daniel karlin
IV
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••‘Piet’ opens with a sentiment which Kipling was to disavow a decade later:
I do not love my Empire’s foes,
Nor call ’em angels; still,
Whatisthe sense of ’atin’ those
’Oom you are paid to kill?This temperate outlook belongs, as the poem’s subtitle tells us, to a ‘Regular of the
Line’; in 1914 this ‘Regular’ would have been serving in the ‘Army of Mercenaries’
which in 1914–15, as A. E. Housman put it, ‘saved the sum of things for pay’.^24
The thousands of men (John Kipling among them) who volunteered in this period
joined what was still thought of as a professional fighting force; but already the
face of war was changing, and in January 1916 it altered decisively with the advent
of conscription. The struggle between an ‘Empire’ and its ‘foes’ was replaced, in
Kipling’s eyes, by a death struggle between civilization and barbarism. In this light,
the lack of preparedness, the conservatism, and the sloth which had angered him at
the time of the Boer War took on a different dimension, as did the guilt and shame
of those who had colluded in the sacrifice of ‘The Children’. The poems of the Boer
War are marked by an impulse to make speeches in the voices of soldiers, rather
than voicing soldiers’ speech, and the Great War exacerbated this impulse; at the
same time, the relationship between those fighting the war and those responsible
for it (responsible for its conduct, but also for its having come about in the first
place) appears poisoned beyond remedy. ‘War poetry’ now had to bear the strain
of a judgement which turned outward towards a ‘foe’ defined in new terms, as
absolute evil, and inward towards the ‘fathers’ who had temporized with that foe
and mistaken it for human.
It makes sense to hate the Germans, as opposed to the ‘Empire’s foes’, because
they are beyond the pale of human fellowship. The feeling is specific to Germany,
and does not apply to her allies. ‘One of the reasons...why we shall be good friends
with the Turk again is that he has many of our ideas about decency,’^25 Kipling
remarks inSea Warfare. The remark is prompted by a description of how the crew
of a submarine operating in the Sea of Marmara relish the opportunity to wash
(^24) A. E. Housman, ‘Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries’, inCollected Poems and Selected Prose,ed.
Christopher Ricks (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), 138. The poem was first published inThe Times,
31 Oct. 1917, under a leading article on ‘The Anniversary of Ypres’. On 21 Dec. 1935, a month before
he died, Kipling wrote of it as ‘the high-water mark of all War verse....Only eight lines but absolutely
perfect’ (Kipling to James Barry, inThe Letters of Rudyard Kipling,vi:1931–1936, ed. Thomas Pinney
(Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004), 417).
(^25) Kipling, ‘Tales of ‘‘The Trade’’ ’, inSea Warfare(London: Macmillan, 1916), 126.Sea Warfare
collected the newspaper articles which Kipling wrote at the behest of the Admiralty in 1915 and 1916,
with accompanying poems, including ‘Mine Sweepers’ (inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 631), ‘ ‘‘Tin Fish’’ ’
(ibid. 648), and ‘My Boy Jack’ (ibid. 216).