told by a young officer in India who takes his horse, Pornic, for an impetuous ride and trips, stumbles and falls down a steep sandy slope into a bizarre village of the undead.

Out of the holes they have excavated into the side of the sandy slope shuffle the nightmareish inhabitants. They were all Hindus, who were thought to be dead, whose bodies were lovingly prepared by their relatives to be burned and cremated, but then (as sometimes happens) stirred with life and revived. Since their religion had ceremoniously moved them on beyond this world they were not allowed to return to normal life but consigned to this open air prison for the living dead, unable to escape up the high, almost vertical, sand sides of the enclave.

Jukes sees that the settlement is open to the river on one side but when he tries to wade out into it, rifle shots are fired from a boat which guards that exit. Even at night, when the boat goes away, the sandy spits in the river turn out to be treacherous quicksand, impossible to escape.

This is all bizarre enough, but the story turns on the relationship between Jukes and a ‘native’ who shows him the ropes, Gunga Dass. Dass is by turns abjectly servile, until his knowledge of the village of the undead reverses the tables and he lords it over Jukes – until the latter restores the good order of the Empire by giving him a good kicking.

He threw himself down on the ground and clasped my ankles. But I had my doubts about Gunga Dass’s benevolence, and kicked him off as he lay protesting… Brahmin or no Brahmin, by my soul and my father’s soul, in you go!” I said, and, seizing him by the shoulders, I crammed his head into the mouth of the burrow, kicked the rest of him in, and, sitting down, covered my face with my hands.

Jukes discovers that another white man had fallen into the settlement and had been working out a route across the quicksand, a little every night, when Dass treacherously shot him dead with his own revolver. Jukes establishes that the white man had made a map of sorts, and is preparing to try it out that night, after the gun boat leaves, when Dass – knowing his plan – hits him over the head, knocking him unconscious. When Jukes comes to, he groggily hears his loyal servant, Dunnoo, his dog-boy, calling over the lip of the sand. Dunnoo had trailed Juke’s horse’s tracks to the Village of the Dead and now throws down a rope, allowing Juke to escape in a flash. Did Dass escape using the map? The narrator and reader never find out.

The strangeness of the subject should dominate but is tainted or even superseded by the casual brutality of the narrator and his assumption that it is fine for a white man to kick an Indian into obedience.

‘They’ (1904) The unnamed narrator is driving his car round Sussex when he comes across a mysteriously beautiful and quiet country house, where he spies children playing amid the landscaped gardens, before meeting the owner, an elegant beautiful woman who is quite blind. It takes several visits and repeated hints from the remote butler, before the penny drops, and the narrator realises the elusive children are ghosts – a realisation passed to him when one of the children kisses his palm in a way he realises, with a jolt, only his dead daughter did. A major feature of Kipling’s fiction is its tendency to be clipped and elliptical. Thus nowhere in the story does it say it was the kiss of the narrator’s child; I only learned this crucial fact from the Kipling Society website’s excellent notes on the story.

Atmosphere and description. Here is the narrator in his car:

As I reached the crest of the Downs I felt the soft air change, saw it glaze under the sun; and, looking down at the sea, in that instant beheld the blue of the Channel turn through polished silver and dulled steel to dingy pewter. A laden collier hugging the coast steered outward for deeper water and, across copper-coloured haze, I saw sails rise one by one on the anchored fishing-fleet. In a deep dene behind me an eddy of sudden wind drummed through sheltered oaks, and spun aloft the first day sample of autumn leaves. When I reached the beach road the sea-fog fumed over the brickfields, and the tide was telling all the groins of the gale beyond Ushant. In less than an hour summer England vanished in chill grey. We were again the shut island of the North, all the ships of the world bellowing at our perilous gates; and between their outcries ran the piping of bewildered gulls. My cap dripped moisture, the folds of the rug held it in pools or sluiced it away in runnels, and the salt-rime stuck to my lips.

In The Same Boat (1911) London in the Edwardian era. Conroy is addicted to najdolene pills to manage a recurring nightmare of being aboard ship and hearing men scream in the engine room and stark terror as a man screams in his face this ship is going down and all is lost. His suave specialist Dr Gilbert introduces him to a fellow patient, the statuesque beautiful Miss Henschil whose similar terror is a vision of men with faces covered in mildew pursuing her across a beach. Over a series of train excursions from London they discuss their symptoms and, by talking, manage to control them, slowly giving up the pills. The denouement comes when Miss Henschil’s nurse, dumpy freckly Miss Blabey, reveals that she spoke with Miss H’s mother who revealed that the faceless men incident actually happened – she visited a leper colony in India when pregnant with Miss H, and the leprous men followed her. This revelation makes the shadow pass from her mind, she is suddenly whole and restored. And when Conroy visits his mother in Hereford, she also confirms that his night terror – which he’d never told her about – was an actual incident which happened to her when she was pregnant and on board a ship returning from India in 1885, when two stokers were scalded by steam and a man thought he’d play a cruel joke on her by telling her the ship was going down. She quickly realised it was a ‘joke’ and forgot about it – but in both cases the fright was obviously so intense that, somehow, it penetrated the souls of the little foetuses in their mothers’ wombs.

Interesting as the premise for a horror story; and interesting insight into drug addiction in the Edwardian era.

The Dog Hervey (1914) Set in cosy, rural Sussex among middle-class families with big houses and servants, typified by Mrs Godfrey and her daughter Milly. The narrator’s friend, Attley, owns a dog who’s given birth to puppies, and so he invites his circle round to choose ones to adopt. A manky one with a squint is chosen by a ‘dark, sallow-skinned, slack-mouthed girl’, Miss Sichliffe. After a few weeks Attley turns up with the dog, saying it’s come down sick and Miss Sichcliffe doesn’t know how to look after it, so can the narrator look after it please? He does – but finds the dog eerie and uncanny. Now named Hervey, this clumsy squinting dog spends all its time looking at him, unnervingly.

A few weeks later, the narrator gets a call that his friends, Mrs Godfrey and Milly, have been taken sick on Madeira. He takes a ship there and a lot of time passes as he and Attley nurse the ladies back to health. On the island they fall in with a wealthy yacht-owner named Shend. Eventually they all ship back to Blighty on a commercial steamer. During the voyage Shend confesses to the narrator that he is an alcoholic, coming to him one night on the verge of delirium tremens. The narrator is sympathetic, listening to poor Shend’s account of his condition, keeping him talking, and eventually Shend confesses that one of his hallucinations is of a funny squint-eyed dog. Really? Can is be of Hervey? How?

The ship docks and the narrator’s loyal chauffeur is there to collect him in his fine motor (Kipling loved motor cars). They drive back through Sussex and stop at the gate of Miss Sichcliffe’s house, where she happens to be outside gardening. Young Shend alights and goes to speak to her. They immediately get on well and turn towards the house together. The dog Hervey is there, skulking, and needs little encouragement to jump into the narrator’s car and be driven home, there to rejoin the narrator’s other dog, Malachi.

I read this story fairly carefully and still don’t understand what it was ‘about’.

The House Surgeon (1909) On an ocean voyage the narrator gets talking to L. Maxwell M’Leod who tells him his story. He recently bought a big old house – Holmescroft – in the Home Counties off the three Moultrie sisters through their lawyer, Baxter, but he has come to believe the house is cursed or haunted.

The narrator is sceptical so, once they’ve docked in England, M’Leod invites him over for a weekend. No sooner is the narrator inside the building than he experiences the extraordinary sense of depression, guilt and despair it throws over everyone who inhabits it.

Intrigued and disturbed, the narrator goes off to visit the lawyer, Baxter, who sold it to M’Leod. He inveigles his way into Baxter’s favour by taking up golf (which he detests) under Baxter’s tutelage and eventually being invited to a health spa, along with the spinster sisters in question, the Moultrie sisters.

What emerges is that only two of the three sisters are now alive – Miss Elizabeth and Miss Mary. The youngest, Miss Agnes, died when they owned Holmescroft. She was found on the path beneath an open first floor window. Now:

a) The narrator himself had stayed in that very room a few weeks earlier, and had noticed that the catch to the window was very close to the floor and stiff, so that in forcing it up and open he very nearly fell out.

b) At this spa there is a dramatic scene when Miss Mary shrieks for help and Baxter and the narrator burst into the sisters’ bedroom to find Miss Mary, her hand and throat covered with blood, wrestling with the open window while her sister grips her knees to stop her throwing herself to her death! Miss Elizabeth claims her sister had slashed her throat and was trying to throw herself out of the window. But after the hysterical women have been calmed down, it emerges that Miss Mary had done no such thing, but had been struggling with the stiff catchment of the window with such force that, when it finally gave, her wrist went through a pane and she accidentally cut herself.

Suddenly all four of them realise that this is what must have happened to their sister, Agnes, at Holmescroft. She had been struggling with the wretched window, yanked it open and fallen to her death by accident. Her spirit has been haunting the wretched house and trying to explain what really happened. This accounts for the terrible sense of foreboding, depression and above all, that something unspeakable is trying to tell you something, that afflicts M’Leod’s family and the narrator and anybody else who enters the building.

The narrator phones the M’Leod family and tells them to vacate the old house while he brings the two spinster sisters over, which they do. The sisters go up to the fatal bedroom (while the narrator and Baxter wait downstairs) and have some kind of mysterious communion with their dead sibling. When they return they have, somehow, spoken to the spirit of their sister, they have accepted that her death was an accident, the terrible secret the house needed to speak has been spoken, and now, magically, Holmescroft is a happy, well-lit, beautiful house again.

The M’Leod family are delighted, and romp through their beautiful and now-released home, and happy young Miss M’Leod sings an old English air.

The name of the story comes from the fact that on the night of the panic at the spa when they think Miss Elizabeth is trying to kill herself, the narrator is introduced as the hospital doctor (to spare the embarrassment of Baxter having to explain that he’s in fact just an acquaintance who he’s told the family secrets); and has another ironic meaning by the end of the story, when the narrator emerges as the hero of the hour who discovered the secret of Holmescroft’s haunting and managed to exorcise it. Early on the narrator says he is no Sherlock Holmes and this draws our attention to the Holmes in the name of the house, Holmescroft.

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 died recently, but Kipling is such a savage editor of his own works that the entire story has been cut.

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 teatable, and her sick leg propped on a stool…

Story: Now Mrs Ashcroft reveals that she was desperately in love with Harry Mockler, Bert Mockler’s son. It was a fierce passion when she came down from London to the area to work. She went to the lengths of scalding her arm to delay her return. Then they arranged 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 he tired of her and took to other women.

Then a new element enters the text: their charwoman’s fiddle girl — Sophy Ellis. When Mrs Ashcroft has one of her severe headaches, the 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 says her wish through the letter box to the ‘token’, or demon, within. And – miraculously – Mrs Ashcroft’s headache disappears because Sophy has taken it for her. Stuff and nonsense, the older woman cries, when the girl tries to explain.

But when, later, Mrs Ashcroft bumps into Harry in the street, still besotted with him (though he shamefacedly avoids acknowledging her) she notices that he is looking very ill, and learns that he’s been in hospital having cut his foot badly with a spade and got infected.

So, after much soul-searching, Mrs Ashcroft nerves herself to go to the ‘wish house’, furtively and embarrassed. She knocks and hears an eerie shuffling sound coming closer, then 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.’

She learns soon afterwards that Harry is healed and getting on with his womanising while she, for her part, develops a nasty ulcer on her shin which she’s had ever since. And that’s it. As so often in Kipling the eerie, ghostly, supernatural element is strangely downbeat, undramatic, almost mundane.

Now, as she talks to her friend, Mrs Ashcroft knows she is dying. And Mrs Fettley, for her part, confesses that she’s going blind. It is a picture of two afflicted old women at the end of their lives. In the final paragraphs, Mrs Ashcroft needs reassuring by her friend 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 a tremendous advance in Kipling’s art from the heartless casual misogyny of his early tales. He shows a moving imaginative sympathy with physical pain and with a certain kind of muted, dignified psychological suffering. And this is just one of many late tales which reach out and depict older women with a tremendous vividness and sympathy.

Kipling Society notes

A Matter of Fact (1892) Three journalists – Keller, Zuyland and the narrator – on a steamer from South Africa to England, the Rathmines, witness a wonder at sea – first a tsunami sends a vast wave of water past them, immediately they are caught in a fog and narrowly miss other boats sent hurtling by the wave but then – the fog clears and they see a never-before-observed vast leviathan of the deep, badly injured (presumably from some underwater cataclysm) break the surface and howl and moan, with great blind eyes and an appalling face surrounded by feelers – and then its female mate also surface and swim round it keening until the male dies and sinks and the female, after last haunting wails, itself disappears.

The stunned newspapermen fall to writing their accounts of this historic event but, in this the second part of the story, as they approach Southampton, dock and take the train amid the snug suburban villas and arrive in smoky London with its ancient institutions, they realise it’s hopeless: nobody will believe them; such a miracle just won’t be believed in this staid suburban country. The American holds out the longest but when he takes the story to the Times, is thrown out as a prankster. And over lunch hears the narrator saying the British public would never accept the truth of such a matter – which is why he’s going to dress it up as a fiction and sell it as a short story – the one we’re reading now!

The vision of the tsunami, the monster in the fog, the overturned steamer they pass and then the two creatures is as vivid a piece of science fantasy as anything in H.G. Wells or Conan Doyle. The second half insofar as it takes the mickey out of the American, over-awed by British civilisation, feels cheap, but on another level, also satirises the staid, unimaginative English, who can only accept the out-of-the-ordinary if sold as fiction, and so, to some extent, satirises the author himself and his trade.

This, I think, is a good example of Kipling’s weakness: there is a powerful central vision but it is weakened by cheap and superficial jibes; his artistry cannot fully support or elaborate the power of the vision – the strength of his imaginative daemon is so often let down by the shallowness of his sensibility. This is why he is a better poet than prose writer, poems being more clipped and focused.

Atmosphere and description:

The sea was as smooth as a duck-pond, except for a regular oily swell. As I looked over the side to see where it might be following us from, the sun rose in a perfectly clear sky and struck the water with its light so sharply that it seemed as though the sea should clang like a burnished gong. The wake of the screw and the little white streak cut by the log-line hanging over the stern were the only marks on the water as far as eye could reach.

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

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.

‘At The End of The Passage’ (1890) Four men in the service of the British Empire in India – a doctor, a civil servant, a surveyor, and an engineer, Hummil. Each week they meet up at Hummil’s station to play cards and eat the horrible food which is all that’s available. It is the summer and blisteringly hot on the plains of northern India, like living in an oven, with nothing to do, no ice, horrible food, barely any drinks. Although there’s a plot of sorts, really this is an evocation of the terrible isolation and mental strain suffered by men given huge responsibilities in an alien and inhospitable land.

They were lonely folk who understood the dread meaning of loneliness. They were all under thirty years of age — which is too soon for any man to possess that knowledge.

Their conversation is about colleagues who’ve died of disease, for example as a result of the continual cholera epidemics, have become lonely alcoholics, or have simply killed themselves – a fairly common occurrence. The doctor, Spurstow, realises their host, Hummil, is at the end of his tether. He is tetchy with his guests and when the other two leave, Spurstow volunteers to stay and Hummil breaks down completely and confesses that he hasn’t slept for days and days, and begs for sleeping pills. Spurstow realises that Hummil has put a spur in his bed to stop himself drifting into the shallow sleep of nightmares. Spurstow disables Hummil’s guns and gives him sleeping draughts.

When the three rendezvous at Hummil’s a week later none of them are surprised to find him dead in his bed. But he didn’t kill himself. In a strange technical twist, Spurstow uses a Kodak camera to take a photograph of the dead man’s eyes and then, minutes after he’s gone into a darkened room to develop the images, the others hear the sound of smashing and breaking. ‘It was impossible,’ he repeats to the others, ‘impossible’. Spurstow obviously saw images of unspeakable horror imprinted on the dead man’s retinas.

The thrust of all these early India stories is the immense sacrifice made by the white men who ran the Empire, in the teeth of resentful ungrateful natives and despite concerted opposition from ignorant Liberals and politicians back home. Their strength is the powerful evocations of India in all its moods:

There was no further speech for a long time. The hot wind whistled without, and the dry trees sobbed. Presently the daily train, winking brass, burnished steel, and spouting steam, pulled up panting in the intense glare.

And the sense of men at the very limits of endurance is powerfully present and, on a human level, is persuasive. But their weakness is their crudity and the bitter sarcasm and contempt for anyone who opposes his Imperial views which run through them like cheap fabric. And, almost needless to say, the obvious fact that it depicts this vast country overwhelmingly from the point of view of the colonial masters, whose interactions with the native inhabitants all too often are limited to kicking and cursing.

The Bisara of Pooree (1887) Very short story about a tiny magic charm in the shape of a carved fish; whoever owns it can make people fall in love with them. A disreputable man named Pack overhears two officers discussing the charm, one – Churton – has come into possession of it, the other – The Man Who Knows – explains its magic powers. Pack overhears all this, breaks into Churton’s house, steals the Bisara and uses it to magic the lovely Miss Hollis in love with him. Churton is outraged and steals the charm back – very satisfactorily watches Miss Hollis fall out with the reptile Pack, then hands the charm on The Man Who Knows who ties it to the bridle of a native pony and watches it being ridden off into the distance. Although very short, this text packs in loads of facts and attitudes about British India, about the social structure and customs of the British in Simla, as well as the weirdness of the native religions and superstitions, all told with a droll ironic tone.

The Lost Legion (1892) Told as if to a journalist (as Kipling indeed was): officers on a cavalry night manoeuvre into the foothills of Afghanistan to arrest a persistent bandit leader, Gulla Kutta Mullah, keep hearing the chinking of cavalry behind them; 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. Because down in the valley they 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 return to haunt and paralyse the Afghans allowing 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.

The Dream of Duncan Parrenness (1884) Kipling was only 19, maybe 18, when he wrote this pastiche of an 18th century East Indian administrator, returning extremely drunk from a party at the office of Warren Hasting (first Governor-General of British India, until 1785) to be confronted by the ghost of himself in the future,

and I, Duncan Parrenness, who was afraid of no man, was taken with a more deadly terror than I hold it has ever been the lot of mortal man to know. For I saw that his face was my very own, but marked and lined and scarred with the furrows of disease and much evil living.

The ghost of his future self makes the drunk and stunned young man an offer to remove everything that will hinder him in his future career: and, in three grand moments, the apparition says:

Give me your trust in men
Give me your trust in women
Give me your boy’s soul and conscience

and at each vow the apparition puts his hand over Parrenness’s heart, which he feels growing colder and harder. And finally, in return for abandoning all his principles, the apparition puts into his hand – a little piece of dry bread. This has the power and the three-ness of a good folk story; combined with the Biblical strangeness and pregnancy of the piece of bread. No wonder Kipling made such an impression at such an early age, he had full command of his strange, haunting idiom so young.

The Tomb of His Ancestors (1897) A hymn to the dedication and hard work of a typical English family, the Chinns, whose menfolk have served in India for generations, since 1799.

It was slow, unseen work, of the sort that is being done all over India today; and though John Chinn’s only reward came, as I have said, in the shape of a grave at Government expense, the little people of the hills never forgot him.

Young John Chinn takes up a post with the ‘Wuddars’, a regiment made up of men from the Bhil tribe – ‘wild men, furtive, shy, full of untold superstitions’ – who worshiped and revered his father Lionel and his father, John. The text takes a long time explaining the good work the white man did, first to win the trust of a tribe inclined to be savage and murderous, then to discipline them and bring them The Law, and eventually Pride in the native Regiment which they formed and served in.

The arrival of young Chinn back for England to join his Wuddars allows Kipling na orgy of lachrymose sentimentality as the young man remembers the Bhil phrases he used in his boyhood, is reunited with his loyal Bhil nurse and faithful Bhil retainer etc and the tears flood into his eyes at each step.

The man was at his feet a second time. ‘He [Chinn] has not forgotten. He remembers his own people as his father remembered. Now can I die. But first I will live and show the Sahib how to kill tigers. That that yonder is my nephew. If he is not a good servant, beat him and send him to me, and I will surely kill him, for now the Sahib is with his own people.’

This old man, Bukta, takes Chinn out for his first tiger shoot which Chinn insists on doing the Bhil way i.e. on foot. Bukta vets reports of tigers until he hears of a monster, ten foot long and virile, they stalk it, and Chinn shoots it through the shoulder at fifteen paces, like a man. That night he is the centre of a native feast or orgy, with lots of strong drink, gifts of flowers from grateful natives and – it is hinted – native women. These treks among the people teach him their ways and customs, and give him authority. Bukta encourages him to dispense the Law to ‘his’ people; his people, for their part, believe his is a demi-god, the reincarnation of his ancestors, even down to the tell-tale Chinn birthmark on his shoulder.

The actual ‘story’ only kicks in half way through the text with all is explanatory apparatus. Rumour comes that the Bhils of the Satpura Mountains have been seeing a vision of old John Chinn riding a tiger in the moonlight. The wise Colonel of the regiment says this kind of thing always prefigures trouble. And sure enough, word then comes that the Satpura Bhils have taken prisoner a Hindu doctor sent to innoculate them against smallpox. So young John Chinn is sent, with the faithful Bukta, to defuse the situation, which he does, masterfully.

But the Bhils are still scared of the night tiger they see his ancestor riding. So, ‘the Deuce take it’, some terrified locals take young John and faithful Bukta to the cave of the tiger and there is an eerie powerful moment when it emerges and stares directly at our hero – who promptly shoots him, leaving the tiger enough breath to bound up to the tomb of his ancestor, John the first, and there expire. Thus the superstitious Bhils are freed from their visions, and vaccinated, and confirmed in their awe of Chinn Sahib.

I suppose a modern reader ought to be offended and outraged that the ‘natives’ are referred to as children throughout, naughty children, good children, embarrassed children, but always children who must be managed and controlled by the White grown-ups.

The officers talked to their soldiers in a tongue not two hundred white folk in India understood; and the men were their children, all drawn from the Bhils, who are, perhaps, the strangest of the many strange races in India.

The least excitement would stampede them, plundering, at random, and now and then killing; but if they were handled discreetly they grieved like children, and promised never to do it again.

‘The Bhils are my children. I have said it many times.’
‘Ay. We be thy children,’ said Bukta.

‘We are the thieves of Mahadeo,’ said the Bhils, simply. ‘It is our fate, and we were frightened. When we are frightened we always steal.’ Simply and directly as children, they gave in the tale of the plunder…

It is hard for children and savages to behave reverently at all times to the idols of their make-belief; and they had frolicked excessively with Jan Chinn.

A rhetoric which, of course, justifies Imperial rule over India by a wise and ‘paternal Government’ (and, incidentally, justifies male rule over the memsahibs). But it is so entirely a quintessence of its time and place, that I can’t see the point of arguing with a text like this, but a) admiring its craft and rhetoric, on its own terms b) pondering the complexity of its relationship with the power structures of its day.

By Word of Mouth (1887) A very short story from Plain Tales From The Hills, in which the doctor mentioned in some of the other stories, Dumoise, marries a meek wife, who promptly dies of cholera. He buries her, then goes for a break in a hill resort, but has barely unpacked his bags before his servant comes running in panic fear, saying he has just seen the dead memsahib walking below, who told him to tell Dumoise that she will see him next month in Nuddea (in Bengal, on the other side of India from the Punjab where Dumoise is based).

Dumoise has barely arrived back at his station before a telegram comes ordering him to Nuddea to help deal with a massive cholera epidemic. He shows the telegram to his assistant who tries to stop him going, saying it is a death sentence, but Dumoise doesn’t care, he knows his fate, he packs and goes and is soon himself dead and reunited with his wife.

There isn’t much suspense in the story; it is really just another example of Kipling’s early vein of ramming home again and again and again the cost to the White Man of running Imperial India and the bloody ingratitude of the lazy sneaky natives and ignorant Liberals back home.

My Own True Ghost Story (1888) The narrator devotes pages and pages to showing off his in-depth knowledge of India and its temporary accommodation for Imperial officers, the dreaded dâk-bungalow, along with a breezy expertise about Indian ghosts.

There are, in this land, ghosts who take the form of fat, cold, pobby corpses, and hide in trees near the roadside till a traveler passes. Then they drop upon his neck and remain. There are also terrible ghosts of women who have died in child-bed. These wander along the pathways at dusk, or hide in the crops near a village, and call seductively. But to answer their call is death in this world and the next. Their feet are turned backward that all sober men may recognize them. There are ghosts of little children who have been thrown into wells. These haunt well curbs and the fringes of jungles, and wail under the stars, or catch women by the wrist and beg to be taken up and carried. These and the corpse ghosts, however, are only vernacular articles and do not attack Sahibs. No native ghost has yet been authentically reported to have frightened an Englishman; but many English ghosts have scared the life out of both white and black.

After all this build-up it is a comically debunking story. In the depths of the night the narrator is convinced he can hear billiards being played in the room next door, though it is a basic bed room just like his. Next morning the servant says it used to be a billiard room thirty years ago when the white men were building the local railway, which puts the narrator into mortal terror.

But at the end of the story he walks into the ‘haunted’ bedroom and sees the loose curtains banging against the windows to produce the sound of billiard balls clacking. What a fool!

Men on the edge of a nervous breakdown

The suppressed violence and sadism which stand out in Kipling’s early stories – especially marring the stories which make up Stalky and Co – and his vicious asides about niggers and natives, his contempt for memsahibs and women – these all make Kipling’s stories hard for anyone of a sensitive nature to read.

Similarly, there is a continuous thread of hysteria, of depression, guilt, mental torment and countless references to horrors of the mind, which create a claustrophobic and sometimes unbearable atmosphere of stress and despair.

Nominally these are ghost stories or tales of the uncanny – but the cumulative impression they give is of an array of male characters just about managing to hang on to their sanity in situations of unbearable strain and torment.

Oh, Spurstow, for pity’s sake give me something that will put me asleep — sound asleep — if it’s only for six hours!’ He sprang up, trembling from head to foot. ‘I haven’t been able to sleep naturally for days, and I can’t stand it! — I can’t stand it!’ (At the End of the Passage)

About half-way through, 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. (A Madonna of the Trenches)

I moved toward the bed, every nerve already aching with the foreknowledge of the pain that was to be dealt it, and sat down, while my amazed and angry soul dropped, gulf by gulf, into that horror of great darkness which is spoken of in the Bible, and which, as auctioneers say, must be experienced to be appreciated. Despair upon despair, misery upon misery, fear after fear, each causing their distinct and separate woe, packed in upon me for an unrecorded length of time… (The House Surgeon)

The man was beyond any expression of terror. He lay and quaked, grunting. When Halley took the sword-hilt from between his teeth, he was still inarticulate, but clung to Halley’s arm, feeling it from elbow to wrist. ‘The Rissala! The dead Rissala!’ he gasped. ‘It is down there!’ (The Lost Legion)

Do you know what fear is? Not ordinary fear of insult, injury or death, but abject, quivering dread of something that you cannot see — fear that dries the inside of the mouth and half of the throat — fear that makes you sweat on the palms of the hands, and gulp in order to keep the uvula at work? (My Own True Ghost Story)

All this makes the moments of gentleness stand out all the more – in a way the eeriest moments are when one of Kipling’s narrators sounds like a normal, sensitive, empathetic human being, for example in the dream-like sweetness of ‘They’, in the rare tone of emotional candour signalled by the narrator’s respect for the blind lady of the house.

And, out of hundreds and hundreds of ‘moments’ and ‘scenes’ in these densely packed stories, one which endures for me is the gentleness of the doctor and the calm understanding tone of the narrator when they have to deal with the ex-soldier right on the verge of hysteria in A Madonna of The Trenches. It is a cliché but it feels like the experience of the Great War, the loss of his only son, Jack, and the extensive work Kipling did writing a history of his son’s regiment and thus poring over countless diaries and letters, have really chastened him, given the old brute a late-flowering gentleness and sympathy which is eerily moving.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged ‘Swept and Garnished’

War Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling (1990)

Imperial Frontiers

The Boer War

The Great War

1. The Imperial Frontiers

2. The Boer War (1899-1902)

3. The Great War

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A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (1917)

Introduction

This collection

The stories

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Strange Tales by Rudyard Kipling (2006)

Men on the edge of a nervous breakdown

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged ‘Swept and Garnished’

War Stories and Poems by Rudyard Kipling (1990)

Imperial Frontiers

The Boer War

The Great War

1. The Imperial Frontiers

2. The Boer War (1899-1902)

3. The Great War

Related links

Other Kipling reviews

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A Diversity of Creatures by Rudyard Kipling (1917)

Introduction

This collection

The stories

Related links

Other Kipling reviews

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Like this:

Strange Tales by Rudyard Kipling (2006)

Men on the edge of a nervous breakdown

Related links

Other Kipling reviews

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