RUDYARD KIPLING’S CAMPAIGN FOR MILITARY
PREPAREDNESS 19024914

Thesis for Hm Dogm of M. A.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Kevin R. Cafigan
1962

 

LIBRARY

Michigan State
University

 

 

 

ABSTRACT

RUDYARD KIPLING'S CAMPAIGN FOR
MILITARY PREPAREDNESS 1902-1914

by Kevin R. Cadigan

In the 1890's Rudyard Kipling was immensely popular.
Much of his popularity was due to the fact that his writings
provided his countrymen with a moral rational for imperialism.

In poems like The White-Man's Burden, he proclaimed that the

 

English were a Chosen Peoples, whose obligation as a superior
race was to expand the British Empire, and carry the benefits
of civilization to the backward areas of the world.

Many of his stories dealt with the British army, whose
officers and men. he believed. were the finest soldiers in
the world. Kipling's soldier stories were widely read.
and they added to militant nationalism that characterized
much of British public opinion in the 1890's. In 1899.
however, came the Boer War, and with it a series of unexpected
and humiliating defeats for the British army. One victim of
the conflict was Kipling's reputation. Critics began to call
him a militant jingo, whose stories and poems had helped to

bring on the War by encouraging the dangerous notion that

the British army was invincible.

Kevin R. Cadigan

During the War Germany's attitude towards Great
Britain was one of open hostility. The German people were
almost unanimously pro-Boer in their sympathies, while their
government. although officially neutral, launched an ambitious
program of naval construction that represented a serious
challenge to the traditional supremacy of the Royal Navy.

Kipling's primary objective as a writer had always
been to entertain his readers. waever, the shocking per—-
formance of the British army in South Africa, and England's
deteriorating relations with Germany so alarmed him that his
major interest changed from literature to politics. The
bulk of his fiction and verse after 1899 was not literature.
but rather propaganda for the cause of military preparedness-—
specifically, preparedness for a war with Germany.

Of all the great powers in Europe, England alone did
not employ peace time conscription. Most Englishmen. as
Kipling was aware. were strongly opposed to compulsory military
service. For this reason he made several attempts to popularize
volunteer rifle clubs for civilians, hoping that the creation
of a national system of clubs would make conscription
unnecessary. With the end of the fighting in South Africa.
though, the public's interest in rifle clubs disappeared.

Kipling was left convinced that any plan for building an

Kevin R. Cadigan

effective defense establishment that depended on volunteers
was unrealistic. Accordingly, he became a staunch supporter
of peace time conscription.

Between 1899 and the start of the First World War.
Kipling observed with anxiety the growing strength of the
German navy. England's refusal to adopt conscription led
him to emphasize the importance of his country's fleet as a
shield against a German invasion of England. In his writings
and speeches. he pleaded with the British taxpayers to
accept the enormous costs involved in maintaining Britain's
naval superiority.

As part of his campaign for military preparedness,
he believed that England should take the initiative in
forming defensive alliances with all of the self-governing
colonies in the Empire. He gave his unqualified support to
the Anglo-French Entente of 1904. and made it clear that he
viewed the agreement as the basis for a formal military
alliance between France and England.

In addition to his other activities, Kipling frequently
used his pen to attack the Unionist and the Liberal parties
for having refused to endorse conscription, or spend what he
considered adequate sums on defense. He thought that both

parties were afraid to back unpopular measures like conscription

Kevin R. Cadigan

because they feared reprisals from the voters. He came to
regard all politicians as self-seeking demagogues, more
interested in winning an election than in promoting their
country's welfare. He decided that democracy was a failure,
and in his writings described what he believed was an ideal
political order. He made his political utopia an enlightened
despotism, governed by a ruling caste of scientists and

engineers.

RUDYARD KIPLING'S CAMPAIGN FOR

MILITARY PREPAREDNESS 1902-1914

BY

Kevin R. Cadigan

A THESIS

Submitted to
Midhigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of History

1962

 

I
p
‘. a 1‘)

.‘J

we are very slightly changed

From the semi-apes who ranged
India's prehistoric clay:

He that drew the longest bow

Ran his brother down, you know,
As we run men down to-day.

(Rudyard Kipling, A General Summary)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 

Page
INTRODUCTION 0 O 0 O O O O O O O O O O O O O 0 O O O O 1
Chapter
I. RUDYARD KIPLING IN THE 1890's: THE
TRIUMPHANT YEARS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
II. THE BOER‘WAR: PART I . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
III. THE BOER‘WAR: PART II . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
IV. THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE APPOINTMENT TO
THE FIRST AND SECOND ARMY CORPS . . . . . 33
V. THE CASE FOR PEACE TIME CONSCRIPTION . . . . . 39
VI. THE ISLANDERS: A PLEA FOR PEACE TIME
CONSCRIPTION O O O O O O O O O O C O O O O 52
VII. "THE ARMY OF A DREAM" . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
VIII. KIPLING AND THE ROYAL NAVY . . . . . . . . . . 83
IX. ALLIANCES: EMPIRE FEDERATION FOR MILITARY
PUWOSES O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O O 90

X. THE ATTEMPT TO TERRIFY . . . . . . . . . . . . 101
XI. 'WHY DEMOCRACY WAS REPUDIATED . . . . . . . . . 108
XII. "THE HUN IS AT THE GATEI" . . . . . . . . . . 129

XIII. THE WAY YEARS AND AFTERWARDS: "THE LULL
'TWIXT BLAST AND BLAST" . . . . . . . . . 134

XIV. KIPLING AND HIS CRITICS . O C O C O O O O O O 140
XV. A CONG‘USION C O O O O O O O O O O O C O O O O 148

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 152

iii

INTRODUCTION

Rudyard Kipling, who has been described by one
modern critic as "a minor writer but a major disaster for
the British Empire,"1 was bornin India in 1865. When he
was five he was sent home to England to attend school.2
In 1882, at the age of seventeen, he graduated from the
United Services College, an institution which specialized
in preparing boys for Sandhurst and a career in the army.
Kipling, however, chose to return to India, where he worked
as a reporter on the staff of a Lahore newspaper.4 It was
during the seven years that he was in India, between 1882
and 1889, that Kipling wrote the first of his stories and
poems with Indian themes. Their publication in England
established his reputation as a rising young author. The
financial rewards from his fiction and verse were such that

by 1889 he could give up his job and leave India forever.

 

1A. J. Liebling. "Rung Ho, Maugham Sahib," The New

YOrker, April 17, 1954, p. 114.
2C. E. Carrington, The Life of Rudyard Kipling (New
York, 1956), pp. 1—10. Hereafter cited as Carrington.

3Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself: For My Friends
Known and Unknown (New York, 1937), pp. 26, 41.

4Ibid., p. 41.

SCarrington. pp. 34-67, 92.

In contrast to his adventure stories, Kipling's own
life after 1889 was comparatively uneventful. Before
returning to England in 1889, he visited Burma, Japan, Hong-
Kong, Singapore, Canada, and the United States. The next two
years were spent in London, where he continued to write
while enjoying the acclaim his work was receiving from
British literary critics. In 1891, his health deteriorating
from overwork, Kipling embarked on a long ocean voyage which
took him to South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia.6

Thus, by 1892, with his Indian background and his
subsequent travels, Kipling had managed to see at firsthand
almost all of the enormous British Empire. He was ready
to settle down, and in 1892 married Caroline Balestier, an
American girl. The first four years of the marriage were
spent in America. After 1896, however, he made his permanent
home in England, where he continued to live until his death
in 1936.7

While Kipling's writings have always received the
attention of literary critics, they have been largely

neglected by students of history. This thesis represents

an attempt to trace the development of Kipling's thoughts

 

6Ibid., pp. 92-147.

7Ibid., pp. 148-189.

on the subject of military preparedness from the start of

the Boer War in 1899 to the start of the First World War in
1914. It is based on the author's conviction that as a

result of the defeats of the British army in South Africa
during the opening stages of the Boer War, and the deterioration
that took place in the relations between England and Germany
in the first years of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling
changed, from a writer whose main purpose had always been to
entertain his readers, into a dedicated political propagandist.
In this role he used his pen to preach such things as hatred

of Germany, peace time conscription, the need for increased
naval appropriations, Empire federation for military purposes,
and eventually, when it appeared that these goals could not

be fully realized within the framework of democratic govern-
ment, to reject democracy for the supposed gains in strength
and national efficiency that could be realized under a
totalitarian regime, administered by an elite of scientific

and enlightened despots.

CHAPTER I

RUDYARD KIPLING IN THE 1890's:

THE TRIUMPHANT YEARS

As an author Kipling enjoyed immediate success. His
rise was meteoric. By the age of twenty-five he was receiving
the kind of critical and popular acclaim which is reserved
for other great writers until they are old men with their
careers behind them. Much of this early fame was due to
his subject matter: the British Empire.1 Before Kipling
there was practically nothing in the way of popular fiction
on the subject. Consequently, he had the advantage of a
fresh theme as well as the ability to present it forcefully
and convincingly. The public was intrigued and delighted
by his work.2 Literary critics and other writers appeared
equally impressed. In 1891 Edmund Gosse described him as
"a new star out of the East, . . . [who] sweeps us away

with him; he plays upon a strange and seductive pipe, and

 

lCarrington, p. 260.

2"During Kipling's lifetime Macmillan's, who held the
English rights of his collected volumes of stories, sold about
seven million copies; Doubleday's, who held the American
rights, nearly eight million" (ibid., p. 362).

we follow him like children."3 Oscar Wilde, reviewing
one of Kipling's first bodks, declared: "As one turns over

the pages of Plain Tales From the Hills, one feels as if one

 

were seated under a poem—tree, reading life by superb
flashes of vulgarity."4 In a letter to Henry James in 1890,
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: Kipling is "by far the most
promising young man who has appeared since-~ahem—-I appeared."5
In 1891, as Kipling's reputation continued to grow, Henry
James replied: "The only news in literature here . .
continues to be the infant monster of a Kipling."6 The
dizzy pace continued. In 1890, Sidney Low, the editor of
the St. James's Gazette, expressed the opinion that Kipling
was possibly greater than Dickens.7 Two years later a
critic for The Saturday Review considered his popularity as
having already placed him "within measurable distance of the

foundations of a Kipling Society."8

 

3Edmund Gosse, "Rudyard Kipling," The Century Magazine,
XLII (1891), 901-910.

4Oscar Wilde, "The Critic as Artist," Intentions
(London, 1891), p. 227.

 

5Quoted in Carrington, p. 145.
61bid.
7 .

Ibid., p. 104.

81bid., p. 263.

Throughout the 1890's imperialism remained the dominant
theme in Kipling's writings.9 One of his contemporaries called
him “the Cecil Rhodes of literature,"10 and John Hay listed him
as one of four men most responsible for making imperialism in
England a popular movement.11 A great deal of Kipling's own
popularity was due to his success in providing a moral rational
for imperialism.12 His fiction and verse breathed idealism
into expansionism, and his arguments were sufficiently persuasive
that by the end of the 1890's "Kiplingism" had become a synonym
for imperialism itself.13 To his readers Kipling gave his own
conviction, perhaps most forcefully in The White Man's Burden,
that the English had a sacred obligation to carry the gospel of
good government and law to all the savage, backward peoples of
the globe, a task that he once described as "aggressive

altruism."l4

 

9"The Literary Inspiration of Imperialism," Living Age,
CCXXV (1900), 807-811.

10William Salter, "One Side of Kipling," Ethical Record,
October-November, 1900, pp. 11-12.

11Cited in Harvey Cushing's, The Life of Sir William

Dale: (Oxford, 1925), II, 1082. The others: Joseph Chamberlain,
Lord Strathcona, and Lord Northcliffe.

12"The Poet in Politics," Review of Reviews (London),
XIX (1899), 107.

l3"Literary Inspiration, . . ." LivingyAggo

14"From Sea to Sea," Letters of Travel (New YOrk, 1912),
p. 400. Unless otherwise indicated all of the poems by Kipling
cited in this thesis can be found in Rudyard Kipling's Verse:
Definitive Edition (New York, 1940). Verse titles have been
‘underlined rather than enclosed in quotation marks.

 

Kipling's reputation was built on his stories and
poems about the British army in India.15 The English
people, he maintained, were all members of a "high caste
and enlightened race,"16 but the best of them, in his
estimation, were the soldiers of the British army. He
wrote of one young man that, "he became an officer and a
gentleman, which is an enviable thing."17 The officers of
the British army, he declared in one story, "are as good
as good can be, because their training begins early, and
God has arranged that a clean-run youth of the British
middle classes shall, in the matter of backbone, brains, and
bowels, surpass all other youths."18 In sharp contrast to
his admiration for the army, he had little but contempt for
the civilians who administered the Empire. He regarded
them as the kind of people who preached "that lying proverb

which says that the pen is mightier than the sword."19

 

5See particularly Departmental Ditties and Barrack-
Room Ballads (New YOrk, 1923), and Soldier Stories (New Ybrk,
1927).

 

6"Kidnapped," Plain Tales from the Hills (New York,
1921), p- 136-

17"Only A Subaltern," Under the Deodars (New York,
1922), p. 217.

18Ibid.

19"On the City Wall," In Black and White (New York,

1920), p. 83.

 

 

It was the soldier, he thought, who had done the work which
made the British Empire possible. Accordingly, he reserved
his fictional eulogies for the fighting man.

Nonetheless, Kipling knew scarcely more about the
realities of war than his readers. The man who wrote so
colorfully, and with such apparent accuracy, about the
British army had never seen a battle in his life.20 His
soldier stories were drawn from his own imagination, and
from the yarns of the officers and men he had known in India.21
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that Kipling idealized
war in much the same way that he did imperialism. His
fiction, which had little to say about the suffering or the
horrors of battle, portrayed war as both romantic and
glamorous; almost even as a game, a superior kind of sport,
more exciting than cricket or football, and only a little
more dangerous. Kipling's soldiers, typically, greet the
news of war with shouts of delight, "unholily pleased,"
at the chance to "have a little fun."22 An officer engaged

in a border skirmish, for example, does not worry about

being killed himself. He only fears his colonel, who will

 

20Carrington, p. 79.

ZlIbid.

22"On the City Wall," p. 86.

blame him for "monopolising the fun."23 In The Light that

 

Failed,24 Dick Heldar, a typical Kipling hero, becomes
"wild with delight . . ." at the sound of the rifle fire
which announces the start of battle. "'God is very good,'"
Dick exults. "'I never thought I'd hear this again. Give
‘em hell, men. Oh, give 'em helli'" For the Dick Heldars
of Kipling's stories, it was not the beginning, but rather
the end of a fight that was a cause for regret. "'It was a
lark, . . .'" Dick exclaims after one battle. "'I only wish
it had lasted twice as long.'"

Kipling was an unconscious creator of myths; during
the 1890's he saw no reason to believe that there could be
any very important difference between the British army of
reality, and the invincible, red-coated heroes that marched
from one triumph to another through the pages of his books.
Until the disasters of the South African War taught him
differently, Kipling believed the boast of his Irish
soldier, Mulvaney (whose men swam across a river in the
nude to surprise and capture a town of rebellious natives),

that the British army could "take St. Pethersburg in their

 

23"The Head of the District," Life's Handicap

(New York, 1922), p. 301.

 

24Included in The Works of Rudyard Kipling: One
'Vblume Edition (New YOrk, 1927), p. 545.

lO

2
dhrawers." 5

Kipling's brand of militant imperialism was well
suited to the England of the 1890's. For most Englishmen
it was a deleriously exciting time to be alive. On contemporary
maps an enormous and ever-increasing portion of the globe
appeared coloured in red: British red. London music halls
were crowded with audiences stamping their feet and lustily
bawling out the words to songs with refrains such as, "Paint
Another Red Patch on the Map,"26 and "A Little-—British--
Army--goes--a--1ong-—1ong-—way."27

Kipling's writings had an enormous influence on his
own generation. By 1899, his name was a household word in
both England and America. In a book written in 1910, H. G.
Wells recalled, "The prevailing forces in my undergraduate

days was not Socialism but Kiplingism. . . . In the middle

nineties . . . [Kipling] became almost a national symbol.

 

25"Taking of Lungtungpen," Soldier Stories, p~ 39-

26Edward Shanks, Mr. Rudyard Kipling: Second Essays
on Literature (London, 1927), p. 238.

27"The Foundations of British Patriotism," The
Kipling_Journal, April, 1944, pp. 13-14. The Kipling Journal,
published quarterly in London since 1927 by the Kipling
Society, contains hundreds of articles on every aspect of
IKipling's work. Over the years the Journal has acquired and
published many of Kipling's letters, speeches, and other
IJncollected writings.

 

11

He got hold of us wonderfully; he filled us with tinkling and

haunting quotations; . . . he coloured the very idiom of our

conversation."28 In 1904, the literary critic Charles

Masterman described the English national character as it
was portrayed in his literature. Kipling, Masterman declared,
revealed

the Briton to himself, a majestic figure, lord of the
earth, who with the approbation of God, but by the

power of his own right arm, had gotten himself the
victory. It presented a figure of the Imperial race,
like Nietzsche's Overman, trampling over the ineffective,
crushing opposing nations, boasting an iron supremacy,
administering an iron justice. [Kipling's] was the
literature of the security of a confident triumph. . . .
Its appeal was to many permanent elements of human
emotion. It proclaimed the supremacy of England as a
mother worth dying for; her children seeking danger as

a bride, searching all the confines of the world:
encountering and joyfully [subduing] enemies and

natural forces. . . . [He gave us a vision] of the

flag of England . . . as everywhere triumphant by the
testimony of all the winds of Heaven. It was a
literature of intoxication; adequate to a nation which,
having conquered the world in a fit of absence of mind,
has suddenly become conscious of the magnitude of

its achievement. Small wonder that to the eyes of the
men of the time there came with it something of the
force of a gospel. . . . [His] proclamation of the
Imperial race co—operating with God in the bloody
destruction and domination of subject peoples passed
into the commonplaces of a journalism which every
morning revealed to the astonished clerk his devastation
of Afghanistan, or . . . of Zanzibar, or slaughter of
ten thousand fantastic Dervishes in a night and a day.29

 

28H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (New York, 1910),

p. 120.

9Charles Masterman, "After the Reaction," Contemporary
Review, LXXVI (1904), 816-820.

 

CHAPTER II
THE BOER WAR: PART I

The last great crises of the New Imperialism came
in 1899: the Boer War.

Kipling's personal interest in South Africa went
back to 1891, when he had spent several weeks in Cape Colony
before going on to visit Australia and New Zealand.1 In
the years that followed he had several times expressed him-
self in favor of expanding British power in South Africa.
This expansion, as he was well aware, could only be achieved
at the expense of the two Boer republics, the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State.2 As early as 1893 he had made Cape Town
dream--

Of Empire to the northward. Ay, one land
From Lion's Head to line!

Two years later he declared that for Britain, South Africa was:

 

lCarrington, pp. 143-44.

2See particularly Kipling's “Address to the Anglo-
African Writer's Club," The Times (London), May 17, 1898,
p. 11. Hereafter cited as The Times.

 

 

3
A Song of the English.

12

13

the last and the largest Empire,
. . . the map that is half unrolled.4

The Jameson Raid into the Transvaal in 1895, followed by
the Kaiser's telegram of sympathy to President Kruger, was
the motivating force behind Kipling's Hymn Before Action,5
a poem expressing his opinion that it was wrong for England
to repudiate Jameson, or to punish any of the men who had
participated in the invasion:

If wrong we did to call them,

By honour bound they came:

Let not Thy Wrath befall them,

But deal to us the blame.

After the Jameson Raid Kipling became increasingly
concerned with the mounting tensions in South Africa between
the Dutch and the British. In 1898 he made a trip to Cape
Town to observe the situation at first hand.6 Before
returning to England, he was introduced to two of the leading
exponents of the New Imperialism: Sir Alfred Milner, the
Queen's High Commissioner in Cape Colony, and Cecil Rhodes.7
Kipling formed a close friendship with Rhodes, that lasted

until Rhodes's death in 1902.8 The two had much in common.

 

4The Native-Born.

5Carrington, p. 178.

6Somethingof Myself, pp. 160-161.
7Carrington, pp. 210-211.

8Somethingof Myself, pp. 160-161.

14

They were both romantics, and they were both imperialists.
Kipling was just the man to share Rhodes's vision, and to
appreciate the magnitude of his life's work: the attempt
to establish an unbroken string of British possessions,
which would stretch from the Cape to Cairo. "What is your
dream," Rhodes asked him? "You are part of it," Kipling
replied.9

The immediate events that preceded the Boer War
can be quickly listed. In April, 1899, a petition was
received at the British Foreign Office. It bore the signatures
of nearly twenty-two thousand of the Queen's subjects on the
Rand, who were protesting the political and economic perse—
cution they were suffering at the hands of the Kruger govern-
ment.10 In the Transvaal, the Dutch Burghers had become a
minority of the white population, while the British, con-
temptuously referred to by the Dutch as”Uitlanders," owned
three—quarters of the country's wealth, paid five-sixths of
all the taxes, and were allowed no more political rights than

the Black Kaffirs.ll From Cape Town, Sir Alfred Milner gave

 

9Quoted in "Notes," Kipling Journal, October, 1953, p. l.

lORayne Kruger, Goodbye Dolly Gray: The Story of the
Boer War (New York, 1960), P. 49. Hereafter cited as Kruger.

llCarrington, p. 232.

15

the Uitlanders his full support. "The spectacle," he

declared in a cable to the Cabinet in London, "of thousands

of British subjects kept permanently in the position of helots,

constantly chaffing under undoubted grievances and calling

vainly to Her Majesty's government for redress, does steadily

determine the influence and reputation of Great Britain and

the respect for the British Government within the Queen's

Dominions. . . ."12
During the Spring and summer of 1899, both sides

in the dispute drifted slowly closer to war. As a result

of the Uitlanders' petition the Salisbury government

instructed Milner to attempt to negotiate a settlement with

President Kruger. A subsequent conference, held in

Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, proved

a complete failure. Milner broke off the negotiations in

disgust after five days of fruitless debate with Kruger.

Further talks between representatives of the two governments

met a like fate. On September 27, when war had become a

near certainty, the Orange Free State announced that it

would support the Transvaal in any armed conflict with

Great Britain.13

 

12R. C. K. Ensor, England, 1870-1914, The Oxford

History of England, XIV (Oxford, 1960), 247. Hereafter cited
as Ensor.

l31b1d., pp. 248-251.

 

 

16

Events moved rapidly forward. On October 9,
President Kruger sent an ultimatum to the Salisbury govern-
ment demanding that no more British troops be sent to Africa.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, October 10, the
Boer ultimatum was in the hands of England's Colonial Secre-
tary, Joseph Chamberlain. It was rejected before the day
was out.14 Britain's formal declaration of war followed on
the eleventh, and 47,000 British troops were dispatched
to the Cape under the command of Sir Redvers Buller.15

In the midst of the crisis, on September 29, The
“Timgg published Kipling's denunciation of Kruger in verse,
The Old Issue,l6 which made up in force for whatever it lacked
in accuracy of literary merit. Kruger, the poem proclaimed,
was "cruel," "crafty," and "sloven, sullen, savage, secret,
uncontrolled." Kipling reminded his countrymen of England's
traditional hostility to tyranny, and suggested that the
destruction of Kruger's despotic regime would advance the
cause of human freedom.

Few Englishmen in October of 1899 entertained any

doubts as to the outcome of the new war. Victory would be

 

14Kruger, p. 57.

15Carrington, p. 232.

l
6The Times, September 29, 1899, p. 7.

 

17

achieved rapidly and cheaply. After two or three decisive
defeats the Boers would surrender, at which time, it was
expected, their two republics would be annexed to the British
Empire. The Chancellor of the Exchequer estimated that the
conflict would cost no more than ten million pounds. The
War Office thought it would not be necessary to send more
than 75,000 troops to South Africa, and that the war itself
would be over in three months.17

Instead, the Boer War was to cost not ten million,
but nearly two hundred million pounds. It was to last not
three months but two and a half years, and England was forced
to send out to South Africa not 75,000, but 450,000 soldiers.
Worse still, the British victory that was finally achieved
was preceded by a series of humiliating defeats which cut
across the country's pride like a whiplash.18

But in the autumn of 1899 all this was still in the
future. In England, until the results of the first battles
were known, optimism and confidence reigned supreme. The

great majority of the public believed that England's volunteer

army was the finest fighting organization in the world. The

 

l7Kruger, p. 482: Elie Halévy, Imperialism and the
Rise of Labour, Vol. V of A History of the English People in
the Nineteenth Century, 6 vols. (New York, 1961), 137. Here—
after cited as Halgvy, V01. V.

lBIbid.

 

18

boast of a popular song from the period was accepted by most
people as being more or less the truth.
So come you foreign soldiers, and
we don't care who you are--
The Uhlans of the Kaiser or the
Cossacks of the Czar--
Our Army may be little, but you've
learned before to—day
That a little British Army goes
a damned long way.19
Like his readers Kipling welcomed the war. He
considered the Transvaal "a festering sore,"20 and with the
rest of his countrymen was convinced the British army would
have the Boers trounced in a matter of months. His personal
opinion of the Dutch was that they were an "old fashioned,"
and backward people, ignorant of even "the elementary
rudiments of civilisation. . . ."21 What chance, after all,
did a poorly disciplined lot of backs-woods farmers, from
"a country overwhelmingly pastoral, . . ."22 have against
the invincible legions of Imperial Britain?

The public's faith in the ability of the British

army was partly due to the almost unbroken string of victories

 

19George K. Sims, The Dandy Fifth, quoted in The
Kipling Journal, April, 1941, p. 28.

20"Address to the Anglo—African Writer's Club:".Ih§

Times.

21Ibid.

22Somethingof Myself, pp. 161-162.

19

that had been won in the army's endemic wars with natives.
Much of the public's confidence, however, was the result
of having read and believed the writings of Rudyard Kipling.
A few years later a critic was to observe that “while British
wars consisted of batteus of blacks, with the minimum of loss
and pain to ourselves, the falsity of the atmosphere of Mr.
Kipling's battle tales was undiscoverable."23 There is no
reason to doubt that prior to the Boer War, Kipling's soldier
stories were accepted by nearly all of his contemporaries as
highly accurate accounts of the British army as it existed
in reality.
In one month alone before the War, March, 1899, the
British press carried such typical comments as these:
The Times: Whether Mr. Kipling has been worth to his
country, as some of his admirers declare, as much as
a whole corp's d'armee, he has helped, half to create,
half to popularize, a type of our soldier such as we
did not before know.
The Speaker: [His writings are a symbol of] the
fighting spirit of Britain and her offshoots, the
indomitable will and brains she exercises by land
and sea, her magnetic power over subject races,
. . . the ingraineddevilry of the British soldier.
[Kipling] is less a figure in<3ur literature than

a literary herald—at-arms, who sounds the note of
Empire with superb vibrations.25

 

 

23Masterman, "After the Reaction," Contemporary Review,
p. 817.

24"Leading Article," March 4, 1899, p. 7.

25"

Rudyard Kipling,‘
(1899), 786-788.

reprintedin Living Age, CCXX

 

20

Bodk Bgyer: [Before 1890 the average Englishman] felt
uneasy about the future. Might it not be true that
money had unnerved him? Was it not possible that he
had grown too fat to fight? Comfort and reassurance
came from a new strong voice out of the East. [Kipling]
exalted on high the private soldier, the young
subaltern. . . . The mere recital of the deeds of
these men compelled belief in their substantial truth.
The wealth of incident, the corrobative details, the
living flesh and blood of the actors, when described
by this master mind, were at once so extravagant and
so consistent in themselves as to supersede any

effort of imagination beyond that which the eye had
seen and the ear had heard. The conclusion was
irrestible that only a suitable environment was wanting
to reproduce from the ranks of Englishmen a Drake or

a Clive, a Peterborough or a Nelson. . . . Slowly

the conception of a fighting Tommy Atkins grew up to
take the place of the previous widely-held belief that
the British soldier was more ornamental than useful,
and only to be mentioned in terms of disparagement
when contrasted with the armed millions of Germany

or France.26

In October, 1899, a month punctuated by electric
tensions, which ended with the roar of artillery in faraway

Africa, Kipling brought out a new bodk, Stalky and Company.27

 

Thinly veiled as fiction, the boOk was actually an auto-
biographical account of Kipling's schooldays at the militarily
oriented united Services Academy.28 One critic who reviewed

.the bodk declared: "Mr. Kipling, as the apostle of muscle

 

26E. H. Mullin, "Stevenson, Kipling, and Anglo-

Saxon Imperialism," Book Buyer, XVIII (1899), 85—90.
27New York, 1920.

28Somethingof Myself, p. 26.

21

and aggressive imperialism, has uttered many battle-cries

in his time; but this is his completest incitement to war,
. . . . . 2

his crowning achievement as the supreme Recruiting Sergeant." 9

The review carried in The Times quoted approvingly Kipling's

 

evaluation of his fictional hero, Stalky. It is just as Mr.

Kipling says, The Times observed:

 

India's full of Stalkies--Cheltenham and
Haileybury and Marlborough chaps--that we don't
know anything about, and the surprises will begin
when there is really a big row on.

"Who will be surprised?" said Dick. . . .

"The other side. The gentlemen who go to the
front in first-class carriages. Just imagine Stalky
let loose on the south side of Europe with a
sufficiency of Sikhs and a reasonable prospect of
loot. Consider it quietly."30

During the bitter disillusionment of the following
months, one fact was to become abundantly clear. England's
"Stalkies," her supply of headlong, heartstrong officers,
the military gentlemen from her public schools, were notor-
iously lacking in the same kind of resourcefulness and in-

genuity shown by their fictional prototype.

 

29 . . . .
"Mr. Kipling as a Recruiting Sergeant,"

LVII (1899), 421-422.

30The Times, October 6, 1899, p. 8.

The Academy,

 

 

CHAPTER III
THE BOER WAR: PART II

Before the year was out, the words in the Timgg'
review of Stalky and Company had become an ironic mockery.
The country was shocked into a numbed horror at the news of
an incredible series of British defeats in South Africa.

The Boers, those same primitive farmers, despised by Kipling
for their backwardness, had disastrously routed British
armies at the battles of Elandsaagte, Ladysmith, Stormberg,
Magersfontein, Colenso and Spionkop.

An unpleasant truth was rapidly borne in upon the
English people. In training, tactics, and organization, the
British army was not the same efficient military machine
that appeared in Kipling's writings. The plight of the
army was largely the fault of the War Office. In 1899,
the army was still practicing battlefield tactics dating
from the Napoleonic wars. The standard training regulations,
as laid down at Aldershot, continued to insist that an

infantry charge be conducted by troops linked shoulder

 

lKruger, pp. 87-88, 98; Ensor, pp. 253-254.

22

23

to shoulder in a solid wall of unbroken flesh. Only two
months a year were devoted to actual military training or
field maneuvers. The average enlisted man spent the rest
of the year keeping his uniform clean, polishing his equip—
ment, and acting as a body servant to his officers.2

Such antiquated procedures formed only one aspect
of a backward administrative and command system. Of all the
great powers in Europe, Great Britain alone did not possess
a General Staff Organization, who could formulate long—
range military policy and see toiit that the army was kept
abreast of modern innovations in warfare. When England went
to war in1899, she found that the normal handicaps of a
dilapidated military structure in the nineteenth century
had all been dramatically intensified by the weapon of the
twentieth century--automatic rifles, repeating pistols,
long-range high explosive artillery, and the machinegun.
Save for the airplane, the armies in South Africa fought with
weapons very nearly as deadly as those used in the two World
wars of our own century. Against these new weapons the
classic tactics of Aldershot were suicidal: The bayonet
charge, lance cavalry, and the shoulder to shoulder formation

of infantry produced mass slaughter when employed against an

 

2Kruger, pp. 62-63.

24

enemy armed and equipped with the new weaponry.

In the absence of a major war since the Crimean,
however, the true condition of the British army passed
unnoticed. Encouraged by Kipling's fiction and the army's
mounting toll of victories in its wars with savages, the
average Englishman remained dangerously complacent. The
British defeats in South Africa, therefore, came as a rude
shock. The humiliations suffered by English arms at
Elandsaagte, Ladysmith, Stormberg, Magersfontein, and Colenso
produced a kind of incredulous astonishment. This quickly
changed to anger. "When the New Year came," J. A. Spender
wrote, "it was doubtful whether the British public were
angrier with the Boers for having defied the power of Great
Britain, or with the Government which had landed itself
and the country in such a position."4

The Boer successes continued through 1899. In
England the initial shock at defeat was replaced by a renewed
determination to fight the War to a victorious conclusion.
Buller was dismissed from his command. In his place was

appointed England's most famous soldier, Lord Roberts,

while Kitchener was assigned to serve as his chief of staff.

 

31bid., pp. 60-63.

4Quoted in Colonel John K. Dunlop, The Development of
the British Army, 1899-1914 (London, 1938), p. 121.

 

25

The arrival of the two officers in Cape Town in January, 1900,
was followed by massive troop reinforcements from England,
as well as the appearance of large numbers of volunteers
from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many of the other
territories in the Empire. In 1900, the War began to go
in Britain's favor. In February, at the battle of Paardeburg,
the Boers received their first serious defeat. Paardeburg
was followed by a series of impressive British victories.
With the survivors of the battle fleeing in front of his
advancing troops, Lord Roberts pushed rapidly forward. On
the thirteenth of March his army captured Bloemfontein, the
capital of the Orange Free State. In the next three months
British troops occupied the remainder of the Free State,
which was formally annexed to the Empire in May. Johannesburg
and Pretoria, the two principal cities of the Transvaal,
fell to the British in June. In August the last organized
Boer army was defeated at Bergendal. Two months later the
Transvaal shared the fate of its sister republic, and became
a colony of the British Empire.

By October, 1900, the War was over, or so it appeared.
Lord Roberts returned to England, where he was greeted as a
conquering hero. Kitchener remained behind to mop up the

few Boers still obstinately refusing to surrender.

26

The War, however, as the British soon learned to
their consternation, was far from being over. It had merely
entered upon a new stage, and was to continue as a guerrilla
war for seventeen more long, discouraging months. While the
Boers could no longer field an army, they were able to
successfully carry on the struggle as mounted infantry.
Boers who had laid down their arms when Pretoria fell, or
after the defeat at Bergendal, were encouraged to further
resistance. Soon swarms of hard-hitting guerrilla units
arose to carry out a series of destructive raids. The
British, for their part, were left baffled and furious at
the effectiveness of the new tactics. To combat his
highly mobile foe, Kitchener was forced to adopt a variety
of measures which were steadily increased in severity as
the struggle dragged on.

The process of disbanding the army, begun in October,
was halted. From England Kitchener demanded and was sent
men and horses by the thousands. Having transformed his own
army into mounted infantry, he could now for the first time
pursue his elusive enemy on equal terms. When even this
failed to produce decisive results, Kitchener was compelled
to extend the War to the Boer women and children. The supply
bases for the Boer guerrillas were their farms, which pro-

vided them with food, shelter, and spare horses. At the start

27

of 1901, he ordered the systematic burning of hundreds of
Boer homesteads. The Boer dependants, the women and children,
were imprisoned in British concentration camps.

To guard the railways, which were their communication
lines, the British had constructed chains of blockhouses.
These were placed at two thousand yard intervals along the
tracks, filled with troops, and fortified with machineguns.
Kitchener now realized that by stringing barbed wire between
each blockhouse he could prevent the guerrilla parties from
gaining access to large areas of the country. vast "drives"
followed, in which thousands of mounted British infantry
formed themselves into cordons and herded whatever Boers
they might encounter in the direction of the barbed wire
and the blockhouses. The enormous numerical superiority of
the British now became decisive. One guerrilla band after
another was trapped in the British net. With escape
impossible the Boers could only choose between fighting,
and being killed,or surrendering. Every week after the
start of the "drives" saw the capture of four to five
hundred guerrillas. Even if the Boers continuedtfluacontest
to the last man, Kitchener was pleased to observe, their final
defeat was inevitable.

The Boers came to the same conclusion. In March,

1902, they asked for peace terms. The negotiations that

28

followed ended in the Peace of Vereeniging in May. The
Boers agreed to accept the annexation of their two republics.
The British for their part showed generosity by granting
three million pounds to rebuild destroyed farms, and by
promising that self—government would be granted in the near
future.5

Between 1899 and 1902, Kipling made three trips to
South Africa.6 In 1900, for the first time, he saw something
of war as it existed in reality.7 He was at the front
during the battle of Paardeburg in February, and at the
invitation of Lord Roberts followed the British Army into
Bloemfontein,8 where he witnessed another battle, that of
Karree siding.

His firsthand look at the South African conflict
convinced him that a primary weakness of the British army

. . . 10 .
was inadequate training. This was due to the fact that

 

The chronological account of the Boer War was taken
from Ensor, pp. 252-256, 345-348; Kruger, pp. 140-160, 450-488,
and Halévy, v, 69-93.

6Carrington, pp. 236, 246, 249.

7Irvin S. Cobb, "Interview with Kipling," Bookman
(New York),XXXVIII (January, 1914), 10.

8Carrington, pp. 237-238.

9Kipling, Somethingrof Myself, pp. 169-171.

10In his writings during the war Kipling severely
criticized the performance of the British army in South Africa.
See particularly: "The Outsider," and "Folly Bridge," in
Uncollected Prose, The Sussex Edition of the Complete Works

in Prose and verse, 35 Vols. (London, 1938), Vol. XXX. Here-
after cited as Sussex Ed., vol. XXX.

29

the regular army was too small to deal with the Boers alone,
while at the same time England had practically nothing in
the way of trained reserves who might be called up to fill
out the ranks of the regulars. The net result was that
Great Britain was forced to fight the opening months of the
War with half—trained civilian volunteers, who had been
given little more than a few lessons in marksmanship before
being rushed to the front. From first to last it was found
necessary to raise and equip an army of 450,000 men.

Against the Boers this gave Britain a numerical superiority
of about four to one. NOnetheless, it took England two-and—
a-half years to defeat a foe whose cities and supply bases
had all been either captured or destroyed.11 As late as

the spring of 1901, Kitchener was complaining that the majority
of the volunteers received from England were totally useless.
They could neither shoot nor ride, and had to be put through
an extensive training period in Cape Town before they could
be sent into battle. On almost every occasion that the
British did encounter the Boers on roughly equal terms they
were defeated. The whole War, in fact, from the British
point of view was a potent demonstration of the superiority

of the trained versus the untrained soldier.12

 

llHaléVY, V: 79'83; 89‘90.

12Kruger, pp. 64-65, 147-151, 431.

30

This was certainly Kipling's conclusion.13 The
British volunteers, he commented disgustedly, were "full
of zeal, but empty of all knowledge."14 After witnessing a
battle, he declared that the Boers "fought to kill, and by
what I could make out the British fought to be killed. So
both parties were accommodated."15

As the War finally drew to a close, it might be
said with some confidence that the British people would
insist that the government enact a comprehensive program
of army reform.l6 Certainly this was Kipling's opinion.

In July, 1901, he published a set of verses in The Times,

appropriately entitled The Lesson. Our failures in South

 

Africa, he declared, were both a surpirse and a national
humiliation. But they were also educational. We have been
given a painful but convincing demonstration of how woefully
unprepared the British army is to fight a modern war against
a well trained and disciplined army:

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of

 

 

 

good.
13" ll ' '
Letters to H. S. W. Edwardes, reprinted in The
Kipling Journal, December, 1956, pp. 13-15.
14"A Sahib's War," Traffics and Discoveries (London,
1924), p. 84.
15

"The Captive," ibid., p. 9.

6"Leading Article," The Times, January 7, 1902, p. 7.

31

Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,

But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times
and again,

Were all our most holy illusions knocked higher than
Gilroy's kite.

We have had a jolly good lesson, and it serves us jolly
well righti

It was our fault, and our very great fault, and pg; the
judgment of Heaven.

We made an Army in our own image, on an island nine by
seven,

Which faithfully mirrored its makers' ideals, equipment,
and mental attitude--

And so we got our lesson: and we ought to accept it
with gratitude.

All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle an
overlie us--

Have felt the effects of the lesson we got--an advantage
no money could buy usi

Then let us develop this marvellous asset which we alone
command,

And which, it may subsequently transpire, will be worth
as much as the Rand.

Let us approach this pivotal fact in a humble yet
hopeful mood--

We have had no end of a lesson. It will do us no end
of goodi

It was our fault, and our very great fault—-and now
we must turn it to use.

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a
single excuse.

The Lesson struck a note of optimism. It reflected

Kipling's confidence that his countrymen would profit from

what they had learned at such a frightful cost in South

Africa. The blood, the suffering, the expense, the shame

of the first defeats: none of it had been in vain. England

had received a lesson, his poem announced, "an advantage no

32

money could buy us,' which might prove more valuable than
the country's newly acquired gold mines in the Transvaal.
Events in Europe were already, in 1901, drawing
Kipling's attention away from South Africa. There might
well be a time in the not too distant future when Englishmen
would be called upon to fight a far more formidable foe than
the Boers. If, before that day came, the nation had profited
from the South African debacle by instituting a thorough-

going system of army reform, then nothing would have been

lost by the War. Much, in fact, would have been gained.

CHAPTER IV

THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE APPOINTMENTS TO THE

FIRST AND SECOND ARMY CORPS

The British Army, the South African War had also
revealed, suffered from a plethora of officers of mediocre
ability. The regular army before the War was still something
of a closed corporation. Wealth and influence could no
longer buy commissions, but they continued to be passports
to speedy promotion, and many officers were able to enjoy
successful army careers while remaining abysmally ignorant
about modern developments in weapons and tactics.

During the Boer War, Kipling turned out a number of
sharply worded pieces in which he contrasted the heroism of
the men who served in the ranks of the British army with
the inefficiency and criminal stupidity that was frequently
displayed by their officers.2 Very little would be gained
by the enactment of any military reform program which did not

include the retirement of those officers,Kipling contemptuously

 

lKruger, pp. 62-63.

2The best examples of this theme appear in the story
"The Outsider," Sussex Ed., Vol. XXX, and the poem Stellenbosch.

 

33

34

dubbed them "The Old Guard,"3 who had been responsible for
the defeats in South Africa. Implicit within the sanguine
hopes that he had expressed in The Lesson was his expectation
that a thorough-going revamping of the army would eliminate
the worst of the Boer war brass-hats.

The Lesson, however, had scarcely appeared before

 

the friends of army reform received a rude shock. In the
previous year (October, 1900), Lord Lansdowne, whose
administration of the War Office had aroused sharp criticism,
was replaced as Secretary for War by St. John Brodrick.4

The new minister was not a happy choice.5 Brodrick's first
year in office saw abandoned the extensive scheme for army
reform and reorganization which he had promised the country.6
Of more immediate seriousness, however, was his broken pledge
concerning the appointments to the First and Second Army
Corps,7 the two units that would be the first to be sent
abroad in any future war. If anything had been proven by

the South African conflict, it was the wisdom of reserving

 

3In the poem, The Song of the Old Guard.
4
Ensor, p. 611.

5Halévy, v, 101.

61bid.

7"Sir Redvers Buller and the First Army Corps,"

The Spectator, LXXXVII (1901), 458.

 

35

these posts for competent officers of proven ability.8

Now, in the autumn of 1901, Sir Redvers Buller was
given command of the First Army Corps. The Second went to
Sir Evelyn Wood. Kipling received the news with stunned
horror. Buller's fumbling had been responsible for the
disaster at Colenso in December, 1899, a defeat which had
cost Britain 1,100 casualties. In addition, Buller had
unnecessarily advised Sir George White, the officer in charge
of the defences at Ladysmith, to surrender, and had failed
at every other task assigned to him before returning to
England in disgrace. As for Wood, he was deaf and had not
taken any part in the War. In another war, Buller's record
and Wood's handicap would insure that neither man would be
allowed to lead troops into battle. The appointments seemed
clearly intended as sinecures. In any case, they violated
Brodrick's promise that, "No General should henceforth be
appointed on the peace establishment who would not be fit
and capable to undertake his command in war time."9

Kipling moved swiftly. He was determined to stimulate
public indignation against the appointments, and, if possible,
to have them reversed. Before acting he must have pondered
over the words he had so confidently written in the summer

of 1901:

 

81bid.
91bid.

36

All the obese, unchallenged old things that stifle and
overlie us-—

Have felt the effects of the lesson we got--an advantage

no money could buy us‘.10

Kipling's first response to Brodrick's appointments
was a long letter to The Spectator, a journal which shared
his indignation. Has the War Office learned nothing, he asked?
"Three or four years ago we should have accepted both imaginary
corps and imaginary generals as serious additions to our
defences; but in the past twenty-four months we have been manu—
facturing a real Army in South Africa . . . [which contains],
thanks to God and the Mauser, . . ." a large number of officers
who are more competent than either General Buller or General
Wood. The British people, Kipling continued, "have paid no
small price in money and in bloOd that there might be born an
Army, handled by fit and proven leaders." The appointment of
Buller and Wood indicates "that, in spite of the pledges of
the government, the whole army machine is to be hauled back
. . . to the old ruts of impotence, pretence, and collapse.
. . . It is not the triviality or ineptitude displayed in

this matter that appals, but the cynical levity."ll

Five days after Kipling's letter appeared in The

 

10The Lesson.

11"On the Appointments to the First and Second Army

Corps," The Spectator, LXXXVII (1901), 479.

37

Spectator, General Buller came to the aid of his critics by
making a rash and somewhat incoherent speech. Attempting to
defend himself, he was foolish enough to declare that in
telling White to surrender Ladysmith, he had intended to
help White by relieving him of responsibility for the decision
to surrender.12 The idea of a general assisting a fellow
officer to surrender was preposterous. The British press was
roused to a fresh burst of anger against the bewildered Buller.
The agitation was kept up until Broderick bowed to the clamor
and relieved him of his command.13

At the height of the furor resulting from Buller's
speech, Kipling's poem The Reformers was published in Th;
gimgg. The verses were more than merely a personal attack
against Buller. Kipling was alarmed at the single mindedness
with which the press was pursuing the General's inadequacies.
He agreed that Buller should be dismissed-—and promptly. But
Buller, he reminded his readers, was only a symbol of what
was wrong with the whole British army. In Kipling's opinion
it was dangerous nonsense to make Buller the scapegoat for
the defeats in South Africa, "his nation‘s sacrifice to turn

the judgment from his race." It would be better to allow

 

12"General Buller," The Times, October 11, 1901, p. 10-

13Kruger, p. 483.

38

Buller to keep his command, if dismissing him meant that

the British public would forget the stern necessity for army
reform, complacently assuming that it had been achieved by
sacking one incompetent officer. In taking this position,
Kipling was not at all concerned with sparing Buller's feelings,
but rather with saving his countrymen from falling into the
disastrous illusion that it was an individual who was to blame
rather than an institution. As he had been careful to point

out in The Lesson: "It was our fault, and our very great

 

fault--and now we must turn it to use. We have forty
million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse" [italics

mine].

CHAPTER V

THE CASE FOR PEACE TIME CONSCRIPTION

The performance of the British army in South Africa
had initiated the clamor for army reform, but the public's
continued interest in the subject after 1902 resulted from
a growing awareness of how universally hated their country
was by all the great powers of Europe. The defeats at the
start of the War had acquainted a watchful Europe with the
appalling defects that existed in the training and organi-
zation of the British army. The imperial colossus, it was
observed, had feet of clay. In France, Germany,and Russia,
the Boer victories were greeted with howls of delight and
were interpreted as the first step in the long overdue dis-
memberment of Britain's swollen Empire. The press in
France, where the memory of Fashoda still galled, conducted
a ferocious anti-British campaign. The German foreign
minister, Count Bfilow, confidently predicted that England
would lose the war. In Russia the advocates of an aggressive
foreign policy urged the Tsar to take advantage of the
opportunity offered by England's preoccupation with the

Boers and move against India. It was well for England that

39

40

she was able to seize the offensive after 1899. For the
possibility of foreign intervention in South Africa, or of
an attack against some other portion of her Empire did not
appreciably diminish until the great British victories that
came in the winter and spring of 1900.1

During the war the Kaiser's government followed a
policy of neutrality. However, there were German volunteers
fighting with the Boers, and most of the German press was
violently pro-Boer. Chamberlain's offer of an alliance
between the two countries was arrogantly rejected.2 Of
more consequence for the future, though, were the German
Naval Laws of 1898, 1900, and 1901, whose announced purpose
was to give Germany a navy second only to Great Britain's.3

The German naval laws and Europe's response to
Britain's difficulties in South Africa increased the support
for army reform in England. Neither, however, brought the
advocates of reform any closer to agreeing on the specific

nature of the measures that should be included in a military

I O 4 l
reorganization program. The most serious weakness of the

 

lKruger, pp. 144-145.

glhid., pp. 75, 107, 144, 154, 156.

3Halévy, v, 112, 115.

4A number of the different proposals for military reform
are discussed in: "Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea," The Spectator,

SLXXXVIII (1902), 40: "Leading Article," The Times, January 4,
1902! p. 90

 

 

41

British army was its chronic shortage of trained and experienced
troops. It was no accident that the average Boer made a
better soldier than his English counterpart. Under the
ever—present threat of an attack by wild animals or marauding
natives, the Boer males grew up with guns in their hands.
Almost all were expert marksmen, and it was this training

that allowed the Boers to nearly defeat Britain at the start
of the War, and later, having lost the offensive themselves,

to carry on the contest for two-and—a-half years.5 As

The Times concluded in a 1902 editorial: In a modern war

"the courage of the untrained man is wasted in conflict
with those that are trained. . . ."6

For Great Britain, then, the South African War had

demonstrated the desirability of maintaining in peacetime

a large, trained, ready reserve, capable of being called up
in an emergency to fill out the ranks of the regular army.
The whole problem pointed towards one solution: peace time
conscription. In her refusal to adopt conscription England
was alone among the great powers of Europe. Freedom from
compulsory military service was traditionally regarded as

one of the rights of Englishmen. Meet people found the whole

 

5Kruger, pp. 63-64, 403-405.

6"Leading Article,” January 7, 1902, p. 7.

42

idea of a draft so repugnant that it would probably mean
political suicide for the party which first suggested it.7
There was scarcely a statesman at even the darkest moments
of the War who could be brought to publicly declare in its
favor.8 In 1902 the Spectator declared that the English people
would never accept conscription "except under fear of utter
subjugation."9

Obnoxious as compulsory military service might be,
the worsening international situation, combined with the
wretched performance of the army in South Africa, kept the
issue before the country. Here it received the endorsement
of a number of organizations and prominent individuals.
Lord Roberts, after his return from South Africa, came out
in favor of conscription, and the National Service League,
dedicated to introducing universal training, was founded in

1901.10 As for Kipling, by the end of the War he had become

 

7 . . . . . . .
This pOint lS discussed in "Mr. Rudyard Kipling's
Idea," The Spectator.

8One possible exception was Lord Rosebery, the leader
of the Liberal Imperialists, who, before the tide of defeat
had been turned, January, 1900, announced publicly his willing-
ness to consider the merits of a system of conscription
(Halévy, v, 101-102).

9 4
"Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea," The Spectator.

10David James, Lord Roberts (London, 1951), p. 415.

43

an ardent supporter of peace time conscription.ll The

bungling and inefficiency of the half-trained recruits that
he had seen in South Africa had left him appalled. "The
British soldier,” he wrote, "failed in every point except
courage."12 The knowledge that the War had been needlessly
prolonged due to England's shortage of trained troops
horrified him.13 He believed that many of the English

dead had died unnecessarily, the men who might have lived
if there had been time to give them two months of intensive
military training before sending them into battle.14 In

a story written in 1900, he described the reaction of a
British Colonel in Cape Town to the news that another batch
of inexperienced recruits had arrived from England. The
colonel's Second assures him that the new men will Vlearn
in time." Before they do, the Colonel replies, most of them
will have been killed, captured, or wounded.15 Kipling

returned to the same theme two years later in a story entitled

”The Captive." One of his characters, a British General,

 

11"Letters to H. S. W. Edwardes,” Kipling Journal.

12"The Captive,” Traffics apg Discoveries, p. 34.

139A Sahib's War,” Ibid., p. 85.

14"The Outsider,” Sussex Ed., XXX, 126-127.

15Ibid.

 

44

declares that he would like to see the war "'1ast another
five years. we'd have an army then. . . . My command here
I regard as a training depot. . . . With luck, we ought to
run half a million men through the mill.”16
In an interview with Irvin S. Cobb in 1913, Kipling
confessed that he had never seen any fighting in India.
”But I did see war in South Africa,” he said. On the
battlefields of South Africa he had expected to "see charges,
and thin red lines, and hear hoarse commands and stand silent
and thrilled in that dread hush before the battle." But
instead of individual heroics, he found "method and precision
and application of modern efficiency ideas [which] makes the
carnage that follows all the more ghastly." The dead and
the wounded seemed to Kipling "like innocent bystanders
who . . . [had] got in the way of some great civil engineering
scheme and had been torn and blown up."17
Kipling admitted that he had been surprised by the
firepower of the machinegun and the scientific accuracy of

the new long-range artillery. Modern warfare, Kipling

concluded, is like a ”mathematical problem, with some of

 

16Traffics and Discoveries, pp. 24, 25, 27.

17"Interview with Kipling," Bookman.

45

the aspects of a surgical operation by the highest paid
specialists. . . . There is no more romance or glamour in
war." Against the new tools of destruction, he had decided,
mere brute courage was not enough. War in becoming scientific
had become professionalized, and in the future would demand
vast armies of skilled men who had been taught their business
. . 18
in peace time.
When the South African War ended, Kipling believed

that public opinion would force the government to enact a
sweeping series of military reforms. For a time he thought
that the widespread interest in army reform might well end in
peace time conscription. To a friend he wrote:

The memories are the things that are going to do us

all good. . . . I don't know how you feel about

some form of compulsory service for home defence,

but all the chaps who've done their whack in

South Africa seem to me to be pretty red-hot

on the subject of conscription. What would you

have given when you went out [to South Africa],

for a sound working knowledge of rifle-shooting

and extended order drill put into you from your

twelfth to your fifteenth years, instead of a

hasty and inadequate . . . run through in a month?19

Despite his burst of optimism, Kipling was fully

aware of the prejudices that the majority of his countrymen

held against compulsory military service. Accordingly, before

 

laIbid.

19"Letters to H. S. W. Edwardes,” Kiplinngournal.

46

adopting an uncompromising stand on the issue, he investi-
gated a number of alternatives to conscription. For a
short time, during and immediately after the War, he believed
that the basic requirement of the trained soldier might be
met by teaching civilians marksmanship on a voluntary basis.
His first reaction to the British defeats in 1899 had been
to form a rifle club for the people of his own town,
Rottingdean. It was his hope that conscription might be
avoided through the creation of a national system of such
clubs.20

In his efforts to popularize rifle clubs on the
national level, Kipling attempted to convince his sports—
minded countrymen of the attractions of target shooting as
a game, different only from cricket or football in that its

ultimate purpose was more useful. In the summer of 1901

he expressed his views on the subject in The Spectator.

 

20H. E. Blyth, "Kipling at Rottingdean,” Kipling

Journal, April, 1953, p. 5. The club in Rottingdean numbered
some fifty members. Kipling regarded the club's purpose as
being important enough to justify erecting a tin shed so that
the members might practice during the winter (Kipling, letter
to Dr. Conland, July 24, 1900, Carpenter Collection, Library
of Congress). After returning from South Africa, Kipling
made several alterations in the range itself, the most
important being to make it a thousand yards long, the first
range of that length in Great Britain, he boasted to Julian
Ralph, to have been started by "purely private enterprise"
(Letter, October 15, 1900, Carpenter Collection).

47

The members of the club in Rottingdean, he explained, rep-
resented every occupation in the village: blacksmiths, shop-
keepers, carpenters, farmers, school teachers, and the
village vicar. Rifle practice was anything but a gentleman's
sport:

If we lose our tempers the target will not answer

back; we cannot impress the unseen markers by our rank,

wealth, or achievement in the world without. . . . We

cannot patronise anyone. . . . Unlike cricket,

football, lawn-tennis or fives, any man can play

the game: for here, no more than on the high veldt,

will the discreet bullet tell its billet whether

the dispatcher was old, unlovely, poor, weak, or

ill-clad. . . . We are enjoying the game for its

own sake; because it is sane, and healthy, and quiet

(infinitely quieter than a cricket match, does not

knock our daily work to pieces, . . . and opens to us

a happy new world of interest and ideas.

Unfortunately, it soon became apparent that the new
sport had failed to catch the public's imagination.
Kipling, accordingly, changed his tactics. He continued
his attempts to promote a national system of rifle clubs,
but after the article in The Spectator, the superiority of

target practice to aristocratic cricket was replaced by a

very different argument: Rifle practice, it now appeared,

 

21?A Village Rifle Club,” reprinted in Sussex Ed.,
xxx, 250-251. Kipling's interest in target practice was
primarily for its military value. It is significant that
he said nothing about a second function of the club in
Rottingdean, the teaching of military drill to the members
(Kipling to Conland, July 24, 1900).

48

was really not a game after all, but instead a sane and
intelligent method for giving civilians peace time military
training, the kind of training, in fact, that they would
need to defeat an invading army on their own beaches.22

The Boer War had been over for two months when Kipling
delivered a speech at ceremonies opening a rifle club in
Lower Sydenham. Despite the return of peace, he chose to
emphasize the practical usefulness of marksmanship as a way
of preparing for war. The South African conflict, he told
his audience, demonstrated the danger of having "the
overwhelming bulk of the population . . . brought up in
absolute ignorance of the use of firearms." Rifle clubs,
he now thought, were not a luxury, but a necessity. Kipling
was not advocating preparedness for another round of imperial
wars, where defeat meant only a loss of prestige. This
was preparedness for survival, survival in a war where
England might have "to be defended by swarms of civilian

riflemen sitting behind hedges and sniping at the enemy."23

 

2
"Mr. Rudyard Kipling on Rifle Ranges," The Times,
August 4, 1902, p. 6. Kipling's opinion on the matter did

not change again. In a letter in 1906, he answered a question
on the subject by declaring: "I write to agree entirely

with your views on the futility of rifle ranges as 'sport.'"
The letter was reprinted in The MorningpPost (April 17, 1906,
p. 12) under the caption: "Mr. Kipling on Chinese Slavery."

23qu. Rudyard Kipling on Rifle Ranges," The Times.

 

 

49

He elaborated on the theme: "Rifle-shooting must
be taught to the individual on the same basis as we . . .
[teach] A B c. We . . . [do] not wait until a hey . . .
[is] 18 or 19 and . . . [thinks] he would like to be Lord
Chancellor before teaching him his letters, and similarly
we must not wait until he . . . [is] 18 or 19 and [decides
that he wants] to die for his country before putting a rifle
into his hands.” Kipling encouraged the members of the new
club to practice basic military drills in addition to
marksmanship. Military preparedness, he assured them, did
not turn men into-Finflammable barbarians.” A man who can
drill and shoot does "not go into the streets blazing away
with his rifle, [or] . . . fall into military formation
every time he . . . [hears] an omnibus."24

Until the end of the war, Kipling found it possible
to hope that the civilian rifle clubs might conceivably be
a satisfactory substitute for conscription. But the clubs
had one fatal weakness: membership was purely voluntary.
While they attracted a considerable number of enthusiasts
during the War, interest in the movement waned abruptly
after 1902. Kipling's club in Rottingdean, along with many

others, lost so many members that it was forced to disband.

 

24Ibid.

50

It was a bitter blow for Kipling. With a lavish expenditure
of his own time and money he had made the Rottingdean club
a model of the type that he hoped would one day be established
in every village in England.2

It was the collapse of the rifle-club movement that
made Kipling turn to conscription. Since most men could
not be persuaded to prepare for war, it would be necessary
to use compulsion. The Kipling who arrived at this conclusion
was a very different man from the arrogant, young Anglo-Indian
who had considered the regular British army an invincible
juggernaut, largely because its ranks were filled exclusively

by volunteers, men who were all professional soldiers.

"The worst of conscription," he had declared in 1889, is

that it sweeps in such a mass of fourth and fifth rate
citizens who, though they may carry a gun, are likely, by
their excusable ineptitude, to do harm to the morale and
set-up of a regiment."26 The Boer War changed his mind.
He admitted as much in 1904 when he wrote: "A thousand
'trained Englishmen ought to be as good as another thousand

-trained Englishmen."27 He no longer believed that there was

 

—_'

25Blyth, "Kipling at Rottingdean," Kipling Journal.

26"From Sea to Sea," Letters of Travel, p. 481.

27"The Anmy of a Dream," Traffics and Discoveries, p. 264.

51

any unbridgeable gap between the career army and the civilian
volunteers. In South Africa he had seen, for the first time
in his life, an army of citizen soldiers. It was not the
same army he had known in India, "but the Army of the People,
heavily laced with Reservists, family folk, who have kiddies
and businesses over the sea. Blacksmiths, gardeners, club-
porters, and small shopkeepers were among those represented,
and their physique was almost as admirable as their spirit."28
Kipling was quick to notice that the raw recruits, if they
had nothing else, had the courage of professionals: "They
were wonderful even in the hour of death--these men and
boys--lodge-keepers, . . . ex-butlers . . . and raw town
lads of twenty._"29 Once properly trained, as the war was to
prove, these soldiers made as good fighting material as the

professionals themselves.3O

 

28"With Number Three,V Suppex Ed., XXX, 82.

29Somethingngyself, p. 168.

30_"On the Appointments to the First and Second Army

The_§pectator.

COI‘PSI,

CHAPTER VI

THE ISLANDERS: A.PLEA FOR

PEACE TIME CONSCRIPTION

VIt is a very foolish thing,' one of Kipling's
contemporaries wrote in the winter of 1902, ”to lock at
Rudyard Kipling from a purely literary point of View.

. . He is so much more than a literary man that the
ordinary standards of literary criticism do not apply to
him any longer."1 At about the same time the critic,
William Archer decided: "Whatever may be . . . [Kipling's]
ultimate place in literature, there can be no doubt that
his poems have won him for him what perhaps he values more-—
a place in the history of his country."2

The comments of both critics were provdked by a
single poem, The IslanderLg, Kipling's powerfully worded

endorsement of peace time conscription. Kipling composed

the verses in 1902 shortly before leaving England on the

 

lEditorial, TThe Islanders," Bodkman (New York),
XIV (1903) , 630—631.

2William Archer, Poets of the YOunger Generation
(London, 1903), p. 220.

52

53

last of his three wartime visits to South Africa.3 The

Islanders was published by The Times in January,4 and

 

immediately succeeded in touching off a prolonged and furious
national debate over the whole issue of compulsory military
service.

Despite the army's unsatisfactory performance in
South Africa, and the alarm over Germany's naval laws,
neither had been sufficient to produce any real popular
support for conscription.5 Those who did favor compulsory
military training found the attitude of the British govern-
ment on the subject even more discouraging. In 1901,
Kipling had tangled with St. John Brodrick, the Secretary for
War, over his appointments to the First and Second Army Corps.
But it was Brodrick's opposition to conscription that completed
Kipling's disenchantment with the new minister.

The Islanders, the work of a bitter and angry man,

 

 

3Carrington, p. 248.

4
January 4,1902, p. 9.

5Elie Halévy, The Rule of Democracy 1905-1914, Vol. VI
of A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century,
6 Vbls. (New York, 1961), 154-155. Hereafter citedas Halévy,

‘Vol. VI.

6"On the Appointments to the First and Second Army

Corps,” The Spectator.

7Halévy, v1, 163.

54

was written with the hope of persuading Englishmen to see
the necessity for conscription. In this sense the poem

was a failure. Kipling's verses, however, did succeed in
attracting more immediate attention than any other polemical
poem composed in the twentieth century. One journal, for
example, called it "an acute social and political force,"
with ”power enough to shake the ministry._"8

‘The Islanders opened by denouncing the British
people for being materialistic and complacent:

Fenced by your careful fathers, ringed by your laden
$833:

Long did ye wake in quiet and long lie down at ease:

Till ye said of Strife, "What is it?9 of the Sword,
VIt is far from our kenV;

Till ye made a sport of your shrunken hosts and a toy
of your armed men.

Ye stopped your ears to the warning—-ye would neither
lodk nor heed—-

Ye hampered and hindered and crippled; Ye thrust out
of sight and away

Those that would serve you for honour and those that
served you for pay.

The defeats in South Africa, Kipling declared,
resulted from England's refusal to accept compulsory
military training in peace time.

Then were the judgments loosened: then was your shame

revealed,

At the hands of a little people, few but apt in the
field.

 

8“Editorial," Independent: LIV (1902)! 412-413'

55

.Yet ye were saved by a remnant (and your land's long-
suffering star),

When your strong men cheered in their millions while
your striplings went to the war.

Sons of the sheltered city--unmade, unhandled, unmeet--

Ye pushed them raw to the battle as ye picked them raw
from the street.

And what did you look they should compass? Warcraft
learned in a breath,

Knowledge unto occasion at the first far view of Death?

But ye said, "Their valour shall show them": but ye
said, 9Tbe end is close."

Then ye returned to your trinkets; then ye contented
your souls

With the flannelled fools at the widket or the muddied
oafs at the goals.

Given to strong delusion, wholly believing a lie,

Ye saw that the land lay fenceless, and ye let the
months go by

Waiting some easy wonder, hoping some saving sign--

Idle--openly idle--in the lee of the forespent Line.

Idle--except for your boasting-—and what is your
boasting worth

If ye grudge a year of service to the lordliest life
on earth?9

Ancient, effortless, ordered, cycle on cycle set,

Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget

It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with
the deep.

 

QMuch of the anger generated by the poem was directed
at the phrase, Fthe lordliest life on earth," and it was
quoted against Kipling as proof that he was a rabid mili-
tarist, who thought that young men would enjoy a year of
compulsory service ('The Islanders,9 The Aggdemy, LXII (1902),
663). Kipling angrily denied the accusation, saying that
the phrase was meant to describe the peaceful civilian life
of the average Englishman, which was "Ancient, effortless,
ordered, cycle on cycle set” (Kipling to E. V. Lucas, letter
quoted in the Kipling Jourpgl, July, 1953, p. 9, and Something

Qf Mysel , pp. 239-240). The reader is left to decide the
truth for himself.

 

56

Men, not gods devised it. Men, not gods, must keep.
Men, not children, servants, or kinsfolk called from
afar,
But each man born in the Island brdke to the matter of
war.
Soberly and by custom taken and trained for the same,
Each man born in the Island entered at youth to the game——
As it were almost cricket, not to be mastered in haste,
But after trial and labour, by temperance, living chaste.
As it were almost cricket--as it were even your play,
weighted and pondered and worshipped, and practised
day and day.

Kipling dismissed the arguments advanced by the
opponents of conscription, and concluded by describing England's
probable fate if she continued without conscription and be-
came involved in a war with one or more of the Great Powers
of Europe.

But ye say, "It will mar our comfort." Ye say, "It will
minish our trade.

Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how
a gun is laid?

For the low, red glare southward when the raided
coast-towns burn?

(Light ye shall have on that lesson, but little time
to learn.)

Will ye pitch some white pavilion, and lustily even
the OddSp

With nets and hoops and mallets, with rackets and bats
and rods?

Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or
ballot them back from your shore?

Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike
no more?

Will ye rise and dethrone your rulers? (Because ye were
idle both?

Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?)

No doubt but ye are the People; who shall make you
afraid?

Also your gods are many; no doubt your gods shall
aid.

57

Idols of greasy altars built for the body's ease;

Proud little brazen Baals and talking fetishes:

Teraphs of sept and party and wise wood-pavement gods-—

These shall come down to the battle and snatch you
from under the rods?

From the gusty, flickering gun-roll with viewless
salvoes rent,

And the pitted hail of the bullets that tell not whence
they were sent.

When ye are ringed as with rion, when ye are scourged
as with whips,

When the meat is yet in your belly, and the boast is
yet on your lips;

When ye go forth at morning and the noon beholds you
broke,

Ere ye lie down at even, your remnant, under the yoke?

With few exceptions the public's response to the
verses was an outburst of indignant anger.lo From furious
readers The Times received dozens of letters that attacked
Kipling for his supposed insult to the British national

character.11 The Times itself considered the poem sufficiently

 

important to make it the subject of two edigorials.12 Egg
Islanders also attracted the attention of other influential
British journals, whose reaction to the verses, as Kipling
had hoped, was a prolonged re-examination of the arguments

for and against conscription.

 

0Kipling's position on compulsory military training
did receive the support of a small minority of The Times'
readers, whose letters appear in the issue of January 7,
1902, p. 10.

1]-Issues of January 6 to 27, 1902.

12"Leading Articles," January 4, 1902, p. 9, and
January 7, 1902, p. 7.

58

The hostile criticism evoked by The Islanders either
condemned Kipling for being a rabid militarist, while denying
the need for conscription, or quarrelled with his comments
on sports. The enthusiasts for football and cricket, fruious

over the reference to ”flanneled fools,- and "muddied oafs,"
summoned up the ghost of Wellington. How dare Kipling

insult the footballer and the Cricketer? "The Iron Duke

was wiser than Mr. Rudyard Kipling."13 Wellington "said

that Waterloo was won on the playing field of Eton; and yet

a man, one Rudyard Kipling, ventures to reprove the nation
for winning . . . [the present War] in the cricket pavilion
and on the grand stand of the footballfield."l4 The poem is
"a violent libel, . . . insolent and mendacious. .

This un—English hatred of manly sport [is] . . . thoroughly

)

characteristic of the anaemic, white livered jingoism which

revels in vicious bloodshed."15 While a nation is waiting

for war, it “can do many worse things than play cricket

 

13"Mr. Rudyard Kipling and 'The Islanders': The

New David and the Modern Goliath," Current Literature, XXXII
(1902), 358—359. The article consists of a collection of

the comments made on The Islanders by Kipling's contemporaries
that appeared in British periodicals.

 

 

 

l4Letter signed "J. F.," The Spectator, LXXXVIII
(1902), 38.
1 5 I! ' ' l' I n
Mr. Rudyard Kipling and The Islanders, . . .

 

gyurrent Literature.

59

and football."16 Certainly, "there is a high, brave spirit
in these 'flannelled fools' and 'muddied oafs' which we in
England should not like to see die. . . . [Let us, therefore,]
' "17
close our ears to traitors.
Conscription was still regarded as a threat to

British liberties. Was it not true, asked The Monthly Review,

 

that "under conscription the civilization of the European

nations has retrogressed," and that compulsory military

, 18

service has bred only "fear," "greed,' and "terror.“

"England with conscription made law.‘ warned a French

Anglophile, "would no longer offer the conditions under which
19

Parliamentary institutions flourished."

On another level, The Islanders was the inspiration

 

for a number of parodies. One was set to music and
included in the score of the successful musical comedy,

A Country Girl, which opened in London two weeks after the

 

publication of Kipling's verses:

There's a writer of rhymes which appeared in The Times
Who is down upon football and cricket,

And he pours out his soul upon the oaf at the goal
And the flannellette fool of the wicket.

 

 

16"The Islanders," The Academy.

17W. J. Knox Little, letter to The Times, January 15,
.1902, p. 12.

18"'The Lordliest Life on Earth,'" VI (February, 1902),

 

 

 

13—4.
19”The Islanders," The Academy.

 

 

60

There was violence feared when his poem appeared,
But the poet was hardly a dreamer:
When the oafs in the mud came to look for his blood

He was off to the Cape on a steamer'.20
The inference that Kipling had fled the country to
.escape the vengeance of his readers was unpleasant, but a
more severe indictment was The Oaf's Answer, a set of
anonymous verses in The London Star:
Fenced by our patient fathers, ringed by our
peaceful seas,
Long did we wake in quiet, and long lie down at
ease,
Till you said of Strife:--"Where is it?" of the
Sword:--9Let it flash again!"
Till you made a god of wanton war and an idol of
armed men.
The author of The ng's Answer considered Kipling a mili—
tarist and declared that The Islgnders had been written for
the express purpose of involving England in another war as
soon as the South African conflict was concluded:
Sons you would tear from their mothers, lads from
their lasses sweet.
And brush them under the wheels of war like the
dust and dirt of the street.21
As The Oaf's Answer indicates, it was Kipling's

advocacy of conscription that produced the most vituperative

'criticism of The Islanders. The Academy, for example,

 

0"Notes on'The Islandersf' The Kiplipg Journal,
June! 1959' pp. 3_50

21
Reprinted in "Mr. Rudyard Kipling and 'The
Islanders,‘ . . .V Current Literature.

61

stated that conscription in England was neither necessary
nor desirable. Most of the supporters of conscription,
The Academy added, are like Mr. Kipling, people who take a

delight in war for its own sake.22 The London Review of

 

Reviews agreed: Kipling's message “is a savage warning that

unless the nation adopts conscription it is doomed to

 

 

perish." But there is no need for conscription, The Review
of Reviews continued, “if the nation repents and turns from
evil ways, . . . and [abstains] with horror from all

thought of forcing its yoke upon unwilling subjects."23

Other opponents of conscription believed, as Kipling
had before the Boer War, that England was a great power
because she employed only volunteers in her armies. The
citizen who fought for purely patriotic reasons, it was still
thought, must always make a better soldier than the unwilling
and resentful conscript.24 The Islanders, one critic wrote
to The Times, is the work of a foolish "alarmist.“ England
has been ”completely successful" in every war since the
Crimean. Was it not through the victories of volunteers

that Britain gained possession of nearly a fourth of the

 

22"The Islanders," The Academy.

 

 

23"The First Faint Signs of a National Awakening,"
xxv (1902) , 147-149-

24W. J. Knox Little, letter to The Times.

 

62

earth's land surfaces? British military power commands the
respect of all nations. There is no power on earth who would
dare attack us. Even now, when we have "deposited . .
about 200,000 'striplings' in South Africa . . . that invader
does not turn up, and Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne
probably will not redden the Southern sky this evening. If
they do so, I will ask your leave to withdraw this letter."25
The Times, The Spectator, and The Monthly Review
believed that England's geographical position and the
superiority of her navy made a large conscript army unnecessary.
._The Spectator denied the need, "while the fleet exists,
. . [for that] amazing supply of men" which conscription
would bring into being. The Times declared that the strength

of the British navy was such that no foreign power could

hope to successfully invade England. Consequently, The Times

 

decided, "a conscript army . . . would be . . . quite useless
for our needs. It could not be sent abroad to fight . . .
and it would have no likelihood of fighting at home."26

The rapid expansion of the new German navy, however,

challenged the old assumption that the invasion of England

 

25$ir Herbert Stephen, January 6, 1902, p. 4.

6“Leading Article," The Times, January 4, 1902;
"Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea,” The Spectator; "'The Lordliest
Life on Earth,T Monthly Review.

 

63

was impossible. The Spectator admitted that the British
navy could only stop an invader if it managed tointercept
his transport vessels.27 But what would happen if an enemy
army did succeed in reaching England?

In The Islgnders Kipling had described the conquest
of the country by just such an army, and had argued that only
conscription would supply enough experienced soldiers to
prevent defeat. The Spectgtor, though opposed to any system

of "Continental conscription,' agreed with Kipling that it

would require more than the courage of civilian volunteers
to repel an invader:

The science of war has made terrible advances, so that
the unskilled . . . are but food for cannon. Ten
thousand men in possession of Hampstead and Sydenham
would hold London at their mercy, though London
contains a nation of brave men. [Preparedness] . . .
can only be secured by training. “The rush of a
crowd, however numerous or however self-sacrificing,
upon a modern army, however small, is but a rush of
victims upon their doom. . . . That is all that

. . . [Mr. Kipling] says, and not only every soldier,
but every politician who has thought upon the subject
knows it to be true.28

But it was here that the same problem arose which
had caused Kipling to become an advocate of conscription.
If The Spectator's estimate is correct, fully two-thirds of

English people were agreed on the desirability of increasing

 

‘ 27"Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea.”

28Ibid.

64

the size of the army, and of devising some means whereby civilians
could be given military training in peace time.29 Nonetheless,
Kipling was still practically alone in his insistence that

nothing short of conscription would accomplish either objective.

While The Islanders was an effective piece of propa-

 

ganda for conscription, it produced, as Kipling admitted himself,
little in the way of practical results.30 The verses, how—

ever, did succeed in stimulating a renewed interest in the
proposals for a national system of rifle and drill clubs.

The Times announced it would support the government if target
practice and military drill were made compulsory in the nation's

schools.31 The Spectator, while continuing to repudiate all

 

forms of compulsion, urged the government to sponsor a

national system of rifle clubs, and declared: "We would

make the competition of the rifle range take the place of a
popular sport."32 Both schemes, however, amounted to nothing ,
more than the same substitute for conscription which Kipling

had rejected as being both unworkable and unrealistic.

 

zglbid.

0 . .
Kipling, letter to Dr. Leander Starr Jameson, June
16, 1902, Kipling Journal, July, 1957, p. 19.
1 . .
"Leading Article," January 4, 1902.

32 . .
"Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea," The Spectator.

 

CHAPTER VII
"THE ARMY OF A DREAM"

One result of The Islanders, however, was a letter
that Kipling received from.Lord Roberts asking him to go on
with his campaign for compulsory military training.1 Thus
encouraged, Kipling renewed his efforts to popularize con-
scription. Despite repeated failures and at a considerable
cost to his own reputation, he continued to work toward this
goal until the start of the First World War twelve years
later.

As Kipling had feared, England's desire for a return
to normalcy after the Boer War proved stronger than her
fear of Germany. In the autumn of 1903, H. O. Arnold-Forster
replaced St. John Brodrick at the War Office.2 Shortly
thereafter, the Esher Commission was created with the task
of drawing up a program for army reform. Kipling was bitterly
disappointed when the Commission's Report, published in

'February, 1904, refused to endorse conscription.3 What

 

l Carrington, p. 248.
2
Ensor, p. 362.

3”Notes," Kiplinngournal, June, 1960, p. 21.

65

66

army reforms the Esher Commission did favor, Kipling declared
were totally inadequate, and he publicly accused the members
of the Commission of attempting to conceal the War Office's
responsibility for the British defeats in South Africa at
the start of the Boer War.4

He expressed his anger in Therfiong ofrthe Old Guard,
a savage poem describing the supposed joy of the military
incompetents at the War Office upon learning that Parliament
had accepted the Esher report, whose timid reforms did not
include any suggestion that they be dismissed from their
positions.

Know this, my brethren, Heaven is clear
And all the clouds are gone-—

The Proper Sort shall flourish now,
Good times are coming on--

The evil that was threatened late
To all of our degree

Hath passed in discord and debate,

And, Hey then up go we!

A common people strove in vain
To shame us unto toil,

But they are spent and we remain,
And we shall share the spoil

According to our several needs
As Beauty shall decree,

As Age ordains or Birth concedes,
And, Hey then up go we!

Till Armageddon break our sleep.

 

41bid.

67

What the British army needed, as Kipling had said
in 1902, was "revolution and not reform."5 To his disgust,
it appeared as if there would be precious little of even the
latter. In 1904, following the publication of the Esher
Report, and after conducting his own study of the military
problems confronting England, Kipling published ”The Army

of a Dream,' a long article on the very radical changes in
the British military system that he personally favored.6

”The Army of a Dream” describes Kipling's conception
of the model army of the future. As its backbone, there are
a hundred thousand permanently mobilized professional soldiers,
the Imperial Guard. The Guard is composed of the elite
troops of all the nations in the British Empire, who serve
as a common imperial defense force. As an auxiliary to the
Guard there is the Reserve, a vast organization of citizen
soldiers. In theory, but not in fact, only volunteers serve
in the Reserve. In place of conscription, Kipling substituted
a variety of potent social and economic pressures, calculated
to make life intolerable for men refusing service in the
army. Such malcontents are disfranchised by the State,

denied all poor relief, legally classified with lunatics

and minors, and scorned by the women. Similar coercive

 

5”The Captive,” Trarficsgapd Discoveries, p. 34.

 

6”The Army of a Dream” first appeared in June, 1904,
in the Morning Post, and was later reprinted in the book
Traffics and Discoveries, pp. 243-300.

 

68

techniques are employed in all of Britain's overseas terri-
tories. As one of the soldiers in Kipling's militaristic
utopia says happily: "No Volunteer no Vbte is the rule
throughout the Empire."7

The American military historian Walter Millis once
wrote that ”The Army of a Dream” reads ”like a cheerful
forecast of the Nazi and Communist system of training
children to war from the cradle, a kind of Orwell 1984 in
reverse, since the author seems completely approving of the
total militarization and regimentation which he describes."8

Millis is quite right. The England that Kipling
envisaged in ”The Army of a Dream" is an armed camp, a
garrison state, where all individual considerations are
subordinated to military prestige and national security.
Citizens in this England of the future enjoy, for all
practical purposes, a life-long military obligation. It
begins at the age of eight, when a boy receives his first
compulsory lessons in marching and drilling. "You've ggp
to be drilled when you're a child, same as you've got to
learn to read, . . .” Kipling wrote. By the time they are
ten, boys know ”their company-drill a heap better than

they . . . [know] their King's English.” This program,

 

7Ibid., p. 263.
8Arms and Men (New York, 1956), p. 181.

69

broadened to include rifle practice and sessions at army
training camps in the summer, continues until the young male
becomes eighteen. Though now considered an adult, he is
required to go on with his military training on a part-time
basis until the age of thirty-five, when he joins an inactive
reserve, the Home Defense Establishment, and is liable for
duty only in the event of a national emergency. The end
product of this system is a nation in which every able—
bodied male becomes a professional soldier merely by donning
a uniform.

One of the soldiers in Kipling's dream army remembers
with horror that there was once a time when people in England
were so incredibly short sighted that they actually encouraged
schoolboys to waste their leisure hours playing militarily
useless games like football and cricket: ”'The notion of
allowing a human being to reach his twentieth year before
asking him to put his feet in the first position was raving
lunacy, . . 3” he declares.10

The descriptions of the military maneuvers conducted
by ”The Army of a Dream” are significant if only because they
indicate that as early as 1904 Kipling was convinced that

England's next war would be fought, if not on her own beaches,

 

9”The Army of a Dream,” pp. 253-264.

10Ibid., p. 246.

70

then certainly on the continent of Europe. In "The Army

of a Dream," he recommended, for example, that certain
British national holidays be set aside for practicing com-
bined land and sea operations. ”Our army to be of any use,"
he wrote, ”must be an army of embarkation." An England in
possession of Kipling's model army would be able to have
hundreds of thousands of men in Europe before the end of

the first seventy-two hours of a war.11

What country would ”The Army of a Dream” be fighting?
Although Kipling was careful not to mention Germany specifi-
cally, the strategic importance of the Channel ports, and
the known ability of the Germans to mobilize rapidly their
own forces were certainly factors that influenced his
thinking, and explain his emphasis on the necessity for
speed in sending a British expeditionary force to Europe
as soon as war began.

Kipling also argued that England's national security
would be increased if all soldiers were trained to perform
a variety of specialized military tasks. Each member of
the Imperial Guard is trained for duty in the navy, the
cavalry, the infantry, and the marines. It was Kipling's

theory that by making the personnel of the armed forces

 

71

interchangeable, it would be possible to provide the
various services in war time with immediate replacements for
their casualties.12

”The Army of a Dream” embodied all of Kipling's
ideas on the subject of military preparedness, and, despite
any concessions he might make to the tender feelings of his
countrymen, by talking of social pressure as a substitute
for government action, his dream army could never have been
created or maintained by anything but conscription.

Most of Kipling's readers found ”The Army of a Dream”
nearly as distasteful as The Islanders. The Times referred

13

to it as ”a most repellent pamphlet.” The London Bodkman

thought it unworthy of serious discussion.14 The Saturday

 

Review of Politics, Litergture, Science, and Art declared

that Kipling ”should fine himself an amount that would

hurt every time he thought of . . . Army Reform.”15 He

has done enough ”special reporting" and ”special pleading”
and should go back to entertaining his readers instead of

irritating them.16

 

lzIbid., pp. 263—264.

13Times' Literary Supplement, October 7, 1904, p. 304.

14”Traffics and Maffics: The Strange Case of Mr.
Kipling,” XXVII (1904), 76-78.

15”Reform and Mr. Kipling,” XCVIII (1904), 494.
16Ibid.

72

As a piece of literature "The Army of a Dream" added
nothing to Kipling's reputation. Its practical results,
he admitted himself, were equally discouraging.l7 The
British government refused to study the article's more
worthwhile suggestions. A letter that Kipling wrote in 1905,
however, suggests that he did not regard his effort as a
total failure: "I am having 'The Army of a Dream,'” he
informed a friend, ”reprinted in pamphlet form, as there have
been numerous requests from adjutants of volunteers, . . .
to get it to give to their companies."18

Kipling's biographer, C. E. Carrington, believes
that there is a marked resemblance between "The Army of a
Dream,” and the Territorial Army organized by R. B. Haldane,
Britain's Secretary for War between 1905 and 1912.19 While
it is true that Haldane shared Kipling's graspcf the
importance of speed in getting an expeditionary force to
Europe in the event of war,20 there is no evidence that he

was influenced by ”The Army of a Dream,” or even that he

ever read the article.

 

17Letter to Mrs. Hill, March 8, 1905, Carpenter Collection.
18 . .

Quoted in Carrington, p. 313.
19

Ibido: p. 324.

20Ensor, pp. 525-526.

73

Despite his Tory sympathies, Kipling was not sorry
in 1905 to see an end of the Balfour ministry.21 Con-
cerning army reform the government had accomplished virtually
nothing since the end of the South African War;22 and for
Kipling this was an issue of far more importance than the
domestic squabbles dividing England's two major parties.
The elections of 1906 returned the Liberals, who remained in
power through the rest of the postwar years. During most
of this time, until 1912, the Secretary for War was R. B.
Haldane, whose military reorganization program created the
famous Territorial Army. Kipling regarded most of Haldane's
reforms with a jaundiced eye, frequently condemning them for
being too little, too late, or too overly inspired by motives
of false economy.23 For this reason his writings, as one
of his contemporaries observed as early as 1906, continued
to predict ”the coming of [a] new war, red with the trampling
of the nations.”24

Kipling's real quarrel with Haldane's army, however,

involved the old issue of conscription. Kipling steadfastly

 

21Carrington, pp. 301-302.

22Ensor, p. 362.

23”Mr. Kipling's‘Warning,” The Times, September 26,

1913, p. 3.

24Talcott.W'illiams, ”Kipling in Prose and Verse,” Book
News Mbnthly, XXV (1906), 207-208.

74

denied Haldane's theory that the volunteer system could
ever be made to produce an army whose numerical strength
would suffice for England's needs.25
During the years immediately before the First World
War Kipling regularly attended army maneuvers at Aldershot.26

He was there in the last summer of peace, August, 1913,27

and ”conceived,_ as he watched a sham fight, "the whole

pressure of our dead of the Boer War flickering and re-
forming as the horizon flickered in the heat.”28 His
convictions remained unchanged. The Territorial Army, he
admitted, was better than nothing, but in numbers and
training he considered them entirely inadequate. He was
certain that in a real war, Haldane's men would be swiftly
crushed by the superbly disciplined millions who comprised
the German military machine. He voiced his fears in a
letter to Coulson Kernahan, a friend who shared his views
on the necessity for conscription:

I've been seeing something of the Territorials

this summer [Kipling wrote], and from my point

of view it all boils down to one thing. If we
could get the training the men would be all right,

 

25Ensor, p. 592.
26 .

Carrington, pp. 324-325.
27Ibid.

28Somethingof Myself, pp. 230-231.

75

but what we are doing now ain't business--foot,
horse, or gun. I wish you could keep on

hammering at a longer time in camp and the
regimental capitation efficiency, as it used to be
in the Volunteers, instead of fines for pg;
attending training.

In the letter to Kernahan, Kipling had suggested
measures designed to improve the efficiency of Haldane's
army. However, it was the limited size of the Territorials,
rather than the quality of their training, that he continued
to find most alarming. Granted, Haldane's reforms had
given England an army superior to the one with which she had
entered the Boer‘War with in 1899. Nonetheless, a good
small army was hardly a substitute for a good large army--
Germany's, for example.

Kipling's dissatisfaction with the Territorials
persuaded him in 1913 to make a final effort for the cause
of compulsory military service. He was fully in accord
with the aims or the National Service League, an organization
attempting to popularize conscription. Under the sponsor-
ship of the League, Kipling delivered a speech at Burwash in
September, 1913. He warned that any future European war
would probably bring with it the attempted invasion of the

British Isles. Should the navy fail us, he went on, and an

 

29Quoted in Coulson Kernahan's book, Nothing_Quite

Like Kiplinngad Happened Before (London, 1944), p. 15.
Hereafter cited as Kernahan. . '

 

76

enemy successfully cross the Channel, England might easily
be conquered. The present British army is so deficient in
numbers, training, and organization that it gives little
promise of being able to successfully resist such an
invasion attempt. Only peace time conscription, he concluded,
will give the nation an army large enough to guarantee our
continued existence as an independent and sovereign power.30
In two editorials that followed the Burwash speech,
Kipling's position on conscription received the support of
the powerful London gimp§,3l Conducting an evaluation of
the efficiency of the Territorials, Thquimes discovered
"serious defects” in the army's equipment, but such short—
comings, the paper added, "are, of course, trifles when
compared with the supreme need for men. . . ."32 The strength
of the Territorial Army, the paper found, was fifty thousand
men short of the minimum figure that Haldane himself had
declared necessary to make the organization effective.33

Equally alarming in the opinion of The Times was the fact

that the number of volunteers for service in the Territorials

 

3O”Mr. Kipling's Warning,”

31”On Universal Training," September 26, 1913, p. 3;

”The State of the Army,” September 27, p. 5.

32”The State of the Army."

33 I. ' ' ' I.
_On Universal Training.,

The Time s .

77

had ”been steadily falling for months."34 It must be said,

The Times concluded, that ”the Territorial system . . . has

not fulfilled the expectations of its author, and is not . . .
adequate for the defence of the country. . . ."35
Turning to the question of peace time conscription,
The Times thought that despite the shortage of volunteers
for the Territorials, so many Englishmen had become alarmed

at the possibility of a general European war that it could

no longer ”be said that the nation at large will not tolerate

any compulsory form of military training. . . . Every day,
in fact, brings nearer the moment when . . . [it] will
become a matter of practical politics. . . . Universal

service has become and must soon be acknowledged as a
necessity. . . .” When adopted, it will promote "the
. . . "36
stability of the nation.
Kipling guessed, and rightly, that if conscription

ever became what The Times called "a matter of practical

 

politics,”37 it would only be after a war had begun, rather

than before. Naturally a pessimist, he eventually came to

 

34”The State of the Army."

35”On Universal Training.”

36Ibid.

37Ibid.

78

accept the bitter truth that while England remained at peace,
she would probably never adopt compulsory military service.
.Accordingly, after his disappointment with the public's
response to "The Army of a Dream," he directed his efforts,
to some degree at least, away from what he regarded as the
ideal, conscription, and made a second attempt to popularize
rifle clubs.38 He still believed that the culbs would never
be a satisfactory substitute for conscription, but, like
the Territorials, they were better than nothing.

As late as 1913 Kipling was urging the merits of a
national system of rifle ranges, to be built by the government
and made available to all the people of England.39 But as

early as 1904, in a letter to The Times, he had added a

 

new twist to this old issue.40 While England's adult males
might resist conscription for themselves, there seemed no
reason why they should object to making rifle practice
mandatory in all the nation's schools. Unlike a military
draft, the idea could hardly be attacked as a violation of
the rights of Englishmen. All of Britain's public schools

had compulsory games, and the penalty for not participating

 

38

See Kipling's 1910 story, "The Parable of Boy Jones,‘
Land and Sea Tales, The Writings in Prose and Verse of Rudyard
Kipling, XXXI (New Yerk, 1937).

39Cobb, "Interview with Kipling,"

40 . . . .
"Mr. Kipling on Universal SerVice,"

January 9, 1904, p. 10.

Bookman.

The Times,

79

(often a public flogging) was always severe.41 In his
letter, Kipling estimated that the average boy between the
ages of twelve and seventeen spent twenty-five hundred hours
participating in school athletic programs. Accordingly, he
suggested that all British schools be required to substitute
a small proportion of the time normally spent on cricket and
football for lessons in military drill and target practice.
It might even be as little as ten per cent, he thought
and not amount to "much more than an hour and a half a week,
. . . but in five or six years that would go far towards
making a trained man."42

One of his last attempts to popularize rifle clubs

was ”The Parable of Boy Jones,, a story published in 1910.
The plot centers around the activities at a target club in a
small English town. The story opens at the club's shooting
range, where the instructor is expressing Kipling's own
conviction that ”'well-directed small-arm fire [can wipe]

up . . . artillery, even in position.'" The villain of the

piece is Boy Jones, who visits the range as a guest of one

of the club's regular members. Observing the field used

 

41”I do not recall," Kipling wrote, that the English

school boy ”is anywhere consulted about his 'racial tendencies,‘
'the sublime instincts of an ancient people,' or his 'Anglo-
Saxon individuality'” (Ibid.).

42Ibid.

80

for target practice, he comments: "'This would make a
thundering good golf—links.'" As he watches the shooting,

Boy Jones suddenly notices that instead of the usual stationery
bull's-eyes, the targets on the range are all in motion. Each
five second interval brings before the marksmen -- the figure

of a man.

Before the story is over, Boy Jones, who has attempted
and failed to hit the sawdust soldiers himself, is ready to
admit the respectability of rifle practice as sport:

[But] "don't tell me,” [he declares] ”that
when the hour strikes every man in England wouldn't
-- er -- rally to the defence of his country like one
man.”

"And he'd be so useful while he was rallying,
wouldn't he," [the friend replies sarcastically].

”Imagine one hundred thousand chaps of your
kidney introduced to the rifle for the first time,
all loading and firing in your fashion! The hospitals
wouldn't hold 'em.”

”Oh, there'd be time to get the general hang of
the thing,” [Boy Jones says cheerily].

"When that hour strikes,” [his friend answers],
"it will already have struck, if you understand.
There may be a few hours--perhaps ten or twelve—-
there will certainly not be more than a day and a
night allowed us to get ready in."

”There will be six months at least,” [Boy Jones
is sure].

”Ah, you probably read that in a paper. I
shouldn't rely on it, if I were you. It won't be like
a county cridket match, date settled months in advance.”44

 

43Land and Sea Tales, pp. 178, 184-185.

44Ibid., pp. 184-185.

81

As the "Parable" ends, a member of the club discovers
the body of a dead rabbit, accidently killed by a stray
bullet: "The marker held up the still kicking body of a
glossy black rabbit. One side of its head was not there.
'Talk of coincidence)“ he says, locking at Boy Jones, ”'the
poor little fool! Jumpin' about after his own business and
thinking he was safe: and then to have his head fair mashed
off him like thisl'"4S

Shooting ranges and target practice was one substitute
for compulsory military service which Kipling attempted to
popularize. Another, curiously enough, was the new Boy
Scout organization, founded by his friend, Baden-Powell,
after the Boer War.46 From the beginning, scouting had
aroused the suspicions of pacifists and anti-militarists who

regarded the movement as a dark plot to train boys for war

while pretending to teach them citizenship}.7 At one Boy

 

451bidol p. 189.

46Carrington, pp. 323—324.

47In 1909, Haldane was subjected to a number of
questions in Parliament on the relationship between the War
Office and the Scout movement. He admitted that he had
planned to allow some Boy Scouts to participate in future
Army maneuvers, but had subsequently been forced to yield to
public indignation and cancel the permission. He added:
”This must not be taken to mean that the War Office does not
greatly appreciate the value of the Boy Scout training"
(The Times, September 16, 1909, p. 7). It is perhaps significant
of the public's attitude toward the movement that The Times

always listed scouting news under the classification "Naval
and Military."

 

82

Scout parade, an old woman was heard to comment angrily,
"little murderers.”48 It is impossible to be sure what
Baden-Powell believed, but he once wrote: ”Scouting is like
a game of football. . . . Football is a good game, but
better than it, better than any other game, is that of man-
hunting.”4

Whatever Baden-POWell's motives were, Kipling
certainly regarded the Scouts as an organization that,
potentially at least, could be used to give young boys the
rudiments of military training.50 One of his gifts to the
Scouts was the poem A Boy Scouts' Patrol Song.51 The words
were set to the tune of "A.Life on the Ocean Wave,” and
sung by boys all over England.52 He also attended a number
of the larger Scout rallies:53 his presence as a famous author

was undoubtedly helpful as a means of stimulating recruiting.

 

48Kernahan, p. 42.
49 ,
Halevy, V, 93.
50Kipling's letter on the Boy Scouts, The Times,
November 4, 1911, p. 10.
51 "

”Mr. Kipling and the Scout Movement,,
September 16, 1909, p. 8.

The Time s ,

 

52Carrington, pp. 323-324.

53Ibid.

CHAPTER‘VIII
KIPLING AND THE ROYAL NAVY

Between 1902 and 1914, Kipling was as convinced of
the imperative necessity for increasing the size of the
British navy as he was of the need for adopting the compulsory
military service that would accomplish the same objective
for the army.

In 1897 and 1898, at the invitation of the Royal Navy,
Kipling had spent several weeks at sea observing fleet
maneuvers in the English Channel.1 On both occasions he had
been deeply impressed. The British navy he declared, has
”such strength and such power as we and the world dare
hardly guess at.”2 It is ”the strongest fleet in the world,”3
and “any other breed of White-Men, with such a weapon to their
hand, would have been exploiting the round Earth in their

own interests long ago.”4 In the same vein, Kipling wrote

 

1Carrington, pp. 208-209, 212-213.

2The two voyages are described in Kipling's A Fleet
in Being. Netes on Two Trips with the Channel Squadron
(London, 1898), p. 34.

3Ibid., p. 47.

4Letter to J. W. MaCkail, 1897, quoted in Carrington,
pp. 208-209.

83

84

in 1897 to his friend, the novelist Rider-Haggard, that

"any nation save ourselves with such a fleet as we have at

present would go out swiftly to trample the guts out of the

rest of the world. . . ."5
The defeats of the British army in South Africa during

the Boer War, and England's failure to adopt peace time

conscription after the War increased Kipling's estimate of

the strategic importance of the British navy's traditional

task of so dominating the English Channel that it would

remain an impassable barrier for a potential invader. It

was for this reason that he vigorously supported the series

of British naval laws between 1902 and 1914 that provided

for sharp increases in the size of the navy. Unlike many

of his countrymen, however, he refused to believe that the

navy alone could ever constitute an invincible shield

against invasion. His agitation for conscription resulted

from the conviction that no matter how powerful the British

navy became, it would always be at least theoretically

possible for an enemy army to succeed in crossing the

Channel.6 It was for this reason that he insisted that

England's national security demanded the creation of a large

 

5Quoted in Rider-Haggard's The Cloak that I Left
(London, 1951), p. 195.

6”Mr. Kipling's Warning,” The Times.

85

conscript army, the one kind of army that he believed would
be able to repel such an invader.

The arrogant boastfulness that appeared in Kipling's
descriptions of the British navy in 1897 and 1898 vanished
immediately with the start of the Boer War in 1899. As
the first reports of the defeats of the British army in
South Africa reached England, Kipling presented his revised
opinion on the comparative strength of the British navy
in a speech in Sussex. The British navy, he declared, in
view of its importance in protecting England from foreign
invasion, is really after all only "a very insignificant
naval force.” He urged the public to accept the extra taxes
that would be required to guarantee ”that the Navy may be
efficient, may be strong, and, above all things, may not
fail us in the hour of need.”7

From the Sussex speech in 1899 to the start of the
First World War, Kipling's ideas on the subject of naval
affairs remained the same. After 1899 he became a rabid
exponent of navalism, constantly urging the necessity for
making further additions to the already swollen size of the

British fleet. As he cynically observed in 1910: ”There's

 

7”Mr. Rudyard Kipling and the Navy,”

November 25, 1899, p. 11.

The Times,

86

not much justice in this world . . . without a navy."8

In contrast to his disillusionment with the British
army, Kipling continued to admire the fighting abilities of
the Royal Navy after the Boer War, and to respect the quality
of the fleet's preparation for ”Armageddon.” It was the
navy, he thought in 1908, that would “save the nation in
the dark days ahead." It was the attitude of the British
public that Kipling found alarming. He was convinced, he
declared in a 1908 speech, ”that the very thoroughness with
which the navy has protected the Nation in the past may
constitute a source of weakness both for the navy and the
Nation.” England has ”been safe for so long,” that many
tax-payers ”are utterly ignorant of the facts . . . on
which England depends for her existence.” For Great Britain
a strong navy was not a luxury, but rather an imperative
necessity. He compared the opponents of increased naval
appropriations, to ”the monkeys in Brazil.” They have been
safely sitting on the same branch for so long that they
begin to imagine that the branch can be sawed off without

any danger to themselves.

 

8”A Priest in Spite of Himself,” Rewards and Fairies
(New York, 1916), pp. 209-210.

9”The Spirit of the Navy,” October, 1908, A Book of
Words, Selections From Speeches and Addresses Delivered between
1906 and 1927 (New York, 1928), PP- 52, 54. Another attempt to
stimulate public interest in the navy was Kipling's article,
”Our Silent Navy: Is It Forgotten,” The Navy_and the Empire

Series, No. 1 (London, 1904), p. 49.

 

87

After 1908, Kipling continued to launch vitriolic
pronouncements against the stupidity of those pacifists and
foolish idealists, who (to use Kipling's own words) seemed
to regard the British navy "as a brutal and blood thirsty
anachronism, which if it can't be openly abolished, ought to
be secretly crippled as soon as possible."10 For Kipling
the attitude of the sort of liberal who was willing to starve
the navy for extra funds to spend on social reforms was
incomprehensible.11 The kindest thing he could say about
such men was that if they were not secret traitors, they
were certainly irresponsible fools.12

Before the First World War, Kipling acted in the
interests of both the army and the navy by opposing any.
legislation that came before Parliament whose enactment might
damage the peace time efficiency of the two services or their
ability to wage war. His biting satire, ”The Horse Marines,”l3

a story written in 1910, attacked a scheme of Haldane's to

save the government money on the army estimates by having

 

 

 

10”The Spirit of the Navy," A Book of Words, p. 53.

11”Mr. Kipling and the Navy,” The Times, July 14, 1910,
p. 12

12Ibid.

13

A Diversity of Creatures, The Writings in Prose
and Verse of Rudyard Kipling, XXII (New York, 1925).

88

cavalry recruits taught to ride on skillfully designed wooden
rocking-horses.l4 The following year he struck a similar blow
for the navy. In 1911 the Asquith government sought the
approval of the House of Commons for the Declaration of London.
The Declaration embodied a number of controversial recommenda-
tions drawn up by an International Prize Court at the Hague
Conference of 1907. The point at issue was an article
in the Declaration that asked all nations to accept raw
materials carried on neutral vessels in war time as absolute
non-contraband. If Great Britain had accepted this provision,
it would have seriously reduced the usefulness of her naval
superiority in the First World War, when the success of the
British blockade in depriving Germany of raw materials was
a decisive factor in ending the War in 1918.15
As he had on similar occasions in the past, Kipling
turned to verse. His indictment of the Liberal government,
the poem entitled The Declaration of London, was published as

Parliament reassembled to vote on the Declaration following

the festivities which had greeted the Coronation of George V:

 

14' ' .
For a report of the questions Haldane was asked

in the House of Commons about the rocking-horses, see The
Times, April 19, 1910, p. 6.

15Ensor, pp. 447-448.

89

We were all one heart and one race
When the Abbey trumpets blew.

For a moment's breathing-space
We had forgotten you.

Now you return to your honoured place
Panting to shame us anew.

Our ears still carry the sound
Of our once-Imperial seas,
Exultant after our King was crowned,
Beneath the sun and the breeze.
It is too early to have them bound
Or sold at your decrees.l6

 

16Only after considerable difficulty did the

government succeed in getting the Declaration through the
Commons, and it was later rejected by the Lords (Ibid.).

CHAPTER IX

ALLIANCES: EMPIRE FEDERATION FOR

NELITARY PURPOSES

While urging conscription at home, Kipling also favored
strengthening England through the creation of a series of
defensive alliances with other nations. Even before the
Boer War he had been an advocate of collective security on
the imperial level.1 What he saw of the fighting in South
Africa between 1899 and 1902 increased his respect for the
troops who had come to Britain's aid from Canada, New
Zealand, and Australia. He found most of them better
soldiers than his own countrymen.2 Together, the poor
performance of the British army in South Africa and the
German naval program, left him convinced by 1902 of the need
for a formal military agreement between England and the
rest of the self-governing states in the Empire.

In July, 1902, the representatives of six of the

self-governing colonies assembled in London, where the

 

1The best example of Kipling's thinking on the subject
is his long poem A Song of the English, written in 1893.

2 . . .
Kipling, letter to Julian Ralph, November 22, 1901,
Carpenter Collection.

90

91

British government proposed the establishment of an imperial
defense alliance.3 Kipling's poem The Houses, addressed
to the countries represented at the conference, made clear
the reasons for such an alliance.

Twixt my house and thy house the pathway is broad,

In thy house or my house is half the world's hoard:

By my house and thy house hangs all the world's fate,

On thy house and my house lies half the world's hate.

For my house and thy house no help shall we find

Save thy house and my house--kin cleaving to kind:

If my house be taken, thine tumbleth anon.

If thy house be forfeit, mine followeth soon.

'Twixt my house and thy house what talk can there be

Of headship or lordship, or service or fee?

Since my house to thy house no greater can send

Than thy house to my house--friend comforting friend:

And thy house to my house no meaner can bring

Than my house to thy house-—King counselling King!
Unfortunately, the touchy issue of colonial nationalism
prevented anything from being accomplished regarding a
common defence plan for the Empire.4 To conscription and
increased naval appropriations, Kipling was forced to add
imperial federation for military purposes as another objective
to be fought for in his campaign to prepare England for war
with Germany.

The self-governing colonies, however, had long been

interested in cooperating with the mother country in the

 

3Ensor, pp. 371-372.

41bid.

92

area of economics, and of establishing a system of imperial
preference in trade. Before England could join such an
inter-colonial customs union, though, she would have to
abandon or at least to modify her free trade policy.5
Kipling was one of a number of influential Englishmen who
supported the proposed customs union.6 He took no interest
in the validity of the various economic arguments that
revolved around the merits of free trade versus protectionism.
What he did believe was that imperial federation for com-
mercial purposes was a small price for England to have to
pay if it led to an imperial military alliance.7

In the 1890's, Kipling had not been unduly troubled
by the knowledge that the union between the White nations
in the Empire was based primarily on emotional ties like
sentiment, tradition, and common heritage. After 1902,
though, his fear of a war with Germany led him to believe
that the relationship between England and her self-governing
colonies ought to be carefully defined and set forth in

treaties and specific commitments.8 England, he now thought,

 

51bid., pp. 372-374.

6”Letters to the Family,” in Letters of Travel, p. 140.

7Ibid.

81bid., pp. 230-240.

93

could no longer afford the luxury of an alliance system
based on nothing stronger than the amorphous bonds of sentiment
and tradition. Specifically, he considered it to be grossly
unjust that while England was pledged to aid any portion of
the Empire attacked by a foreign power, the self-governing
nations were unwilling to make a like guarantee in return.
In 1907, as a method of coercion he recommended, half-
seriously, that England cancel all of her own promises of
military assistance. Faced with the horrors of "an annual
invasion,” the colonies, he said, would quickly change their
minds about the wisdom of a reciprocal alliance.10

The same year, 1907, saw the meeting of another
colonial conference in London, whose results helped strengthen
the concept of Dominion status.11 A Commonwealth of free
nations held no attractions for Kipling. He considered
it a poor substitute for a strong, federated Empire, dependent
for its security on a military draft and a common imperial
army. His ideal was still the Empire as he had imagined it

in his 1904 article, "The Army of a Dream.”12

 

91bid.

10”The Puzzler,” Actions and Reactions, The Writings
in Prose and verse of Rudyard Kipling, XX (New York, 1920),
p. 218.

l
Carrington, p. 307.

2Traffics and Discoveries, pp. 250-254.

94

In the autumn of 1907, Kipling was offered an honorary
degree by McGill University. His acceptance produced a
long list of requests for speeches from other Canadian
organizations. For the first and last time in his life
Kipling submitted to the ordeal of an extended lecture tour,
seizing upon it as an opportunity to carry his views on
Empire federation to the Canadian people.13 The Canadian
Pacific donated a private railroad car, which he used as
he travelled from Quebec to Vancouver.14 The journey was
punctuated by stops for speaking engagements, at Montreal,
Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, and Victoria.15

The cities changed, but the message that Kipling
delivered to his audiences in each of them remained the same:
In the face of a common peril, the member states of the
British Empire must forge a stronger union.l6 He was lavish
in his praise for the assistance the Canadians had given
Britain during the Boer War. It was a demonstration, he
declared, that the member nations of the Empire could
co-operate as effectively in war as they did in peace.

England, he assured his audience, will never forget that when

 

l3Carrington, p. 308.
l4Kipling, Something of Myself, p. 213.

15James Stewart, Rudyard Kipling: A Bibliographical
Catalogue (Toronto, 1959), p. 505. Hereafter cited as Stewart.

16”Letters to the Family,” Letters of Travel, pp- 234-237-

95

she

was in distress Canada went to her aid, as Australia

went, as New Zealand went, as the Crown colonies

went, without one thought of present interests,

or politics, or pocket. . . . Out of that great

gathering of our men on the plains of South

Africa there was born, I think, a treaty of

mutual preference between the various members

of . . . [the] Empire which . . . regular diplomatists

will find it difficult to annul.17

The Canadians, he noted, were right to be proud of

their wealth and material progress. He warned, however,
that the Canadian people would be making a serious mistake
if they allowed nationalism to blind them to the obligation
they owed to the rest of the Empire. For, he said, ”To
whom much has been given, from them much--much—-shall be
required'.”18 He added: ”A young country must take long
views. . . . Our four young nations--the Big Four--
[Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa] have a long,
an uphill, and a triumphant road to tread."19 Kipling
stressed that peace and security could only be maintained

if the nations of the Empire travelled this road together.

This was true, he declared, because ”when all is said and

 

l7”Imperial Relations,” A Book of words, pp. 25—26.
18”Growth and Responsibility,” Ibid., p. 34.

19”Imperial Relations,” p. 27.

96

done, we have only each other to depend upon."20

Despite the warmth of his Canadian reception, when

Kipling returned to England he was aware that he had not
succeeded in his main purpose, that of awakening the Canadian
people to a realization of the need for a greater degree of
imperial unity.21 He expressed his disappointment in a
series of articles entitled ”Letters to the Family.” He
made no attempt to conceal his bitterness over the lack of
Canadian support for an imperial defense treaty. Canada,
he wrote, has become a wealthy country: militarily, however,
she is still pathetically weak. Without British support,

she would very soon cease to exist as a nation.

The anxious inquirer is told that she does her

duty toward England by developing her resources;

that wages are so high a paid army is out of the

question; . . . that a little wise diplomacy is all

that will ever be needed in this so civilised era. . . .

The question before Canada is not what she thinks

or pays, [for military protection] but what an

enemy may think it necessary to make her pay. If

she continues wealthy and remains weak she will
surely be attacked under one pretext or another.22

 

20”Growth and Responsibility,“ p. 31.

21Letter to Lord Milner, quoted in Carrington, p. 309.
22”Letters to the Family,” Letters of Travel,
pp. 234-236. ”'Letters to the Family)" wrote one critic,
”are one of the most notable contributions to Imperialist
literature from the point of view of the Colonies that has
yet appeared” (Cyril Falls, Rudyard Kipling, A Critical
Study [New York, 1915], p. 187).

97

He challenged the assumption of the Canadians that
they could remain militarily secure without pain or
sacrifice because England would protect them in the event
of war. The English government, Kipling warned, is the
servant of ”an excess of voters who . . . loudly resent that
any money should be diverted from themselves; and since money
is spent on fleets and armies to protect the Empire, . . .
argue that if the Empire ceased to exist armaments would
cease too, and the money so saved could be spent on their
creature comforts. . . . If the Empire were threatened they
would not, in their own interests, urge England to spend men
and money on it.”23

”Letters to the Family” included a grim admonition
for all the Dominions. If imperial federation is to come at
all, Kipling declared, it must be now. More ”time will not
be allowed us to multiply to unquestionable peace. . . ."24

Kipling's final comment on the subject of imperial

defence appeared in a story published immediately before the

start of the War in 1914. As an example of the kind of

 

23Ibid., pp. 235-236. Even before his Canadian trip,

in the Spring of 1907, Kipling had written in a letter: "I
never realized that the English of the Island were so genuinely
vindictive against the English of the Empire” (Letter, quoted
in Ellis Ames Ballard, Catalog Intimatergnd Descriptive, of

My Kipling Collection [Philadelphia, 1935], p. 246).
24Ibid., p. 239.

98

deluded thinking that he had preached against for nearly
fifteen years, Kipling created Mr. Lingman, a Dominion states-
man who is visiting England. Mr. Lingman refuses to recognize
the need for a firm military alliance between England and the
Dominions: "My idea," he says, "has always been that the
component parts of the Empire should take counsel among
themselves on the approach of War, so that, after we have
decided on the merits of casus belli, we can co-ordinate
what part each dominion shall play whenever war is, unfortunate-
ly, a possibility.” By the end of the story, however, Mr.
Lingman has changed his mind. He has come to realize that
in a world where crises occur without ”any approaching
warning,” the chances for survival are greatly enhanced by
preparing to meet them. The Empire, he now thinks, should
have a gigantic, permanently mobilized army, capable of
being ”brought to bear, without any respect to the merits of
the casus belli, instantaneously, automatically, and
remorselessly at the first faint buzz of war.”25

The same considerations that led Kipling to advocate
a military pact among the member nations of the Empire, made
him a vigorous supporter of his country's defense arrangements

with France. As early as 1896 he had suggested that England

 

25”The Vortex,” A Diversity of Creatures, PP- 451‘452'

 

466.

99

could profitably enter into an alliance with France.26

The idea had been dropped during his own anti-French phase
at the time of the Fashoda crisis.27 It was revived again
in 1902 as he grew increasingly apprehensive over the
possibility of a war with Germany. He was delighted when
the Anglo-French Entente was signed in 1904. To a French
acquaintance, Vicomte d'Humieres, he expressed the opinion
that the agreement was the hope of the future for both
countries. Only Germany, Kipling said, ”the Middle-Ages
with modern guns”--will stand to profit if France and England
ever quarrel again. It is ”for the sake of tomorrow,” he
concluded, that our two countries must learn how to work
together to-day.28 Kipling demonstrated his interest in
strengthening and maintaining the Entente again when Edward
VII died in 1910. His memorial poem thanked the King for

helping to create the atmosphere of mutual trust that had

 

2 . .
6Letter to C. E. Nerton, quoted in Carrington,

pp. 178-179.

2
7Letter to Douglas Murray, October 14, 1899,
Carpenter Collection.

28Letter, August 7, 1904, quoted in the Preface to
d'Humieres, Through Isle and Empire (New York, 1905).
Kipling's letter, written shortly after the creation of the
Entente, was made public and became the subject of an
approving ”Leading Article” in The Times of September 13,
1904, p. 8.

 

100

made the alliance possible.29 Between 1909 and 1914 Kipling
made a number of visits to France. What he observed of the
mounting tensions there confirmed his own view, that a general
European war was only a matter of time.30 His liking for
the French, however, was increased by personal contacts with
men like Clemenceau, who were able to convince him that in
the next war England would not be fighting Germany alone.31
When the President of the French Republic made a state visit
to England in the summer of 1913, Kipling seized upon it as
an opportunity to express his confidence in the Entente.

His poem, France, composed for the occasion, praised the
courage that had always been displayed by Frenchmen and
Englishmen in their wars against each other in the past.

But now both nations--

. . . watch the new years shape, wondering if they hold

Fiercer lightnings in their heart than we launched of old.

Now we hear new voices rise, question, boast, or gird,

Now we count neW'keels afloat, and new hosts on land,

Massed like ours (rememberest thou?) when our strokes
‘were planned.

We were schooled for dear life's sake, to know each other's
blade.

What can Blood and Iron make more than we have made?

we have learned by keenest use to know each other's mind.

What shall Blood and Iron loose that we cannot bind?

 

29The Dead King.

30Kipling, letter to Mrs. Hill, April 4, 1914,
Carpenter Collection.

31Ibid.

CHAPTER X

THE ATTEMPT TO TERRIFY

Kipling preached the necessity for conscription,
Army reform, naval increases, and Empire federation as a
means of preparing England for a war with Germany. On one
level, he delivered this message in the form of speeches
and articles. Frequently, however, it was poetry that became
a medium for conveying his political opinions. He published,
between 1902 and 1914, a large number of verses which, like
The Islanders, were deliberate attempts to terrify his
countrymen into accepting the various military reforms that
he championed himself. The poems of this period typically
take the form of attacks against the materialism and com-
placency of the British people, who are condemned for their
folly in not spending more on defence and for their refusal
to adopt peace time conscription. The punishment for their
sins, he predicted, would be a dreadful day of reckoning,
specifically the country's defeat in some future war. He

portrayed the consequences in exceedingly unpleasant terms,
and could describe in detail England's conquest by a barbaric

enemy, under whose rule the English people are systematically

101

102

reduced to the level of perpetual serfdom.

For Kipling, Germany's military advantage over
England increased with the passage of every year after 1902.
In contrast, his own country's response to the mounting menace
from across the channel, her larger naval appropriations and
the small Territorial Army, appeared so inadequate to him
that he became increasingly pessimistic about the chances
for averting a British defeat when war did come. Modern
England, he thought, was passing through a period similar to
the last days of the Roman occupation: once again civilization
was being challenged by organized barbarism. He expressed
the notion in a 1906 story.2 As the symbols for his own
despair he chose two Roman officers of the late fourth

century, Parnesius and Pertinax, who are charged with what

 

1The following poems should be read: The Islanders,
Before a Midnight Breaks in Storm, Rimmon, The Old Men, Th;
Dykes, all written in 1902 and 1903, and included in Kipling's
book The Five Nations (New Yerk, 1903). ”They are not poems
alone,” wrote one critic, ”but political pamphlets in verse,
audacious indictments of existing conditions . . . that
[refuse] to be forgotten. It is hard, if not impossible to
treat them simply as literature, to weigh their aesthetic
value apart from their political significance and the events
which begot them” (F. T. Cooper, ”Mr. Kipling's The Five
Nations, An Appreciation,” Werld's work, VII [1903], 4138—4140).
After 1903 the student of Kipling's work should consult ‘Tpp
Heritage, 1905, The veterans, 1907, The City of Brass, 1909,

The Dead King, A Departure, 1910, and Macdonough's Song, 1912.

 

 

 

2Something of Myself, p. 205.

103

has become an impossible task, defending the Great Roman
Wall against the barbarians. As Parnesius had, Kipling
felt himself "to be a man with a rotten stick standing before
a broken fence to turn bulls.” It was a mood of somber
fatalism. He captured it in Pertinax's comment before the
final onslaught: ”'We be two dead men, my brother'."'3
But like the Romans of his allegory, Kipling refused
to abandon an effort that seemed to him increasingly hopeless.
He did what he could to halt ”the effortless ordered drift
towards Armageddon.”4 As for his countrymen, he continued to--
Warn them of seas that slip our yoke
Of slow conspiring stars--
The ancient front of things unbroke
But heavy with new wars.5

While the tocsin of alarm could be most dramatically

sounded in verse, similar warnings of impending doom appear

 

3”The Winged Hats,” Puck of Podk's Hill, The Writings

in Prose and verse of Rudyard Kipling, XIX (New York, 1920),
pp. 208-209.

4Somethingof Myself, p. 240. Note the use of the
words ”Effortless,” ”Ordered," in The Islanders. Kipling
wrote later about the years between the South African and the
First World Wars: ”There was always heavy written work. . . .
This was specially the case during the three years before,
. . . [1914] when warnings came thick and fast, and the wise
people to whom I conveyed them said: 'Oh, but you're
so-o-extreme'” (Ibid., p. 212).

5Our Fathers Also.

104

in Kipling's private letters, stories, and speeches. "The

Mother Hive,‘ an allegory composed in 1908 chronicled the
subjugation and enslavement of a society of bees by their
mortal enemies, the wax moths. The bees, it soon becomes
clear, represent the English people, and, as Kipling was
careful to point out, their destruction is the direct result
of a number of internal weaknesses in the hive. Like
Englishmen, the bees, through generations of self-indulgence,
have become grossly materialistic, a fact which not only
encourages aggression, but also makes successful resistance
impossible.6

Kipling's views remained the same after 1908. In a
letter in 1911 he wrote despondently: ”Things in England
are as mad as usual. If there were any logic in the
English we should be steering straight for at least three
revolutions at the same time, so I presume that they will
neutralize each other. Meantime the Teuton has his large
cold eye on us and prepares to give us Toko when he feels

good and ready. . . . But we ought to see in a few years

now . O"

 

6”The Mother Hive,” Actions and Reactions, pp. 91-116.

7To Duckworth Ford, December 10, 1911, quoted in
Carrington, p. 317.

105

Among Kipling's numerous attempts to frighten the
British people into accepting his views on military prepared-
ness was "The Edge of the Evening," a story about airplanes
published in 1913.8 In 1909, the Frenchman, Blériot, made
the first successful crossing of the English Channel by air.
The development of the new invention followed rapidly. In
1911 the British government found it necessary to enact an
Aerial Navigation Law, giving the Home office authority to
prohibit the movement of aircraft over proscribed areas.
The same year the activities of German agents in England
produced another piece of legislation, the Official Secrets
Act.10

Kipling saw his first airplane in 1910 while on a

visit to France.11 He was quick to grasp the machine's

military potential,12 and followed with intense interest the

 

8Included in A Diversity of Creatures.

9Ensor, pp. 433-434.

lOIbid., p. 444.

11Carrington, p. 325. Even earlier, 1905, Kipling's
science fiction story, ”With the Night Mail,” Actions and
Reactions, had imagined something of the airplane's future
potential.

12Address at Folkestone, ”On Aeronautics,” The Times,
October 26, 1910, p. 12. As late as 1910, The Times was still
listing all news about airplane testing and development under
the heading ”Sport, Agriculture, and Country Life.” Glancing
at this section the contemporary reader is immediately
struck by the many brief accounts of the testing activities
of German fliers.

 

 

106

tests conducted by the Royal Aircraft Establishment at

Aldershot.13 At the same time, however, the extraordinary

progress of the Germans in the field of aeronautics left

him even more conscious that the British people were a nation

sitting ”in kimonoes on dynamite kegs."14 ”The Edge of the

Evening” —- the title itself suggests approaching tragedy —-

opens on an English country house where a summer garden

party is in progress. The party is interrupted by the arrival

of a strange airplane which lands on the lawn. Its two

passengers are German spies, who have crossed the Channel to

take aerial photographs of British defense installations.

The forced landing is the result of engine trouble. When

the kindly but unwitting Englishmen come forward to offer

assistance, the Germans reply by attempting to murder them.
In the same year that he wrote "The Edge of the

Evening,” 1913, Kipling delivered an address for the National

Service League at Burwash. As the subject for his speech,

Kipling turned to the theme that he had treated so frequently

in fiction and verse. Deliberately he played on the fears

of his audience. All attempts to introduce conscription into

England had failed, he declared, because it is ”almost as

 

13Carrington, p. 325.

14”The Edge of the Evening," A Diversiry of Creatures,

p. 333.

107

impossible to make a people who have never known invasion

realize what invasion is as it is to make a man realize the

fact of his own death."15

Should England be invaded, he warned, the civilian
populace will not be allowed to go on with their normal lives,
or merely required to pay taxes to officials with a foreign
accent:

Even attempted invasion does not mean that; it means
riot and arson and disorder and bloodshed and
starvation on a scale that a man can scarcely imagine
to himself: it means disorganization of every relation
of life . . . from the highest to the lowest. As
things stand at present, we have neither the men nor
the means nor the organization nor the will . . .

[to successfully resist invasion]. That is why those
of us who think go about in fear and in doubt: that

is why those of us who do not think are full of silly
boastings one day and of blind panic the next: that

is why we have no security inside or outside our
borders: that is why we tell each other lies to

cover our own fears and yet know all the time that

our lies are useless. In this matter we must take
refuge behind no paid member of Parliament. The

power to change this wasteful state of affairs lies

in the hands of the people of England. The
responsibility is ours and the punishment if we
persist in our folly, in our fraud, and in our make-
believe--the punishment will fall not only upon us but
upon the third and fourth generation of those that hath
betrayed their country.16

 

15 a

”Mr. Kipling's Warning, The Times.

l6Ibid.

CHAPTER.XI
WHY DEMOCRACY WAS REPUDIATED

In 1900 the literary critic William Salter plucked a
quotation from Herbert Spencer and applied it to Kipling:
"'We are in the course of rebarbarization and there is no
prospect but that of military despotisms, which we are
rapidly approaching.‘ If Mr. Kipling's influence is to be
followed, I am afraid that this is so."1

Long before 1914 Kipling had decided that England's
failure to adopt peace time conscription was the result of
her system of government: political democracy. As a young
man in India he had developed a deep admiration for the
efficient and generally enlightened despotism which
characterized British Colonial Administration. He left
India firmly convinced of the merits of a political system
which allowed what he called the ”strong man” to ”govern
alone.”2 Later, in the 1890's, a list of the qualities that

he most respected in a society appeared in the poem

 

1”One Side of Kipling,” The Ethical Record. Salter
added: ”It is said by those who have read him carefully that
the word 'freedom' does not occur in his books. Certainly he
has no song in praise of liberty. . . .”

2”From Sea to Sea,” Letters of Travel, p. 492.

108

109

McAndrew'erymn. They were: Law, order, duty, restraint,
obedience, discipline. His omission of freedom is significant,
but it does not necessarily imply any active dislike for
democracy. That was to come later. In the 1890's, Kipling
seems merely to have entertained the suspicion that democracy
was an inefficient form of government, a handicap for any
country who wanted to become strong and respected. On his
visit to Japan in 1889, for example, he was told by a-Japanese
acquaintance that Japan was becoming more like England, and
now had a constitution, a Parliament, and two political
parties. Kipling had replied: Your political parties "will
both tell lies to you and to each other. . . . They will
pass bills, and spend their time fighting each other. Then
all the foreign governments will discover that you have no
fixed policy. . . . Then, when you have sufficiently
disgusted the foreign powers, they will wait until the
Liberals and the Radicals are fighting very hard, and then
they will blow you out of the water.”3

Democracy for Kipling, in other words, was a luxury,
which only powerful nations like England could afford. Then
came the Boer War. The frightening defeats of the opening

months caused Kipling to reverse his earlier opinion.

 

31bid.

110

Democracy was still a luxury, but its cost, in terms of
national inefficiency was greater than he had imagined.
Of what possible use, he asked himself, was a representative
government, or a set of personal liberties which could not
be enjoyed without endangering England's national security?
It was not the defeats in South Africa, however,
but rather his country's refusal to adopt conscription after
the War which turned Kipling into an active and vocal opponent
of democracy. He came to believe that in every democratic
country the votes of the majority of the citizens were given
to the candidate who would promise them something for nothing.
Conversely, these votes were also employed as weapons to
strike down any politician or political party foolish enough
to support unpopular measures, such as conscription, or
higher taxes to meet the costs of increased army and navy
appropriations.
Kipling's low opinion of democracy was the result of
his even lower opinion of the intelligence and the motives

of the common man. He once described himself as ”a political

 

4”On Amnesty to the Rebels, " Sussex Ed-c XXX: 7-

5Kipling advanced this thesis on a number of
occasions. It appears in two poems, The City of Brass and
A Servant When He Reigneth, and in ”Letters to the Family”
Letters of Travel, pp. 235-236, 239, and a 1908 speech,
”The Spirit of the Navy,” A Book of Words, pp. 52-54.

111

Calvinist."6 He thought that men were creatures born in
sin, more prone to do evil than good, generally ignorant,
frequently irrational, and sufficiently selfish that they
almost invariably pursued their own interests at the expense
of society. "The raw fact of life," he once wrote, "is that
mankind is a little lower than the angels. . . . But if you
begin by the convention that men are angels, they will
assuredly become bigger beasts than ever.”7

He became convinced after the South African War
that democracy was nothing but government by the incompetent
and for the incompetent. The failure of either the conser-
vatives or the Liberals to endorse conscription after the
Boer War led him to hate the politicians of both parties. He
considered most of them as nothing but the self-seeking
servants of the irresponsible mob who had put them in office.8
Politics, he said on one occasion, was "a dog's life without

a dog's decencies.”9 After reading a bodk about pirates, he

 

esomethingof Myself, p. 237.

7Quoted in Bonamy Dobrée, ”Kipling the Visionary,”
The Kipling Journal, April, 1956, p. 3.

8The only two statesmen that Kipling ever genuinely
admired were Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner. The poem
Thipgs and the Man, 1904, was written as a tribute to Chamberlain,
and for Lord Milner, who most closely approximated his ideal
of the strong man ruling alone, he wrote in 1905 a poem entitled
The Pro-Consuls.

9Quoted in Carrington, p. 314.

112

commented: ”I don't suppose the pirate did much more harm
than the politician.”10

Kipling was not alone in concluding that while England
remained at peace the nature of her political institutions
made it almost impossible to pass a conscription law. In
1902, The Spectgppr, although refusing to endorse conscription,
had agreed with Kipling on the desirability of peace time
military training. ”It is rather a melancholy thought,”
The Spectator observed, "that upon this subject, so vital to
its very existence as well as to its future, the country will
receive but little assistance from the wisdom of Parliament,
[whose members] . . . are hampered by the fear . . . that if
they take a lead, and the lead is not entirely sanctioned by
opinion, they will lose all influence with the electors.“ As
for compulsory military service, The Spectator thought that
it was ”useless to discuss its advantages—-and it has some-—
or its disadvantages--and it has many--for the terrible laws
necessary to enforce it cannot, except in extremity, be got
passed. . . .” The Spectator concluded, to advocate con-
scription in England is nothing but ”a waste of intellectual

"11
energy.,

 

10Ibid., p. 379.

11”Mr. Rudyard Kipling's Idea.”

113

The same theme was taken up by A. Irving Muntz in a
letter to The Times. Conscription, he declared,"is not
against the laws of nature nor an outrage on the British
constitution; thrones will not topple for it, though a
government, conceivably, might. And is this not the
difficulty--the supposed reluctance of this free people to
surrender the thing they mistake for liberty, and their
anticipated vengeance on those who may have the temerity to
ask it?”12

The evolution of Kipling's thoughts on the subject
of popular government, between the end of the Boer War and
the start of the First World War, can be traced chronologically.
The Islgnders, written in the winter of 1902, was as much
a tract against the failures of democracy as it was a propa-
ganda piece for conscription. A month after the poem's
publication he expressed his personal disgust with the
policies of the Unionist Government by remarking that in
England statesmen ”seem as dead as the dodo.”l3

By 1904 it had become clear that the Unionists had

no intention of trying to pass a peace time conscription law.

Kipling considered the refusal to back conscription a policy

 

12January 7, 1902, p. 10

13”On Amnesty to the Rebels,” Sussex Ed., XXX, 7.

 

114

of expediency, based on the party's fear of defeat at the
next election. His thoughts on the subject in 1904 appeared
in "The Army of a Dream,” where his military utopia was
constructed around the axion: "No Volunteer No Vote."14

The same year he wrote to H. S. W. Edwardes: "I wish I

felt confident that the powers that be were going in for a
year's service. I think they'll try to water the whole thing
down to please the public, and then, when the smash comes, the
virtuous public will rise in its wrath because the Government
did--what it was ordered to do.”15 In another 1904 letter,
to Vicomte d'Humiéres who had visited England, Kipling
declared: ”From the point of view of an inhabitant, I am
specially delighted with your tributes to the energy of the
[English] race, a thing which some of us at times to-day
begin to doubt. There exists--I am glad you did not see it--
an England which, ruined by excess of comfort, has gone to
sleep and, because it snores loudly, believes that it is
thinking.”16

Practically everything which occurred on the English

political scene after 1904 added to Kipling's growing hatred

 

4Traffics and Discoveries, p. 26.
15L " . .
_ etters to H. S. W. Edwardes, The Kiplinngournal.

6 . ' .
Preface to d'HumiEres, Through Isle and Empire.

 

115

for democracy. While the Unionists remained in power he
continued to attack the Balfour government's failure to act
on army reform. Following the Unionist defeat in the 1906
election, he was equally articulate in denouncing the Liberals
for the same reason. Although he had little affection for
either political party, he found the political ideology of
the Liberals particularly repugnant. In the 1890's he had
condemned the more radical section of the Party, for talking
what he termed ”pernicious varieties of safe sedition,"17
and for believing that peace could be achieved through
unilateral disarmament, by ”snatching away England's arms when
she isn't looking--just like a naughty child--so that when
she wants to fight she'll find she can't.”18 He considered
the Liberals of 1906 even more fuzzy-minded than the ones he
had known in the nineties. The new Liberalism seemed to
him perilously close to Socialism. He suspected the Party
was trying to turn England into a welfare state, and said
their schemes for social betterment were nothing more than

19

"robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul!”

The most dangerous Liberals, of course, were those whose

 

17Something of Mypelf, pp. 99-100.

laIbid.

19Quoted in Carrington, p. 316.

116

zeal for social reforms like National Insurance had so
blinded them to the threat from Germany that they were
prepared to pay for their welfare legislation by slicing
funds off the army and navy estimates.

Liberal or Conservative, though, a politician remained
a politician. Shortly after the Liberals came to power he
wrote to H. A. Gwynne: ”I am glad you have seen the
politicians at close quarters. They are a macaroni-backed
crew, even the best of them, and they will follow any winning
causes.”21 It is significant that in his pronouncements
against democracy, Kipling seldom mentioned any particular
political party by name. In 1913, when a Canadian politician
referred to him as the semi-official propagandist for the
Tory party, he angrily threatened to sue the man for libel.22
He did not attack any political party so much as he attacked

what he called ”the fatal weakness” of the party system,

the principle that the voters should be allowed to influence

 

20”Letters to the Family,” Letters of Trgvel, p. 139.

21Quoted in Carrington, p. 318.

22Ibid., p. 314. In June, 1914, Francis Gribble wrote
of Kipling: ”Of late years, . . . he has put himself for-
ward as the town-crier of the Tory party--proclaiming
extreme Tory views in exceedingly offensive language. The
more he rants, the louder the hacks of the Tory Press applaud"
(”Rudyard Kipling,” Everyman, June 5, 1914, p. 37).

117

the policies of a government by their power to appoint and
remove their representatives.2

As Kipling had feared,Campbell-Bannerman's Liberals,
like Balfour's Unionists, were unwilling to risk their
party's political future by supporting any measure as uni-
versally unpopular as peace time conscription. Kipling's
second attempt, after 1904, to introduce such innocuous
substitutes for conscription as rifle clubs and target
shooting in the nation's schools was an admission of his own
defeat. He attributed his failure to democracy: that
wretched system which handed the whip of coercion to the mob,
and turned statesmen into fawning, impotent ciphers, little
better than slaves to the brutes who had voted them into
office. ”It must be hard for those who do not live there,”
he told the Canadians in 1907, ”to realize the cross between
canker and blight that has settled on England. . . . Every
form of unfitness, general or specialised, born or
created, during the last generation has combined in one big
trust-—a majority of all the minorities to play the game
of government.” England's most serious weakness ”is an

excess of voters,' who resent having to pay taxes for defense.

And whatever the English voters object to is important, if

 

23”On Amnesty to the Rebels,” Sussex Ed., XXX, 7.

 

118

only because ”their leaders need their votes.”24

It was this sort of thinking that in 1908 led Kipling
to define democracy as ”any crowd on the move--that is to say,
the helpless thing which breaks through floors and falls into
cellars: overturns pleasure boats by rushing from port to
starboard: stamps men into pulp because it has lost six
pence, and jams and grills in the doorways of blazing
theatres.” It is government based on the worship of ”Demos--
a jealous God of primitive tastes and despotic tendencies."25

Between 1909 and 1911 Kipling stoutly resisted the
Liberal government's proposed Parliament Bill, which would
reform the House of Lords by reducing the power of the Upper
House to veto legislation. In 1911, the Liberals, now under
the leadership of Asquith, obtained the promise of George V
to, if necessary, create enough Peers to carry the bill.

In the constitutional crisis which followed, Kipling supported
the ”Die-Bards,” the minority of Peers who had sworn to vote
against the bill despite the King's threat.26 Kipling's
reasons for opposing the Parliament Bill were made clear

in a speech at Brighton in the autumn of 1910. It was the

 

24”Letters to the Family,” Letters of Travel, pp. 139,
235-236.

251bid., p. 181.

26Carrington, pp. 316-317.

119

division of power in England between the House of Commons
and the House of Lords, he thought, which in the past had
prevented the worst evils of democracy, and had made it
possible for England to become powerful enough to gain
possession of ”one square mile in every four of the globe,"
with responsibility ”for the protection of one person in five
out of the entire population of this . . . planet." With
this form of government, England had ”abated the pretensions
and cooled the imaginations of Kings, churches, armies, mobs
and their leaders.”2

Despite the statements contained in the Brighton
speech, Kipling's personal opinion was that England, even
without the Parliament Bill, was already too democratic.
The bill's passage would remove the last checks the state
had against the wishes of that selfish, undisciplined animal:
the mob. With all power in the hands of the voters, there
would be nothing to stop them from destroying the country
in a frantic rush to get something for nothing. They would
beggar the army, starve the navy, and wreck England forever.

In 1911 he wrote:

 

27”The Ritual of Government,” A Book of Words, p. 63.

The merits of divided government, of checks and balances,
is the subject of the poem, My Father's Chair.

120

It is not wealth, nor talk, nor trade, nor schools,
nor even the Vote,

Will save your land when the enemy's hand is
tightening round your throat.28

At the start of the controversy over the Parliament
Bill in 1909, Kipling attacked the Liberals in a lengthy
poem entitled The City of Brass. He accused the party's
leaders of encouraging idleness at home by their socialistic
policies: of keeping themselves in power by bribing the
voters with handouts in the form of domestic welfare legis-
lation, and of financing the whole program with money that
ought to have been spent on the army and the navy. He
warned Englishmen that the Liberals had ”pulled down the
walls that their fathers had made them--the impregnable
ramparts of old, they razed and relaid them--

As playgrounds of pleasure and leisure, with limitless
entries,

And havens of rest for the wastrels where once walked
‘the sentries:

And because there was need of more pay for the shouters
and marchers,

They disbanded in face of their foeman their yeomen
and archers.

They replied to their well-wishers' fears--to their
enemies' laughter,

Saying: _”Peace1 We have fashioned a God Which shall
save us hereafter.

We ascribe all dominion to man in his factions conferring,

And have given to numbers the Name of the Wisdom
unerring.

 

28Together.

121

Arrived the day of judgement (a war, presumably with Germany),

and England ”passed from the roll of the Nations in headlong

surrender.

The City of Brass was madetfluasubject of an editorial
in the London Nation. It was once possible, the magazine
proclaimed:

for poets and patriots to speak of their country with

a certain . . . affection. . . . But now, hold and
inharmonious as a Spartan invasion, up comes Mr.

Kipling with his City of Brass, . . . and pours contempt
on all our pride. Exultant with savage joy, almost

as though he were the Barbarian himself, he foretells
the speedy destruction of our land and Empire. . . .

The causes of our impending overthrow are interesting
because they are just the things on which . . . we
rather flattered ourselves, thinking we deserved
something of the eulogy of Pericles. . . . [He]

traces the ruin of our country to our tolerance in
daily life, our pleasure in public festivals, our
objection to drill-sergeant discipline, our love of
personal freedom, our belief in the general heart and
brain of our people, and our desire to believe in the
same powers of self-government in others. [And he
opposes] . . . those particular qualities of freedom
and tolerance and kindliness which we believe to
be our country's noblest distinctions in history.29

In August, 1911, the Parliament Bill was passed and
became law. In July, when passage of the bill had become
a certainty, Kipling wrote dejectedly to Moreton Frewen:
"I suppose that there will be something left of the island

after everybody has finished with it, but frankly, I don't

 

29
"A Mouth of Brass," Nation, v (1909), 486-488.

122

see what."30 Kipling's fears, however, were exaggerated.

The new limitations on the Peers' veto left the basic
situation unchanged. The staunchest opponents of conscription,
after all, were not to be found in the Upper Chamber, but in
the House of Commons.

Between 1911 and 1914, Kipling continued to see in
popular government the explanation for the failure of his
various attempts to make his countrymen do more in the way
of preparing for war: Empire federation, conscription,
increased naval appropriations--everywhere he found himself
frustrated and defeated by the same obnoxious political system.
His philosophy of military preparedness, he admitted himself,
could only be implemented by compulsion, and in England all
of the instruments of coercion were now in the hands of the
mob. The country, he said in a 1912 speech, put the Liberals
into office ”because we hoped to get something for nothing.
Else why did we turn our backs on tariff reform? . . . And
what is our reward to-day? What have we gained? A land
without a constitution, within measurable distance of civil
war [over the issue of Home Rule for Ireland], under the very
shadow of Armaggeddon, for which by land and by sea and in

our own distracted souls we are utterly unprepared.” It was

 

30Letter, dated July 31, 1911, Frewen Papers, Library

of Congress.

123

not just England that the Liberals were leading towards
destruction, but the whole Empire; for on England's "fate
hangs the destinies of one-fifth of the human race."31

Kipling deserves a minor place in the intellectual
history of the early twentieth century if only because he
was more than merely a negative critic. For example, while
he indicted the government for its failure to adopt peace
time conscription, he also, as in "The Army of a Dream,”
put forward a number of specific suggestions, some with
considerable merit, to improve the fighting abilities of the
British army. Similarly, he was not content just to criticize
democracy. Between 1905 and 1912 he gradually developed a
political philosophy whose ideas, while not wholly original,
clearly indicated the nature of the political system that he
hoped would one day replace democracy. In working out his
philosophy Kipling recalled what he had seen of British
colonial administration in India. The foundation stone of
his political credo became the concept of benevolent despotism,
with the accompanying assertion that a political utopia would
consist of a government where power was in the hands of
efficient, enlightened professionals. All decisions affecting

military security, justice, and the administration of

 

31”Kipling on the Stump,” Literarnyigest, XLV (1912),
904-905.

124

government could then be made by an elite of strong, capable

men, instead of by the unthinking and vulgar masses.
Kipling's conception of a political utopia appears

most clearly in two stories ”With the Night Mail,” written

. 32 n u . . 33

in 1905, and As Easy as A.B.C., written in 1912.

Both stories are placed in the twenty-first century, where

"Democracy” is equated with ”Disease,, and as a form of
government has been repudiated by rational men.34 All
sovereign states have disappeared, and world peace has been
achieved under the benevolent dictatorship of the scientists
and the technocrats (the same people, in fact, whose occu-
pations normally place a premium on efficiency). The rule

of science has replaced that of the elected demagogues, whose
loose talk of liberty and personal freedom hurled the world
of the twentieth century into a cataclysmic disaster. By

the twenty-first century, however, all that is left to remind
men of the black period in human history before democracy
perished are ”inherited memories of horror, panic, fear, and

cruelty.”35

 

32In Actions and Reactions.

33In A Diversity_of Creatures.
4 II II o .
.As Easy as A.B.C-,. A DiverSity of Creatures, p. 24.

351bid., p. 14.

125

In the two stories, power is exercised by an inter-
national authority, the "Aerial Board of Control.” The
members of the Board are scientists and technicians drawn
from the former nations of the earth, who have united as an
international partnership of the efficient few to govern
the inefficient many. It is also a partnership of equals, in
which no single nation is permitted a greater influence than
any other in determining the Board's decisions.

”As Easy as A.B.C.” indicates the extent of Kipling's
hatred for democracy by 1912. The story begins as the
headquarters of the Aerial Board of Control, in London,
receives a message from the frantic people of Chicago,
asking for assistance in crushing the revolt of a primitive
and superstitious sect who call themselves the democrats.

The democrats, it soon becomes clear, are a throwback to the
type of political barbarism that existed in twentieth century
England. They have committed the monstrous sin of preaching
”popular government” to the inhabitants of Chicago. The
democrats want to return ”to the old Voodoo-business of voting
with papers and wooden boxes and word drunk-drunk people and

printed formulas and news sheets'.”36

 

36Ibid., p. 27.

126

The Aerial Board dispatches a military force to

Chicago, and the uprising is quickly suppressed. MacDonough's

 

Song, sung by the victors after the democrats have been
defeated, is an impassioned tirade against democracy:

Whether the People be led by The Lord,
Or lured by the loudest throat:
If it be quicker to die by the sword
Or cheaper to die by vote--
These are things we have dealt with once,
(And they will not rise from their grave)
For Hely People, however it runs,
Endeth in wholly Slave.

Whatsoever, for any cause,
Seeketh to take or give
Power above or beyond the Laws,
Suffer it not to live!
Ho1y State or Holy King--
Or Hely People's Will--
Have no truck with the senseless thing.
Order the guns and killi
Saying--after--me:--

Once there was The People--Terror gave it birth;

Once there was The Pegple and it made a Hell of Earth.

Earth arose and crushed it. ListenL 0 ye slaini

Once there was The Pepple--it shall never be again'.37
The members of the Aerial Board are told that the

democrats first became a menace in Chicago when they began

to make speeches (employing "metaphors” which "were of the

 

37Ipid., p. 14. Italics are Kiplings. This poem,

one of his admirers admitted, was probably "the most nakedly,
blatantly, 'unpopular' thing Kipling has ever written"
(Katharine Gerould, Modes and Merals [New York, 1920],

p. 261).

127

A

most Medieval") describing their barbaric system of
government:

[They] demanded that every matter of daily life,
including most of the physical functions, should be
submitted for decision at any time of the week,
month or year to . . . anybody who happened to be
passing by or residing within a certain radius, and
that everybody should forthwith abandon his concerns
to settle the matter, . . . by putting crosses on paper,
which rubbish should later be counted. . . . Out of
this amazing play, . . . [they] assured us, would
automatically arise a higher, nobler, and kinder
world, based-- . . . [they] demonstrated this with
the awful lucidity of the insane-— . . . on the
sanctitity of the Crowd.38

At the end of the story it is decided to send the
democrats to England, where they can be exhibited as relics
from the past, who will ”do the voting trick as often as
you ask 'em a question.” As living museum pieces they will
serve as a constant reminder of the type of institutional
primitivism from which the world has finally escaped.

Kipling's last comments on the subject of popular
government were the series of epitaphs in verse that he wrote
in 1919.40 He suggested as an inscription for all the

British dead:

 

381bid., pp. 31-32.

3
91bid., pp. 40-44.

4OEpitaphs of the War.

128

If any question why we died,
Tell them, because our fathers lied.

On the tomb of any British politician he would have inscribed.

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my'lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?

CHAPTER.XII

”THE HUN IS AT THE GATE'."
(For All We Have and Are)

Kipling's activities in last months of peace indicate
how little remained by 1914 of the same writer who had once,
before the South African War, been content to use his pen
for no other purpose than that of entertaining his readers.
In a speech to the members of the Royal Geographic Society
in February, 1914, Kipling declared that despite the advances
of science and the inventions of weapons like the submarine
and the airplane, one thing remained eternal: ”Only the
spirit of man carries on, unaltered and unappeasable. There
will arise--they are shaping themselves even now--riSks to
be met as cruel as any that Hudson or Scott faced; . . . and
decisions to be taken as splendidly terrible.”l He visited
France in April. In a letter from Paris he said that he
found it impossible to do any writing: ”Life is so exacting
from the political point of view that one has only time to

watch it just now and wonder what new smash will turn up."2

 

1”Some Aspects of Travel,” A Bodk of Words, p. 213.

2Letter to Mrs. Hill, April 4, 1914, Carpenter
Collection.

129

130

He returned to England in May, and was soon actively supporting
the Unionist Party's attempt to prevent the Liberals from
passing their proposed Home Rule Bill for Ireland.3

In the domestic crisis that the bill produced, Kipling
took the side of the Ulster Protestants who had sworn to
resist, by force if necessary, their incorporation into a
Catholic, semi-independent Ireland.4 He opposed Home Rule
because it violated all his convictions on the subject of
imperial federation. He was convinced the Catholic Irish
could not be trusted with self-government.5 Despite his
support for the Ulster Protestants, however, Kipling was
alarmed by their behavior. Their fear of becoming a persecuted
minority in an Ireland governed by papists had made them
desperate. By 1914 Ireland was on the brink of civil war.
Worse still, the Ulstermen were arming themselves with rifles
imported from Germany.6 A civil war in Ireland would give
Germany a distinct advantage in Europe. Britain would be
required to send large numbers of troops to Ireland, whose

involvement there, perhaps indefinitely, would significantly

 

3Carrington, pp. 327-328.
4 .
Ibid., p. 326.
5Somethingof Myself, p. 130.

6Carrington, p. 326.

131

reduce the strength of her forces for a war in Europe.

Kipling revealed his distaste for the Heme Rule Bill
in an angry speech, and in his bitter poem The Covenant.7 His
speech indicting the Liberal government was so extreme that
several members of the Asquith Ministry are reported to have
demanded that he be arrested on a charge of sedition.8 To his
friend H. A. Gwynne, who edited the right-wing conservative
Morning Post, Kipling wrote: "You talk of the German danger.
Does it occur to you that a betrayed Ulster will repeat 1688
in the shape of a direct appeal to Germany? And that in
doing this she will have the sullen sympathy of a great many
people in England who are suffering under intolerable mis—
government?" Ulster, he continued, remembering the Kaiser's

earlier sympathy for the Boers, is nearer than South Africa:
and a betrayed Ulster is more dangerous than twenty southern
Irelands in open revolt."9

Until the end of May, Kipling gave his time and

energy to grinding out partisan statements designed to block

the Home Rule Bill. But then it was June and the assassination

 

7A report of the speech appears in "Mr. Kipling on
Ulster,” The Times, May 8, 1914, p. 6.

8Stewart, p. 293.

9Quoted in Carrington, pp. 326-327.

132

of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand at Sarajevo became the
occasion for the War that he had so long predicted. In
the following weeks such domestic problems as Ireland and
votes for women grew daily less important. England entered
the War in August; Kipling was not surprised. The day War
was declared he opened his wife's diary, and under the date
August 4, wrote: ”Incidentally Armageddon begins.”10

As he had done on a similar occasion fifteen years
earlier, Kipling's first response to the War was a poem
addressed to the British nation. Like The Old Issue, written

at the start of the Boer War, Kipling's new poem,For All We

 

Have and Are, first appeared in The Times.11 But the mood
of his verses in 1914, however, was very different from that
of The Old Issue, which said nothing about the grimmer side
of war. For All We Have andpAre struck a somber note. It
was a call to arms that carried with it a statement on the
horrors of war:

For all we have and are,

For all our children's fate,
Stand up and take the war.
The Hun is at the gatel

Our world has passed away,
In wantonness o'erthrown.

 

lOIbid., p. 329.

11
September 2, 1914, p. 9.

133

There is nothing left to-day

But steel and fire and stone!
Though all we knew depart,
The old Commandments stand:--
”In courage keep your heart,
In strength lift up your hand."

Once more we hear the word
That sickened earth of old:--
”No law except the Sword
Unsheathed and uncontrolled.”
Once more it knits mankind,
Once more the nations go

To meet and break and bind

A crazed and driven foe.

Comfort, content, delight,

The ages' slow-bought gain,
They shrivelled in a night.
Only ourselves remain

To face the naked days

In silent fortitude,

There is but one task for all--
One life for each to give.

What stands if Freedomfall?
Who dies if England live?

CHAPTER XIII

THE WAR YEARS AND AFTERWARDS:

”THE LULL 'TWIXT BLAST AND BLAST”
(The Storm Cone)

While this thesis was never intended as a biography,
it would be difficult to conclude without a brief description
of the last twenty-two years of Kipling's life, from 1914
to 1936.

During the First World War, Kipling would perhaps have
been justified if he had reminded the British public that
at least a portion of the terrible price in blood that they
were paying out in the War against Germany could have been
avoided if they had heeded his strictures on military
preparedness. The temptation to say, ”I told you so,"
must have been very great. Yet there is no indication of
this attitude in any of Kipling's War time writings.

As he had during the South African War, Kipling made
several visits to the front lines. He watched battles from
the trenches in France, and went to Italy in 1917 to observe

the Italian campaign.

 

lCarrington, PP. 336-337, 342, 345.

134

135

At the start of the War, Kipling refused an invitation
from the British government to write propaganda for the allies.
The offer was rejected for the same reason that had led him
in the past to turn down a title or any other sort of official
recognition. He would not write to order. He was unwilling
to accept honors from a government that he might later feel
compelled to attack, and after the start of the War he frequently
used his pen against statesmen and generals when they blundered.2

While he would not write the government's official
propaganda, Kipling was more than willing to use his talents
to stir up hatred against Germany. In point of fact, practi-
cally everything that he did write after August, 1914, was
directed toward this goal.3 He had come to hate Germany long
before the War. It was a hatred that grew with every year:
from the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger after the Jameson raid:
to the pro-Boer attitude of the German people in the South
African War; to the naval competition and armaments race
initiated by Germany at the turn of the century. In 1915

Kipling's only son, eighteen-year—old John Kipling, a Second

 

2Ibid., pp. 333, 347.

3Most of Kipling's writings on the War appear in Egg
New Army in Training (London, 1915); France at War (London, 1916);
The Fringes of the Fleet (London, 1915); Sea Warfare (London,
1916); The War in the Mountains (New York, 1917); The Eyes of
Asia (New York, 1918); The Years Between (London, 1919);
The Irish Guards in the Great War (London, 1923).

 

136

Lieutenant in the Irish Guards, was killed in action at
the Battle of Loos.4 It would be too strong a statement to
say that Kipling's mind was affected by his son's death.
His sanity was untouched, but his loathing for the Kaiser,
the German government, and the German people deepened into
a kind of brooding megalomania.

The following excerpts from Kipling's wartime
speeches are indicative of his feelings. In 1915 he
declared:

However the world pretends to divide itself, there
are only two divisions in the world to-day--human
beings and Germans. All mankind bears witness . . .
that there is no crime, no cruelty, no abomination
that the mind of man can conceive, which the German
has not perpetrated, is not perpetrating, and will
not perpetrate if he is allowed to go on. He does
not recognize the existence of any law, least of
all those he has subscribed to himself, in making
war against combatants or non-combatants, men,
women, and children.5

[In 1917 he said:]

Everywhere these Germans do evil, whether they
be soldiers, shop-keepers, travellers, missionaries.
They do evil deliberately. It is their nature. It
is the mark of their nationality. They are like
microbes--wherever they abound; the evil develops
and infects everything roundabout. . . . The man
who tells a lie, who violates a woman, who kills
a child, knows that he is breaking the human law.

 

4Carrington, pp. 332, 339, 341.

5”A Call to the Nation,” Kiplinngournal, printed in

the issues of April, 1946, p. 8, and October, 1946, p. 13.

137

But a German does not know it, he does not feel it.
The bridges are broken forever between them and us.
Henceforth there will be two races upon the earth--
the human race and the German race.6

[In 1918 he offered the opinion that:]

The Hun has been educated . . . from his birth to
lock upon assasination and robbery, embellished with
every treachery and abomination that the mind of man
can elaborately think out, as a perfectly legitimate
means to the national ends of his country. . . .7

Kipling's services did not go unrewarded. In May,
1917, he received a message from the Prime Minister offering
him any honor he might care to accept. He replied by
message that he wanted nothing.

He was disgusted by the peace terms accorded Germany
at the end of the War. He considered them far too generous.
Wilson's fourteen points (Kipling met the American President
at a Buckingham Palace reception when he visited Britain
after the Armistice) he termed ”idiotic.”9 He feared they
would tie the hands of the victorious allies, and prevent

them from giving Germany the punishment she deserved.10

 

6”Address at Bordeaux,” Kiplinngournal, April, 1946,

 

p. 9.
7”Kipling's Message,” Kiplinngournal, July, 1946,
p 15
8Carrington, p. 353.
9 .
Ibid., p. 348.
10

Ibid.

138

In a 1917 speech he indicated what his own policy towards
the defeated Germans would have been. "Civilized nations,"
he argued "must resort to the sterilizing process; they must
put into force measures of international hygiene. Beware
of the German microbe. . . .”11 His poem Justice, written
in 1918, was a further elaboration on this theme. It called
for the complete disarmament of Germany and the punishment
of German war criminals.

After the War, Kipling retained both his interest
in politics and his hatred for Germany. During the 1920's,
he served as one of the Imperial‘War Graves Commissioners,
a job that demanded a considerable amount of his time and
energy. In Europe there were a million British dead to be
found, exhumed, identified, and reburied in permanent
cemeteries. He suggested the inscription that was transcribed
on the stone of sacrifice in each cemetery: "Their name
liveth for evermore.”12

Kipling's last years were tragically reminiscent of
the decade before 1914. Germany was rearming, and while

her leaders pursued the policies that would lead to a Second

World War, a disarmed and badly divided England attempted to

 

11”Address at Bordeaux."

12Carrington, p. 344.

139

persuade itself that the catastrophe could be averted by
timely concessions, fair play, and the voice of reason. To
the generation of Englishmen that would one day fight Hitler's
Germany, Kipling offered the same advice that he had given
to their fathers: adopt peace time conscription. The
impotence of British arms, he assured them, did nothing to
keep the peace, but instead only invited aggression. Appease-
ment of Germany? He considered it dangerous nonsense, a policy
which only encouraged the barbarians to believe they could
13
conquer Europe on the cheap.
He did not live to see the second War with Germany.

But before his death in 1936 he wrote The Storm Cone, a
grim poem predicting the War that came three years later:

This is the midnight--1et no star

Delude us--dawn is very far.

This is the tempest long foretold--

Slow to make head but sure to hold.

Stand by! The lull 'twixt blast and blast

Signals the storm is near, not past:

And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn to-morrow be.
Only the darkness hides the shape
Of further peril to escape.

 

3Kipling's pronouncements against the Germans after
the First World War were published under the title ”Kipling

and the Germans,” The Kiplinngournal, July, 1945,;p. 11-12.

CHAPTER.XIV
KIPLING AND HIS CRITICS

”Kipling's literary reputation has suffered a Waterloo
with British military prestige in the Transvaal,"1 a critic
announced with satisfaction in 1901. After the start of the
Boer War, Kipling was attacked by many of his contemporaries
as a jingoistic militarist, who preached a gospel of
arrogance and ruthlessness, and who took a cruel delight in
war for its own sake. His stories and poems, it was felt,
had hymned the nation into a bloody and purposeless conflict
on the South African veldt. Specifically, it was thought
that his all too convincing, though fallacious descriptions
of the British army in the 1890's were partly responsible
for the aggressive temper of the English people at the start
of the War.2

The attack against Kipling continued after the end
of the War in 1902, whenhis disillusionment with the

British army and his growing fear of Germany led him to

 

lMichael Monohan, ”The Kipling Blue Pill," The
Philistine: A Periodical of Protest, XIII (1901), 129-130.

2The best article by a contemporary on this point

is Masterman's, ”After the Reaction,” Contemporary Review.

140

141

advocate peace time conscription. Bertrand Russell called
him that "destable man," and thought of him as a "satan."3
Max Beerbohm despised Kiplimg so much that be portrayed him,
in a series of critical articles and brutal caricatures, as
the personification of the mindless, aggressive militarist
who made wars for other men to fight, and who was interested
only in cruelty and physical violence.

Kipling frequently received a hostile reception even
from the people who shared his opinions. A proposal for
military reform could be opposed merely because he had been

the one to suggest it. The anger provoked by The Islanders,

 

for example, was only partly due to the national aversion to
compulsory military training. An editorial on the poem in
The Bookman recalled:

Three years ago it was Kipling himself who pro-
claimed in brassy notes the pride of race, who
despised the ”lesser breeds,” and who saw in the
clean-limbed, nonchalant, and well-fred "flanneled
fools” whom he now withers by his scorn, the
masters of the earth in peace and war, . . . the
finest soldiers in the world. [Then came the Boer
War] and a few Dutchmen who knew nothing of polo
”crumpled up” . . . his Guards and Lancers and
Highlanders, . . . and to-day Mr. Kipling is
calling his athletic but utterly untrained young

 

3Bertrand Russell, ”A Fifty-six Year Friendship,"
quoted in The Kipling Journal, June, 1960, p. 3.
4G. M, Trevelyan, A Layman's Love of Letters,
Kipling Journal, December, 1954, p. 6.

142

Englishmen mere ”muddied oafs." [He would do well]

to moderate his indigantion against those who still

are labouring under a delusion which he himself has

done far more than any other living man to foster

and perpetuate.

A summary of the indictment drawn up against Kipling

between the time of the first British defeats in South
Africa to the start of the First World War would include
statements such as: He is ”on the side of all that is
ignorant, selfish, base, and brutal in the instincts of
Humanity,”6 and is "indirectly or directly concerned in fanning
the evil passions of semi-barbarous crowds.”7 He is "vulgar,"
"brutal," and a moral'retrograde,” with ”no enthusiasm for
art.”8 ”An improvement in our gear of an ironclad or a maxim
gun would give him infinitely more pleasure than the dis-
covery of a masterpiece by Raphael or Phidias."9 Of all

. . . . . . . .10
English writers he is ”eas11y the most Sinister and malign.'

Poets before him ”have usually been in advance of their age:

 

5"The Islanders,” Bodkman (New York).

6Robert Buchanan, ”The voice of the Hooligan,”
Contemporary Review, LXXVI (1899), 774-776.

7Robert Buchanan, ”The Ethics of Criticism,”
Contemporary Review, LXXVII (1900), 221-223.

Henry Murray, ”Rudyard Kipling,” in Robert Buchanan
and other Essays (London, 1901), p. 155.

91bid.

10Charles Russell, ”Are There Two Rudyard Kiplings?"
Cosmopolitan, XXXI (1901), 653-655.

143

he has reversed precedent by reviving in the nineteenth
century the spirit of the fourteenth.”11 He is "the laureate
of the gospel of blood and iron.”12 He represents "the spirit
that Bismarck was the incarnation of in Germany, the spirit
that Nietzsche exemplified in philosophy, the spirit of the
Jameson Raid, the disregard of the ordinary laws of morality,
[that] we had supposed till recently were the Special glory
of the nineteenth century."13 His soul is like "an English
expedition going out to shoot savages with maxim guns."l4

His ideas are ”barbaric,”15 They are typical of the unedu-
cated mind that despises everything ”which does not conform
to that material standard which substitutes Mayfair for

Sinai and speaks its prophecies through the mouth of the

machine gun. . . . His gospel of violence leads nowhere

except to more violence.”16 When Robert Bridges was appointed

 

llIbid.

12George Hamlin Fitch, Modern English Bodks of Power
(San Francisco, 1912), p. 2.

13Salter, ”One Side of Kipling,” Ethical Record.

14George Moore, ”Avowals,” Lippincotts Monthly
Magazine, LXXIII (1904), 99-103.

15W. B. Parker, "Rudyard Kipling,” World's Work, XV
(1908), 9921-9924.

16A. G. Gardiner, ”Rudyard Kipling,” Prpphets, Priests,

and Kings (London, 1914), pp. 324-327.

144

Poet Laureate in 1913, one British Journal declared that
Kipling had not been offered the post because the Prime
Minister, Asquith, considered him a dangerous man, and "the
only poet we have who could make a war.”17 Later, following
the death of his son in the First World War, Kipling received
a number of letters, brutally informing him that he deserved
his loss for having provoked the War.18

Toward the end of his life, in 1930, Harold Laski
predicted: Kipling will be remembered "in the historian's
note-book as a man who did in England what Bernhardiand
Treitschke did in Germany. . . . He will symbolize the
literature of hate, of malignant grandiosity, and of Jingo
ambition."19

Kipling might have succeeded in salvaging much of
his literary reputation and popular appeal had he been content
to confine his political opinions to essays and articles.
Instead, with few exceptions, he chose to express his ideas

as he had always done, through the medium of fiction and

verse. His reasons for doing so are not clear. Perhaps he

 

l7”Mr. Rudyard Kipling,” The Sketch, July 30, 1913, p. 17.

18Carrington, p. 341.

9”Four Literary Portraits,” quoted in The Kipling
Journal, October, 1930, pp. 78-79.

145

believed he could entertain his readers while simultaneously
preaching at them. Possibly he was convinced that his
popularity (still considerable with the general public) as

a novelist, poet, and story teller would assure his views

a wider audience if they were presented under the guise of
fiction.

Unfortunately, however, Kipling's talent was not equal
to the challenge. The attempt to combine literature with
politics proved a failure, or at best only a very limited
success. ”An audience slipping away or turning their backs
is everywhere apparent,” wrote one critic in 1904.20 A
review of Kipling's Traffics and Discoveries, the book that
included ”The Army of a Dream" carried the comment: ”He
shouts, he occasionally deafens us, but he has ceased to
impress."21

There is no doubt that the quality of Kipling's
work fell off sharply after 1899. His last long and purely
non-political work was the popular romance Kim, published in

1901. The following year, in a highly critical essay entitled

”The Writer Who Does Not Care,”22 Frank Moore Colby observed

 

20 . .
Masterman, ”After the Reaction,” Contemporary ReView.

1Review, Traffics and Discoveries The Academy,LXVII
(1904), 311.

zggggkmgp (New Yerk), XV (1902), 85-87.

146

that Kipling's answer to the public's demand for more

books like Kim had been to undertake "the conduct of the
British government through the agency of bad verse. Th;
Islanders may be true and statesmanlike, and rifle clubs may
be founded on the strength of it, and cricketers may hang their
heads for shame.” But from the point of view of literature,
Colby declared, it is Kipling at his worst. "As literary
pleasure-lovers, his readers have a right to complain.

Bother his prophecies and devil take his reforms and all
those ballads with a purpose. . . .“ Kipling, Colby thought,
should forget crusades and devote himself exclusively to
literature. He should give up politics, Colby went on, if
only because his influence on the political life of the
British nation is so slight as to be totally negligible.
"Beyond stirring up rows and coining some quotable phrases,
what has he done for politics these last few years? [As] .

a counselor of nations [he is] always certain beyond human
certainty, and almost always wrong.”

Colby's advice was ignored. Neither his own failures,
or the savage personal attadks by the critics persuaded
Kipling from the path he had deliberately chosen. Colby
himself had admitted with grudging respect: "He will not
repent, or conform, or edit himself, or study how to please.

But there is about him a sort of surly sincerity even at his

147

worst. . . . Whatever his sins are, they are not sins of
subservience. . . ."23 Faced with a choice between literature
and politics, Kipling decided on politics, with the result
that for many years he wrote little more than a vituperative
journalism, whose interest to-day is almost solely confined to
the student of history. In 1914, two months before England
declared war on Germany, another critic, echoing Colby's
judgment twelve years earlier, found a sad contrast between
the mediocre quality of Kipling's writings after 1900, and
"the magnificent achievements of his genius in the inspired

days before the Moth and the Rust entered in and corrupted

. .24
it..

 

23Ibid.

24Gribble, ”Rudyard Kipling," Everyman.

CHAPTER XV
A CONCLUSION

Was Kipling a militarist? There is reason to believe
that it was only his poor vision which prevented him from
making a career out of the army.1 Throughout his writings,
both before the Boer War and afterwards, there is seldom
absent the shrill note of the drill sergeant. It appears,
perhaps most typically, in his jungle stories for children,
when the boy Mowgli finds that while there are many laws to
be learned in the jungle--

. . . the Head of the HOof of the Law and the
haunch and the hump is---Obey!2

In Kipling's defense, however, it may be argued that
his views on the subject of conscription, if unacceptable to
his contemporaries, were those of a realist. He advocated
conscription because he realized that in peace time it was
the one means whereby a standing army with a large reserve
could be created. He would have agreed with the conclusion
of the German officer in 1910, who came away from observing

the volunteers of the Territorial Army to report: ”The

 

lKipling, Something of Myself, 26, 35, 41.

2The Jungle Books (New York, 1948), I, 93.

 

148

.__,_
v ,

Ll

149

young men lack the training given by compulsory service.
The Territorial Army is a joke."3 Eventually, during the
First World War, in 1916, England adopted peace time conscription.
It might also be noted that the year of compulsory army service
that Kipling aSked for in The Islanders is less than the two
year requirement that exists in the United States at the
present time.

An admirer of Kipling's once wrote about him that
"patriotism was the passion that shaped his life."4 The
same idea was expressed by one of his detractors, who observed:
”Kipling is to me a standing warning of the danger of treating
the instinct of patriotism as if it were an all—sufficing
virtue."5 This was Kipling's most serious weakness. As
the critic A. G. Gardiner has said, Kipling never appreciated
the England of Milton and Shakespeare, the small insular
England which "taught the world the meaning of liberty.”
He understood, Gardiner added, only ”the might of England,
the thunder of its battleships and the tread of its armies

across the plains."6 Kipling was in fact a poet who celebrated

 

3Halévy, VI, 192.

4Andre' Chevrillon, ”Rudyard Kipling as a Frenchman
Sees Him,” Around the World with Rudyard Kipling (New York,
1926), p. 76.

5Quoted in ”Kipling's Attack on the British Government,"
Literary Digest, XLVIII (1914), 1425-1426.

6”Rudyard Kipling,” Prophets, Priests, and Kings, p. 325.

150

materialism and power. He did love England, but, as Harold
Laski put it, "the England he loved was a strident and
greedy Brittania, shrieking defiance of a world which did
not appreciate her strength. War and its glories, power
for its own sake, . . . conquest for the sake of victory,
the pride of knowing no equal--these, for Mr. Kipling, were
the supreme virtues.”7

If Kipling's patriotism was malignant and dangerous,
it was because it equated bigness with greatness, and
measured everything in terms of military power and national
security. Certainly such productions as "The Army of a Dream,"8
and ”As Easy as A.B.C.,”9 so horrified many of his contemporaries
that it became impossible for them to admit the merits of any
of his views on the subject of military preparedness. His
philosophy was incapable of dealing with anything more
abstract than moral absolutes. He wrote in 1901: "Ye
cannot in one place rule and in another bear service. Either

"10

ye must everywhere rule or everywhere obey. . . . The

statement may be taken as a summary for his whole political

 

7"Four Literary Portraits,” Kipling Journal.
8Traffics and Discoveries.

9 . .

A DiverSity of Creatures.

10”A Sahib's War,” Traffics and Discoveries, p. 81.

 

151

credo: Inflexible, rigid, and dogmatic, it led him to

reject anything which opposed, or appeared to oppose, national
security. Its implications led him into such excesses as
"Democracy is Disease,”11 and made his recommendations for
saving England in a war with Germany so outrageous that they

frequently appeared more undesirable than defeat itself.

 

1 . .
"As Easy as A.B.C.” A DiverSity of Creatures, p. 24.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY

Primary Sources

For Kipling's own writings the following bodks were
the most useful. His autobiography, Something of Myself:
For My Friends Known_§nd Unknown (New York, 1937), was helpful
for information on his political views after the Boer War.
The best of his poems on imperialism are in The Seven Seas
(New York, 1925), first published in 1896. A good collection
of his stories about the British army before the Boer War
is Soldier Stories (New York, 1927). Most of Kipling's poems
on the South African War are in The Five Nations (New Yerk,
1903). The same book includes a number of the poems which,
like The Islanders, were an attempt to frighten his country-
men into accepting conscription by describing the ease with
which a well trained enemy army could conquer England.
Traffics and Discoveries (London, 1924), includes a number
of Kipling's stories about the Boer War, and his long article
”The Army of a Dream.” The war stories portray the various
weaknesses in the training, organization, and leadership of
the British army that Kipling had observed during his visits

to South Africa. "Letters to the Family," in Letters of Travel

 

152

153

(New York, 1912), includes Kipling's views on Empire feder-
ation and a number of his more specific criticisms of democracy.
In The Years Between (London, 1923), Kipling published a
collection of the poems on army reform, the Royal Navy,
Empire Federation, and democracy, that he wrote between 1902
and 1918. Unless otherwise indicated, however, the source
for all of the poems that have been mentioned in this thesis
was deyard Kipling's verse: Derinitive Edition (New York,
1940).

The only easily available source for Kipling's
speeches is A Bodk of wards, Selections from Speeches gnd
Addresses Delivered between 1906 and 1927 (New York, 1928).
Most of his speeches, however, were never included in book
form. 'A guide to Kipling's uncollected speeches, with a
list of the periodicals in which they were reported, appears
in James Stewart's Rudyprd Kipling: A Bibliogrgphical
Catalogue (Toronto, 1959).

Of the numerous editions of Kipling's works, the most
complete, though expensive and difficult to obtain, is the
thirty-five volume Snpsex Edition of the Cpmplete works in
Prose and verse (London, 1938). velume thirty of this
edition, entitled Uncollected Prpse, contains the stories
on the South African war that were not collected by Kipling

in Traffics and Discoveries.

154

For Kipling's letters: A list of those which have
been published in periodicals or bodks appears in Stewart's
bibliography. In the United States the largest collection
of Kipling's unpublished correspondence is at the Library of
Congress. The Chandler Collection and the Carpenter Collection
of Kipling's letters are in the library's rare bodk room.
Letters that Kipling wrote to Theodore Roosevelt and to
Moreton Frewen are in the Roosevelt Pppers and the Frewen
Papers, in the library's manuscript division. Kipling's
letters, especially those in the Carpenter Collection, were
particularly useful in providing information for his views
on army reform during the Boer War, and his reasons for
advocating conscription after the War. Another good source,

both for letters and uncollected speeches, was The Kipling

 

Journal, the quarterly published in London by the Kipling
Society since 1927.

For the opinions of Kipling's contemporaries about
his writings, both before and after the Boer War, there are
literally hundreds of articles. Some of the better ones in
the 1890's, which explain his popularity and success at
providing a moral rational for imperialism are: Edmund Gosse,
”Rudyard Kipling," The Century Ma azine, XLII (1891), 901-910;

”The Literary Inspiration of Imperialism,” Living Age, CCXXV

 

(1900), 807-811; ”The Poet in Politics," Review of Reviews

 

155

(London), XIX (1899), 107. The extent to which Kipling's
stories about the British army before the South African War
influenced the thinking of his contemporaries is discussed

in: "Leading Article,” The Times, March 4, 1899, p. 7;

"Rudyard Kipling,” Living Age, CCXX (1899),786-788; and

E. H. Mullin, ”Stevenson, Kipling, and Anglo-Saxon Imperialism,"
Book Buyer, XVIII (1899), 85-90.

The best of the articles which make the charge that
Kipling was a militarist, whose writings helped to bring on
the War by presenting a false picture of the British soldier,
and by encouraging the public to feel aggressive and arrogant
are: Charles Masterman, ”After the Reaction,” Contemporary
Review, LXXVI (1904), 816-820; two essays by Robert Buchanan,
”The voice of the Hooligan,” Contemporary Review, LXXVI (1899),
774-776, and ”The Ethics of Criticism,” Contemporary Review,
LXXVII (1900), 221-223. The most complete and carefully
reasoned discussion of this point appears in Alfred G.
Gardiner's ”Rudyard Kipling," prophets, Priests, and Kings
(London, 1914).

The Islpnders, beside producing numerous attacks
against Kipling, encouraged a thoughtful examination of the
whole question of peace time conscription in: ”Mr. Kipling's
Idea,” The Spectgtor, LXXXVIII (1902), 40; and two "Leading

Articles” in The Times, January 4, 1902, p. 9, and January 7,

 

1902, p. 7.

 

156

Other aspects of Kipling's political activities after
the Boer War, particularly his campaign for peace time
conscription, are dealt with in: "Traffics and Mafficks:

The Strange Case of Mr. Kipling," Bookman (London), XXVII
(1904), 76-78; ”Reform and Mr. Kipling," The Saturdapreview
oerolitics, LiteratureL Science, and Art, XCVIII (1904), 494;

"On Universal Training,“ The Times, September 26, 1913, p. 3;

"The State of the Army,” The Times, September 27, 1913, p. 5.
Kipling's preference for military security and

national prestige at the expense of political democracy and

individual freedom was the subject of several highly critical

articles: ”A Mouth of Brass,” Nation (London), V (1909),

486-488; William Salter, “One Side of Kipling," The Ethical

 

Record, October-November, 1900, pp. 11-12; "The First Faint
Signs of a National Awakening,” Review of Reviews (London),

XXV (1902), 147-149.

Secondary Sources

The best biographical treatment of Kipling is
C. E. Carrington, The Life of Rudyard Kipling (New York,
1956). The book supplies a great deal of new information
about Kipling's personal life, for Carrington was the first
person to be given access to the Kipling family papers. The

biography, however, is chiefly devoted to a chronological

157

account of Kipling's life, with most of the emphasis being
placed on his literary rather than on his political activities.
The Kipling Journal was also used as a secondary source.
The hundreds of articles about him that have been printed
in the Journal were useful for facts on every phase of
Kipling's career.

Concerning the military aspects of the period, a
good narrative account of the South African War, with a
discussion of the causes for the British defeats at the
start of the War, is Rayne Kruger's Good-Bye Dollderay:
The Story of the Boer War (New York, 1960). Kruger, who is
both a South African and a distant relation of Paul Kruger,
the President of the Transvaal Republic at the time of the
War, has nonetheless managed to write an impartial account
of the conflict as seen from both sides. For information on
the British army after 1902, the most useful secondary
sources were Elie Halévy's Imperialism and the Rise of Labour,
1895-1905, and The Rule of Democracy, 1905-1914, volumes five
and six in his Histgry of the English Pegple in the Nineteenth

Century (New York, 1961).

 

 

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