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from dark defile to gethsemane 

of the ‘crazed and driven foe’, and the vengeful widow’s pleasure at manufacturing
artilleryshells in ‘The Song of the Lathes’ (‘Shells for guns in Flanders! Feed
the guns!’).^32 It vitiates even some of theEpitaphs of the War,particularlythose
dealing with women.^33 Indeed, the best of theEpitaphsavoid speaking of the enemy
altogether, or only in the most neutral terms; what happens to ‘The Beginner’ does
not happen because the enemy is evil, but simply because he is there:

On the first hour of my first day

In the front trench I fell.

(Childreninboxesataplay

Standuptowatchitwell.)^34

The wit of the parallel is not adverse to its pathos, but is the very condition of it. But
Kipling can be heartless too; he makes ‘The Sleepy Sentinel’ pick his way through
an intricate pattern of rhyme and word-play, as though to remind him of his lack
of alertness:

Faithless the watch that I kept: now I have none to keep.

I was slain because I slept: now I am slain I sleep.

Let no man reproach me again, whatever watch is unkept—

I sleep because I am slain. They slew me because I slept.^35

‘They slew me’ carries no special animus; the poem is quite properly absorbed by its
reflexive dance, and doesn’t waste its energy implying that it was somehow wicked
of the Germans to take advantage of the sentinel’s carelessness. Indeed, with these
poems the heretical thought occurs that they are not denominated as ‘English’ at all.

My son was killed while laughing at some jest. I would I knew

What it was, and it might serve me in a time when jests are few.

The father who stumbles so forlornly along the path of the old ‘fourteener’ is
English by right of rhythm, but not of feeling. ‘The Coward’, ‘The Refined Man’,
the victim of ‘Shock’—none of these, from within the words he is given, disavows
his counterpart on the other side of the trenches. Is ‘ ‘‘Tin Fish’’ ’, the briefest and
most fearful of the War poems outside theEpitaphs,theboastof‘us’or‘them’?

The ships destroy us above

And ensnare us beneath.

We arise, we lie down, and we move

In the belly of Death.

(^32) Kipling, ‘For All We Have and Are’ and ‘Song of the Lathes’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 330 and
310.
(^33) See e.g. ‘Raped and Revenged’ (ibid. 391), in which the ‘used and butchered’ woman expresses
satisfaction that 100 lives have been taken for her one. ‘V. A. D. (Mediterranean)’, which, untilPoems
1886–1929, was the concluding poem of theEpitaphs, has a similar theme: the nurse’s death is avenged
by the sinking of ‘certain keels for whose return the heathen look in vain’ (ibid. 392). 34
Kipling, ‘The Beginner’, ibid. 389.^35 Kipling, ‘The Sleepy Sentinel’, ibid. 389.