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 daniel karlin

You’ve made the British taxpayer rebuild your country-seat—

I’veknown some pet battalions charge a dam’ sight less than Piet.^29

The pun onchargemaliciously reflects on the less-than-zealous performance of
some self-regarding Army units; ‘pet’ falls short of ‘Piet’, so the Boers get the best of
it in both peace and war. Such concessions are unimaginable in Kipling’s writings
about the Great War. The spirit of unreconciled hatred is embodied in ‘Justice’, a
poem written shortly before the Armistice, in October 1918. The justice Kipling
claims is a kind of wild revenge, going beyondthe ‘normal’ bounds of retribution,
proposing the annihilation of the German polity:

That neither schools nor priests,

Nor Kings may build again

A people with the heart of beasts

Made wise concerning men.

Whereby our dead shall sleep

In honour, unbetrayed,

And we in faith and honour keep

That peace for which they paid.^30

As with ‘Piet’, there is a pun in the last line about money, but the humour of
it is sour. ‘That peace for which they paid’ means ‘that peace which our dead
bought with their lives’, but it also means ‘that peace for which they, the Germans,
paid’. Kipling has in mind more than crushing war reparations that would prevent
Germany physically from rebuilding her strength. In a letter written four days
beforetheArmistice,heglossedthelines‘Apeoplewiththeheartofbeasts|Made
wise concerning men’ as

a people with such an outlook on life as would be possessed by animals who had been
laboriously instructed in the baser side of humanity and also the higher—a sort of were-wolf
people in fact. (And it’s curious that out of the Hun country comes the best and fullest story
of the were-wolf who disguises itself as man or woman....Every race betrays itself in its
legends, don’t you think?)^31

Suchapeoplemustnotbeallowednormalhumaninstitutions—education,religion,
authority—because these would foster an unnatural ‘[wisdom] concerning men’,
which the ‘beast’ would take advantage of when the time came round again.
This view of Germany is axiomatic in Kipling’s public poetry of the War; it
licenses both the minatory tone of ‘For All We Have and Are’, with its denunciation

(^29) Kipling, ‘Piet’, 481. ‘[F]row’ is the German ‘Frau’, i.e. wife.
(^30) Kipling, ‘Justice’, inRudyard Kipling’ s Verse, 394.
(^31) Kipling to John Powell, 7 Nov. 1918, inThe Letters of Rudyard Kipling,iv:1911–1919,ed.Thomas
Pinney (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 519. The image of Germany as the ‘were-wolf’ recurs in many
letters of the 1920s and 1930s as Kipling raged against German reconstruction and rearmament. The
phrase ‘who disguises itself’ is a ‘Freudian’ slip, leaving the werewolf grammatically suspended between
human and non-human identity.