daniel karlin
The ‘captives of our bow and spear’
Arecheap, alas! as we are dear.^6It may be absurd for an empire to conduct itself like this, but the absurdity itself is
a guarantor of imperial status. The tone is rueful, not shocked or scandalized; the
speaker has an insider’s confidence both that things will continue to be mismanaged
and that the troopships will keep coming. In turn, we can imagine readers wryly
acknowledging the truth of the observation, but not feeling threatened or moved; to
take pleasure in the poem, you have to digest its callousness, make it your own; if it
makes you truly indignant, you have misread it. ‘The Children’, by contrast, is meant
tomakeyoufeelwretched,andatoddswiththeorder ofthingsthathasproducedthis
wretchedness. The loss of a son disaffiliates his parents. At the same time they bear
collective responsibility for the very conditions which have caused their anguish.
The untroubled ‘we’ of ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ has suffered an irreconcilable
split. ‘These were our children who died for our lands,’ the poem begins; ‘We have
only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter.’ But in the
following stanzas a different ‘we’ appears, separated from the children by more than
death: ‘They believed us and perished for it. Our statecraft, our learning|Delivered
them bound to the Pit and alive to the burning.’ As we have seen, Kipling reiterated
this self-accusation inEpitaphs of the War. It was ‘common form’ for the ‘Crammer’s
boast’ to die on the frontier, too, but what made that acceptable has ceased to
function. The fathers lie, and are wounded by the terrible reflux of their falsehood.
II
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••The ‘scrimmage in a Border Station’ typified war to Kipling’s generation. He was
born in 1865, in the middle of a century of unparalleled peace—the century
between Waterloo and Ypres. During this period the British Army fought no
battle on European soil, the first such century since the Middle Ages. In the same
period France went through two revolutions (1830 and 1848), acoup d’ ́etat(1851),
invasion and defeat by Prussia (1870), and the blood-bath of the Paris Commune
(1871). Of course, conflicts such as the Crimean War (1853–6), the Indian Mutiny
(1857), the Afghan and Sudanese campaigns in the 1880s, and above all the Boer
War (1899–1902), seemed bloody, protracted, and costly enough at the time,
but even the Boer War was not, as Kipling thought, ‘a first-class dress-parade
for Armageddon’.^7 WhenArmageddoncame,itwasonaninconceivablygreater
(^6) The phrase ‘Captives of our bow and spear’ derives from Jer. 6: 23, which has ‘bow and spear’ in
a passage referring to conquest.
(^7) The phrase is attributed to a general in Kipling’s ‘The Captive’ (inTraffics and Discoveries,first
published in 1904). ‘The Song of the Old Guard’, subtitled ‘Army Reform—After Boer War’ (Rudyard
Kipling’s Verse, 313–14) is less optimistic, satirizing the diehard conservatives who cling to privilege
and place, and whose dead hand won’t slacken its grip ‘Till Armageddon break our sleep’.