from dark defile to gethsemane themselves and their clothes; it is connected, not literally but metaphorically, with
thecomment of a submariner in another section of the book: ‘Oh, if Fritz only
fought clean, this wouldn’t be half a bad show. But Fritz can’t fight clean.’^26
In ‘The Beginnings’, Kipling claimed that hatred of Germany was both a national
and a novel phenomenon:
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late
With long arrears to make good,
When the English began to hate.^27The rhyme ‘blood/good’ is not a ‘true’ rhyme; the English haven’t, in the past,
had the good of hatred, but they are going to make good that lack; they are
going to make ‘blood’ and ‘good’ rhyme in earnest. There is little if any objective
evidence for this notion, and it is more likely that Kipling was projecting onto
his country a feeling he could no longer keep himself from voicing. He could
not conceive of a civilized German, let alone feature one in his writing; the word
he adopted and made famous, ‘Hun’, is like a savage amputation of ‘human’.^28
There can be no respect, and no mercy, for the German as enemy; there are no
poems which record the valour, endurance, or suffering of German soldiers, no
genial tribute to ‘Fritz’ or hope of sharing a stein of beer with him after the War is
over.
Kipling’s hatred, in its purity and absolutism, was inimical to large strategic
or political aims, since these always involve an element of compromise, more or
less ignoble. The politicians who negotiated the Armistice believed that Britain’s
national interest would best be served by weakening Germany but not annihilating
her; Kipling took the opposite view. Again, the contrast with the Boer War is
revealing. In ‘Piet’ there is an indulgent recognition of the cleverness of the Boers
in getting their conquerors to put them back on their feet as part of the peace
settlement:
Ah, there, Piet! with your brand-new English plough,
Your gratis tents an’ cattle, an’ your most ungrateful frow,(^26) Kipling, ‘The Fringes of the Fleet’, inSea Warfare, 59.
(^27) Kipling, ‘The Beginnings’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 673. The poem was first published with
Kipling’s most hate-filled (if not hateful) story, ‘Mary Postgate’, inA Diversity of Creatures(1917);
when the poem was separately reprinted after the War, inPoems 1886–1929,itwas,like‘TheChildren’,
given the misleading subtitle ‘1914–18’. 28
The Germans had only themselves to blame for ‘Hun’; theOEDcitesKaiserWilhelmII’sspeech
to German troops being sent to China, exhorting them to behave as mercilessly as Huns (speech
reported inThe Times, 30 July 1900). In 1902 Kipling denounced the proposal that Britain should join
Germany in a naval blockade of Venezuela, in a poemwhose concluding lines reject an alliance ‘With
the Goth and the shamelessHun!’ (‘The Rowers’, inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 284). In the context of
the Great War, he first used the word in ‘For All We Have and Are’, published inThe Times,2Sep.
1914: ‘Stand up and take the war.|TheHunisatthegate!’(inRudyard Kipling’s Verse, 329).