daniel karlin
the war’s effect on her people, above all the political and moral lessons to be drawn
bothfrom the disastrous beginning of the conflict and its sobering resolution.
England as a nation struck Kipling as unprepared, and indeed unfit, for war.
Even a poem such as ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, written to support a charitable
appeal for relief of soldiers’ families, opens with a scornful dig at the people who
are being asked to stump up:
When you’ve shouted ‘Rule Britannia’, when you’ve sung ‘God Save the Queen’,
When you’ve finished killing Kruger with your mouth,
Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine
For a gentleman in khaki ordered South?^17The internal rhyme between ‘killing’ and ‘shilling’ is apt because the ‘shilling’ is
such a military coin (recruits ‘take the Queen’s shilling’; ‘Shillin’ a Day’ is the
title of a Barrack-Room Ballad about the miserly military pension); the civilians
who are aping military valour are challenged to put their money where their
mouth is. There was too much mouth about the business for Kipling’s liking, too
much national complacency and boasting; he pointed the moral by a deliberate
anachronism, placing ‘Recessional’, the warning poem he had written for Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, at the end of his Boer War ‘Service Songs’.^18
‘England’ viewed from India or Burma might be exasperatingly feckless in its
conduct of the Empire, but that very quality was part of its charm; in England
itself the charm was broken, or rather had to be conjured anew, using the spell
not of distance but of proximity. That helps to explain Kipling’s concentration, in
the period following the Boer War, on stories and poems about England and the
English, epitomized byPuck of Pook’s Hill(1906) andRewards and Fairies(1910).
But this effort at ‘rebuilding’ England was only partially successful; the psychic
wound which Kipling suffered in the Boer War was healed, but as often with old
wounds, never quite lost its ache.
Many of the Boer War poems are therefore ‘condition-of-England’ poems as
much as they are poems about the events and experiences of the war itself. Or rather,
Kipling uses these events and experiences as a lens through which ‘England’ is seen
and judged by the soldiers, who in earlier poems would have taken metropolitan
inefficiency and mismanagement in their marching stride. ‘Chant-Pagan’, the
opening poem of ‘Service Songs’, announces this theme:
Me that ’ave been what I’ve been,
Me that ’ave gone where I’ve gone,(^17) Kipling, ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’, ibid. 459.
(^18) ‘Recessional’ kept this position in the 3-vol.Poems 1886–1929, the last collected edition published
in Kipling’s lifetime; in theDefinitive Editionthe poem shifted forward in time again, appearing on
pp. 328–9 between ‘The Question’ (1916) and ‘For All We Have and Are’ (1914). ‘Service Songs’ was
not published as a separate volume, but appeared as a section ofThe Five Nations(1903), which also
includes other poems relating to the Boer War.