from dark defile to gethsemane scale, and it was close to home. What Robert Lowell, in 1965, foresaw as America’s
imperialfuture—‘small war on the heels of small|war’—was the reality of Britain’s
imperial past.^8 (Nor did the small wars demand large forces. At its height the entire
Indian Army would barely have filled a week’s draft headed for the Somme. There
was no conscription, and neither Army nor Navy were ‘representative’ of society.
The generic ‘Tommy’ ofBarrack-Room Ballads(1892) is a social derelict; he is not
‘working-class’ and is indeed despised by all ranks of respectable society; if he is not
low in one sense, he is so in another, a ‘gentleman-ranker’ who has fallen from his
social position through crime or debauchery.^9 Only the officers who led this motley
crew could claim a recognized social status, an irony of which ‘Arithmetic on the
Frontier’ is acutely conscious.
Military conflict in the outposts of Empire was very much as Kipling describes
it in this and a score of other poems and stories: haphazard, intermittent, local.
During his time as a reporter, working for theCivil and Military Gazettein Lahore
and its larger sister paper, the AllahabadPioneer, he heard innumerable anecdotes
of such engagements, and was able to record details of speech and behaviour with
an immediacy which still strikes home; he became a kind of verse chronicler of
different branches of the ‘Service’, and a spokesman for its habit of mind. But the
inwardness of the fiction and poetry from this period which deals with war is not
simply a product of diligent, or even imaginative, ‘reporting’. It is bound up with his
grasp of the mentality of imperial service, which locates honour and authenticity on
the frontier, and defines the metropolitan centre in terms of its folly and ignorance.
On the Border, you can expect the infallible judgement of your peers; at home,
public opinion is swayed by politicians and the press. ‘I’ll see you in theTimes’, one
departing Viceroy says to his successor:
A quarter-column of eye-searing print,
A leader once a quarter—then a war;
The Strand a-bellow through the fog:—‘Defeat!’
‘’Orrible slaughter!’^10Yet there is no question of subverting this ritual of misrepresentation; if anything,
the opposite is the case: what would be truly disconcerting to the hard-bitten
‘proconsul’ would be to have his actions reported objectively, in quiet tones, on the
streets of a London divested of fog and glamour.
(^8) Robert Lowell, ‘Waking Early Sunday Morning’, inCollected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David
Gewinter (London: Faber, 2003), 386. ‘I have been on the Border in eight wars, not counting Burma,’
says the Sikh narrator of ‘A Sahibs’ War’ (Traffics and Discoveries, first published in 1904). ‘The first
Afghan War; the second Afghan War; two MahsudWaziri wars (that is four); two Black Mountain
wars, if I remember right; the Malakand and the Tirah. I do not count Burma, or some small things’.
(^9) Kipling, ‘Gentlemen-Rankers’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 424–5.
(^10) Kipling, ‘One Viceroy Resigns’, ibid. 72. The speaker is Lord Dufferin, who retired as Viceroy in
1888; he is giving the benefit of his wisdom to Lord Lansdowne.