daniel karlin
Kipling had lost his only son, killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915. Was he one
ofthese lying fathers? As a ‘living Englishman’ he carried the burden of survival.
Saintsbury’s tribute suggests that Kipling’s whole career had been leading up to
‘1914–18’, and ‘Common Form’ seems like an acceptance of responsibility, though
not for ‘the spirit that won’. But perhaps there is a flaw in this teleological design.
Perhaps the story is less clear-cut, whether for good or ill; Kipling may be neither
the architect of victory nor the spinner of death-dealing lies. The gravitational pull
of the Great War draws the preceding fifty years into itself; writings on war itself
are doubly likely to be judged in this way, and those of Kipling, who wrote so much
about war and over so long a period, are no exception. But the journey whose
destination seemed so clear to Saintsbury in 1920 had started from a point at which
‘1914–18’ was not only unforeseen, but unimaginable.
This essay will follow two lines of argument. The first takes account of Kipling’s
origins as a writer in order to understand his attitude to war, and to trace both the
continuities and changes in the way he wrote about it. The second takes issue with
Saintsbury’s assumption that Kipling’s vocation as a writer was instrumental—that
he had been engaged, all his life, in a literary form of nation building. I think
this is only half the story, and that Kipling’s war poetry, in particular, is marked
by impulses towards different kinds of truth telling: one voices experience, the
other advocates ideas; one sings, the other prophesies in song. The best of Kipling,
whether in prose and verse, is the product of a divided self; and the ‘two sides to his
head’ were not always at peace with each other.^3
I
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••A scrimmage in a Border Station—
A canter down some dark defile—
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail—
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!(^3) The phrase comes from ‘The Two-Sided Man’, a poem whose first stanza formed one of
the chapter headings inKim: ‘Much I owe to the Lands that grew—|More to the Lives that
fed—|But most to Allah Who gave me two|Separate sides to my head’ (Rudyard Kipling’s Verse,
587).