from dark defile to gethsemane These lines come from ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, published in Kipling’s first
collectionof poems,Departmental Ditties and Other Verses, in 1886.^4 Compare
them to the following lines from ‘The Children’, published in 1917:
That flesh we had nursed from the first in all cleanness was given
To corruption unveiled and assailed by the malice of Heaven—
By the heart-shaking jests of Decay where it lolled on the wires—
To be blanched or gay-painted by fumes—to be cindered by fires—
To be senselessly tossed and retossed in stale mutilation
From crater to crater. For this we shall take expiation.
But who shall return us our children?^5The contrast between these two poems measures the distance Kipling had travelled
in his experience—or better say, since he was never personally in combat, his
apprehension—of war. In 1886 he was 21 years old—the same age as ‘the
Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride’. In 1917 he was mourning the loss of
his son, who was barely 18 when he was killed. ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’
makes no mention of parents; ‘The Children’ makes no mention of school. The
German shell which abolished the (more than) ‘two thousand pounds of education’
invested in John Kipling was, in all likelihood, cheap to manufacture. But in ‘The
Children’ Kipling thinks not of education but of nurture—‘That flesh we had
nursed’. It is not a matter of public policy but of the most intimate human touch.
‘Shot like a rabbit in a ride!’ That has bite and lilt, and an apt heartlessness.
But in ‘The Children’ the body takes on a ‘heart-shaking’ parodic life, ‘lolling’
and ‘gay-painted’, as though it were still a child fond of idleness and dressing
up. In a final pun it is ‘senselessly tossed’, both because it is, itself, without
sensation, and because its fate is beyond reason. There is no ‘arithmetic on the front
line’.
The contrast between the two poems extends further. The jaunty knowingness
of the earlier one tells us about something more than a young man’s ignorance of
what it means to father, and lose, a child. It derives from a world-view that had
become untenable in 1917, whether one was a parent or not. Towards the end of
‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ Kipling adopts the first-person plural, referring to ‘our
messmates’ being killed, as though he were one of the young men concerned; it is
on this note that the poem concludes.
With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem.
The troopships bring us one by one,
At vast expense of time and steam,
To slay Afridis where they run.(^4) Kipling, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 45. The ‘Frontier’ is the
North-West Frontier, between part of British India (now Pakistan) and Afghanistan. A ‘jezail’ is a
long-barrelled Afghan musket. 5
Kipling, ‘The Children’, ibid. 523.