[NYTr] For Veterans Day - Rudyard Kipling and his teenage son John

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

sent by Jane Franklin - Nov 11, 2007

A neighbor just sent this article (link below) from the Times of London
to me for Veterans Day.  Here is her note:

"This is such an amazing story for Veterans Day.  Rudyard Kipling
pulled strings to get his young son to enlist in WW1. The son was
killed right away, and the father lived with the pain of that decision
for the rest of his life.  President Bush was photographed this week
with burned and profoundly injured soldiers. He should have read
Kipling before sending troops to die and become maimed in this
senseless war."

What happened to Rudyard Kipling reminds me of "In the Valley of Elah,"
a great movie that came and went through "art" theaters without most
people ever having an opportunity to see it (until it comes out on
DVD).  By the end, the father, a former MP, and the mother realize that
they have lost two sons because their sons believed in the Military
their father prized.

Jane Franklin
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/jbfranklins


                          ***

The Times of London - Books - Nov 11, 2007
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article2846746.ece


My doomed dear boy John Kipling

The letters between Rudyard Kipling and his teenage son John, who died
on his first day in action, tell a poignant first world war story for
Remembrance Sunday

It is said that every family in Britain was touched by the first world
war but few could have felt its tragic sting more keenly than Rudyard
Kipling. The author who entranced children with The Jungle Book and his
Just So stories was also a fervent wartime propagandist whose
intervention led his beloved teenage son, John, to die amid the carnage
of the trenches. The decision tormented him for the rest of his life.

John Kipling’s death in France at the age of 18 was a metaphor for the
blindness of a conflict in which a whole generation volunteered to
fight against Germany. Chronically shortsighted, he was killed on his
first day of action, unable to see a thing. In torrential rain, he
could either have taken his glasses off and seen nothing, or kept them
on with the same result. That day there were 7,500 casualties, rising
to 50,000 by the end of the battle.

Two years later, after a futile crusade to locate his son’s body and
give it a proper burial, Kipling wrote a powerful epitaph that became
the universal voice of every teenager who had perished:

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

With the ear of the prime minister and of the king, Kipling had been a
powerful advocate of the war and a recruiter who believed that in order
to preserve the British Empire as a benign and essential force of world
stability, an aggressive empire-building Germany should be stopped.

He had once proclaimed: “We must demand that every fit young man come
forward to enlist and that every young man who chooses to remain at
home be shunned by his community.”

His letters to John – from boyhood to the young man’s early death –
help to explain the depth of his later remorse. While confirming his
great love for the boy, they show a father trying to instil his ideals
and self-discipline into his son. Even before John is 16, Kipling is
writing about getting him into the army. John’s own letters to his
parents during the last few weeks of his life add to the poignancy of
the tragedy.

[Extracts from the letters follow at the link above. - NYTransfer]

Letters extracted from "O Beloved Kids," edited by Elliot L Gilbert and
published by Max Press at £9.99. Copies can be ordered for £9.49
including postage from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585