daniel karlin
If people buying newspapers in the Strand are ignorant in one way, those making
thenews by suffering, or inflicting, the ‘’Orrible slaughter’ are so in another; but
this allows them to speak more than they know, as in the poem’s final lines:
‘What was the end of all the show,
Johnnie, Johnnie?’
Ask my Colonel, for I don’t know,
Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!
We broke a King and we built a road—
A court-house stands where the Reg’ment goed.
And the river’s clean where the raw blood flowed
When the Widow give the party.
(Bugle: Ta—rara—ra-ra-rara!)^11Law and trade, the court-house and the road, encapsulate the imperial mission
(Kipling has no time for the Church). Yet the establishment of this new order
rests on violence: ‘We broke a King’. This may be an imperialist act, but it has
its roots in English history, in the Revolution and the beheading of Charles I,
and further back still, the ‘breaking’ of King John and his enforced acceptance of
Magna Carta.^12 Not that the agent of this regenerative violence knows anything of
its ‘end’, whether aim or outcome: ‘Ask my Colonel, for I don’t know’. What he
knows is suggested by something else—the something which makes Kipling a poet
and not merely a skilled apologist. ‘WebrokeaKingandwebuilta road’ balances
destruction of the old authority with creation of the new. But a road is also for
marching, for marching away. ‘A court-housestandswhere the Reg’mentgoed’:
another kind of balance opposes the stable to the mobile, the permanence of Law
to the transience of Force. Then comes the third line, which doesn’t countenance
the neat summing-up of the couplet—‘And the river’s clean where the raw blood
flowed’, as though a river could wash its hands of bloodshed. The light from
this terrible phrase glares back at the ‘court-house’, standing not just where the
‘Reg’ment goed’ but where ‘the raw blood flowed’. It returns us to the visceral lines
earlier in the poem which evoke with brutal jollity the catering arrangements at the
Widow’s party:
‘What did you do for knives and forks,
Johnnie, Johnnie?’
We carries ’em with us wherever we walks,
Johnnie, my Johnnie, aha!(^11) Kipling, ‘The Widow’s Party’, ibid. 422. The ‘Widow’ is Queen Victoria.
(^12) Kipling’s ‘The Old Issue’ (ibid. 296–8), published on the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899,
reminds us that ‘All we have of freedom’ was gained by violent resistance to monarchical tyranny:
‘Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing,|Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, slowly
from the King.’ Magna Carta is invoked in this poem, as well as the execution of Charles I. See also
‘The Reeds at Runnymede’ (ibid. 715–16), one of the poems which Kipling contributed to C. R. L.
Fletcher’sA History of England(1911).