TRICIA LOOTENSAn' some graves by a barb-wire fence,
An' a Dutchman I've fought 'oo might give
Me a job were I ever inclined
To look in an' offsaddle an' live
Where there's neither a road nor a tree -
But only my Maker an' me,
And I think it will kill me or cure,
So I think I will go there an' see.
Me! (461)Home is where the graves are; and the graves in question are those of one's
comrades. The speaker of "Chant-Pagan" turns to his former enemy, in
imagination, as one who has "gone where he's gone" and "seen what he's
seen." Drawn, too, by the "silence, the shine, an' the size" of South Africa's
"'igh, inexpressible skies" (459), Kipling's speaker strikes at the heart of
English pastoralism: he can no longer bear a native land in which "some-
thing" seems to have "gone small" (460).
"Chant-Pagan" speaks directly to the paradox of Kipling's "Greater
Britain." "A smell came out over the sea -" reads an uncollected 1891 essay
that Kipling wrote on returning to India. It was the "smell of damp earth,
coconut oil, ginger, onions and mankind. It spoke with a strong voice,
recalling many things; but the most curious revelation to one man was the
sudden knowledge that under these skies lay home." 50 Once the "Native-
Born" heard such voices ("The Native-Born" [1894]); once their dead lay in
the cemeteries of Lahore or the karoo; once they came to think (or perhaps
even learned to think), as some did, in a language other than English - on
what grounds could they claim to speak as British patriots? Blood was the
only answer. Indeed, as Stephen D. Arata has argued, on such grounds,
colonials might even claim superior patriotic authority, as the hardiest of
all British stock. 51 And thus, for all Kipling's internationalist identification
with "strong men," to do one's patriotic duty to Greater Britain was to
glorify the mastery of the British "white men." The strong Eastern robber's
son must enlist under the Western colonel's son; that "better man," the
Indian water-bearer Gunga Din, must submit to being "belted," "flayed"
(406), and yet praised as "white, clear white, inside" (405).
Kipling's belief in war as source of unity, like his belief in a Greater
Britain, was thus both fueled and riven by his own war with civilian
middle-class Englishness. The great spokesman for British xenophobia, he
was himself irretrievably alien, passionately and powerfully drawn to
aliens. In the end, as the increasing vehemence of Kipling's post-Victorian
poetry may suggest, neither the claims of blood nor the spilling of blood
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