Vol. 20 No. 11 · 4 June 1998
pages 25-26 | 2333 words
Hustling off the Crockery
John Bayley
- The Irish Guards in the Great War: The First Battalion by Rudyard Kipling
Spellmount, 320 pp, £24.95, January 1997, ISBN 1 873376 72 3
- The Irish Guards in the Great War: The Second Battalion by Rudyard Kipling
Spellmount, 223 pp, £24.95, January 1998, ISBN 1 873376 83 9
At the height of one of the IRA bombing campaigns, a sergeant in the Irish Guards, on duty outside the barracks, was asked by some British civilians what he thought about the campaign. He didn’t think about it: he had received orders about security but was indifferent to the cause of all the fuss. A professional soldier from Limerick, he got on with his job. A chastened Kipling, who had once held that everyone must have the strongest views about everything where race and nationhood were concerned, would none the less have respected the sergeant’s attitude. Time and again in this history he emphasises that ‘a battalion’s field is bounded by its own vision.’ Still more so, by implication, its views of the matter in hand.
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Letters
Vol. 20 No. 12 · 18 June 1998
From Christopher Hitchens
John Bayley in his review of Rudyard Kipling on the Irish Guards (LRB, 4 June) mentions the old man’s advice to his son John about putting tennis netting over trenches on the Western Fornt, and says that ‘we do not know whether John Kipling ever read the paternal advice.’ Actually, we do know. On 29 August 1915, after the advice on ‘rabbit netting’ had been pressed on him several times, young Kipling wrote home to say: ‘Many thanks for Dad’s letters. His "tips for the trenches" are rather quaint. Surely you know that it is a standing order never to have anything over the top of a trench, even rabbit wires. If the Bosch [sic] comes, he has you like rabbits underneath it.’ He was dead a month later, but out in No Man’s Land rather than under the net. Bayley understates matters when he says that Kipling senior’s ‘hatred of the German establishment was deep and bitter ‘. His letters, particularly those to his equally bloodthirsty and almost equally bigoted friend Theodore Roosevelt, are pervaded by a loathing for all Germans and a desire for their destruction en masse. ‘I almost begin to hope that when we have done with him there will be very little Hun left.’ He expressed an especial pleasure in the idea that Germany was losing so many young men of marriageable age. The ‘irony’ of this never seems to have struck him -certainly not when he wrote ‘Mary Postgate ‘, which is the most explicitly sadistic story of them all, and which, though published well after John’s death, was composed before it.
Christopher Hitchens
Washington DC
Vol. 20 No. 13 · 2 July 1998
From John Bayley
Following my review of Kipling’s History of the Irish Guards in the Great War, I am grateful to Christopher Hitchens (Letters, 18 June) for his news about John Kipling and the tennis netting. It is significant, too, that ‘Mary Postgate’ – Kipling’s ‘daemon’ at its most diabolical – was being brooded at a time in 1914 when the media were systematically concocting horror stories about Belgian babies being tossed on German bayonets (see Kipling’s fiendishly skilful tale ‘Swept and Garnished’). His genius was in faithfully reflecting the popular hysteria of the time. But if he did not change his opinion of the Germans he did begin to understand what the war was like: his History is itself an expiation, as are the poems and stories mentioned in my review. These show a unique imagination at work on the horrors of war, as they lived on in soldiers’ minds.
For reasons of space my review was cut a bit at the end. I should wish to emphasise the praise I gave there to the production of the History by the Spellmount Press – a beautiful job.
John Bayley
Oxford
