from dark defile to gethsemane The struggle in Kipling’s Boer War poems between an inwardness of feeling
whichproduces (as though spontaneously) images of authentic experience, and the
desire to bully or jolly ‘public opinion’ into adopting a particular point of view,
is complicated by Kipling’s attitude to the Boers themselves. Unlike every other
colonial war of the nineteenth century, the Boer War was, as the title of one of the
stories inTraffics and Discoveriesputs it, ‘A Sahibs’ War’: that is, a war between white
men. There are Kipling stories which take seriously the interplay of racial politics
and economic interests in different parts of South Africa, from British-ruled Natal,
the Cape Colony with its population of doubtfully loyal Afrikaners, to the Boer
republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State; but there are also poems in
which these issues dissolve into the simplified figure of the Boer farmer and fighter,
who had taught England her lesson, but with whom the English soldier could
fraternize and be reconciled after the war (the speaker of ‘Chant-Pagan’ intends
to leave ‘awful old England’, and return to South Africa to work for his former
enemy). In ‘Piet’ a soldier voices respect for the fighting qualities of his enemy, as
had the speaker of ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’; but where racial difference in the earlier poem is
integral to its convincing us that an English soldier would indeed feel and speak as
he does (in other words, that the respect being shown is truthful), in the later poem
racial kinship has the opposite effect, blighting the poem’s atmosphere and making
the feeling sound confected and false:
I’ve ’eard ’im cryin’ from the ground
Like Abel’s blood of old,
An’ skirmished out to look, an’ found
The beggar nearly cold.
I’ve waited on till ’e was dead
(Which couldn’t ’elp ’im much),
But many grateful things ’e’s said
To me for doin’ such.^22If the dying Boer is Abel, then the Englishman who has slain his brother is Cain; yet
it is God, not Cain, who hears the voice of Abel’s blood crying from the ground.^23
In this strange version, God-like Cain goes looking for Abel, and finds him, and
behaves indeed as his brother’s keeper, and receives his brother’s blessing for doing
it. The speaker of ‘Fuzzy-Wuzzy’ is more cynical and succinct about his fallen foe:
‘’E’s generally shammin’ when ’e’s dead.’ There seems to be no question that ‘Piet’
might be ‘shammin’ ’, though the treachery, or trickery, of the Boers is a constant
theme of other poems and stories. Kipling is in a muddle here; the Great War
cleared up the muddle, but brought something worse in its place.
(^22) Kipling, ‘Piet’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 480.
(^23) Gen. 4: 9–10: ‘And the Lord said unto Cain, Where is Abel thy brother? And he said, I know not:
Am I my brother’s keeper? And he said, What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother’s blood crieth
out to me from the ground.’