BrightArts & CultureLiterature

The Battle That Never Ends: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’

In the wake of World War I, Rudyard Kipling warned against the devastation of war and the glittering promises of progress.
Save
The Battle That Never Ends: Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’
Allied Soldiers climb out of trenches in this World War I photo. CP Picture Archive/AP
Jeff Minick
Updated:
0:00

World War I radically rearranged the world.

As a consequence of that bloody disaster, Czarist Russia collapsed, and the communists seized control of the country. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was no more. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s flight into exile signaled the end of the German empire. Combat, disease, and starvation took some 20 million lives and shattered European ideas of progress and civilization.

Jeff Minick
Jeff Minick
Author
Jeff Minick has four children and a growing platoon of grandchildren. For 20 years, he taught history, literature, and Latin to seminars of homeschooling students in Asheville, N.C. He is the author of two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust on Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning as I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” Today, he lives and writes in Front Royal, Va.