HERE, MY SON Rudyard Kipling and the Battle of Loos

THIS IS THE CHAPEL: HERE, MY SON Rudyard Kipling and the Battle of Loos Dedicated to the Memory of Patrick Neafsy of Achadh Mór, Private 6534, 2nd Battalion Irish Guards, killed in action, 27 September 1915 Edward Neafcy, October 2008 After 93 years, my brother David has brought home to Mayo the story of Patrick Neafsy and his short life as a British soldier. He was in the 2nd Irish Guards. The Battle of Loos was fought from the 25 September to the 8 October, 1915. It was the biggest battle in British history up to then. Today if people know of it at all, it is generally because Rudyard Kipling’s son John was lost there. He was an officer in the Irish Guards. Patrick and John Kipling died in the same action. Patrick and John were among 32 Irish Guards who died on 27 September 1915 on a flat Flanders field exposed to German artillery, machine gun and rifle fire. Such was the slaughter that the Germans called it the Leichenfeld (Corpses Field) von Loos. Despite Remembrance Day having been so well observed in my lifetime, I had not been motivated to think too much about the Great War with its apparent senselessness. David’s and my trip to Loos made me wonder about the motivations of lads such as Patrick who responded to Kitchener’s ‘Your Country Needs You’ recruitment campaign, and the motivation of such a man as 1 Kipling deliversRudyard a recrui Kipting ling to support the war. The thoughts of the private soldiers are speech - Southporseldot, mLanc recoashire,rded – particularly as personal diaries were discouraged as they England. Junem 1915ight fall into enemy hands - but Kipling set down in verse and prose so many of his thoughts and the world literally bought them. To look at what Kipling thought therefore, should show what the country thought. What wars had he looked to for material for his poems of battle? Why had he encouraged his son to take such risk? How did he cope with the grief of bereavement? My wife and I live in Sussex not far from Burwash, where Kipling’s house, Bateman’s, is to be found. This is where John Kipling was raised. Bateman’s is a National Trust property now, and is open to the public. With AD 1634 over the door and standing on 33 acres, ‘... in reality the house is little ...’ wrote Kipling. At the high point of empire, he was also at the cutting edge of technology. His Rolls Royce could take him with ease from one historically fascinating place to another. He did not drive himself: cars could break down, flat tyres were frequent then, and telephones hard to find. Better to have someone to drive who could fix things that went wrong. He harnessed ‘what they call a river’ on his land to drive an electric generator rather than the flour mill it had driven before. An underground cable brought a direct current to batteries in an outbuilding. These powered carbon filament lamp bulbs, each emitting 15-20 watts - slightly better than a candle - for a few hours each evening. No doubt a must at that time for a man who had everything, electric lights would have been especially useful to a writer with myopia. David had Kipling’s ‘2nd Irish Guards’. I bought the Wordsworth Library’s ‘The Works of Rudyard Kipling’, 1994, which has an introduction by George Orwell, written in 1942. I also bought a biography of Kipling, ‘The Unforgiving Minute’, by Harry Ricketts, 1999. I had often wondered where the name ‘Rudyard’ came from. It was a place name – a lake where Kipling’s parents had got engaged. His family name was Joseph. The family tradition was to alternate John and Joseph between the generations. Kipling’s first son would be John. Later I read his little autobiography, ‘Something of Myself’. If the millions who flocked to the colours for the Great War had been taught one poem in English literature, it would have been Tennyson’s ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ – ‘theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do or die’. If English, 2 Scottish, Irish, French, German, Austrian, Italian, Serbian, Russian, American and probably even Turk, who flocked to the colours in the Great War, knew just one line of French literature, it would have been the translation into their own language of Alexandre Dumas’ ‘Un pour Tous, Tous pour Un’. Dumas has D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers say this only once, but ‘One for All and All for One’ resounded around a world so eager for this sentiment. It had an echo in Ireland: Now boys pull together in all sorts of weather Don’t show the white feather wherever you go Act each as a brother and help one another Like true hearted men from the County Mayo. A white feather had long been held in the British army and evidently outside it, to be a sign of cowardice. Its origin was in cockfighting where it was supposed that a bird with a white feather was a cross-breed and an inferior fighter. Its use was encouraged from the beginning of the Great War - men who were slow to respond to the nation’s call to arms were at risk of being given a white feather by the young women they knew. It was a very effective recruiting device. The millions of men – and the women behind them – who cheered for the Great War, had been brought up on loyalty, duty, blind obedience, and fear of being shamed. Kipling was born into this world and by his works he reinforced its values. He was rewarded by unusual success very early in life. More can be found on Patrick Neafsy than the typical soldier of the Great War for two reasons. The individual service records of many British regiments were destroyed by bombing in the Second World War, but we are fortunate that those of the Irish Guards survive. We are also fortunate that as John Kipling had been an Irish Guards officer, the regiment could ask his father to write their Great War history. The two volumes Kipling produced contain much detail that would be otherwise difficult to get at, if recorded at all. The sources available for this piece are therefore Kipling’s own works; what others wrote about Kipling, what Kipling wrote about the Irish Guards, and, as it turned out, a work from which Kipling chose to quote. 3 Kipling was the author of what is almost certainly the best known poem in the English language – ‘If’. Then there are the perennials, ‘Jungle Book’, ‘Kim’ and the ‘Just So’ stories. These are all aimed at children, though perhaps particularly with ‘If’ the message is meant to go to them by way of their parents. But Kipling also wrote for adults and without looking at what he wrote, we all have the impression that he was an imperialist and a jingoist. Apart from Jungle Book, which I knew from the film, the only Kipling work I knew was the poem, ‘Gunga Din’, and that was because when I turned eighteen and went in our local pub, a World War II veteran used to recite it. I was to find that, like many people, I know many lines of Kipling without knowing who the author was. I found that he was not just an average patriot; he was passionate for the British Empire. He was therefore a vociferous opponent of anything that challenged its integrity. Born December 30th 1865, in India but boarded out at six - unhappily - in England, then schooled there, he returned to work at 17 in British India. As a young travel correspondent for a British magazine in India, he saw no military challenge from Japan and made light of the efforts Japan was making to ‘Europeanise’ itself. On the other hand he feared China for its potential. The Japanese were neither ‘natives’ nor sahibs. At Kobe, Japan, ‘... as in Nagasaki, everyone smiled except the Chinaman. I do not like Chinamen. They stand high above the crowd and they swagger, unconsciously parting the crowd before them as an Englishman parts the crowd in a native city’. He goes on:‘The Chinaman’s an old man when he’s young ... but the Japanese is a child all his life’. He makes a distinction between Chinese and Indians: ‘If we had control over as many Chinamen as we have of natives of India, and had given them one tithe of the cosseting, the painful pushing forward, and studious, even nervous, regard of their interests and aspirations as we have given to India, we should long ago have been expelled from, or have reaped the rewards of, the richest land on the face of the earth’. In passing, the word ‘Chinaman’ has been discouraged in English long before the term ‘politically correct’ was coined. Presumably it was considered to be 4 pejorative. Yet one hears Chinese speaking amongst themselves today and they say ‘Chinaman’. When at 24 Kipling arrived to work in London, already having made a name for himself, he found he disliked the city and was not impressed with the English, living as they did in black houses and ignorant of anything beyond the Channel. He was to become most forcefully anti-German quite early in his life. Prussian arrogance was intimidating to all neighbouring states. Germany therefore attracted his ire rather than the people of different colours and creeds the little British army had to fight on the fringes of their Empire.

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